Pod Insights Dan Snow's History Hit The Real Peaky Blinders About this episode Today, we step beyond the slow-motion swagger and into the gritty, complex reality of the Peaky Blinders. Who were the gangsters behind the myths? And what was life actually like in the backstreets of late 19th and early 20th-century Birmingham?
We’re joined by social historian Carl Chinn to uncover the true story of Birmingham’s infamous gangs. Carl is the author of ‘PEAKY BLINDERS: The Real Gangs and Gangsters’, and features in the documentary ‘Peaky Blinders: The Real Story’.
Produced by James Hickmann and edited by Dougal Patmore.
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1:23 Dan Snow? The Peaky Blinders, they existed. Who were they? At the turn of the 20th century, Birmingham in England was an industrial powerhouse, celebrated for its innovation and enterprise and civic pride. But beneath that reputation lay another story, one of brutal gang warfare. It was home to the infamous Peaky Blinders. Thanks to global success of the Peaky Blinders TV show and now the movie, the term has become synonymous with style, swagger, cinematic gangster glamour. But how much of that is actually true? From the rise of the so-called slogging gangs in the 1860s to the violent racecourse wars
2:06 Dan Snow? of the 1920s, this episode uncovers a world far less glamorous, far more revealing than the fiction. It's a story not just about crime, but about poverty, policing, social change in industrial Britain. For this, I am joined by the one and only, the legend that is the historian author Carl Chin, specialist in the social history of Birmingham. His book, Peaky Blinders, The Real Gangs and Gangsters is out now. And he appears in Robin Bex's new documentary, Peaky Blinders, The Real Story, which is available to buy and rent on digital platforms now. Carl has taken me on a tour through the streets of historic Birmingham a few years ago. You can check that documentary out on the History at TV channel. But now Carl is back and we're going to explore together who the Peaky Blinders really were,
2:51 Dan Snow? where they came from, and how the myth has diverged from the historical record. This is the true story behind the Peaky Blinders. Let's get into it.
3:06 Dan Snow? Carl, good to see you.
3:07 Speaker 02 Thank you, Dan, for inviting me.
3:08 Dan Snow? Great to have you back on the pod. You're one of the best in the business. Tell me about, tell me about this amazing, dynamic, crazy city that was Birmingham in the 19th century at the height of that industrial revolution.
3:20 Speaker 02 Birmingham at the height of the industrial revolution, Dan, was the city of a thousand trades. It's a title we grew up with, we were so proud of. You name it, Birmingham made it. Lots of small metal goods, buttons, guns, obviously, jewellery, but the brass trade was very important in Birmingham. So brass bedsteads, brass fittings for all over the home. And towards the end of the 19th century, those older trades were slowly declining, but new trades were coming in. So from the gun trade, tubes.
3:55 Dan Snow? Yes.
3:55 Speaker 02 Mean you can use a tube making machine to move into making bicycles.
4:00 Dan Snow? Nice.
4:01 Speaker 02 So that's why firms like the Birmingham Small Arms moved into eventually to motorbikes.
4:06 Dan Snow? That's crazy, isn't it?
4:07 Speaker 02 And so you've got this developing... New industries at the end of the nineteenth century. You've got lots of skilled workers and semi skilled workers who are doing well. And better quality tunnel back houses are being built for them. So those are houses that in a long terrace. Ah to take up as little space as possible, they tunnel back. So you've got a bedroom and a room downstairs. You've got another bedroom on that level and you've got the back room. Then you've got the backyard and the the house tunnels back into the backyard. So that's where you get lots of terracing like in Spark Hill, uh Bournbrook and places like that. But what is overlooked too often is that two hundred thousand Brummies.
4:51 Speaker 02 Nearly half the population lived in a ring of poverty. In badly built, gerry built, decaying, in sanitary back to back houses. And it's in those districts, Dan, the districts of the poor who are already suffering hardships. Ill health, early deaths, bad pay, irregular work. It's in those districts that the rain of the Peaky Blinders impacted most negatively.
5:18 Dan Snow? A- and just on those in those communities, so a- any shift in economic fortunes, they're feeling the fallout straight away. So you meant you you said irregular work. When times are good, they've got work.
5:27 Speaker 02 Yeah, so very similar to what you find in much of the old East End of London, South London, in the docks of Liverpool. You've got lots of irregular work. So, yeah, things are going well. There's lots of labourers. They're unskilled, but when things, there's a bit of a recession or a a downturn in trade. You can't get work in a factory or on the building sites. Then what we also forget, just like in the East End of London, Manchester, you've got lots of street traders. They are really struggling because what are you going to sell when you're pushing a banner around the streets when it's pouring rain? So what we see in the older parts of Birmingham, I won't use the phrase inner city. Because that's much more a modern phrase. Let's call it the central areas, the central neighbourhoods.
6:13 Speaker 02 What you see is lots of unskilled men and their families, lots of women having to work. There is factory work in Birmingham for women. That's better than.
