The wicker coffin, draped in the flags of Great Britain and Brazil and an Arsenal scarf, and accompanied by an escort of Hell's Angels and the London Dixieland jazz band playing Just a Closer Walk with Thee, arrived at Golders Green crematorium in the midst of rain and storm. It departed at the end of a ceremony in which Shakespeare, Dylan Thomas and Oscar Wilde all received a mention, to the strains of The Stripper.
"This is," said the Rev Dave Tomlinson, with priestly understatement, "unlike any funeral I've ever taken." Mourners at the farewell for Great Train Robber Ronnie Biggs, who died last month aged 84, had been asked by his son not to wear black "or carry any offensive or aggressive jewellery", and if there were any of the knuckleduster pendants that have appeared at some recent criminal funerals, they were hard to spot.
Tomlinson, who had conducted the funeral of Biggs's fellow robber Bruce Reynolds last year, said he had received many anonymous emails asking him how he could justify taking the funeral.
"Jesus didn't hang out with hoity-toity, holier-than-thou religious people," he told the congregation in the standing-room-only chapel.
"He seemed much more at home with the sinners. At the end of the day, we are all sinners."
He anticipated that Biggs's arrival at a metaphorical pearly gate "will create a bit of a stir". Biggs's Brazilian-born son, Michael, whose birth secured his freedom until he made his voluntary return to Britain and jail in 2002, paid a tearful tribute to his father, who had brought him up as a single parent in Rio de Janeiro.
"He met Bruce Reynolds in borstal and it all went uphill and downhill from there," he said. "They both agreed that they wanted to write, travel the world and have a son called Nicholas."
He described his father's life in Brazil. "He loved his puff, three times a day, if he could. He spoke the lingo and he danced the samba and he always had a soft spot for the underdog … Ashes to ashes and dust to beaches."
Inviting mourners for a drink afterwards, Michael told his father: "Don't worry, you're not paying – there wasn't enough money left in your account." He briefly recounted his father's life, from escaping from Wandsworth prison, where "Oscar Wilde and Voltaire" had previously resided, to France, Australia and Brazil.
Nick Reynolds, Bruce's musician and artist son, said of Biggs, who suffered a series of strokes that left him unable to speak: "The house was a wreck but the lights were still on." He read a letter from one-time fellow inmate Charles Bronson: "I do hope the royal family shows its respects with a train wreath. Without villains like Ronnie, what a boring world it would be." (There was a train wreath, with a floral tribute of Biggs's two-fingered salute, but the card was not from the majesty to whom Biggs gave more than a decade of pleasure.)
There was a message in the form of a Shakespeare sonnet from Charmian, his first wife whom he had to abandon when he fled Australia for Brazil: "Love alters not with brief hours and weeks,/ But bears it out even to the edge of doom."
An old friend, Cookie, read one of Biggs's prison poems, which recalled his time inside and the "sombre silence, foul, familiar smells". The Alabama Three, the band to which Nick Reynolds belongs, played The Carnival Is Over, the old Seekers' song with which Biggs had ended his autobiography, Odd Man Out.
Howard Marks, who knows what it's like to be on the run and banged up, from his days as a dope smuggler, quoted the explorer Richard Burton – "do what thy manhood bids thee do" – and then gave a full-throated performance of Dylan Thomas's "death shall have no dominion" that another Richard Burton wouldn't have been ashamed of.
Biggs's granddaughter, Ingrid, said: "I never saw you as Ronnie Biggs the Great Train Tobber but as my own grandad." The actor Steven Berkoff, who had met Biggs in 1987, when making a film about him that both agreed was "a load of cobblers", praised his "most terrific patter".
Chris Pickard, his friend and ghost writer, said it was good that Biggs's beloved Arsenal were top of the premiership when he died. "Even Ron knew there was no point in hanging around waiting for them to win the league," he told a congregation that included gangland figures such as Freddie Foreman, and children of the fast dwindling band of train robbers.
Even after finishing his updated autobiography a couple of years ago, said Pickard, Biggs had been keen to write more. He regretted that they would now be unable to finish their planned project: Ronnie Biggs's Crookery Book for Single Men on the Run. The first recipe was to have been for porridge.
With closing words from the Rev, Biggs's coffin slipped away. Outside the chapel, the strains of The Stripper gave way to Bring Me Sunshine as the police, in their final meeting with Biggs, handled the traffic and the mourners headed down the road to the Refectory bar.
Golders Green crematorium has seen it all in the century or so since it opened. Biggs joins a distinguished list of those whose funerals were held there, from Sigmund Freud and Bram Stoker to TS Eliot and Joe Orton, the playwright who, in Loot, encapsulated the enduring national fascination with cops and robbers that shows no sign of abating, even if one of its leading characters has finally accepted that the carnival is over.
