But this box, my friends, holds an extraordinary story. Gather round, and hear the tale of how a man posted himself from London to Australia.
Reg Spiers spent three days inside this wooden box to get home to Perth after he found himself stranded in the UK.
He’d come over in the 1960s to recover from an injury and take a break from his athletics career.
The promising javelin thrower had aspirations of competing in the Tokyo Olympics in 1964. But when that proved unreachable, he took a job at an airport to earn money and fly home.
However, when Reg’s wallet was stolen he was forced to change his game plan – or never get home in time for his daughter’s birthday.
So, he had a friend build a box he could live in after it was loaded onto a plane (of course).
He said: ‘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.
‘It’s like when I travel now if I go overseas. There’s the seat. Sit in it, and go.’
But the reality was far more complicated.
He was successfully loaded onto an Air India plane, but was forced to endure a 24 hour delay crammed in the 5ft x 3ft x 2.5ft box, due to fog.
Once in the air he crept out to wee into a bottle, which he left on top of the crate as the plane descended into Paris on its first stop.
French baggage handlers thought it had been left there as some sort of sick joke by Brits.
‘They were saying some terrible things about the English,’ he said. ‘But they didn’t even think of the box. So I kept on going.’
Next stop was Bombay, where things got a little sticky.
Reg said his box was left in the sun’s glare upside-down for four hours – so he got naked.
More hours past until, finally, he arrived home to the sweet sound of Australian baggage handlers swearing about the size of his crate.
He said: ‘The accents – how could you miss? I’m on the soil. Amazing. Wonderful. I made it.
‘I was grinning from ear to ear, but I wasn’t going to let them know I’m there now – I’ve almost pulled the whole thing off.
‘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.’
Once on the inside, he found tools and cut his way out of the room. Reg slid into a suit, jumped a fence and hailed a cab home. Simple as that.
The idea worked – even if his wife didn’t believe him – but it would seem crazy today.
The cost of shipping the box would have actualy been more expensive than a plane ticket, however Reg knew he could say the receiver was going to pay cash on delivery (of course, the crafty guy had escaped by that point so it didn’t matter).
There a slim chance that something like this would ever happen again and, if it did, the chances of survival have plummeted. The hold is usually pressurised and the temperature usually remains above freezing but all cargo loaded on to planes is screened and a hidden person would be found.
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