6:26 Speaker 02 Low paid work in going out charring, cleaning, or taking in washing for the better off. So what you find in the factories in Birmingham and the small workshops is that single women or young married women with no kids or one or two kids are going to work in the factories. Because relatively it's better paid, not as well paid as the men, but it's better paid than going out charring, taking in washing, or what used to do as well a lot of the poor women in Birmingham, they would card buttons. So in the old days, buttons would be put onto a card to be sold in a little shop.
6:59 Dan Snow? Alright.
7:00 Speaker 02 And you'd buy one at a time.
7:01 Dan Snow? Okay, they'd press them into the cards?
7:02 Speaker 02 Yes, they would get them into the card, or hooks and eyes.
7:05 Dan Snow? Wow.
7:06 Speaker 02 So, there's a lot of poverty, there's irregular work, there's bad housing, there's youngsters are working from the, in the eighteen sixties, seventies and into really the early eighties, from the ages of six, seven and eight in workshops and factories. It starts to change in the eighties, but what you've also got, once schooling becomes compulsory, is that youngsters are wagging it, as we would say in Birmingham, not going to school. My grandad, for example, my grandad Chinborne in eighteen ninety-two, would sell newspapers, go around the streets flogging newspapers to make a hate me. And with that hate me, he and the other poor kids would go to an eating house in the Boring, and they would have a
7:48 Speaker 02 hate me dip. They'd have the meat, sides of beef, over the gas, heating, going round and round on a spit, and they would have a hate me dip, a hate me thick piece of bread, dipped in the fat. That was their tea.
8:02 Dan Snow? Wow. You must have, they must have dreamt about selling those papers.
8:05 Speaker 02 It was, it was hard days, and not just in Birmingham, Dan. This, this is the lived experience of the urban poor.
8:11 Dan Snow? Yeah.
8:11 Speaker 02 Of Sheffield, of Leeds, of Glasgow, of Dublin, of Birmingham, elsewhere.
8:15 Dan Snow? A- a- and, and why do we hear about the kind of lawless behaviour in Birmingham? The, the, the riots of the sixties and, and is, what, or is it just that, is it just that concentration of, of poverty, or what, what are the politics doing?
8:27 Speaker 02 So what we've got is a situation where the poor are, nobody cares about them, Dan. The elite of Birmingham, Birmingham's praised as the best golden city in the world on the Chamberlain.
8:38 Dan Snow? Joseph Chamberlain.
8:39 Speaker 02 It wasn't for the poor.
8:40 Dan Snow? Fame as well, I bet it wasn't, yeah.
8:41 Speaker 02 Because he decided his crowning glory was Corporation Street. He would build this Parisian style boulevard that would sweep through a sway of badly built housing.
8:52 Speaker 02 And have this shopping road that would reflect Birmingham's status as a metropolis of the Midlands, but five thousand poor people lost their homes then for that, for that status symbol. And they were pushed into the surrounding neighbourhoods. So of the landlords like that, there's a higher demand. The rents go up.
9:11 Dan Snow? It's even worse.
9:12 Speaker 02 So it gets even worse, they have to take in lodgers, tiny two-bedroomed houses, probably only as big as this room that we're sitting in now. And then TB spreads, other communicable diseases. So when we see Birmingham as a rioter city, it wasn't necessarily riotous, it was violent. It was one of the most violent cities in Great Britain. However, there were riots. And the rise of the backstreet gangs can be seen tied in to political rioting. In the late eighteen sixties, I've got the gang starting in eighteen sixty-eight, that's the earliest references I've got, to the Bar Street Gang, the Park Street Gang, which went on for a generation or more.
9:55 Speaker 02 There's three factors at work here, Dan. First of all, the middle class, who are still living in some numbers around the old parts of Birmingham, around the ballring, are putting pressure on the police to put down the gatherings of young men on a Sunday.
10:10 Dan Snow? Right, they've got a day off.
10:12 Speaker 02 They're day off, they're gathering on great waste ground, they're playing rough sports, they're swearing and they're gambling, pitch and toss, they're throwing coins at a market, pitching them, whoever gets them nearest tosses them up. They don't like this to the middle class.
10:27 Dan Snow? It's the one bit of relief they're getting all week, these lads.
10:29 Speaker 02 That's all it is, Dan.
10:30 Dan Snow? And the middle class have decided that they don't like that.
10:32 Speaker 02 Because they're swearing and they're abusing the lords, they.
10:35 Dan Snow? Drinking alcohol.
10:36 Speaker 02 So they put pressure on the police for a crusade against pitch and toss. That leads to a reaction. Now, that reaction is young men, teenage lads, and young men gathering in gangs, street gangs. At the same time as this crusade. There's a vile, horrible Protestant preacher who had been a Catholic called William Murphy, sets up his tabernacle in Birmingham, so-called prayer place. Basically, all he did was say vile, filthy things about the Pope and nuns to antagonise the local Irish. He always sets up his tabernacle, he travels around the country, he sets it up next to an Irish district.
