PEAKY BLINDERS TO THE BIRMINGHAM BOYS
THE EPSOM ROAD AMBUSH
On Friday 3 June 1921, London’s Evening News carried the attention-grabbing headline: ‘The Epsom Road Ambush’. In an alarming report, readers were told of how, after that day’s racing at Epsom, a battle had caused panic and, in a dramatic raid, a charabanc (motor-coach) party of men had been surprised in a beer garden by a force of a hundred police. They had made twenty-eight arrests, including two men with loaded revolvers. A vivid, attention-grabbing spread told of an attack the previous afternoon next to the Brick Kiln pub at Ewell Corner when a gang had assaulted a group of men in a vehicle, some of whom were hospitalised. The attackers had then easily escaped because racegoers leaving the Epsom meeting had fled from them. People shouted in fright at their drivers to turn around and many scuttled back to Epsom or took other routes home. One startled resident saw what had happened. Opposite the pub, a private car had been running and beside it a man with a pair of field glasses was watching the road. When he said, ‘Here they come, boys,’ the car was driven at full speed across the road. Its front tyres burst with loud bangs as it crashed into an oncoming vehicle, whose occupants were attacked by a gang of ten to fifteen men wielding hammers, hatchets, bottles, bricks and hedge sticks. There was a charabanc nearby and then many of the gang jumped in and made off.10
With the newspapers carrying daily reports of the guerrilla conflict between British forces and Irish republican fighters in the Irish War of Independence, fears were heightened, and so a few witnesses actually believed that some sort of terrorism was afoot – one telephone caller warning the local police that a Sinn Fein riot was taking place.11 Gathering a number of officers, a detective inspector immediately made his way to the scene. By the roadside, he found three men suffering from wounds, as well as two badly damaged cars. He transmitted details of the attackers’ charabanc to all stations in the Metropolitan Police area.12 A young PC noticed a motor tallying the description at the George and Dragon hotel on Kingston Hill. After he passed on this information, over twenty uniformed and plain-clothes policemen hurried to the hotel on bicycles and in commandeered vehicles. Reinforcements swiftly followed in police motor tenders, and altogether the force numbered about a hundred.13 They surrounded the pub and garden where the men from the charabanc were drinking. One officer pulled out the vehicle’s spark plugs so it couldn’t be driven and then others approached the lawn. Sergeant Dawson was the first to confront the men. Holding up his revolver, he announced, ‘I will shoot the first man that tries to escape.’ After the arrests were made, the police saw that the charabanc floor was smeared with blood and covered with broken glass; they found a loaded Mauser pistol, hammers, large stones, a chopper and a hammer with the handle missing as if it had been broken off in the fight.14
The next day, twenty-eight men were charged with committing grievous bodily harm to ten others. But they were not members of Sinn Fein and they had nothing to do with the Irish War of Independence. As the Evening News revealed, they were well known on racecourses, although they were not bookmakers.15 These observations were well founded. Most of them belonged to the Birmingham Gang, which was battling London’s Sabini Gang over control of the rackets on southern England’s racecourses. However, the victims were not Londoners; they were bookmakers from Leeds. Previously regarded as allies of the Birmingham Gang, they’d recently switched allegiance to the Sabinis and therefore, in the eyes of the Birmingham Gang, had to be punished. The Epsom Road Ambush was a major event in that struggle for supremacy. Involving a large number of attackers, it was well planned and was a bloody warning to bookmakers of what would happen if they deserted the Birmingham Gang. And as the victims were mostly Jewish, it was also an opportunity for venomous anti-Semitism.
Yet the Epsom Road Ambush did not work out as the Birmingham Gang had intended. It ensured that London’s bookmakers, Jewish and non-Jewish, would look even more towards the Sabini Gang for protection. It attracted widespread condemnation in the press; it energised the police against the gang; and it resulted in the imprisonment of seventeen of the most menacing of the Birmingham Gang. The disturbing details of their attack and the sentences passed on them will be recounted later, but it is important here to emphasise that most of them had been peaky blinders, and that a discussion of their early lives informs an understanding of how the legacy of the peaky blinders was both the Birmingham Gang and Britain’s first major gangland war.
BANKS’S MOB
Amongst the men arrested and convicted was Edward Banks, formerly Edward Pankhurst, and the man who had arranged the trip to Epsom.16 Born in 1878 and the eldest of a big family of siblings, Banks was short at 5 foot 3 inches. Despite this, he was ever ready to brawl, and by 1904 he had received seven convictions for fighting and assault. One of them in particular highlighted his volatile nature. In December 1903, after a policeman had remonstrated with him for using bad language, Banks ran into his house and, from the attic window, threw a soda-water bottle that hit the officer in the chest.17 By then, he had also been found guilty of petty theft and warehouse breaking, whilst he had been fortunate to have been given the benefit of the doubt on a charge of loitering. Under the 1824 Vagrancy Act, the police were allowed to arrest those they suspected of frequenting public spaces with the intent of committing an arrestable offence. This section also applied to those loitering with intent and was regularly applied to suspected pickpockets. By now, Banks was one of the Birmingham Boys and, like them, he moved across the Midlands to rob. In 1904, he and an accomplice were found guilty of breaking and entering a shop in Nottingham and stealing gold and silver watches, gold rings and other items worth £100. He was sent to prison for twelve months.18 The court was told that Banks was the leader of a gang of Birmingham thieves and that he was a very bad character.19 He was indeed and, once released, he became embroiled in the infamous Garrison Lane Vendetta.
