Assassination attempt: claim corroborated

A retired senior detective, Detective Superintendent Cliff McHardy, 81, has claimed that unidentified conspirators put a wooden log on a railway track to try to derail the official train transporting the Queen and Duke of Edinburgh from Sydney across Australia’s Great Dividing Range of mountains.  Since the original story, two  other officers have come forward to corroborate this.  They are former Chief Superintendent Barry Antill, 70, and former Detective Senior Sergeant Doug Bentley, 69.

According to Bonnie Malkin and Andrew Pierce in the London Daily Telegraph of 27 January, this incident  lacked the precision and detailed planning of some other better known assassination attempts on world leaders.  As for the train, after it struck the log it was merely forced to slow and came safely to a halt at a level crossing.

The report says “the so-called Republican plot” was revealed when retired Detective Superintendent Cliff McHardy, 81, decided to break his silence in an interview in his local newspaper to try to clear-up one of the great unsolved mysteries of his long police career.  He said that on 29 April 1970, The Queen and the Duke were travelling by train to Orange in New South Wales.

When the train entered a winding cutting near Lithgow, two hours to the west of Sydney, it struck a large log wedged across the rails. From his investigations she concluded this was an act of deliberate sabotage to force the train off the tracks.  Fortunately the train driver was moving unusually slowly.

“If the train had reached its normal speed it would have plunged off the tracks and into an embankment,” Mr. McHardy said.  The log became stuck underneath the front wheels for 200 metres before the train, largely undamaged, came to a halt at a level crossing.

…tracked checked one hour earlier….

A security “sweeper” train had checked the line an hour before and had found nothing. He concluded that the assassins had knowledge of the official train’s schedule.

He told The Daily Telegraph: “The log had been moved onto the line in darkness, by one or two people who had prior knowledge of the area,” he said. “Vandals couldn’t have been involved because there’s no pub nearby, so you couldn’t put it down to hoodlum behaviour. It was pre-planned.”

Mr McHardy and two detectives interviewed witnesses including railway employees and local people but no arrests were made. The Lithgow Mercury says Australian Irish Republican Army  sympathisers were among those questioned.  Mr McHardy said the incident was covered-up by the government which issued a suppression order.

“They said keep it out of the press because The Queen is still out here and if it had broken the next morning there would have been all sorts of trouble and we can do without that in a small country town,” said Mr McHardy.

He said that he had decided to speak out now in the hope that “it would prompt the people responsible to come forward and own up”.

The rest of the trip unfolded without incident and hundreds of well-wishers turned out in Orange to greet the young Queen and Duke. A spokesman for Buckingham Palace declined to comment but said  the archives for the trip showed no records of the train hitting a log.

LITHGOW: ATTEMPT TO DERAIL THE QUEEN’S TRAIN

On the night of 29 April 1970, an event occurred on the rail corridor through Lithgow that had the potential to change the course of world history (reports Orange‟s Central Western Daily,22January 2009).

“It was an incident on such a scale of international significance that an ironcast wall of secrecy was thrown up by Federal and State authorities when they responded to a curious media who had been hearing whispers‟something was amiss,”writes Len Ashworth, editor of the Lithgow Mercury, a sister paper to the Orange paper.

When Det Sgt Cliff McHardy received a phone call that night the implications were immediate; someone had made a serious attempt to derail the Royal Train that was conveying Queen Elizabeth and Prince Phillip to Orange. Long retired after 11 years in charge of Lithgow detectives, McHardy –who left the Force with the rank of detective superintendent – has now recounted his memories of the frantic investigations and bemoaned the fact that the culprit was “one that got away‟.

On the night of the drama the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh were travelling on what was known as the Commissioner’s Train. The security largely consisted of uniformed police who were ordered to man every railway station along the route and railway personnel on duty at every level crossing. On board were members of the Royal entourage and federal and special branch police. The schedule was for the train to spend the night under tighter security in a siding at Orange, ready for a two-and-a-half hour visit next day. The train almost did not make it. As it passed at speed through a winding cutting at Bowenfels the locomotive struck a large log that had been placed across the tracks.

The train continued under brakes for about 200 metres with the log wedged under the front wheels before finally coming to a halt at the level crossing near Bowenfels station.

When Det Sgt McHardy and Detectives Barry Antill and Doug Bentley arrived they found the hardwood log had not splintered under the heavy impact and had deep indentations from the locomotive wheels. But the locomotive had remained on track and largely unscathed.

The attempt to derail the train was no spur-of-the-moment example of vandalism taken to the extreme. Whoever was responsible had surveyed the area as marks indicated where the log had previously been resting at the top of the embankment in an area not often frequented by the public. It had been rolled from there onto the tracks and manoeuvred into place, possibly by more than one person.

The offenders had also been aware of the time schedule for not only the Royal Train but a security “sweeper‟ locomotive that had gone through a short time earlier to guard against just such an incident. The obstruction was placed on the tracks sometime between the passing of the sweep and the arrival in the cutting of the train carrying the British Monarch and her husband to Orange.

There were numerous suspects and theories but the perpetrators of the attempt to derail the Queen’s train were never found.

While the hunt for the culprit was underway Government officials were as much concerned about the embarrassment to Australia if the story leaked as they were with the incident itself.

Government gags were placed on the release of any information to the public. “I was constantly reassuring my superiors that the local media would cooperate if we asked them to,”McHardy said. “I told them that the editor of the Lithgow Mercury, Bede Leighton, was man of total integrity who would abide by his word when told anything in confidence. “They were used to dealing with the Sydney media and remained sceptical. ”But the official suppression order worked and there was never a mention of the incident, even though most Lithgow railwaymen knew of the incident. They obeyed from their department to say nothing.

https://www.mq.edu.au/research/research-centres-groups-and-facilities/resilient-societies/centres/centre-for-media-history/australian-media-history-database/associations/australian-newspaper-history-group/documents/number51.pdf

Pause tomorrow to honour Diggers