Charmian Powell might not yet be a household name, unlike the man who once shared her life, but her own narrative of extraordinary resilience is certainly comparable. To most, the nickname the first wife of Great Train Robber Ronnie Biggs explains all. But this is a woman who, thanks to the criminal exploits of another man and at the risk of her own liberty, not only faced decades of reinvention and life disguised, raising children and learning to recreate an identity again, including a new career, and whose story was then retold on national television by Sheridan Smith. Now, largely relayed from an archive of Charmian Powell’s interviews recorded in Australia, here is a chance to look behind the British criminal legend’s mask at his version of events.
Who Is Charmian Powell?
Charmian Powell (daughter of Bernard Powell and Muriel Rawbone) was born in tiny Northamptonshire market town Brackley on 17 May 1939. From accounts available, she lived a fairly normal, conventional middle-class English childhood – which makes the rest of the story all the more compelling.
Charmian Powell met the notorious Ronnie Biggs aged just seventeen. The two met when Ronnie, a minor criminal already involved in the legal system, allegedly her parents did not approve of. Despite this, they both married in 1960, with Charmian being twenty and Ronnie thirty. At the time, as Charmian Powell revealed to us in our interview, she had no idea that her new husband would develop into one of history’s most infamous thieves.
Charmian Powell’s Career
And one thing has to be said at the outset: Charmian Powell was not really a public figure in the usual sense of the word. Her life had circumstances largely beyond her choice imposed upon her, and most of what is known about her focuses on the reaction she had to these circumstances rather than on a professional career that was selected in the first place.
There is, however, one other ‘real’, self-made career within her biography. Once separated from Biggs, and settling finally in Australia, she returned to her studies, obtained a university degree while supporting sons on her own for many years, and worked as a book editor under a changed legal name of Charmian Brent, the change itself being via deed poll. This is another part of her story often overshadowed by the lurid drama in earlier events, that indicates the ability of the woman to create a steady, private life after one that was extraordinary and very publicly chaotic.
What’s more, however willingly, she also became a public commentator on her own story in an interview that went over a hour with Alan Whicker in the 1976 and she even went as far as to appear in the Australian program Australian Story around 2000s, then she worked as advisor on the TV series called Mrs Biggs which went to screen on ITV in 2012 in relation to dramatisation of her life. She is believed to have taken the flight from Australia to Britain by February 2012, just before filming started.
What Is Known About Their Personal Life?
The centre of Charmian Powell‘s life is her marriage to Ronnie Biggs and the complex decade and a half that followed. In August 1963, Biggs joined the band that stole £2.6m – the equivalent of several tens of millions of pounds now – from a Royal Mail train in a highly daring train robbery. Charmian Powell says she did not know that her husband was to be involved in the robbery and said that when he finally took home about £110,000, this was his loot-that she was stunned. Biggs was arrested and incarcerated but escaped from Wandsworth Prison in July 1965 with the help of persons on the outside climbing the walls, with Biggs climbing up them.
As related in Biggs’ version of events and as summed up in Wikipedia, during the period he was in prison Charmian Powell had entered into relationship with another person and was pregnant, had to obtain an illegal abortion in Britain at the time, decided that she want to be with Biggs, he was joined by his friend in December 1965, in Paris, new identities for the family, June 1966 both Charmian together with two small children boarded a plane and flew to him in Darwin Australia, they later settled near Adelaide were their third son was born.
When Biggs and his family eventually settled in Melbourne, where he took several jobs, including constructing sets at the local TV station, a newspaper article dated October 1969 announced Biggs to be hiding out in Melbourne. As a result of this article, he and his family again went into hiding, and reports of Charmian being arrested around this time have been published, along with brief periods of child care for the sons before their return to Charmian.
Five months after this announcement was published-early 1970-Biggs boarded a passenger liner for South America (using a false passport) and abandoned his family once again in Australia. She saw Biggs one last time while he was hiding out in Australia, a short, clandestine meeting organised through friends.
Life After Ronnie Biggs’ Escape
The years which followed were, by any standards, trying ones. The eldest child was killed in a car crash a short time after Biggs fled the country, and Charmian Powell had to bear the loss on her own. After Biggs was caught in Rio de Janeiro in 1974, an Australian newspaper flew Charmian out to see her husband, only for her to discover he had a Brazilian girlfriend who was pregnant with his child. The married pair divorced in 1976 partly as a bid to assist with Biggs’ extradition process from Brazil, according to a subsequent article in a newspaper.
It was during these years, bringing up her two remaining sons mostly by herself in Melbourne, that Charmian Powell tried her hardest to ensure they lived relatively normal private lives free from their notorious father’s public spotlight. Conflicting information appears to exist surrounding this particular period of her life; however, widely accepted facts tell that she worked to keep two separate lives and maintained that they had ‘hardly any contact’ with him following Biggs’ departure from the country. By themselves, they went on to be productive members of the community.
What Do Reliable Sources Confirm?
Details of her life are readily available from her recorded interview, the news archives, and Wikipedia. Details about her date and place of birth, her marriage and subsequent divorce to Ronnie Biggs, the taking of her Brent name, moving to Australia, and her place of death have been confirmed by numerous independent sources, notably by the Australian News Broadcasting Company, ABC News, which covered the circumstances of her death in detail.
Softer biography claims on the internet, such as the personality description (detailed more fully elsewhere on this site) or particular job details other than editing, will often be unable to be independently corroborated and have to be treated as characterisation rather than fact.
If the details can only be obtained from her own interviews (as much of the detail here is derived from Australian Story and her interview for Whicker’s World), then it must be kept in mind that this will represent her version rather than objective truth. Charmian Brent-as she was then known-died on 11th December 2014 in the Box Hill suburb of Melbourne, at the age of 75, and leaves two sons and four grandchildren.
Final Thoughts
Charmian Powell‘s life never quite looks like a footnote to that of Ronnie Biggs, but something akin to a parallel story-marred by his choices but carried, by her own perseverance, to a new conclusion entirely. From small-town life in Northamptonshire, through several decades of turmoil in Australia, to a finally earned and independent career and private life, Powell’s story is another reminder that while criminals make the headlines, those who are caught in their wake lead private lives and have private histories that deserve consideration on their own terms.