11:15 Dan Snow? Right.
11:15 Speaker 02 Park Street, where Selfridges now overlooks, was the site of a terrible ethnic riot. And on the first day, the Irish attacked his tabernacle, he hired gangs to protect him. There were too many Irish. The next day, a huge English mob attacked the Irish. So eighteen sixty-seven, this happens, the crusade against Pigeon Toss. Happening at the same time, there's a Pigeon Toss site in Park Street, and they form an Irish Catholic gang for the two reasons. One, the attack of the police, two, the attack of the police on them as Irish Catholics. At the same time, better off working class men get the vote, don't they? In the late eighteen sixties, now the working class matter. So they want that vote.
11:56 Speaker 02 And what I found is immediately in the late eighteen sixties, and thenceforth, the Liberals and Conservatives in Birmingham are hiring gangs to disrupt each other's meetings.
12:08 Dan Snow? Really?
12:09 Speaker 02 The worst one, Dan, was in eighteen eighty-four. Birmingham, as you know, was dominated by Chamberlain and the Liberals.
12:15 Dan Snow? Yes.
12:16 Speaker 02 Lord Randolph Churchill, ring a bell?
12:18 Dan Snow? Yeah, Winston's dad.
12:19 Speaker 02 Comes to Birmingham, he was standing as a Conservative. He's buried in the lion in his den, Chamberlain. And he has a big meeting in what is now Villa Park, which was called the Lower Grounds. He hired, well, the local Conservatives hire gangs to protect them.
12:36 Dan Snow? Really?
12:37 Speaker 02 But the Liberals marched through the streets with drums and music playing, and they go in the pubs and they get the gang leaders. There's a massive riot, the Aston Riots of eighteen eighty-four. It's so bad that they smash up the meeting. It's so bad that Churchill in Parliament and his recorded in Hansard names the Lynch Street Gang, the Harding Street Gang, and the Bar Street Gang.
13:05 Speaker 02 Chamberlain Zoppos pay people to say, no, we weren't paid by the Liberals. We weren't involved. Few gets thrown out of Parliament, he gets allowed. There's a vote against Churchill, but it gets defeated. Few months later, I've discovered they were paying these people. The Liberals were paying these people to exonerate Chamberlain and his men. So you've got these three factors coming together in the late eighteen sixties. The politicians using gangs, Murphy and his riot, enabling the gangs as another spark and the crusade against pigeon toss. And those early gangs, the Park Street gang, the Milk Street gang, where I took you for a walk.
13:45 Dan Snow? Yes.
13:46 Speaker 02 The Bar Street gang, Barford Street gang, they're all within a few hundred yards of each other. They fight each other and they fight each other until the early twentieth century.
13:57 Dan Snow? You're listening to Dan Snow's History. We're going to be back after this break. This episode is brought to you by TikTok. I never thought about the history of coffee. You make it, you drink it, nothing more to it. Then I've had a TikTok video about how people in the seventeen hundreds would pour their coffee into saucers to let it cool before drinking it. I love that sort of discovery, a detail, but suddenly you're imagining how people lived and drank and socialised. Now I wonder what all baffled historians about us, mugs. It's a ceramic vessel, but crucially, it has a handle. Well, that's the joy of TikTok, folks. You look for one thing and find yourself somewhere completely different. Your next discovery is waiting on TikTok.
14:38 Dan Snow? Learn more at tiktok.com/discovermore. This episode is brought to you by Decagon. If you've ever been trapped in phone tree hell, pushing zero fifty times while a voice robot pretends not to hear you, you know true psychological warfare. It's brutal, folks. Thankfully, that kind of horror is now confined to the history books. Customer service has evolved. Decagon helps companies create personalised, concierge-style customer experiences with AI agents across chat, email, voice and SMS. They're available twenty-four seven, feel natural to talk to. And can resolve customer requests on their own. So businesses can keep up with requests without losing their personal touch.
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16:45 Dan Snow? In a world where swords were sharp.
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17:18 Dan Snow? Where do we get the, where do we get the, the name Peaky Blinders from?
17:21 Speaker 02 So originally they're just called street ruffians. And then from 1872, the term slogger. A slogger is somebody that belongs to a slugging gang. It's from the pugilistic term to slog, to hit with a fierce blow. From 1890, a new term comes in. Now, it's called Peaky Blinders. It's not one gang, as we see in the series, Dan. In one district with one family at the heart of it. Peaky Blinders is the generic term for the backstreet thugs of Birmingham.
17:52 Dan Snow? Okay.
17:52 Speaker 02 Belonging to numerous slugging gangs. So in Manchester and Salford, they're called Scotlers. They belong to Scotland gangs. In London, in Clerkenwell, King's Cross, in the East End, in Bethnal Green and Spitalfields and Whitechapel, in South London around the elephants, they're known as street ruffians. Until 1898, and a really violent bank holiday Monday in August. And a new term comes into the English language, hooligan.
