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A flight from Melbourne to London is going to set you back a fair whack, and that was certainly true back in 1965.
Unable to afford a flight back home, and earning a rather meagre £40 a month working for Victorian Railways, it was time to think outside (or perhaps inside) the box.
Desperate times call for desperate measures, so Brian Robson (pictured above), now 75 years of age and blessed with the wisdom of hindsight, attempted to airmail himself back home to Cardiff, Wales.
He didn’t act alone, enlisting the help of two Irish blokes he says he knows only as Paul and John, and it’s the search for that pair that has led to Brian reaching out for a chance to reconnect.
Via The Guardian, here are the basics of this ill-fated plan:
Robson bought a box “the size of a mini-fridge” and packed it with pillows, a suitcase, a book of Beatles songs and two bottles – one for water and one for urine. His friends then nailed it shut and booked Robson as cargo on a Qantas flight from Melbourne to London.
But their plan came unstuck. The flight was full, so Robson was transferred to a PanAm flight that instead took him to Los Angeles.
The box he was in was regularly placed upside down, and the plane’s hold area temperature swung between freezing and boiling, meaning Brian’s body ached and he had difficulty breathing.
Brian had labelled the cargo, i.e. himself, a computer, which made for an interesting time when he arrived in LA:
[He] was discovered by startled customs officials and then interrogated by the FBI.
He told the BBC that a man had “looked through a hole in a wood knot in the chest and we caught each other eye to eye”.
“He jumped back a mile and said, ‘There’s a body in there.’”
Whilst touching down in the US was certainly not the plan, he did eventually make it home, as a first-class passenger on a Pam Am flight.
Due to the illegal nature of his exploits, Brian agreed to keep the name of his two Irish pals out of things, but he’s always wondered what came of them.
As he told The Irish Times, it’s never too late to reach out:
He wrote to them when he returned from Australia, but didn’t get a reply.
“I did try a couple of times, I think, and of course we didn’t have internet in those days, so from that day to this I’ve never spoken to them. They were the last people I spoke to in Australia before the crate was sealed shut.”
They must know what happened to him because his story went all over the world at the time. “But I’ve got no idea what happened to them. I would love to hear what happened after I left.”
Brian requests that anyone with information mail him at brianpms@hotmail.com.
Here’s hoping this one has a happy ending, and the trio is reunited.
When asked what he would do if one of his kids tried something similar, Brian said simply “I would kill them. But it was a different time.”
That it was.
[sources:guardian&irishtimes]
