The incredible true story of Reg Spiers; the man who airfreighted himself from England to Australia. 'Out of the Box, The Highs and Lows of a Champion Smuggler' - New Book by Julie and Marcus McSorley. Courtesy: www.outoftheboxstory.com

IT WAS 1964 when Aussie javelin thrower Reg Spiers found himself penniless in London.

Desperate to return home for his daughter’s birthday but without a cent to his name, he decided to post himself to Australia — in a wooden box.

“I just got in the thing and went. What was there to be frightened of? I’m not frightened of the dark so I just sat there,” Spiers, from Adelaide, told the BBC.

“It’s like when I travel now if I go overseas. There’s the seat. Sit in it, and go.”

Spiers was just 22 when he hatched the hairbrained scheme with his friend John McSorley, an English javelin thrower.

What followed was an amazing 63-hour journey from London to Perth: stowed upside down on a tarmac in the scorching sun, dropped by a forklift and on the brink of dehydration.

But Spiers survived and his incredible tale has been detailed in a book by McSorley’s wife and son, Julie and Marcus McSorley, Out Of The Box: The Highs And Lows Of A Champion Smuggler.

Spiers, a promising javelin thrower who had competed at the 1962 Commonwealth Games, travelled to London in 1964 after failing to make the Australian Olympic team.

He was trailing around the athletics circuit hoping to perform at a level that would qualify him for the Tokyo games.

He failed and, penniless, took an airport job.

Working in the cargo area inspired his crazy idea to return to his homeland in a crate.

“I worked in the export cargo section, so I knew about cash-on-delivery with freight. I’d seen animals come through all the time and I thought, ‘If they can do it I can do it’,” Spiers told the BBC.

He took McSorley for a drink at Twickenham’s Crown pub in October 1964 and together they concocted the airfreight plan.

“He told me it had to be 5ft x 3ft x 2.5ft, (1.5m x 0.9m x 0.75m),” McSorley said.

“I knew Reg and I thought, ‘He’s going to do it regardless, so if he’s going to do it I’d better make him a box that at least is going to get him there’.”

The box allowed Spiers to sit up straight-legged or lie back with knees bent. It also opened at both ends so he could jump out to stretch his legs.

They labelled the box as a load of paint addressed to a fictitious “Mr Graham”, specifying cash-on-delivery.

With some canned food, a torch, blanket, pillow and two plastic bottles (one for water and the other for urine), Spiers was loaded on to a Perth-bound Air India plane at Heathrow Airport on October 17, 1964.

While the plan sounded good on paper, the journey was hellish.

Spiers endured a 24-hour delay in London due to fog, and could only climb out of the box once the plane took off.

The first stop was Paris followed by Mumbai, India, where baggage handlers stowed Spiers’ box upside down on the tarmac.

“It was hot as hell in Bombay so I took off all my clothes,” he says. “Wouldn’t it have been funny if I’d got pinched then?”

“They had the thing on its end. I was on the tarmac while they were changing me from one plane to another. I’m strapped in but my feet are up in the air. I’m sweating like a pig but not to give up — wait, be patient — and eventually they came and got me and put me on another plane.”

When the plane finally touched down in Perth, Spiers knew he was home.

“The accents — how could you miss? I’m on the soil. Amazing. Wonderful. I made it,” he said.

“I knew they would take the box to a bond shed. When they put me in the shed I got out straight away. There were cartons of beer in there. I don’t drink but I whipped a beer out and had a drink of that.”

Keen to remain undetected, Spiers said he found tools and cut himself out of the cargo shed when no-one was looking.

He pretended he was a normal traveller and used his passport to get through immigration.

“There was no security. I put on a suit out of my bag so I looked cool, jumped through the window, walked out on to the street and thumbed a ride into town. Simple as that,” he said.

But it wasn’t that simple.

Spiers was elated to be reunited with his wife and daughter in Adelaide but forgot to let McSorley know that he was safe.

That’s when McSorley, back in England, notified a journalist friend, causing a huge media storm.

The airline eventually allowed Spiers to fly for free.

It is unlikely Spiers could ever make that journey now as cargo is screened and held in freezing, pressurised cabins.

The bold journey turned Spiers into an Aussie legend. But, according to his biographer Marcus McSorley, it was “just the beginning” in Spiers’ sensational life.

“After the box incident Reg went on to smuggle a different kind of substance,’ Mr McSorley told Daily Mail Australia.

“He went onto assume three different identities, was wanted in three different continents, he went on the run with his lover and was sentenced to death in Sri Lanka as a Frenchman. The guy’s lived quite a life.”

Spiers disappeared from Adelaide in 1981 after being charged over a plot to smuggle $1.2 million in narcotics into Australia.

In 1982 he was arrested in India on charges of being a drug courier, but fled the country.

He was next arrested in Sri Lanka in 1984 while travelling on a fake passport under the name Patrick Claude Albert Ledoux and sentenced to death for drugs offences.

He successfully appealed the sentence and spent five years in jail in Australia.

Out Of The Box: The Highs and Lows of a Champion Smuggler, released in 2014, details Spiers’ journey from London to Perth in a box as well as his many years on the run as a drugs fugitive.