18:19 Dan Snow? Hooligans. And they begin in London, do they?
18:22 Speaker 02 Yeah.
18:22 Dan Snow? Wow.
18:22 Speaker 02 But it's the same kind of phenomenon. Birmingham's hooligans, the Peaky Blinders come sluggers. Manchester's are the Scotlers.
18:30 Dan Snow? Yeah.
18:31 Speaker 02 In Liverpool, they're the corner boys. It's the same phenomenon. So you've got these numerous backstreet gangs. And at first, they have no fashion. So what they've got round the neck is just the one thing called a daff. It's a silk type scarf, Dan, that's wrapped round the neck. And if it's not in, it's called a choker. In Manchester, the Scotlers wear woolen mufflers. In Birmingham, it's scarves. But then in 1890, and I found the very first reference to this new fashion, January 1890, new fashion comes in for the sluggers. They're wearing bell bottom trousers, tight to the knee and wide around the bottom, 22 inches.
19:12 Speaker 02 They've still got the daff, uh, but they're now wearing a hat called a billycock. It's the working man's bowler.
19:20 Dan Snow? Okay.
19:21 Speaker 02 And they have a skinhead haircut, except they've got a quiff. I've got photos of these from the West Midlands Police Museum, and they've got this quiff. They like to show off the quiff, so they wet the brim of the billycock. Hold it over a fire and turn the front into like a funnel. And they wear it over their eye, they pull it over one eye. So what's the brim doing to that eye?
19:46 Dan Snow? It's hiding.
19:46 Speaker 02 It's hiding, it's blinding it.
19:47 Dan Snow? Oh, it's blinding it, that's nice.
19:49 Speaker 02 So then, when the flat cap comes in, they do the same. So the term Peaky Blinder Dan is a term about a fashion. It's nothing to do with the belief that disposable safety razor blades were stitched into the peak of a flat cap.
20:06 Dan Snow? So not, they're not blinding people.
20:08 Speaker 02 Now, actually, I managed to have a flat cap with me here. And may I ask you to put it on? It's probably a little bit small, because it fits my head. Lovely.
20:17 Dan Snow? There we go.
20:17 Speaker 02 So now, me and you are gonna have in the Birmingham language, a bossed up.
20:22 Dan Snow? Okay.
20:22 Speaker 02 A fight.
20:23 Dan Snow? All right.
20:23 Speaker 02 All right. You're gonna take your flat cap off now and slash me. What have you done to your fingers?
20:29 Dan Snow? I've just cut my fingers, haven't I?
20:30 Speaker 02 Correct.
20:30 Dan Snow? That's what I've always wondered, okay.
20:31 Speaker 02 Yeah, now feel the back, it's fl- it's floppy, isn't it?
20:34 Dan Snow? Yeah.
20:35 Speaker 02 So let me give you a chance. We're gonna have a bossed up and I'm gonna go, Dan, I'm gonna slash you in a minute, but just wait a bit.
20:43 Speaker 02 By the time I fold it, what have you done to me?
20:45 Dan Snow? I've, I've beat you up.
20:46 Speaker 02 You put me under.
20:48 Dan Snow? Yeah.
20:48 Speaker 02 So, one, it's not feasible. Two, it never happened. I've gone through hundreds of court cases, newspaper articles. And back in the early eighties, Dan, when I first wrote about the real Peaky Blinders, so this is a forty year.
21:01 Dan Snow? Yeah.
21:01 Speaker 02 Research that I've been on. When I first wrote about them, I interviewed old men that knew Peaky Blinders. They told me exactly the thing, that they would pull that ke- peak of the cap over one eye. So it didn't happen, it's not feasible, and the first hats they wore were not. Flat caps, they were billycocks. And finally, disposable safety razor blades were not patented by King Gillette. Until the early twentieth century.
21:27 Dan Snow? Oh, right, okay.
21:28 Speaker 02 They were not sold in any great numbers in England till the First World War. And during the First World War, the British tummies were issued with cot-throat razors.
21:37 Dan Snow? Right.
21:37 Speaker 02 And they were too expensive, the disposables. They were thirty seven shillings and sixpence for five best Sheffield steel. A poor man in Birmingham in the East End would be lucky to earn seventeen shillings and sixpence a week.
21:50 Dan Snow? So that's okay, so it's not come from that?
21:52 Speaker 02 It's not, it's a fa- it's a myth that grew up from the late 30s in newspapers from outside Birmingham.
21:57 Dan Snow? Okay.
21:58 Speaker 02 And you think of the name, Dan, it's infused with dread and violence, Peaky Blinders.
22:03 Dan Snow? It's a good name.
