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

WELSH teenager Brian Robson was so homesick in 1965 Australia that he decided to do the unthinkable: mail himself to London in a crate.

His ill-planned journey went catastrophically wrong, and the cramped box, which measured less than a metre-cubed, almost became a coffin.

As the crate was buffeted around in the hold, desperate Robson was frequently forced to stand on his head, and repeatedly blacked out, he told Reuters at the time.

“It was pretty scary,” he said. “The crate was a bit too small. I had only a pint of water and five biscuits to live on. I had finished the biscuits and had two mouthfuls of water left when they found me. Most of the water had spilled out.”

He managed to travel 12,900 kilometres to Los Angeles, spending 92 hours nailed in the wooden box before he was discovered. He was then flown the rest of the way to London in comfort, his jetliner ticket marked “deported from the United States”. An airline official ran up to him at the last minute with the shoes he had left in the crate, and Robson boarded the plane to Britain in socks, carrying his footwear in one hand.

The media was enthralled by the story of his reckless adventure. Robson had been inspired by the story of Australian javelin thrower Reg Spiers, who only a year earlier had stowed away in the opposite direction, from London to Australia. The penniless 22-year-old from Adelaide had been determined to make it home for his daughter’s birthday.

His 63-hour journey to Perth was more successful, since the athlete had prepared carefully with the help of a friend, sourcing a box with room to stretch out his legs and packing canned food, a torch, blanket, pillow and two plastic bottles (one for water and the other for urine).

Robson, on the other hand, had only a few supplies and his crate was much smaller. He was described as “useless” by a Liberal MP in Victoria, who sought legal proceedings against the young Welshman.

Sergeant Kenneth Larse of the airport police in LA said he would have been dead before the crate had completed the next 12-hour, 8850km leg of the journey to London.

Cardiff-born Robson had intended to be shipped on a direct 36-hour Qantas flight from Sydney

to London on 17 May. His plane from Melbourne reached Sydney as planned, but the connecting flight was full and he was left upside down on the tarmac for 22 hours before he was instead put on a Pan Am flight to LA, where the freight was to be transferred.

The hold wasn’t heated, and Robson’s situation became perilous. He was in terrible pain, he had difficulty breathing and slipped in and out of consciousness. In total, he spent four days in the crate.

He was finally rescued when airport workers spotted a torchlight and heard knocking coming from the box, which was marked “Ajax computer”. Three of his British friends had helped nail him in.

Too weak to walk, 173cm-tall Robson was taken to the prison ward of Los Angeles County General Hospital. He appeared in court for illegal entry to the US a day later, and spoke to reporters from a wheelchair, his legs and arms bruised from the painful trip.

“If everything goes all right I expect to be home in a week,” he said. “When I get back, I’m going to forget all about Australia and America and just settle down.”

He said his biggest fear was over whether the cargo section of the plane would be pressurised.

“I was dead scared, petrified would be more like it,” he said.

Robson had been bored and unhappy after 10 months working as a bus conductor and railway porter on the Victorian railways in Melbourne, and didn’t have the money to get home. He was in the country on an assisted immigration program paid for by the Australian government, so he couldn’t even get a passport until his two years were up.

“Australia was a complete shock to my system,” Robson, now 70, told the BBC this week. “I found it very difficult, and thought from the moment I got there I wanted to get out as quickly as possible.”

But Robson said he was pleasantly surprised by the reaction to his reckless escapades.

“Nobody’s mad at me,” he said at the time, adding that he planned to repay the $750 his trip had cost. “Everybody’s on my side.”

Looking back, he says he knows he was foolish. But sitting on that concrete in Sydney, there was no way he was going reveal himself. “It was London or die.”