‘Ronnie was the love of my life’

CHARMIAN Biggs knew that allowing TV to tell her story in a drama series was going to throw up some terribly sad moments. When we meet she has just watched one of them – a recreation of the day her young son was killed in a car accident. She’s understandably tearful after seeing the scene for the first time.

She was aware that in agreeing to let writer Jeff Pope tell her story there would be ups and downs, just as there were in her own marriage to Great Train Robber Ronnie Biggs.

He was the love of her life. They met, ironically you might think, on a train a month after she’d left school. Unable to afford to go to university, she had got a job. They fell in love, married, had children and he promised to give up his criminal ways. Getting involved in the Great Train Robbery changed all that.

They ended up on the run. Ronnie escaped from prison and fled to Rio, where he fathered a child by a local woman. He and Charmian divorced.

She stayed on in Australia and built a new life with her sons. A very sick Biggs is now back in this country.

As the title suggests, ITV’s drama Mrs Biggs is not about Ronnie, but Charmian. The woman behind the man. It’s a fascinating story, being told for the first time, as we see her coping with everything life throws at her from the age of 18 to 35.

“I wanted the story to be told truthfully from the point of view of the family of someone who was involved in the robbery, both the before and the after,” she explains. “There were fantastic times, as well as very sad ones. That’s life: you have to have the lows to appreciate the highs.”

Having seen Pope’s previous work showing the untold side of major crimes – The Murder Of Stephen Lawrence, See No Evil: The Moors Murders and Appropriate Adult (about Fred West) – Charmian was confident the makers would do a good job She was interviewed for an Australian TV programme in 2001 and thought that was the end of it. The show was well received and her family were happy with it. Despite the divorce, she and Biggs remained on good terms. “ I went to see him in 1997 after he had his first stroke and helped him to talk again,” she recalls.

“After that he had another stroke the following year, but I didn’t know much about what was going on in that period. I didn’t know he was coming back to the UK – nobody told me – so that came as a bit of a shock to all of us.

“After speaking to the Australian Broadcasting Company it was a closed book as far as I was concerned. But it was put to me by ITV that a drama could tell people far more about the situation than a documentary so I allowed myself to be talked into it.”

Writing her autobiography had been suggested from time to time. “Absolutely, because books have been my living. I was a journalist and became an editor, mostly historical books,” says Charmian.

“I was made quite a good offer in 1995 by Macmillan and I went away fully intending to start writing. I did start, but the information was overwhelming. It kept me awake for weeks and I couldn’t sleep and it was upsetting. I decided it wasn’t good for me, so I put it aside.”

“I tried to have another go at it. It wasn’t that I didn’t feel I could write it well enough but it brought back so much emotion that I thought I’d closed away in little cupboards in my head. You close these things away. And along the way Ron had published his autobiography, so I didn’t think it was appropriate for me to do anything.”

Charmian had built a new life for herself in Australia with her two sons, following the death of young son Nicky. When he was killed, a friend on the staff of Melbourne University asked what she’d change if she could change her life.

“I said I would have gone to university and that’s how I came to go back. I won a place to Birmingham before I met Ron but didn’t get the county scholarship necessary to pay for my board and my folks, with four other children, couldn’t afford it.”

In Australia, she worked for 30 years from the mid-1970s until retiring at 66. She had various jobs after university, eventually working for the government promoting Australia’s image overseas.

She’s built a happy and fulfilling life for her family in Australia and thought long and hard about the prospect of dragging it all up again. The family want to live privately, but are supportive of her and the series.

“Like Charmian, I think they felt it was an opportunity once and for all to tell the story as it happened,” says writer and executive producer Jeff Pope. “There are lots of myths that persist about the robbery and misconceptions that we have about Ron in particular. This was an opportunity to tell it as it was.”

Pope praises Charmian for being so unflinching in telling the writers everything about her life, including things she’d kept buried for many years. “When she read it back, it was shocking for her. Then she said quietly to herself, it happened.”

Charmian continued to love Ron even after he asked for a divorce, believing the authorities would be more likely to let him stay in Brazil if he married the local woman he’d got pregnant.

Pope sees it as a love story. “Charmian says if you really love someone that means you want them to be happy. And if they’re going to be happier without you in their life then if you really love them, you let them go. That was the thing that most inspired me,” he says.