Story of the week: The javelin champ who posted himself to Australia in a box
Reg Spiers couldn’t afford a ticket home so he and his mate posted him as freight
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I have the flu, which means I want to write about something hilarious. Constantly reading about how Boris didn’t realise the party he was hosting at his own gaff was a party, despite the fact he was wearing a party hat and playing Sisqo’s Thong Song on repeat, is making my blood boil. As is all news regarding the Met Police, the relentless defence of Trump, or how gun-toting nutbags believe that it’s A-OK for kids to have shotguns and babies, but heaven forbid they attend sex-ed classes, read books, learn about Black history or hear a story told by a drag queen.
So, as a welcome reprieve, here’s a true story about Australian athlete Reg Spiers posting himself from London to Australia in a box because – and this is a genuine quote – “What was there to be frightened of?”
In a world where I find myself increasingly frightened of many things, I think this story is incredibly uplifting, funny and moving. Turns out, it’s as much a tale about friendship as it is about ridiculousness. You know that question, “Would you help your friend to bury a body?” Well, we’re changing it now to “Would you help your friend post themself to Australia in a box?”
And, after reading this, the answer has to be: Hell yes.
An Australian and a Brit walk onto a javelin field
Javelin-thrower Reg Spiers met fellow javelinist (no idea if that’s a word, but we’re going with it) John McSorley in 1962 at the Commonwealth Games in Perth. Their connection was immediate. The way I’ve heard them describe it in interviews, they shared that electric moment when you first meet someone and think, “Ah, finally my person has shown up” and know you’ll be pals for life.
In 1964, Reg headed to London to try to qualify for the Tokyo Olympics having missed the cut-off for applications in Oz. “He suddenly turned up at my front door,” John recalls. “Look, I was delighted to see him, but I was shocked. He was telling me that he’d given his last two ninepence or something as a tip to the taxi driver – but he’s full of joy. He’s happy. And he stayed with me and we managed to get by. Life was a laugh a minute.”
Unfortunately, Reg didn’t qualify for the Olympics due to a stubborn injury, so he took a job working with cargo at Heathrow airport to save up for the ticket home. However, figuring it would take forever to earn enough, he came up with another plan instead. (Reg estimates a ticket from London to Perth cost about £350 at the time, equating to roughly £6,800 today.) “I knew that you could ship animals in these big jets,” he says. “And I thought, ‘Well, if the dogs can survive it, I could’. So that’s where I came up with the bright idea of jumping in a box… I put a stamp on my ass to send myself home.”
“You’re out of your mind”
When Reg first told John of his plan, he recalls his friend telling him: “‘You’re out of your mind – you crazy, bloody, Aussie’.” But it sounds like John didn’t take much persuading to get involved.
“I said, ‘Listen – if you’re going to do it, then I’ve got to make the crate. I’m not having you go in some bloody orange box and busting out of the thing’,” John recalls. “And so that was it. That’s what we were going to do.”
The biggest box you could put on an aircraft at the time was 5ft x 3ft x 2.5ft, (1.5m x 0.9m x 0.75m) and Reg was 6ft 1in – so it wouldn’t be comfortable, but he’d be able to sit upright with his legs straight or lie down with his knees bent. “I was 22,” Reg says. “You can put up with a lot when you’re that age. Ask me now to do it and I wouldn’t.” They put latches at both ends so he could get out from either side and also straps inside to keep him steady when the box was moved. The box had big slats, allowing plenty of air which were covered over on the inside with brown paper to hide him.
We invented a shoe company, addressed the box to the owner and stated ‘cash on delivery’
“We hit on this idea that Reg should go as ‘rubberised emulsion’ for a shoe company,” John recalls. “Something that people wouldn’t know what it was. We invented this shoe company called ‘The Supreme Shoe Company, Gloucester Road, London’ and [the box] was to be delivered to a Mr. Graham in Perth, and paid ‘Cash on Delivery’.”
All of which was complete nonsense. Total guff.
After leaving London, the plane would stop in Paris before heading to Mumbai. There, Reg’s box would be transferred to a different plane. Then there’d be one more stop, this time in Singapore, before it finally arrived in Perth, Australia.
They packed two bottles – one with water inside and an empty one for urine – as well as a blanket, torch, a gift for his mother (placemats featuring pictures of Tower of London guards), a book (The Bedside Esquire), a suit to change into upon arrival, and some tins of Heinz Baked Beans. “I was working for Heinz at that stage,” John says, “so he’d have a number of tins of baked beans to eat raw. He loved them.”
