The "'Eastcastle Street robbery"' was, at the time, Britain's largest postwar robbery. It occurred on Wednesday 21 May 1952 when seven masked men held up a post office van just off Oxford Street, central London. The robbers escaped with £287,000 (estimated to be worth, in 2014, approximately £7,380,000).
The robbers used two cars to sandwich the van. The first car emerged slowly from a side street causing the van to slow down, the second car then pulled up alongside. The driver and two attendants were dragged out and coshed and the van was stolen. It was later found abandoned near Regent's Park; 18 of the 31 mailbags were missing. It was found that the van's alarm bell had been tampered with.
The robbery heralded the start of the 'project' (i.e. a carefully planned and executed) crime. Rehearsals had been carried out in the roads outside London under the pretext that a crime movie was being shot. The mastermind behind the raid was London gangster Billy Hill and the robbers included George "Taters" Chatham and Terry "Lucky Tel" Hogan. A £25,000 reward was offered for information leading to recovery of the money and a thousand police officers took part in searches, but the robbers were never caught.
Prime Minister Winston Churchill demanded daily updates on the police investigation and the Postmaster General, Earl de la Warr, was required to report to the Parliament of the United Kingdom on what had gone wrong. Yet, despite the involvement of over 1,000 police officers, no one was ever caught.
In popular culture
The plot of Alexander Mackendrick's 1955 comedy film The Ladykillers references the robbery, which was still unsolved at the time, and implies that the characters had a hand in it.