22:03 Speaker 02 I'd heard about it growing up, and the story I was told was they slashed the forehead, hence blood went in the eyes. In the series, it's they slashed the eyes, but there's a problem there, the bridge of the nose. And it's just a myth.
22:16 Dan Snow? Okay, so why were they called it?
22:18 Speaker 02 They were called it because they pulled the peak over the eye.
22:22 Dan Snow? And then one eye's then blind?
22:23 Speaker 02 Yeah, it's covered, it's blinded.
22:24 Dan Snow? Okay, and that was the fashion?
22:25 Speaker 02 Yeah, Peaky Blinders, just a fashion statement. But that doesn't neglect the fact that they were brutal men.
22:30 Dan Snow? Well, I was gonna say, are we, are we, you're not gonna now tell me that they were just, uh, you know, gathering for prayer meetings?
22:36 Speaker 02 They weren't gathering for, in fact, they hated the Salvation Army and attacked the Salvation Army women in particular. The, the sloggers, like the Scottlers of Manchester, Salford, the Corner Boys of Liverpool, what became known as the Hooligans of London. They preyed upon the poor amongst whom they lived. That's their worst trait for me. They baited the police, we can talk about that, three policemen were killed. Numerous policemen were maimed and had to leave the force. They battled each other viciously, and there were killings and maimings of gang members by other gangs. But the worst thing they did, Dan, was they bullied the hard-working, decent poor amongst whom they lived.
23:19 Speaker 02 And it was known as the reign of the ruffians, the reign of the Peaky Blinders.
23:24 Dan Snow? Wow. Whatever their beginnings, they, they go into what we might call organised crime, do they?
23:28 Speaker 02 No, they don't, and that's again, a misconception. These are backstreet gangs. Their aim is violence. And I'm not gonna excuse them, but we need to understand them. And that's what really I focused on very much in my, in my research, is what led these men to become so violent. We're living, they're living in a very hard world. Badly built housing, in sanitary conditions, they have no parks or recreation grounds, there's no gardens, the street is their playground. And the street belongs to them, it's the only thing that they own. And the other, the reason they can own the street is because of these.
24:09 Speaker 02 They're harder than the next street, so that's why the street gangs emerge. Some of the gang members are just hard men who work hard. And don't commit crime. Many of them are not though. They are petty thieves. We say petty thieves. It's not petty for the people who are on the receiving end, but in terms of the English law, it's better. They're violent, they're abusive, they're racist, and there's some of them are sexual predators. And horrible, horrible sexually assaulting men. So what we've got is the development of these gangs. Yes, they might go into a pub. And they'll order a round of drinks and they refuse to pay.
24:51 Speaker 02 And if the gaffer, the publican, asks them for money, they'll smash the pub up. Into the eighteen eighties and early eighteen nineties for an assault on a copper. A bad assault on a policeman, they could get fined forty shillings. It's a lot of money. When you're only earning half that or less than half that. So what they do? They have a whip round. But who's paying for the whip round? The little shopkeepers. The publicans, the beer house keepers. So that's seen as petty crime. It's not for them. Who are suffering.
25:21 Dan Snow? By the eighteen, you've always told me by the eighteen nineties. Birmingham's like Gotham City in Batman. There, there's a new, there's a new cop in town.
25:28 Speaker 02 Yeah, you're right. Eighteen ninety nine, new cop comes in, Charles Horton Rafta. He's a Protestant from Belfast, but unlike Major Campbell in the series, he's not sectarian. He comes to Birmingham with a reference from an Irish Catholic nationalist MP.
25:45 Dan Snow? Oh, interesting.
25:45 Speaker 02 He's, he's in the Royal Irish Constabulary Dan. But he's seen as someone who's fair to both sides in the disturbances that are happening. He comes to Birmingham and his remit is to put down the Peaky Blinders. And he realises that the Birmingham police are badly under manned. So he sets on a very fast recruitment campaign. Of young, fit men who have to be five foot nine and a half. And very soon, five foot ten. They have physical training instruction. One of their instructors was a man called Sergeant Doughty. I met his son, I knew his son Stan. I was, used to drink with him in the Georgian Spark Brook in the nineteen eighties.
26:27 Speaker 02 He gave me a photo of his dad in his P T kit with the coppers. Years later, I realised this is a man that's training the police to fight the Peaky Blinders. Very rapid recruitment campaign. Now.
26:41 Speaker 02 Once that's done, he sends them out into the streets, two at a time. The Peaky Blinders are overwhelmingly small brummies. Five foot four, like my great grandfather Edward Derrick, who was a Peaky Blinder. Five foot one, like Samuel Sheldon and many others. They take the fight to the streets. And Rafta, the story went in the Birmingham Police for years after he died in the mid thirties. Rafta asked three things of his men. Can you read? Can you write?
27:13 Dan Snow? And can you?
27:14 Speaker 02 Fight. And they had to fight. And again, what's happened, Dan, over the last few years. Rare memoirs have come to my attention by coppers who were retiring in the twenties. It was a battle.
