The Bank Job - Historical Background

Historical Background

The film is in part based on historical facts about the Baker Street robbery. A gang tunnelled into a branch of Lloyds Bank at the junction of Baker Street and Marylebone Road, in London, on the night of 11 September 1971 and robbed the safe deposit boxes there. The robbers had rented a leather goods shop named Le Sac, two doors down from the bank, and tunnelled a distance of approximately 40 feet (12 metres), passing under the intervening Chicken Inn restaurant.

Robert Rowlands, a radio ham operator, overheard conversations between the robbers and their rooftop lookout. He contacted police and tape-recorded the conversations, which were subsequently made public. The film includes lines recorded by Rowlands, such as the lookout's comment that "Money may be your god, but it's not mine, and I'm fucking off." After four days of news coverage, the British authorities supposedly issued a D-Notice, requesting that news coverage be discontinued for reasons of national security, however The Times was still reporting the case over two months later. Contrary to its portrayal in the film, a D-Notice cannot be legally enforced.

The film's producers claim that they have an inside source, identified in press reports as George McIndoe, who served as an executive producer. The film's claims that the issuance of the D-Notice was because a safe deposit box held sex pictures of Princess Margaret with London gangster-turned-actor John Bindon. The possible connection to Michael X is apparently based on information provided by McIndoe, though the basis and extent of his information remains unclear. The film-makers acknowledged that they made up the character Martine, and David Denby in The New Yorker wrote that it is "impossible to say how much of the film's story is true".

The fictitious character of Lew Vogel may in part allude to pornographer and racketeer Bernie Silver, a key figure in Soho in the 1960s and early 1970s, who was jailed in 1975 for the 1956 murder of Tommy "Scarface" Smithson; and also to later events surrounding his associate the real-life pornographer James Humphreys. After an outcry in 1972 when the Sunday People published photographs of the head of the Metropolitan Police Flying Squad, Commander Kenneth Drury, spending a luxurious two-week holiday with their wives with Humphreys in Cyprus, a police raid on Humphreys' house uncovered a wallsafe containing a diary cataloguing detailed itemised payments to seventeen different officers. Humphreys was jailed for eight years in 1974 for wounding his wife's former lover. He then turned Queen's Evidence, testifying against some of Scotland Yard's most senior officers in two major corruption trials in 1977; for which he received a Royal Pardon and was released from prison. In 1994 Humphreys was jailed for twelve months for living off the earnings of prostitutes. Vogel's role as a slum landlord using Michael X as his enforcer draws on the career of Peter Rachman, who employed Michael X in this role.

The major political sex scandal of the period was the resignation of Lord Lambton in 1973. Again the circumstances were somewhat different to those shown in the film. Lambton resigned after a photograph was circulated around Fleet Street by the husband of one of two prostitutes he was shown in bed with, smoking marijuana; along with more photographs of other "prominent people". The prostitute, Norma Levy, did specialise in sado-masochism as a dominatrix, but remembers Lambton as being "relatively straight", and if anything more interested in the marijuana. She had been introduced to Lambton in July 1972 by upmarket madame Jean Horn. The affair was subsequently investigated by DCS Bert Wickstead of the Serious Crime Squad, who had also led the investigations into Silver and Humphreys. A confusion led to the additional resignation of another minister, Lord Jellicoe, although he had not been directly connected with Levy.

Part of the filming took place on location at the offices of Websters, 136 Baker Street where the rooftops were actually used for lookout purposes. The majority of outside shots, namely shots including the bank and adjacent shops, were done on a specially constructed set of Baker Street, to retain an authentic feel of the period and to allow for greater control of visible elements. This partial set was extended using VFX by the Australian company Iloura.