Fin Dwyer
speaker
2,951 appearances
16 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2026
last heard 9 Sep
Fin Dwyer’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 16 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 6.
Appearances
Now it is worth bearing in mind though that Gorges would have had reason to play up his role in the saga to Bulmer Hobson and his cellmate in prison.
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Being a man who stole the crown jewels would have enhanced his reputation in the radical Republican circles he was trying to infiltrate back in nineteen twelve, and then when he was in prison, he certainly would have been the first person to exaggerate their criminal endeavors in jail to impress other prisoners.
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Yet, given the other suspicions around these two men, I tend to think it's probably true.
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However, before we posthumously hang Drawn Quarter, Shackleton and Gorges, it should be said there is actually another candidate who only came to light about a decade after the robbery, and that's Francis Goldney.
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He was one of the other men who held a position in the Office of Arms.
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I mentioned him briefly earlier.
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You might remember he was the guy who was the mayor of Canterbury and very quickly ruled out by the police because he wasn't in Ireland at the time of the robbery.
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Now Goldney, as you might also recall, had taken the position in the Office of Arms to enhance his political CV, and he had emerged largely unscathed from the entire affair.
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He continued on to serve as mayor of Canterbury.
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Until 1910, and later in that year of 1910, he was actually elected to the House of Commons as a Conservative.
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But it was only when Goldney was killed in a car crash in 1918 that another side to his life emerged.
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It was actually revealed that he had been stealing valuable items for several years for his own private collection.
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He had taken manuscripts and chalices, among other things, and this certainly gave him a motive for taking the crown jewels.
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However, Goldney wasn't in Ireland at the time of the robbery, and given he had few connections in Dublin, it's very difficult to see how he would have developed the local contacts needed to pull off the heist.
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Ultimately, we're never going to fully know who carried out the robbery and we can only speculate about the identity of the thieves.
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But before I finish, I do want to look at the fate of the jewels themselves.
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Now to this day, they're still missing.
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Vickers and indeed Richard Gorges both claimed Shackleton had taken them to Amsterdam and pawned them in the Dutch capital on the condition that they would only be sold after three years.
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I should say local law in Canterbury argues that Francis Goldney did the same thing.
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Both theories might just be based on the fact that Amsterdam was in the early twentieth century the capital of the global diamond trade, rather than maybe based on any real evidence that that happened.
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