A man who posted himself back to the UK from Australia in the 1960s has revealed he took a load of laxatives to stop his box overflowing with waste during his five-day journey.
Brian Robson, 76, originally from Wales, moved to Australia when he was 19-years-old and worked for Victorian Railways in the 1960s.
But, tiring of life down under, Brian hatched upon a plan to return himself to the UK in 1965 in extremely desperate circumstances.
Realising that a train ticket would be £700, which was unaffordable on his monthly salary of just £40, Brian hatched upon a plan to seal himself in a wooden crate and travel from Australia.
To avoid paying this high price to get home, he decided instead to convince two men from Ireland to help stow him onto a freight train.
The two men nailed Brian inside the crate which he had outfitted with a pillow, a suitcase and a book of Beatles songs.
The journey itself was a “quite horrific experience” and took five days. In preparation, Brian took laxatives for three days beforehand to avoid any accidents.
His Irish accomplices had labelled the small wooden crate as a computer and booked him onto a Qantas flight from Melbourne to London without a hitch.
However, en route home, the crate was transferred to a PanAm flight because the original plane was full.
Instead of London, Brian was headed for L.A. and found himself stored in a freight shed where, after five days, he was too weak to hammer himself out.
Luckily for Brian, a man “looked through a hole in a wood knot in the chest and we caught each other eye to eye”, he told the BBC.
“He jumped back a mile and said, ‘There’s a body in there.’”
Brian spent five days recovering in hospital and was questioned by the FBI.
Not too long after, he was released and allowed to fly on a passenger jet back to the UK without any legal action taken against him by the then-acting minister for immigration, Leslie Bury.
When he arrived back in the UK, Brian wrote to the two men who had aided his plan, but they never responded.
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The now 76-year-old doesn't remember where they were from, or what their surnames were but is still desperate to thank them, Daily Record reports.
He told the Irish Times : “I’m 99 per cent sure that they were called Paul and John. Paul really was 100 per cent against it … but John said, ‘Don’t worry about it, I’ll persuade him.’
"And so, they both went ahead and helped.”
He documented his journey in a book, The Crate Escape, which was published in 2021.
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