Uncle Ronnie Biggs

For 50 years, Ian Dowding’s mother never told him her brother was Ronnie Biggs My secret uncle

Ialways had this sneaky feeling that my mother had a secret. Something was not quite right, like that annoying piece of the jigsaw you find is missing only when the puzzle is complete.

My parents had lived through the Second World War, and their families were affected by both wars – loved ones lost, relationships fractured.

My mother was a Londoner and had lived through the Blitz as a teenager with her mother. She had two older brothers who were away in the Navy. Her father, who had fought in the First World War, was a steward on British Rail. My parents met and married soon after the end of the war, and my sister and I were born in 1947 and 1949 respectively.

I never met any of my grandparents. Three of them were dead before I was born and my mother lost contact with her father after a falling-out when he remarried – well, that’s what she told us.

We visited one of Mother’s older brothers and his family – but on only one occasion I remember. The other brother had emigrated after the war and was living in America. She cut ties with her family one by one.

Years later, her brother in America wrote to her, but she didn’t reply. I didn’t think any of this was strange and just assumed the war had caused the fragmentation of the family.

My mother lived into her nineties. We got her to move to a bungalow a few doors from us, so we could be close, and I went to see her every day. It was through our chats that I guessed there was a skeleton somewhere in those family cupboards; nothing concrete, just moments when she subtly changed the subject or seemed to be evading something. She died in 2016 and I suspect she believed she was taking the secret with her.

I had dabbled into my family’s ancestry but mainly on my father’s side. My son, Alex, went as far as sending off a sample of his DNA. He hoped to find something a bit exotic and exciting in his search. He was disappointed when it came back that he was 55 per cent English, 32 per cent Scandinavian and 13 per cent Celtic.

He then dug up some further research, which he passed on to me. ‘Your mother,’ he wrote, ‘had four brothers: Alfred, Victor, Terence and Ronald. Terence died young and Ronald was born in 1929, four years after your mother.’

I texted him back: ‘Mother had only two older brothers – are you sure you are not on the wrong branch of the family tree? She never mentioned a younger brother.’

Another text came back: ‘Ronald was an actor and carpenter.’

With it was a photograph. I laughed out loud and texted back: ‘Don’t be daft – that’s Ronnie Biggs, the Great Train Robber.’ I got a text back: ‘Are you serious?’

Ronnie Biggs (1929-2013) was one of the gang who held up a mail train in 1963 and stole £2.6 million pounds – the biggest robbery in history at the time. It made headlines around the world, so his face was familiar to me – but not necessarily to my son.

It had been a family joke that Mother shared her maiden name with a notorious criminal, but she’d explained it away as a coincidence.

Alex was indeed right. Ronnie Biggs was my uncle. That last piece of the jigsaw puzzle had fallen into place. The younger brother had been evacuated during the war – the black sheep of the family, in trouble with the law for minor offences before national infamy arrived in 1963.

He became even better known after his escape from prison in 1965 and his subsequent escapades in Brazil, where he avoided capture, before voluntarily returning to jail in Britain in 2001.

Was the secret kept as a desperate attempt on my mother’s part at respectability? Did she think it would affect our father’s career or have a negative effect on her children? Whatever the reason, she kept the secret well.

Perhaps, though, knowing it could have had a positive effect. I might have avoided some of the bullying at school, when other boys said, ‘My dad’s tougher than your dad.’

I could have topped that with ‘Yeah, but my uncle is Ronnie Biggs.’

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