Hancock was a strongly built man with blond, curly hair.

In March 1968, aged 29, he was an engineer at Simonsen's Brothers, a commercial piggery just outside Blenheim. He'd been working there for two years. He had nothing but a parking ticket to his name.

He liked a drink at the end of the week with his mates, including the then 23-year-old Sergent. They'd been friends for more than five years.

Blenheim pubs were given permission to serve drinks until 10pm just five months earlier, after closing at 6pm for 50 years. After a few late-night drinks, the friends would often delve into a discussion about money.

Marlborough was a low-income area, and most folks were strapped for cash. Unemployment was a part of life. An average three-bedroom house cost $8280 (now about $142,000), having risen 24.2 per cent in eight years.

Hancock recalled the 1960s being "dead boring for everyone around", as "nothing was happening" and "everyone was going nowhere". Farmers had yet to cash in on the grape rush. The first commercial vineyard wasn’t planted until 1973.

Topics of interest in the later half of the decade included the introduction of mini skirts, the changing length of boys’ hair at Marlborough Boys' College, and Blenheim being confused with Nelson three times on television.

"In the 60s, you went to work, you went home, went to the pub, moaned into your beer," Hancock said.

"It went round and round. No-one went anywhere. It was a town behind the times in a country behind the times."

One night at the pub, Hancock and his friends got onto the topic of escaped prisoner Trevor Nash, who was the central figure in a £19,000 payroll robbery in Auckland in 1956.

Nash and his gang broke into the Waterfront Industries Commission's offices, before they were arrested, escaped, and then arrested again in Australia.

Hancock was critical of how Nash executed his crime and said he hadn't been smart about it.

"You haven't got the guts to do what Nash did," Sergent said.

"Bloody oath, I could too," Hancock said.

The circle of friends joked that robbing a bank would be the only way to get out of debt. It was a fun idea; one that was easy enough to entertain during their regular pub sessions. On paper, the group decided, they had the perfect team.

Sergent once worked in the Blenheim Post Office, which connected to the Post Office Savings Bank, one of the few buildings in town that stored a large pile of cash.

He was familiar with the savings bank's layout and knew how someone could enter the building and steal the money in the strongroom without setting off the alarm. Hancock, on the other hand, knew how to use a blow torch, which could be used to get through the strongroom's door.

The group decided there would be little problem getting into the saving bank's strongroom. The door only boasted two thick plates. It shouldn't be a problem, providing of course, the alarm system could be bypassed.

Their theory was based on a 1935 incident, when the same strongroom door had to be cut with a blowtorch after its key jammed. Both Hancock and Sergent guessed the savings bank would have replaced it with the same type of door.

Hancock, self-described as a "smart b.....d who could do everything", thought the savings bank heist would be an easy in-out job.

Sergent was a "pretty laid back" but "private" man who thought it would be a laugh.

But surely this was just pub talk? A fantastical tale spun by a bunch of buddies to pass the hours. Until it wasn't.

The strongroom had four wooden lockers, four steel lockers and several steel cabinets. Sergent pointed out the lockers that contained cash.

The friends used a screwdriver and their small crowbar to force the lockers open, revealing $21,000 in crisp banknotes.

Hancock then noticed a Gladstone bag.

"Geoff said to forget about them, but I was curious about the bag, so I had a poke around and found it had this toy lock on it," Hancock said.

"I broke the lock and found the bag had $30,000 inside. We later found out it was a social welfare payout from the Social Security Department that was left at the post office and wasn't supposed to be there."

It was the long Easter weekend. The department's Social Security funds, believed to total $30,000 (now about $535,190), were locked away for safekeeping.

At the time, the Social Security Department collected its money from the Bank of New Zealand, but its cash was kept at the post office, where social security payments were made.

In Blenheim, the department had its own steel locker in the strongroom of the savings bank where cash for paying superannuation beneficiaries and British pensioners were kept.

The two men put all their takings in the Gladstone bag and took the lot.

Hancock said there was so much money in the bag some was sticking out the top. The Gladstone bag was packed into the car, along with the blow torch and tools.

They left nothing but some steel cuttings and grit on the floor, half a dozen burnt out matches and a hole in the strongroom door.

Both Hancock and Sergent wore gloves and later destroyed the clothes they had been wearing by burning them with the blow torch.