As detailed in Peaky Blinders. The Real Story, this was an especially violent backstreet gang war that was regarded as ‘The End of the Peaky Blinders’.20 Fought between 1908 and 1912 by men who were near neighbours in Bordesley and Deritend, close to the city centre, it pitched the disreputable Sheldon brothers, the inspiration for the Shelby family in the series Peaky Blinders, against a hard man called Billy Beach and his pals.21 Banks was with the Sheldons, and in January 1909, men brandishing revolvers forced their way into his house looking for him. They did not find him.22 The next year, in August 1910, Banks was arrested for possessing a loaded firearm whilst drunk. In his defence, he said that three evenings previously, his enemies had again broken into his house, kicking in the door and smashing the windows. Afterwards, he had bought the revolver to prevent a recurrence. Banks denied that he had threatened to shoot Beach, but after he was sentenced to one month with hard labour, he vowed, ‘I will get twelve months for him when I come out, or swing for him.’23
As it was, Banks did not swing for Beach, and over the next decade he seemed to transform his life. He was not arrested for any serious offence and his economic standing improved markedly. Formerly a hawker who made a precarious living traipsing the streets selling vegetables from a handcart, he had lived in badly built back-to-backs; however, by 1921, Banks had a greengrocery shop at 67 Digbeth, just below the Bull Ring markets, and he and his wife lived on the premises. Nearby, he had another shop selling fish and rabbits.24 In total, he employed fourteen people, and after his arrest he was able to bail himself for the huge sum of £1,000 and secure seven sureties totalling £3,000.25 His success was most unusual and, given his previous and later criminality, it is likely that it was achieved from illegal activities.
It was apparent that Banks also headed a group within the Birmingham Gang. Although the notorious Billy Kimber may have been its main leader, this gang was nothing like that of a modern organised crime syndicate, and nor did it have the compactness of the Sabini Gang. It was a rowdy assortment of small bands of rogues. Because of this splintering, due to the Birmingham Gang being based neither in one neighbourhood nor around one family, and because it operated outside the city and did not spawn a successor gang, it has not passed into folklore, and memories of the gang all but disappeared after the Second World War. However, back in the late 1980s, an anonymous letter was sent to me stating that one of those arrested after the Epsom Road Ambush was Billy Hayden, who came out of Sherlock Street, one of ‘Banks’s mob . . . he used a chopper in the big battle when it went down.’26
Hayden was arrested at the scene in Epsom. Though just over 5 foot 5 inches, Hayden could mix it in a fight. In 1909, he was involved in a street melee with a father and son he had rowed with in a pub. After seeing Hayden knock the older man to the ground twice, a witness ran for a constable. When they returned, Hayden had been stabbed by the son at the top of the left cheekbone, a wound a doctor later described as very dangerous.27 A year later, Hayden was one of a number of men arrested for playing pitch and toss, a favourite pastime of the peaky blinders, on a Sunday afternoon.28 He also had two convictions for larceny, yet he was not a habitual criminal and was a very different character to most of the other arrested men. By 1911, he was a butcher aged twenty-four; his wife, Annie, was a factory worker, and they had a young daughter and son.
A working man, Hayden also served his country loyally. After seven years with the Special Reserve, he left in 1912 but then volunteered to join the 10th Battalion Royal Warwickshire Regiment in September 1914, soon after the outbreak of the First World War. He was accepted before the height standard was raised and was posted to France in July 1915. Towards the end of the war, his wife was notified that he had been killed in action, but this was a mistake and soon afterwards she was informed that he was a prisoner of war. A lance corporal, Hayden had already seen plenty of action at the battles of Albert, the Menin Road Ridge and Passchendaele, among others. Then, from 21– 23 March 1918, his battalion was involved in the Battle of St Quentin, where he was captured, after which he was made to work down German mines.29 Following his discharge, Hayden must have struggled to get by as a hawker, and so during the coal strike of 1921, he went to the Black Country to draw out crop coal – inferior coal close to the surface. It was a long trek from his home for hard, dirty and low-paid work. Perhaps the opportunity of making easy money on the racecourses was too tempting for him and led him to join Banks’s Mob.
Hayden was from a street near to where Banks lived, as were several other men convicted of the Epsom Road Ambush, and it was likely that they too were part of his Mob. They included William Bayliss from Barford Street – one of the first streets in Birmingham to have a gang of sloggers, the forerunners of the peaky blinders.30 He had convictions for living on the earnings from prostitution and was also anti-Semitic, a prejudice infecting the Birmingham Gang.31 In 1892, Bayliss was nineteen when he and two other roughs were involved in what was condemned as a small-scale Judenhetze, a persecution of Jews.32 Without any reason, they had formed an intense hatred for a German Jew and had ‘threatened that they would half murder him’ when they came across him. When they did so, they kicked him in the stomach and Bayliss struck him with his buckled belt. Afterwards, the victim was menaced with serious injury if he gave evidence. He was so scared that he refused to identify his tormentors until the magistrates assured him, ‘that the law in Birmingham was strong enough to protect foreigners, and if any attempt was made to continue the assault the Police should be communicated with’.33
Five years later, Bayliss was one of a gang of drunken roughs standing at a street corner quarrelling and using bad language. When a policeman ordered them to move on, he was violently assaulted. A crowd gathered to watch but the only person to help was a lady who blew the officer’s whistle to signal help. Bayliss kicked her on the arm and was sentenced to six weeks’ hard labour for each assault.34 Undeterred from violence, in July 1914 he hit a policeman with the back of a chair. He was given four months’ imprisonment with hard labour. Now following only intermittent employment, Bayliss was viewed by the police as ