The Japan-Australia Link To The Great Train Robbery

Ronnie Biggs and the Great Train Robbery were pretty well-known among my generation of Australians growing up, and recognition of the famous long-term fugitive was enough in Japan for his 2014 death to be widely reported. What is less established, however, is that both Japan and Australia have a much closer connection to the crook than many in either country know.

Biggs was one of a gang of about 16 people who carried out the Great Train Robbery in 1963, making off with 2.61 million pounds (worth about 12.16 billion yen today). Biggs used his share of the haul to pay for almost 40 years on the run, most famously where he flaunted his fugitive status by living in Brazil, which did not have an extradition treaty with Britain at the time, so he could not be sent back.

Bigg’s connection with Australia is well-established.

After hiding out in Europe for a while, he headed to a life of obscurity in Australia and lived there for several years before he received a tip-off that Interpol had tracked him down.

Biggs fled, finding his way to Brazil, where he lived a reasonably luxurious life by selling his story to tourists, living off the earnings of his celebrity son and being the lead singer on the final single released by the Sex Pistols, No One Is Innocent.

Biggs eventually gave himself up and returned to Britain in 2001, where he served jail time until his release on compassionate grounds shortly before his death following a series of strokes and illnesses dating back many years.

So, where does Japan come into it? We have to go back to Australia for that. After settling Down Under, Biggs called his wife, Charmain Brent, and their two young sons out to join him. They lived first in Sydney, then Adelaide and finally in the eastern suburbs of Melbourne. Following Biggs’ departure, Charmain Brent would study and forge an outstanding career in publishing, and she would put her boys through good schools, though one of the three sons she had with Biggs would die in a car accident aged 11 in 1970. The couple apparently remained on amicable terms after divorcing, even though Biggs fathered a child with another woman and his ex-wife went on record with some pretty serious allegations against him.

Biggs’ eldest son, Chris Brent, would grow up using his mother’s maiden name and with little contact and virtually no input from his notorious father. Chris Brent was a star playing Australian Rules football at junior level for Trinity Grammar school. He would come within a whisker of reaching the highest level of Australian Rules football. Brent played for Fitzroy, a now-defunct club then a team in the Victorian Football League, the highest standard in Australia.

In 1981, Brent kicked a record 91 goals for Fitzroy’s under 19 team, but he never managed to crack it for a senior game, though some of his teammates would become legends of the game of Fitzroy, then a top level team, in 1981.

Brent’s teammates at Fitzroy included Paul Roos and Gary Pert, who would both go on to be legends of Australian Rules football both on and off the field.

Pert told the Melbourne Age that Brent’s famous back-story wasn’t talked about because it didn’t matter. ”It had nothing to do with him. It wasn’t important to his teammates – what was important was whether he was a good guy and a good footballer. And I remember he was both.”

Roos remembers being aware of who he was, but says it wasn’t something teenagers would have been overly intrigued by. ”You weren’t going to go to an encyclopaedia and look up the Great Train Robbery.”

A typical conversation about it, says Roos, would have gone something like, ”That’s Ronnie Biggs’ son.”

“Who’s Ronnie Biggs?”

“The Great Train Robbery.”

“What’s the Great Train Robbery?”

Brent decided not to pursue a career in Aussie Rules footy, but played at high levels including in Tasmania and back in the Victorian Amateur Football Association, where a connection would get him a job with the international courier company, TNT. This company led Brent to Tokyo, where he was instrumental in forming the Tokyo Goannas in 1991.

Brent was said to have played with distinction and been a handful for Japanese defenders in regular games against local university students, and as the Goannas’ founding treasurer. “A role he performed with distinction – and accuracy, I might add,” a Goannas connection told the Melbourne Age in 2013.

“Chris was vice president of the club in our first or second year,” Goannas co-founder Kim Bebbington said on the team’s Facebook page. “On the field he was a very solid unit, very hard to stop or shift.”

Brent would leave Tokyo, spend time in Singapore with his lawyer wife and their children, and then return to the obscurity many who knew him said he preferred. His whereabouts today remain unknown, but his legacy lives on in an obscure Japan-Australia connection.

Reference

Banking on a legend

Train of thought derailed

Ronnie Biggs’ former wife Charmian tells of life with and without him

Charmian Brent, the former wife of great train robber Ronnie Biggs, dies

The Club We Hold So Dear — The Extraordinary Life of Chris Brent (podcast)