After returning the blow torch to the workshop, the pair drove to Hancock's house and made a rough count of the cash. In the end, they weren't sure how much money they had taken or what to do with it.

Hancock buried a wad of cash under his dog kennel. The pair then packed the rest of the money into polythene bags, placed the bags into the Gladstone bag and, with rifles to make it look like they were going shooting, drove about 65 kilometres deep into the Marlborough Sounds bush.

The pair trekked to a remote location, where they dug a hole with a jungle knife and buried the Gladstone bag. Hancock and Sergent agreed that, if caught and interviewed, neither would give up where the money was hidden.

As police searched far and wide for the missing money, Ray Hancock was using it to pay his bills - in the post office he had just robbed.

Police were stumped. About $50,000 had been stolen from the Blenheim Post Office Savings Bank in Blenheim - “a record for New Zealand” - but there were no witnesses and little evidence.

Someone with inside knowledge of the savings bank's layout must have committed the heist, police told the media.

Their theory was based on how the door closest to the savings bank's strongroom had been forced, and the strongroom had been broken into on April 15, an Easter Monday, when it was holding a lot more cash than usual.

Police checked the alibis of every known criminal in New Zealand capable of breaking into the savings bank over the next few days, but found that none of them had been in Blenheim over Easter.

They also ran checks on all past and present employees of the Blenheim Post Office and the Social Security Department, who would have known intimate details on the savings bank. No-one caught their eye.

A broken window from the savings bank was removed to check for fingerprints, after none were found in the strongroom.

Police issued a statement which said they were looking for a pale blue 1957 Holden station wagon, after several people reported seeing it on Monday afternoon with engineering tools in the back.

But despite numerous phone calls about the whereabouts of a car matching the description, the vehicle was never found.

Two days later, after the fingerprint check of the broken window revealed nothing, the empty cash boxes and strongroom door were taken to Wellington for further examination.

It was another dead end.

"The police said they had a huge file of evidence, but they had nothing," Hancock laughed.

On April 18, three days after the heist, businesses belonging to the Marlborough Chamber of Commerce got together to discuss the burglary.

One member accused the post office of being "exceedingly lax in its security arrangements".

Bank of New Zealand Blenheim manager J. R. Dickens expressed his "dismay" at the saving bank's security. His own bank was equipped with an anti-blow safe behind a combination safe.

"That's where the cash is kept, not in wooden boxes," Dickens said.

The economic conditions of the 1960s were causing repercussions in the criminal world, he said, giving his thoughts on the motive.

"We might count ourselves lucky that it was a government department and not a private concern that was the target," he said.

Blenheim-based Inspector A. Hunt reassured members that the culprits would not be on the run for long.

"There is a man or a group of people who have set a record for New Zealand that they won't be able to skite [boast] about," he said.

Later that night, Hancock and Sergent were arrested and interviewed by police. They admitted stealing from the savings bank.

They were charged with "breaking and entering a building" with "intent to commit a crime" by Christchurch Detective Sergeant James Dawson.

The next morning, the pair led detectives to the area in the Mahau Sound, part of the Marlborough Sounds, where they'd buried the Gladstone bag.

It took them a few hours of searching in rough scrub before they found the place where the money was buried, about 60 centimetres deep and, in spite of being packed in canvas and plastic bags, it was soaking wet with ground and rain water.

The money was taken to the Blenheim Police Station. Police left the paper notes to dry out. Hancock and Sergent were not so lucky.

The pair were taken in their wet, mud-splattered clothes to the Blenheim Court and remanded by R. A. J. Marston JP, to appear before the Blenheim Magistrate Court on April 26, 1968.

Sergent had on a red checkered shirt, neat trousers and shoes. Hancock was wearing a light blue football jersey with the number '20' on it. They were the same clothes they had on when they were arrested.

"[A photographer] got a photo of me with my Central jersey number on the back, which was a bit deflating for me because ... I was the fulltime centre or wing. I wasn't a reserve, but that was a reserve number," Hancock said.

A news report of the hearing said Hancock "kept smiling" as the charge was read. The pair were taken into custody until their next appearance.

The police station became a counting house when police, Post Office and Social Security Department staff banded together to tally the cash.

They found $46,722.61 in the Gladstone bag, which left $4249.31 unaccounted for.