27:26 Dan Snow? Yeah.
27:26 Speaker 02 On the streets. It doesn't end immediately. There's still some vicious attacks. There's a killing of a member of the Summerhill gang by one of the Camden Street gang. The killing of P C Gunther, the maiming of P C Blinko. But by nineteen oh five, the Birmingham newspapers are saying the palmy days of the Peaky Blinders are over.
27:50 Dan Snow? Really?
27:51 Speaker 02 By nineteen ten, they're writing about the Peaky Blinders in the past tense. In nineteen fifteen, the second year of the First World War, the Birmingham Mail writes, what's happened to the Peaky Blinders? Well, the police are pleased they've gone. Where are they? Oh, they're either working and earning good money in the munitions factories or fighting at the front. And that's what happened to them. There were no Peaky Blinders in nineteen twenties Birmingham because they'd either got killed in the First World War, maimed in the First World War, or they were aging.
28:23 Dan Snow? And, and so, and if you're a skilled industrial worker, you've done well at it.
28:27 Speaker 02 You have. So don't forget, these men are all labourers. Overwhelmingly, I've got a couple that were in skilled trades. And they're earning good money in the missions. The problem is after the First World War, there's no work for them.
28:39 Dan Snow? Yeah.
28:39 Speaker 02 But the peaky blinders then are gone. There are still nasty men, there's little gangs in Birmingham, but there is not the rampant backstreet gang problem. They've bedevilled and blighted the lives of the poor from the late eighteen sixties till just before the First World War.
28:54 Dan Snow? Okay, but but so the the police seem to have retaken the streets of Birmingham, but all of this violence, all this activity, it does spark something more organised crime, doesn't it?
29:02 Speaker 02 Yeah, it leads to semi organised crime in that a gang called the Birmingham Gang emerges from some of the worst peaky blinders. And they go racing, Dan.
29:14 Dan Snow? Okay, so they go national?
29:15 Speaker 02 Yes. So what's happening from the late, probably from the eighteen seventies, but certainly by the eighteen eighties and nineties. According to a London newspaper, senior peaky blinders, they said in eighteen ninety eight, go racing in the flat racing season. Now, the flats are always more popular than the jumps. What are people carrying up to race course, Dan?
29:35 Dan Snow? Oh, they're carrying up their, well, they're drinking a lot and they're carrying their winnings or or what they want to, their steak. Yeah, exactly.
29:40 Speaker 02 So this is like bees to a honey pot. Small gangs from Birmingham, six, seven, eight, are travelling across the Midlands of the North. How are they able to do so? The extension of the railway system.
29:53 Dan Snow? Yeah.
29:54 Speaker 02 And they're going to the racecourses, they take over, they dominate the rackets in the Midlands of the North. There are gangs from Sheffield and Leeds, but even in Yorkshire, they have to pay tribute to the Birmingham Gang.
30:08 Dan Snow? Really? That must have been, that must have tough for the Yorkshireman to swallow.
30:11 Speaker 02 Yeah, I mean, the Sheffield gang, the the Moonies, the Garvins, originally the Moonies was the West Bar gang, the Garvin gang was the Park gang. They they are not in control. So what happens is you've got all these little gangs and they start pickpocketing. There's very few coppers there and the coppers that are there are too scared of the gangs. There's hardly any steward in, so they're pickpocketing, but then they start to intimidate bookmakers and extort money from them. You understand there, that's a good pitch, a fiver.
30:42 Dan Snow? Yeah.
30:43 Speaker 02 Oh, you've got a stall, we've got a stall, two and sixpence a race, six races, fifteen chillings, seventy five pence. You write the ro- horse, the names of the horses and the bet, the prices of the horses on a blackboard. Two and sixpence for a stick of chalk each race, another fifteen chillings, that's thirty bob. At the end of each race, you've got to get rid of those previous runners. So you get a sponge that has to be dipped in a bucket of water, two and sixpence for the sponge each race, two and sixpence for the bucket of water each race. It mounts up.
31:12 Dan Snow? Yeah.
31:12 Speaker 02 Mounts up a lot. So by the early twentieth century, as the gangs are being put down in Birmingham, some of them have moved really away from the back streets. And they are brought together into a formidable fighting force by a man called Billy Kimber. Don't know if it rings a bell from series one.
31:33 Dan Snow? Yep.
31:34 Speaker 02 The Cockney gangster running the racecourse who gets killed. He was a big burly brummy from Summer Lane. His family's descendants, his Birmingham descendants are regularly in contact with me and have been for many years. He brings them together into this fearsome fighting force, not fully organised, because each little mob has got its own leader, but he has got brains as well as brawn. He's a fearsome fighter, but he's got a bit in his noodle. And what he does before the First World War, he abandons his Birmingham wife Maude to live and die in poverty. And she's buried in a pauper's grave. And his granddaughters and his great granddaughters in Birmingham still hate him for doing that.
