The story sparked worldwide media interest, and media tycoon Frank Packer helped to arrange her release three days later. Packer helped secure release from custody She wept uncontrollably when her children were taken away. The next morning Brent was arrested and taken into custody. When their baby was five months' old they read that Interpol was looking for Biggs in Melbourne. Home movies featured in Australian Story in 2001 showed their happy social life in Melbourne with other young families, but that was short-lived. I certainly wasn't going to turn him in, so you have to swallow it and get over it and get on with the next day." "And the cold, hard reality was I didn't have anywhere else to go. "Sometimes tempers got rather frayed and we'd have strong words about how I didn't like the situation. "I have to say, ultimately, I hated being on the run and that could affect the relationship," Brent said. It had paid for his legal fees, his escape from prison, false passports, plastic surgery in Paris to change his appearance and their trip to Australia. She told Australian Story they didn't have anything of the proceeds of the robbery. They settled in Melbourne and had a third son.īiggs worked as a carpenter while his wife worked night shift in a biscuit factory. "I firmly believed that I was providing the answer to his prayers, I suppose." The Great Train Robbery
"I felt that all he really needed was a family life and people to love him and that he had enough brains to get on in the world without resorting to crime. I had made him promise me when we were married that he would never engage in any criminal activity ever again," she said.
He forbade his daughter from seeing the petty criminal, so the couple eloped. When Brent met the charming Biggs, her father, a school principal, was horrified. "It's horrible to be tarred with that brush and there's nothing that you can do about it." "The hardest thing of all to cope with is being thought of as criminal in intent because you're associated with a known criminal when, in fact, I never was that way inclined and never have been," she told Australian Story in 2001. Sadly for Brent, who changed her name by deed poll, there was no escaping her ex-husband's notoriety. The Australian connection Ronnie Biggs' former wife tells the ABC about life with and without the infamous train robber.
#The last mr biggs son series
In the intervening years, her life story was laid bare in a British, BAFTA award-winning ITV television series Mrs Biggs. She featured again in 2013 on the eve of the 50th anniversary of the robbery.
In 2001, when Biggs finally surrendered and returned to prison in Britain after being 36 years on the run, the former Mrs Biggs was featured on the ABC's Australian Story. The couple later fled to Melbourne before Biggs went on to Brazil, leaving her in Australia. The men stole 2.6 million British pounds - said to be equivalent to about 40 million pounds ($76.5 million) today - which a bank had sent by registered mail.īrent maintained she had no idea that her husband was involved in the heist and went into shock when he brought home his share of 110,000 pounds. She was 75.īrent was just 17 when she met and fell in love with Biggs, a petty criminal who had spent time in prison.īiggs was part of a large group of men who in 1963 hijacked a Royal Mail train while it was travelling from Glasgow to London, known as the Great Train Robbery. Great train robber Ronnie Biggs' former wife, Charmian Brent, has died in Melbourne.
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