"The missing money claims were rubbish ... neither the police nor the bank tellers were really sure how much was there to begin with," Hancock said.

"The whole damn show was wide open. There was money loose everywhere. Anyone could have seen what had happened, picked up a wad [of cash], [to] stick it in their pocket."

Police spoke with Simonsen's older brother, Lloyd, who was also Hancock's boss, about the burglary.

After speaking with him, police wanted to empty the farm's two fully stocked 100-tonne grain silos to see if there was money in them, Ross Simonsen said.

"But we said 'no' as Ray was scared of heights. It was his one fault. You had to fill the silos from the top, you see, and he would never go up there," he said.

"There was plenty of talk about it, basically about how he did it and why he did it. But he was that sort of guy, do it as a devil. A sudden impulse and he'd do it."

On April 23, police continued to search for the missing money, despite pouring rain, as they believed used notes might have been buried separately to new ones.

A small army of police searched the ridge between Mahau and Kenepuru sounds in hopes of finding the missing money, an Express article said.

But it was like searching for a needle in a haystack. The terrain was steep, gullied and overgrown, and the rain dampened spirits.

No more cash was ever found.

Hancock and Sergent pleaded guilty in the Blenheim Magistrate's Court on April 30, almost two weeks after the heist.

The pair weren't charged with bank robbery, because that implied intimidation was used. They also weren't charged with theft, as they had, for the most part, returned the money.

The hearing attracted a lot of spectators. For the first time in years, it was standing room only in the court's public gallery.

Hancock’s lawyer Anthony Willy recalled getting a letter from Hancock's former teacher and rugby coach, Upper Hutt's St Patrick's College school teacher Alec McDonald.

"We, who knew him in the school, find it hard to associate him with so serious a crime," McDonald wrote.

"He was a happy schoolboy - more interested in sport than books, and in minor scrapes [at] most, but there was never a hint of anything serious and certainly nothing against his honesty through his time at college."

While in remand the pair were put into a cell at the Nelson Police Station.

"The cell had bars on the window that previous criminals had been working on during their time in isolation," Hancock said.

Hancock said to Sergent if they pulled one corner section of the bars, the whole thing would fall apart. He was right. Police later came in to see the two men with the bars on the bench beside them.

"The police cried 'bloody hell' and laughed," Hancock said.

On May 17, the pair appeared in the Supreme Court for sentencing.

Hancock and Sergent served their three-year sentences in Addington Prison, Paparua, or Christchurch Men's Prison, Rolleston Prison, and Mt Crawford Prison.

"We went to bloody near every prison in the country," Hancock said. "I'd never seen so much of New Zealand."

Each time they arrived at a new prison, their reputation for pulling off one of the biggest heists in New Zealand made them "the bosses", he said.

"The lower downs had to make an appointment if they wanted to see us. People thought I was New Zealand's answer to Ned Kelly."

Sergent served two years and three months before being released, while Hancock served two years and four months.

"Looking back, I would tell my younger self not to tell [the police] and don't give back the money. It would have bought about 10 houses back in the day," he said.

"The police said we should have never given it back, the legal professions said we should have never given it back. They brought a priest that came around to see me, he said we should have never given it back."

But despite having "no guilt, no shame, no regrets" about the heist, Hancock said he couldn't do it now.

"The ATMs take all the skill out of it," he said.

Down at his local pub in Picton, Oxley's Bar and Kitchen duty manager Lauren Cunningham said Hancock was "definitely a character" and "someone who had lived quite a colourful life".

She said Hancock had a favourite spot at the end of the bar where he would lean himself against the wall and have a drink.

Now 80-years-old, Hancock said he was once "bulletproof", but now "full of bullet holes".

He signs his name "What's left of Ray Hancock". It's a nod to his frail legs, suspected methyl bromide poisoning and being blind in one eye, he said.

"He does enjoy his notoriety," Cunningham said.

"I didn't believe him the first time he told me [about the burglary]. He compares himself to a train robber, and old American bank robbers. He tells other customers all about his adventures."

Hancock recalled a time when he told one woman at the pub and she didn't believe him. She came up to him later and laughed, saying: "You really are a bank robber, I thought you were a load of s***."

*Sergent moved to Australia in the 1990s. He could not be reached for comment, and his family in Blenheim wanted the matter "dead and buried".