THE PEAKY BLINDERS’ LEGACY
The Roaring Twenties of the popular imagination is an exuberant, joyous, fashionable and, above all, youthful decade encapsulated by the self-indulgent Bright Young Things. A mixture of rich aristocrats and bohemians disdainful of social norms, they delighted in their wild behaviour, spectacular parties, expensive cocktails, drug-taking and outrageous excesses. This impression of the 1920s is infused with the riches and privilege of a tiny minority, yet the decade was an exciting one for many more who relished new-found freedoms. Released from their stays and hoops, young women known as ‘flappers’ went out more confidently in skirts shortened to the knee and with bobbed hair covered trendily by bell-shaped cloche hats worn low on the forehead. Smoking and drinking like young men, they too embraced the jazz craze, the dance craze, the cinema craze, the Charleston craze and all the other crazes of the decade.
As for the middle-aged middle class, the 1920s may not have been roistering but they were pleasurable. Growing in numbers and secure in their employment, they could afford to buy modern semi-detached houses in the suburbs and to spend their disposable income on the cars that took them to and from work and on day trips. Yet millions faced a harsher reality. Britain was riven by gender and class inequalities. Working-class women may have gained the vote in 1928 but they were far from equal in education, health, the workplace and opportunities; huge numbers of working-class people still lived in badly built and overcrowded housing in polluted neighbourhoods; and working-class men were much more likely than others to suffer the indignities and hopelessness of unemployment. The older industries that had propelled Britain into industrial supremacy were in rapid decline, and the closure of cotton mills, iron works, coal mines and shipyards devastated whole communities across Britain. In a land of plenty, unhappily the only abundant thing in the lives of the poor was poverty. The Roaring Twenties may have been a party-time for a few, but for countless numbers it was a hard and hungry time.
These grim realities are ignored in dramatised versions of the decade, which are also deeply affected by Hollywood’s portrayals of ‘Jazz Age’ America with its mobsters and their molls, singers, dancers, bootleggers, decadent socialites, speakeasies, shootouts, and escapades. Gangsters, in particular, have become ingrained in the popular consciousness as a peculiarly 1920s American phenomenon, but more recently a stylish, peak-capped and charismatic British version has arisen through the acclaimed television series, Peaky Blinders. These gangsters take their name from real peaky blinders, who also wore flat caps, but, unlike their fictional counterparts, they were neither well-dressed nor alluring. Vicious thugs, they had made Birmingham notorious as one of the most violent cities in Britain, not in the 1920s but in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Belonging to numerous street gangs, they revelled in fighting each other, attacking the police and preying upon the decent majority of the poor amongst whom they lived.
As explored in Peaky Blinders: The Real Story, they disappeared before the First World War, thanks to stronger policing, sterner sentences for violent crime and the provision of youth and sports clubs for lads. Yet though their reign of ruffianism was ended in Birmingham, they passed on a violent legacy because men who had been peaky blinders sparked the first major gangland war in Britain. Belonging to a loose combination of villains known as the Birmingham Gang, by 1920, they controlled the pickpocketing of racegoers and the blackmailing of bookmakers on most of England’s racecourses. Such criminality was lucrative and the Birmingham Gang’s dominance was quickly challenged in the South by London’s Sabini Gang. The resulting Racecourse War of the spring and summer of 1921 was a new and shocking phenomenon. Previously, street gangs within one city had brawled with each other simply to assert which was the hardest; now, two gangs of criminals from different cities clashed over making money illegally. The fighting between them was brutal, provoking headlines in newspapers across the country. Men were scarred by slashes from cut-throat razors; others were shot; and many were battered with hammers and other weapons. And at the forefront of the fighting were former peaky blinders.
