Tipperary ETB Adult Learning Scheme
He has kept his secrets for more than 50 years, the quiet man of the most famous criminal gang in British history, the mastermind of the Great Train Robbery.
Now aged 85 and one of just two surviving members of the 15-strong gang, Douglas Gordon Goody lives quietly in the Spanish countryside with his partner, Maria, and their five dogs.
It is back to his rural roots for a man whose introduction to crime was smuggling cattle over the Northern Irish border to dodge customs.
The key fact about the 1963 robbery that gripped the public imagination remained unknown until now – who was the insider, the mystery man who fed the gang the information they needed to know to target the train?
Patrick McKenna was the "Ulsterman". Then a 43-year-old Belfast-born postal worker in north London, he was introduced to Goody through a third party.
They met four times in early 1963 and McKenna told them how a post train operated, allowing the gang to successfully stop the Glasgow-to-London Royal Mail train in the early hours of 8 August 1963, getting away with more than £2.6m
Goody only knew the man's name because he happened to pick up his glasses case, which had fallen in the grass when McKenna went to buy ice-cream for the plotters on a warm May day in Kensington Gardens, and saw it scribbled inside. The name and the fact that, as Goody later recalled, McKenna looked like the comedian Frank Skinner were all Goody knew, but now a documentary team have used those clues to trace the Ulsterman.
Belfast-born postal worker Patrick McKenna, identified by Goody as 'the Ulsterman' who helped the gang plan the crime. PR
But while there is now a face and a name to the insider the police never found, as one mystery is solved, another deepens. After McKenna picked up his share in two holdalls and a mailbag and piled them into the boot of a grey car, the money disappeared from history.
His family, who live in Manchester, were "shocked" to hear about McKenna's part in the conspiracy. A quiet church-going man, who lived a simple life, staying in the post office until his retirement,
For Goody it's the release of a long-kept secret. In fragile health, he has finally decided to write a book. "I've read them all, I watched the film Buster. It was good. Everybody loved Buster."
Goody was sentenced to 35 years and served 12. He insists that while the robbery was "my job", evidence at his trial was faked. He was arrested in Leicester, where he had been staying in a hotel with his then girlfriend, a former Miss Great Britain. "The receptionist thought I looked like the picture they were running in the paper of Bruce Reynolds, (the gang leader) and she rang the police."
Goody was given 30 years in prison but was released in 1975. He soo left for Spain.
Goody doesn't return to England, or to Ireland where he was born, but his memories are sharp, his language caught in a timewarp of 60s Britain. "My old man wanted me to be a plumber's mate. I wanted to be a criminal.
Now aged 85 and one of just two surviving members of the 15-strong gang, Douglas Gordon Goody lives quietly in the Spanish countryside with his partner, Maria, and their five dogs.
It is back to his rural roots for a man whose introduction to crime was smuggling cattle over the Northern Irish border to dodge customs.
The key fact about the 1963 robbery that gripped the public imagination remained unknown until now – who was the insider, the mystery man who fed the gang the information they needed to know to target the train?
Patrick McKenna was the "Ulsterman". Then a 43-year-old Belfast-born postal worker in north London, he was introduced to Goody through a third party.
They met four times in early 1963 and McKenna told them how a post train operated, allowing the gang to successfully stop the Glasgow-to-London Royal Mail train in the early hours of 8 August 1963, getting away with more than £2.6m
Goody only knew the man's name because he happened to pick up his glasses case, which had fallen in the grass when McKenna went to buy ice-cream for the plotters on a warm May day in Kensington Gardens, and saw it scribbled inside. The name and the fact that, as Goody later recalled, McKenna looked like the comedian Frank Skinner were all Goody knew, but now a documentary team have used those clues to trace the Ulsterman.
Belfast-born postal worker Patrick McKenna, identified by Goody as 'the Ulsterman' who helped the gang plan the crime. PR
But while there is now a face and a name to the insider the police never found, as one mystery is solved, another deepens. After McKenna picked up his share in two holdalls and a mailbag and piled them into the boot of a grey car, the money disappeared from history.
His family, who live in Manchester, were "shocked" to hear about McKenna's part in the conspiracy. A quiet church-going man, who lived a simple life, staying in the post office until his retirement,
For Goody it's the release of a long-kept secret. In fragile health, he has finally decided to write a book. "I've read them all, I watched the film Buster. It was good. Everybody loved Buster."
Goody was sentenced to 35 years and served 12. He insists that while the robbery was "my job", evidence at his trial was faked. He was arrested in Leicester, where he had been staying in a hotel with his then girlfriend, a former Miss Great Britain. "The receptionist thought I looked like the picture they were running in the paper of Bruce Reynolds, (the gang leader) and she rang the police."
Goody was given 30 years in prison but was released in 1975. He soo left for Spain.
Goody doesn't return to England, or to Ireland where he was born, but his memories are sharp, his language caught in a timewarp of 60s Britain. "My old man wanted me to be a plumber's mate. I wanted to be a criminal.