32:18 Speaker 02 He pals up in London with George Sage of the Camden Town mob, North London, but this is where he's dead cute. He also pals up with the McDonald's from the Elephant Boys, South London. After the First World War, the Birmingham Gang, because there's hardly any racing in the First World War, because it's seen as unpatriotic. The Birmingham Gang reassert their control over the racecourses of the Midlands and the North. But then they're drawn down south to palop with the Camden Town mob and the Elephant Boys. And in nineteen twenty, they take control. But they're racist. They're horrible. And they extort extra money from the Jewish bookmakers. One of whom was a character called Alfie Solomon.
33:04 Speaker 02 In the series, Alfie Solomon's played by Tom Hardy. I met the younger brother of the real Alfie Solomon in nineteen eighty seven, Simeon Solomon, in a very tough pub in North London. And he looked at me as we were having a chat, and he went, it's packed. He went, it's all your lot's fault. I said, who? He said, you lot from up north. Now, I'm a Midlander. Actually, I'm a West Midlander. I don't like being called a Northerner or a Southerner, but I was in a tough pub. I took it that day.
33:35 Speaker 02 And he told me about what started the Racecourse War of nineteen twenty one. The first gangland war between two organised gangs from two different cities. The Birmingham Gang and the Sabinis.
33:52 Speaker 02 And he said, what happened, Carl? He said, my brother Alfie was betting under the name Sidney Lewis, which Simeon also betted under, because, as he said, because of racism, we would have never garnered a bet if we stood with our Jewish names. And, um, one of your mob, he said, came along and beat him up badly. I found, well, he told me about the beating, and since then I've found a rare account in a book by a Jewish guy who was a boxing referee was there that day.
34:22 Dan Snow? Wow, it's a corroboration.
34:23 Speaker 02 And that's a great thrill, Dan, because I believe in the spoken word, but as you know, there's a snobbery in academia towards the spoken word. So finding the corroboration. And then I found an ex-copper who corroborated as well in his memoirs. So Alfie Solomon, as opposed to Alfie Solomon's in the series, was not an orthodox-looking Jewish guy from a Yiddish background in the East End. He was from North London, well, Covent Garden. He was from Covent Garden. His dad had a little business. They grew up with the servants. And he's standing on his stool. And a man called Tommy Armstrong, one of the most violent, vicious, brutal, nasty Birmingham
35:05 Speaker 02 gang members, came past him and he wanted forty pound on a horse that's eleven to four. So if he puts forty pound down, he gets a hundred and ten back.
35:15 Speaker 02 But he wants it on the nod. I'm not paying. I want it on credit. Now, if he loses, is he gonna bung the forty quid?
35:24 Dan Snow? Exactly.
35:25 Speaker 02 But if it wins, and it won, and he come back and he shouted, I want me winnings. And Alfie Solomon shouted, I said, no bet, no bet. He took his field glasses off, smashed them into the face of Alfie Solomon. According to the guy whose account I read, the ex, the former referee, the Jewish guy, he said he fell to the floor, his face a bloody mess, and Armstrong then smashed his boots into his face. Armstrong then went on to beat up so badly an inoffensive Jewish bookmaker that the poor guy died a few weeks later. Armstrong was add up for manslaughter. Nobody turned up to as a witness.
36:08 Speaker 02 The poor bookie's widow stood up in court and said, your honour, to the judge, no man will turn up here to speak against him, they're so scared of him. That started the racecourse war. Alfie Solomon was not a gangster till then. He'd served honourably in the First World War. Billy Kimber didn't. He did a runner, he deserted. He went to Ireland where racing continued. So did a lot of the other organised gang members. Alfie Solomon turns to Edward Emmanuel. He is the, the big Jewish gang leader in the East End, Whitechapel, Spitalfields.
36:46 Speaker 02 And he's got in with a top bookie called Walter Beresford.
36:51 Speaker 02 They're running spielers, illegal gambling clubs. And they're also on the racecourse, but they can't take over the racecourse because of the Birmingham gang and their London allies. So Edward Emmanuel spots an opportunity now. And what he does, he knows he's got a gang of East End Jewish tough nuts, but they're not enough. So he pals up with an up and coming Anglo Italian gangster, Derby Sabini. And Sabini has got a gang from Clerkenwell and Kings Cross made up of Anglo Italians like himself. But also men of solely English heritage. And they set this gang up. And there's some vicious fighting throughout the spring and early summer of twenty one.
37:34 Speaker 02 But ultimately, the Birmingham gang and their London allies are defeated. Because Edward Emmanuel's got a brainier brain than Kimber. He starts the Bookmakers' Protection Association. I was a bookie, Dan. My dad was president of the Birmingham Bookmakers' Protection Association. An organisation which I didn't realise was set up by a gangster. And what they do, they get the support of the jockey club who are really worried sick about attendance levels because of all these headlines about gang wars. So they get their support. The Metropolitan Police liked the idea as well. So what do they do, Dan? They hire the Sabinis as stewards. And the Birmingham gang loses it. Yes.