Now, forgive me for projecting here, but if you or I were about to embark on the most batshit idea anyone’s ever had with a 90% likelihood of resulting in either death or arrest, I assume we’d be a smidge nervous. Not Reg though. “I wasn’t [nervous], strangely enough. I’m not trying to say I was brave. I think I was closer to being stupid. But no, once the ball started to roll, there wasn’t time to be frightened or anything like that. You just put up with it and ride it out. [John] could have had some thoughts in that regard. But it was never mentioned. It was a bit of a joke if anything. We just did it. What you have to remember is we were young, careless and carefree. I think if we’d been older and got a bit more sense we probably would never have done it.”
60 hours in a box with some Heinz
There was a 24-hour delay in London because of fog – the whole time during which, Reg was stuck in his box. Once the plane finally lifted off, he let himself out, quickly peed into an empty baked bean can and left it on top of the box (by accident) before the plane landed in Paris. He remembers hearing the baggage handlers in Paris being LIVID about the pee can, assuming it to be an insult from their London counterparts. Luckily, they didn’t connect it in any way to the box it was balancing on and Reg rode on.
At the next stop, in Mumbai (Bombay at the time), handlers left Reg hanging upside down in the sun for four hours while they changed planes. He managed to strip naked and zone out in the heat. Once he’d successfully passed through Singapore, he knew he was going to make Australia – which he did, landing in Perth a mind-boggling 60 hours after first getting into the box.
There, he was carried to a bond shed where they sort everything for customs. He now had to get out of the box without being seen, get through customs, and somehow get to Adelaide, where he lived. Reg waited until the shed was empty, crawled out of the box, put on his suit to look more ‘appropriate’, found a tool box and cut through a chain linking two large doors. He joined a group of passengers getting off a plane, sauntering along like he belonged, presented his passport at customs and was waved through. HE’D ONLY GONE AND DONE IT.
He then hitchhiked part of the way home and also borrowed money from a priest for a train, arriving back in Adelaide three days after setting off from London – just in time for his daughter’s third birthday.
A telling off from Heinz
Reg didn’t tell John that he’d arrived. Classic Reg. So John – convinced that he’d helped to kill his mate – contacted someone he knew at the Daily Telegraph, asking them to help try to find out what had happened. That journo contacted another in Sydney, who contacted Reg… and the story broke big time.
Once the empty crate was found in storage, proving the story, Reg became a folk hero: the man so keen to get back to Australia he’d packed himself up as freight. Meanwhile, all John got back in the UK was a stern telling off from Heinz for associating the brand with such mischief. Air India did ask Reg to pay the freight charge – which he politely declined to do – while a spokesman from the airline said: “It’s a miracle that Spiers arrived in Perth alive. My blood runs cold when I think of the terrible risks he ran. The cargo could have been offloaded and left in some tropical depot over a weekend, he could have been discovered en route and thrown into jail, he could have been packed with other freight and suffocated, or the pressurisation in the cargo hold might have failed.”
It didn’t put Reg off though – he went on to have a notable career as a drug smuggler (true story), spending many years smuggling himself and various substances all over the world. He spent time in jail in several countries and many years on the run. At one point he was even sentenced to death in Sri Lanka, yet managed to appeal and serve time in Australia instead. “I’m 80 years old and I can feel it. But I never regret a moment, not at all,” he says. “I had experiences that people don’t have.”
The best of which surely has to be his unbreakable friendship with John.
“The depth of our friendship is something that is not tangible,” John says. “We’re very different personalities: he’s this real, outgoing guy and I tend to be fairly reserved – the reserved Englishman. But somehow it worked and it’s continued to work. We’d do anything for each other. It’s a weird thing, but it’s nice. It’s nice to know that you can meet somebody and be that close to them. There are certain times in your life you come to a crossroads and think, ‘Shall I do this?’ and people don’t do it. Reg was the sort of guy where there was no such thing as ‘can’t’ – you can do anything. And that still exists in him.”
“[John] will always be in my life,” Reg says. “Because we like each other”.
Just One More Thing…
I really hope you enjoyed this story which is about friendship really. The silliness you get up to and support your friends through, and the bonds it creates. The ‘Ah, fuck it’ moments that score through the monotony of the everyday. While I’m not saying we should all pack ourselves into crates, I am fully endorsing maintaining lifelong connections with those people who make us feel alive.
Please consider subscribing, sharing, liking or commenting – it really does help! Until next week…
I mainly used this brilliant episode of the podcast ‘Criminal’, as well as this BBC article, for info for this story. John’s wife and son, Julie and Marcus McSorley, have also written a book about Reg’s trip called Out of the Box: The Highs and Lows of a Champion Smuggler.