I hope our friends in the UK had a nice bank holiday yesterday.
The central bank in the United Kingdom is known as the Bank of England; its headquarters is in central London, and among its many jobs is to hold huge stores of gold bars, for the country and for bank customers.
There are reportedly hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of gold in its underground vaults.
The walls are eight feet thick,plus there are guards as well as electronic and physical security measures, including keys that are more than a foot long.
Thanks to all that security, no one has ever robbed the Bank of England.
But if you ask whether anyone’s broken into the Bank of England… the answer is a little more complicated.
Even the Bank doesn’t have a huge amount of information about this, but we know that in 1836, its directors started getting anonymous letters from someone who claimed that they knew how to get into a gold vault.
Not only that, the writer said they could prove it, inviting the directors to choose a day and time to meet inside the vault.
The bewildered bankers agreed, and sure enough, at the agreed meeting time, they found a man dropping by the supposedly impenetrable vault.
Fortunately, he wasn’t a robber; he was a repairman, who had been doing fixes on the sewer system underneath the bank.
And he’d discovered a drain that led right into the vault, which meant a potential robber had a way in and out.
The bankers were relieved: the anonymous letters hadn’t been threats, they were warnings.
And after verifying the sewer worker’s story, they decided to give him a reward for his honesty: £800, which in today’s money would be worth over £75,000.
Honest pay for honest work.
If you’re a hard rock fan, you may want to head to the English town of Burslem.
Burslem was the hometown of Motorhead frontman Lemmy, and this Friday they’re going to have a dedication ceremony for the town’s new Lemmy statue.
There will also be live music, food, and a parade of bikers offering a “21-rev salute” in Lemmy’s memory.
Has any gold ever been stolen from the Bank of England? (Bank of England)
Lemmy Forever Stoke-on-Trent statue unveiling ceremony and festivities announced (RadioX)