During their heyday in the 1890s, it was noticed that ‘senior peaky blinders’ had become racecourses rogues, travelling the country during the more thrilling Flat racing season of the spring and summer.1 Racecourses were ‘happy hunting grounds’ for them because of the large amounts of money carried by bookmakers and punters. Cash betting was illegal anywhere else, a factor that encouraged rising attendances at Flat meetings in a period when there was an expanding middle class and an extending railway network that facilitated travel. The result was an extraordinary growth in ready-money betting. 2 This was a magnet to thieves, who were able to rob and intimidate virtually with impunity because of the lack of control on racecourses. Too few police were employed to keep order and some of them were susceptible to bribes ‘to look the other way’.3 This state of affairs made it easy for gangs of six, seven and eight men to surround and trip up their victims to rob them or else to snatch purses, watches and chains. Travelling to and from the racecourse by train, teams from each gang also worked as card sharps upon gullible fellow passengers.4 Such pickpockets and card sharpers increasingly intimidated bookmakers to pay into ‘collections’, and they were joined by welching gangs. Two or three men, protected by several others, would set up as bookmakers, disappearing before they had to pay out winning bets.5
Racecourse pests, as the police termed them, were known colloquially as ‘the Boys’, and the Birmingham Boys, also called the Brummagem Boys, ranged wide, but they were not alone. In Scotland, crews of roughs from the East End of Glasgow and ‘other notorious regions were foremost in a reprehensible system that had been in vogue at Scottish race meetings for a considerable time – forcing money from bookmakers’.6 South of the border, the Newcastle Boys plagued the racecourses of the North-East, extorting ‘protection’ money from bookies; whilst another gang, the Mexborough Boys from South Yorkshire, focused on ‘megging’ – an expression for the three-card trick, also called ‘find the lady’.7 Yet it was the ‘Brums’ who were the most feared, and for a short time they were brought together into a fearsome force under the overall leadership of Billy Kimber.8
Portrayed in the series Peaky Blinders as a small, dapper Londoner, in reality he was a burly Brummie with a formidable reputation as a street fighter. Born in 1882, he had been a peaky blinder but, by his early twenties, he had followed others in moving away from backstreet rowdiness and into pickpocketing. Under Kimber, the medley of small gangs that made up the Birmingham Boys came together as a slightly more coherent entity known as the Birmingham Gang or Brummagem Gang. By the early twentieth century, it ruled with a rod of iron the racecourses of the Midlands and the North of England, up to the border with the Newcastle Boys. But Kimber had bigger ambitions. He wanted to organise and control the highly profitable rackets on the more numerous racecourses of southern England, leading him to abandon his family and move to London in 1910. He achieved his ambition, and although racing was curtailed during the First World War, he reasserted his dominance in 1920. But his success was short-lived because the Birmingham Gang’s takeover fuelled the resentment and envy of London gangs, and violence soon broke out.
A world city and centre of the British Empire, London expanded massively in the 1920s. Propelled by the expansion of the railway and underground systems, it burst out of its bounds, rapidly overlaying the surrounding countryside with large-scale suburban development. In sharp contrast to the comfortable homes, pleasant settings and prosperous lives of the suburbanites, the poor of London’s older central districts endured unfit housing and insanitary conditions and struggled to get by on low-paid and intermittent work. Just as Britain was a nation rent apart by class so too was London, perhaps more starkly so, as the wealth of the City and the West End was so close to some of the most deprived neighbourhoods in the country. It was from these poorer areas which emerged the gangs that became embroiled in the Racecourse War of 1921. Like Birmingham, parts of the capital had also been infested by backstreet gangs in the later nineteenth century. Commonly known as hooligans, they had much in common with the peaky blinders in that they were territorial, motivated by asserting their fighting prowess, and fought with belts and knives as well as fists and feet.9 But there were also crucial differences. There was a wider use of revolvers and pistols in London, where neighbourhood gangs also emerged – and some of these developed into more organised criminal groupings. They included the Titanics, a pickpocketing gang from Hoxton, and the Elephant Boys of South London, which became an important ally of Kimber through his friendship with two of their top men – brothers Wag and Wal McDonald. In a city decisively split by the River Thames, Kimber cleverly secured back-up from the other side of the divide thanks to George ‘Brummy’ Sage, who would go on to lead the Camden Town Gang.
