The battle of heathrow, july 1948

London Airport in 1948 did not resemble Heathrow of today, in any shape or form. It had opened for civilian use only two years earlier, in May 1946, on the site of a wartime RAF airfield, and it was still largely a building site. The terminal was a row of ex-army tents and prefabricated huts on the north side of the runway, with duckboards laid over the mud. There was no perimeter fence. The roads in from Bath Road were unlit. There was virtually no security.

What the airport did have, increasingly, was valuable cargo. The war had ended the sea's monopoly on moving gold and diamonds between London and the rest of the world, and the British Overseas Airways Corporation — BOAC, the nationalized airline — had begun carrying high-value consignments in and out through a bonded warehouse on the airfield. Bullion, diamonds from Amsterdam and Antwerp, currency and other valuables all passed through the London Airport.

In the summer of 1948, the word went round the criminal underworld that a consignment was due. Gold bullion and diamonds together, a shipment that the newspapers afterwards valued at something over £220,000, would be held overnight at a warehouse at the airport. In today's money that is comfortably into eight figures. In 1948, it was a considerable fortune.

The criminals who decided to take it were not amateurs. The gang that came together for the airport job drew on the “best” of London's professional thieves.

Who planned it has never been entirely settled. Jack Spot, a gang leader, claimed the job as his own for the rest of his life, and his ghostwritten memoir has him as the mastermind who was wise enough to stay away on the night. Billy Hill, the leader of a rival gang who despised Spot, said otherwise. The police files do not speculate. What is not in doubt is that the active crew included Teddy Hughes and Sammy Ross, two of the most capable thieves in London, and that the job was put together with professionalism.

A BOAC warehouseman had been approached and, the gang believed, bought off with promises of riches. On the night, he would spike the tea that the night shift drank in their hut with barbitone, a sedative easily obtained from any chemist. Once the staff were unconscious, the gang would drive in through the unlit airfield, open the warehouse with the keys the inside man would leave, load the gold and diamonds into their lorry, and be away down the Bath Road before anyone was awake to notice.

The inside man went to the police.

Whether the warehouseman had always intended to report the impending crime, or whether he took the money and then lost his nerve, we’ll never know. The official version was simply that a loyal employee did his duty.

The Flying Squad in 1948 was barely thirty years old. It had been formed in 1919 as a small mobile unit of detectives with the use of a couple of horse-drawn covered carts and had grown through the twenties and thirties into the Metropolitan Police's elite plain-clothes force. They had fast cars, a reputation for physical courage, and a relationship with the underworld, through a network of informants.

The man in charge of the airport operation was Detective Superintendent Robert Lee, and he made a decision that probably seemed foolhardy at the time but turned out to be genius. Rather than arrest the gang on the approach road, or simply move the consignment, he decided to let them come.

On the evening of 28 July, the BOAC night shift was quietly replaced. Flying Squad detectives in warehousemen's overalls took their places in the shed. Others lay hidden among the crates and in the dark around the building. The spiked tea was poured and not drunk. The officers slumped in heaps, as if they were drugged, and waited.

The gang arrived shortly after midnight. They came in through the unlocked door, found the staff apparently insensible, and began to empty the warehouse.

Then one of them decided to make sure. He bent over a "sleeping" warehouseman and looked too closely, or lifted an eyelid, or simply noticed that the man was breathing wrong. The detectives’ cover was blown.

The officers came up off the floor and out of the crates, and the warehouse erupted into a brawl. The gang were armed with coshes, iron bars and lengths of lead piping. The police had truncheons and out numbered the criminals. Men fought in the dark among the packing cases; officers were laid out, one with a fractured skull and several suffered broken bones. But they outfought the thieves.  When it was over, most of the gang were on the floor in handcuffs.

Eight men eventually stood in the dock at the Old Bailey. They were sentenced in September 1948 to terms of between five and twelve years, with Hughes and Ross getting the longest.

The Battle of Heathrow, as the papers instantly christened it, was the first great post-war police triumph, and it arrived at a moment when the Metropolitan Police badly needed one. The force was under strength, underpaid and, in the public mind, increasingly outpaced by a new kind of organised criminal. Finally, the Met showed the public what they could do.

It also marked a change in crime. The airport job was a bullion robbery planned by a professional firm using inside information. It was not the spontaneous smash-and-grab of the 1930s; it was the template for the outrageous “big jobs” that were to come: the Great Train Robbery of 1963 and Brink's-Mat in 1983.

In the years that followed, the Flying Squad would build its reputation on the relationship between detectives and informants. It became the great unspoken fact of London policing and eventually would lead to official investigations and scandal. But in 1948, on a muddy airfield, it worked.