Open Writing

I’ve done some daft things in my time, but nothing quite so crazy as my attempt to steal the famous Gretna Green anvil.

I shudder now to think what would have happened if I had been caught but at the time it seemed a great idea.

The year was 1957. I had been a freelance journalist in Huddersfield for three years when members of the rag committee at what was then the Huddersfield Technical College approached my agency with an idea for a stunt to get publicity for their charity rag week.

It was really very simple. They wanted us to help them pinch the anvil over which countless marriages of love-sick, runaway teenagers had been performed.

We would finance the trip and pay for the transport and hopefully we would make a profit by selling the story to the national daily papers. I was only 25 and it seemed like a lot of fun. So I volunteered to be a member of the raiding party. I had only passed my driving test a few days earlier and it was a harrowing drive up to Scotland in the car I hired. In those days there were no motorways and the journey took several hours.

My three student passengers and I escaped death twice driving up Shapfell in the wind and rain when we narrowly avoided collision with heavy lorries and I dented a wing hitting a high kerb.

Our resolve unshaken - which is more than we could say for our bodies - we arrived in the early hours of Sunday morning and waited for daylight.

This was the plan. One of the students and myself would walk into the smithy to establish that the anvil was there. Then we would return shortly before it closed for the day and hide.

Once the smithy was closed we would take the anvil - we decided it would need two of us to carry it - and leave behind a ransom note and hotfoot it back to Huddersfield.

Things did not quite go according to plan. The first thing we noticed when we walked into the smithy was that there was no anvil. We browsed through the souvenirs on sale and then casually asked the man in charge: “Where’s the famous anvil”?

We could hardly believe the reply. “We got a tip that some students from Huddersfield were on their way here to steal the anvil and we’ve had it taken away under armed guard.”

Trying desperately not to give ourselves away we casually asked a few questions. Our pose as tourists must have been convincing because he never suspected a thing. It seemed incredible but he told us that the Laird of Gretna Green who owned the anvil had called in a local army unit. They had carried the anvil away on a gun carrier to the Laird’s castle.

As far as I was concerned that made as good a story as the anvil being stolen. I phoned the story down to one of my colleagues in Huddersfield and it was sent to every daily paper.

That was it - or so I thought. But the students had other ideas. Without telling me they went to see the Laird, told him who they were and that they had intended stealing the anvil and then asked, “Please may we borrow it?”

Amazingly, he agreed and he even laid on a car to take the students and the anvil to where our car was parked. That lump of old iron was insured for £5,000 - a lot of money in those days - and I felt a bit nervous driving back home with it in the boot of the car.

Over the next few days the students used the anvil for a number of stunts to publicise their rag week and one of my colleagues went with the students to London where a mock wedding ceremony was performed over the anvil outside Caxton Hall.

I can’t remember how the Laird got the anvil back but the students were delighted with the way it all worked out. I wasn’t too happy. I don’t think our agency broke even after paying for the hire of the car, the damage caused to it, petrol and meals.

I never did find out who tipped off the authorities. And over the years I have often wondered if I would have been brave enough - or daft enough - to have gone through with the theft.