Chief Superintendent Malcolm Fewtrell, who died on November 28 aged 96, led the Buckinghamshire Police in the investigation of the Great Train Robbery.
As head of the county's criminal investigation department, Fewtrell arrived on the scene of the crime, Bridgego Bridge, near Sears Crossing, at 5am on August 8 1963. After taking in the thieves' efficiency, he supervised the gathering of such evidence as a bloody cloth and the coupling on the mail coach of the Glasgow-London train, which had contained £2,600,000 in notes.
Next he went to Cheddington station, where statements were taken from more than 80 people on the train, including the coshed driver. These confirmed that about 15 hooded men had been involved, but little else. By lunchtime it was clear that the Bucks force did not have the necessary resources, and Fewtrell advised his chief constable to call in Scotland Yard.
There was some tension in Fewtrell's relationship with the London officers, who were conscious of lending a hand to their country cousins. One mistake, which he later admitted making, was in directing searchers for the gang's hideout to work outwards from the abandoned coach towards a perimeter of 35 miles, instead of getting them to start on the perimeter and move inwards; the distance had been chosen because one thief had told the train's fireman that the gang needed half an hour to get away.
They had made little progress a few days later when a cowman rang the Bucks headquarters number, Aylesbury 5010 (which was rapidly becoming as well known as the Yard's Whitehall 1212), in order to voice suspicions about a lonely farmhouse with blackened windows just inside the perimeter. The call was added to the long list of others expected to prove erroneous or hoaxes, and the cowman had to ring again next day before two officers went to Leatherslade Farm.
The recent occupants had fled hastily, and the officers summoned Fewtrell, who arrived with two senior Scotland Yard detectives to find the house well-stocked with food and containing several mailbags stuffed with bank wrappers and Post Office chits, as well as £600. "The whole place is one big clue," he pronounced.
As it became clear that most of the villains were Londoners, the Yard took over the bulk of the investigation, but Fewtrell interviewed the solicitors' clerk Roger Field, who had helped the robbers buy the farm house Fewtrell trapped him over a cup of tea into admitting responsibility for a German hotel bill which had been paid for with some of the money. Later he also had responsibility for the security of the makeshift court room in the district council offices and for the recovered £300,000, which had to be held as evidence.
When Fewtrell retired after the robbers' trial, he was the first officer free to tell his side of the story. With the help of Ronald Payne, who was brought back from Moscow by The Sunday Telegraph to cover the case, he wrote The Train Robbers (1964).
This contained a summary of the familiar facts together with reflections on Post Office complacency and the confusion resulting from so many police working on one case. While paying tribute to individual Yard officers, he pointed out their variability: "Some are first class, others not so good, and there are others still who just like to bask in the glory of being from Scotland Yard."
One of a policeman's six sons, four of whom became officers, Ernest Malcolm Fewtrell was born on September 28 1909 in the police house at Ryde on the Isle of Wight. After Reading School, he went out to New South Wales to work as a jackaroo on sheep stations for six months, then came home to become a Bucks police cadet.
First stationed at Chesham, Fewtrell steadily worked his way up through the uniformed and detective branches. When he went into hospital with appendicitis he met and married a nurse, Anne Thomas, with whom he had a son and a daughter.
Fewtrell was not allowed to join the Armed Forces on the outbreak of war, and by 1950 he had reached the rank of detective inspector; four years later he was appointed chief superintendent. In addition to routine post office robberies and murders, he was once given the unusual task of assembling 10 redheaded men for an identity parade with the A6 murderer James Hanratty, which necessitated borrowing several servicemen from an RAF station.
On leaving the police, he was an accommodation officer for Portsmouth Polytechnic before settling at Swanage, where he was a keen gardener. He relished the edition of Dickens he was given on his 80th birthday; he read it right through, then started again. He also took on the administration of the Neighbourhood Watch and continued to play golf into his nineties.
Fewtrell took the personal publicity connected with the train robbery in his stride, bluntly telling reporters he did not know why some people called him Maigret. Long after his retirement, it was noted that he had a resemblance to John Thaw in Morse, the television series about a detective inspector in the Thames Valley Police, which is the successor to the Bucks Constabulary.
