Carl Chinn – The Real Peaky Blinders

Last week I was lucky enough to attend a talk with a real Midlands Legend. Professor Carl Chinn is my favourite historian, I particularly love his knowledge of ‘The Real Peaky Blinders‘, the stories of the real people and families who inspired the now classic TV programme. Carl gave a free talk at Great Barr library as part of the Sandwell Literature festival, which is currently ongoing across Midlands libraries.

Here are some of the highlights of his talk.

The Myth of the Peaky Blinders

The TV series Peaky Blinders shows a glamorously dressed gang, they are very well turned out, anti heroes. But reality was very different. I believe there is a danger if you don’t get it across that gang life is not good or glamorous. The gangs of Birmingham did bad things to the poor with whom they lived.

The BBC programme was said to be about one particular gang, but this was not true. The Peaky Blinders gang died out before World War 1. At the time the series is set, there were many gangs in Birmingham.

Based on real people

Alfie Soloman (not Solomans as in the series, played by Tom Hardy) was a real person. Carl Chinn interviewed his brother in 1987 in a tough London pub. The first gang war in London that took place in 1921 was caused in part by a vicious attack on Soloman at a racecourse. The attack was carried out by one of Billy Kimber’s Birmingham gang, Tommy Armstrong. This attack led to Alfie Solomon becoming on of the most vicious gangsters that Britain has ever known.

Darby Sabini was a character in series 2. He was portrayed as an Italian gangster who spoke with an Italian accent, and was very elegantly dressed. In 1987, Carl interviewed the son of Sabini’s right hand man. The truth about Sabini, which was discussed during this interview, was very different from the portrayal. Derby grew up in Clerkenwell, London, and never spoke a word of Italian. He was never a Mafia style ‘don’, he was a gangster from Clerkenwell.

One character who appeared in the first couple of series was Billy Kimber. He was portrayed as a London gangster (played by Charlie Creed Miles in the series), but in real life he was a ‘Summer Rower’ from Birmingham. He was a real hard man, the leader of the ‘Brummagum Boys’, a collective group of Birmingham gang members. Billy Kimber was a big man, a violent man, but he also had a brain. He abandoned his first family in Birmingham, leaving his first wife to die in poverty in 1926 in the Jewellery Quarter. His daughters from this marriage grew up in poverty. Within 2 days of his wife’s death he had married again. He eventually became a racecourse bookmaker and bought a house in Torquay.

What about the Shelby’s?

The Shelby’s were portrayed as Irish Roma, but Carl can find no real evidence of any gangs linked to Romany families. In fact, Roma were the most deprived people in the Midlands at that time, many living on Black Patch (now part of Smethwick). Romany families made Birmingham their Winter base, due to ‘Horsefair’. Roma were persecuted, they were not gangsters. One of their most famous sons may well have been the movie legend Charlie Chaplin. Chaplin had no birth certificate, but his grandmother was a gypsy. His son, Michael, found a locked door in a cabinet in Switzerland after Chaplin’s death.He found a letter from a man called Charlie Hill from Cannock, that Chaplin had saved. The letter claimed that Charlie Chaplin was a liar to say he didn’t know where he was born, that his mother and Chaplin’s mother were sisters, and that Chaplin was born on the Black Patch.

The nearest name to the Shelby’s is a family called the Sheldon’s, but they certainly had none of the looks or glamour of the Shelby’s.

So who were the Peaky Blinders?

Large numbers of the real Peaky Blinders were petty thieves. The idea of razor blades in their caps was just a myth, no evidence it was ever anything more. The Peaky Blinders used their boots and belts as weapons, along with coshes and broken bricks. Disposable razors were not sold in the UK until 1910, by which time the Peaky Blinders were no more. The first Peaky Blinders did not wear flat caps, but bowler hats. In one attack in Small Heath the Peaky Blinders were referred to as the ‘bell bottom gang’.

Most of the Peaky Blinders did not become big time criminals like Billy Kimber. Instead they slowly disappeared. By 1940, they were even forgotten, or long dead.

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