During a period when ‘un-Englishness’ was despised, when foreigners were demeaned as inferior, and when Eastern European Jewish immigration was restricted by laws targeting ‘undesirable’ aliens, racism coursed through the Birmingham Gang and their London allies. They especially hated Jewish bookmakers, who were subjected even more than others to blackmailing for ‘protection’. It was the brutish beating of one of them that was the catalyst for conflict. The victim was Alfie Solomon. Dramatised in Peaky Blinders as Alfie Solomons, and as if he were from an Orthodox Jewish background, he actually belonged to a secular Anglo-Jewish family. After his mauling in March 1921, Solomon and other Jewish bookies turned turned to another gang leader for help, this leader would later be portrayed in the drama – Darby Sabini. Depicted on screen as a smartly dressed Italian gangster, he was really an Anglo-Italian who identified as an Englishman. He led a gang of men like himself from London’s Little Italy in Clerkenwell, but the gang also included those from solely English backgrounds and Anglo-Jewish men from the East End. At its core, though, the Sabini Gang was tightly organised under one clear leader bolstered by an intimate inner circle that included two of Sabini’s brothers, as well as close friends with whom he had grown up.
The bloody conflict between the Sabini Gang and the Birmingham Gang and its London allies was marked by serious outbreaks of violence at Alexandra Park racecourse, which led to the death of a Jewish bookie; at the Epsom Road Battle, in which several mostly Jewish bookmakers were savagely assaulted, and at Bath races, where there were wild scenes when the Birmingham Gang went on the rampage. The nation watched on in horror as the gangs clashed not only on southern racecourses but also on the streets of North London. But in the autumn of 1921, and in a startling turn of events, the Birmingham Gang and the Sabinis declared a truce and agreed to divide the racecourse rackets between them on a regional basis. However, Kimber’s London allies were left out of the agreement. Determined to wrest power back from the Sabinis, in 1922, Sage formed the Camden Town Gang, which was supported by Hoxton’s Titanics and the Elephant Boys. Another violent confrontation broke out in North London and on racecourses around the capital. Yet again the Sabinis were the winners, and for a short period there was peace. Then, in 1925, the Sabini Gang was again challenged fiercely within London whilst in Sheffield a man was murdered in a war between the Mooney Gang and the Garvin Gang. Both leaders were racing men who had belonged to street gangs and both were embedded in poor districts close to the centre of a city famed for its production of steel. But their bitter quarrel was not over racecourse rackets – it was over control of a gambling site close to Sheffield city centre.
That gang war was put down by forceful policing and, in another unexpected twist, and for a variety of reasons that will be made clear, the racecourse gangs of London and Birmingham soon faded away. They had caused mayhem, terrorised bookmakers and racegoers, inflicted terrible wounds, triggered fearful headlines, and had seemed all but invincible. Yet now some of the gangsters sought legitimacy for themselves and respectability for their families; others carried on as petty criminals; and a handful became leading figures in London’s gangland. Most have been all but forgotten, and none have been glamorised in gangland mythology – none except for Darby Sabini. He has been depicted as if he were a 1920s-type American mobster, a Mafia-style don and ‘Britain’s Godfather’ from whom later London gang leaders took inspiration. He was no such thing. Nor were the other 1920s gangsters audacious and exciting anti-heroes. They were dangerous, nasty, mob-handed racketeers who blackmailed, intimidated and maimed. Yet they were as noticeable and important a feature of the Roaring Twenties as the dissolute Bright Young Things, the carefree young flappers and jazzers, the few glamorous wealthy, the favoured suburbanites, and the unfortunate many who were unemployed and poor. This is the story of those real gangsters. It is the story of Britain’s most notorious 1920s gangs and of the legacy of the peaky blinders.