38:17 Speaker 02 So that's the very first organised gang war in Britain. And it's because Billy Kimber, who was a Peaky Blinder. And his main fighting men had all been Peaky Blinders.
38:28 Dan Snow? Now, you mentioned that your great grandad was a Peaky Blinder. But when you were growing up, was there still a memory, was it talked about, as you say, blighting that community?
38:37 Speaker 02 Yeah, my great grandad, Edward Derek, I knew about him growing up. I knew that he was a thief. I knew that he was violent and an abusive husband.
38:48 Speaker 02 I interviewed people from my dad's street who knew him. They told me that he'd come home mucky drunk. And if my great grandmother Ada heard him coming, she would rush with my grandmother Maisie, next door to Granny Carey's. And he wouldn't go into Granny Carey's because she got five big sons. Or else if she wasn't in Granny Carey's, she'd run and hide in the brew house. That was the common or wash house. But too often he'd go home. And I later found a report again, the oral evidence being substantiated, verified by the written word, a legal document stating he used to come home, beat her up, threaten to kill her, punt her about the place and threaten to set fire to the house with her and the daughter in.
39:32 Speaker 02 So I knew all that growing up. Then, oh, many years ago, Dave Cross, who was the late Dave Cross, who was the policeman in charge of the West Midlands Police Museum, said, Carl, I found a photo of your grandfather, Derek. He said he was a right blighter. And he was a Peaky Blinder. I've looked at it now in the evidence. He got the later fashion in a photo of the Peaky's, which was longer hair parted in the middle, but he'd still got the daft. Then I find that his older brother, John, my great great uncle, was one of the main leaders of this notorious Sparkbrook Slogging Gang. So I've got that. I knew about it growing up and I've done a lot more research into it. And I have to tell you, Dan, I'm not proud to be this great grandson
40:18 Speaker 02 of a real Peaky Blinder or the great great nephew of a leading figure in a slogging gang. But I'm very proud to be the son, the grandson and the greatest grandson of backstreet Birmingham women. As we would stay in Birmingham, my generation, proud to be the son, great grandson and grandson of backstreet Birmingham wenches.
40:38 Dan Snow? Well, Carl, I'm sure they'd be equally proud of you, equally proud of all the work you've done. Tell us, what's the latest book called?
40:44 Speaker 02 The latest book is called Peaky Blinders, The Real Gangs and Gangsters. And I'm on a documentary on Amazon that is looking at the real Peaky Blinders.
40:52 Dan Snow? Brilliant, good timing. Thanks very much for coming on.
40:54 Speaker 02 Thank you for having me, Dan. It's a great pleasure.
40:56 Dan Snow? Well, huge thank you to Colton for bringing us the real story behind the Peaky Blinders. A world far removed from the slow motion swagger of the TV show and the movie, but I think you can agree, far more interesting for being real. Because those real gangs of Birmingham were not criminal masterminds pulling political strings. They were young men, they were street fighters, they were petty thieves and racecourse racketeers. They were shaped by poverty and brutality, youth culture, boredom, official neglect, and the hard edge of industrial life. Now, before you go, I've got something exciting I'm just going to tell you about. Over the past few months, loads of you have got in touch saying that you love it when History Hit hosts get together. We've got Kate and Matt and Eleanor and Tristan, all those guys.
41:40 Dan Snow? Kate List has got the Betwixt the Sheets podcast, Eleanor and Matt, Gone Medieval, Anthony and Maddie, After Dark, Tristan with the Ancients. Basically, you've been asking for an Avengers assembling of the History Hit universe, and we've listened. If you're a subscriber to this podcast, if you're one of the wonderful people who get our bonus content, you're about to get some brand new episodes, taking you behind the scenes in History Hit Towers. It's where we host, we're all going to get together, we're going to have a few drinks, we're going to eat some snacks, and we're going to talk about the stuff that normally happens after the microphones go off. So if you're already a subscriber, and thank you very much if you are, please keep an eye out for that. Thank you. In 1095, the Pope absolutely freaked out.
42:23 Dan Snow? He issued a call to arms which set Europe on a collision course in the Holy Land. In our mini-series running throughout April, we chart the epic sweep of the Crusades, from the astonishing capture of Jerusalem to the bitter failures of later expeditions. We'll hear about the mysterious religious orders, the Knights Templar, and the Nazari Ismailis, and we'll relive the climactic siege of Acre, the epic battle that finally ended the Crusader presence in the Holy Land. All these episodes come in April, so follow Dan Snow's History Hit, or smash that subscribe button if you're watching on YouTube, and you won't miss a single one.
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Previous Japan's WWII Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto Next The Soviet Marshal Georgy Zhukov Page updated October 31, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated
