Bruce Richard Reynolds (7 September 1931 – 28 February 2013) was an English criminal who masterminded the 1963 Great Train Robbery. At the time it was Britain's largest robbery, netting , equivalent to £ million today. Reynolds spent five years on the run before being sentenced to 25 years imprisonment in 1969. He was released in 1978. He also wrote three books and performed with the band Alabama 3, for whom his son, Nick, plays. Early life Bruce Richard Reynolds was born at Charing Cross Hospital, in the Strand, central London, the only child of Thomas Richard and Dorothy Margaret (née Keen). He was initially brought up in Putney, and his mother, a nurse, died in 1935 when he was aged four. His father, a trade-union activist at the Ford Dagenham assembly plant, married again, and the family moved to Gants Hill. Reynolds found it difficult to live with his father and stepmother, choosing often to stay with one or other of his grandmothers. During the London Blitz of the Second World War he was evacuated to Suffolk and then to Warwickshire. On leaving school at 14½, Reynolds failed the eyesight test to join the Royal Navy, and decided he wanted to become a foreign correspondent, so he applied in person for a job at Northcliffe House. Employed first as a messenger boy, he then worked in the accounts department of the Daily Mail. By the age of 17 he had become bored with the routine and was working in the Bland/Sutton Institute of Pathology at Middlesex Hospital, before joining Claud Butler as a bicycle messenger and a member of their semi-professional racing team, where he first met criminals and began a life of crime. Criminal career After undertaking some petty crime and spending time in HMP Wormwood Scrubs and Borstal for theft (from which he escaped and was eventually caught and sent to Reading Prison), he spent six weeks of the required two years doing National Service in the British Army, before absconding to return to petty crime. Sentenced to three years imprisonment in 1952 for breaking and entering, he was sent to the juvenile wing of Wandsworth Prison in London. He then embarked on jewellery thefts from large country houses. In 1957 Reynolds was arrested, together with Terry Hogan, for assault and robbery of £500 from a bookmaker returning from White City Greyhounds. The police stated their belief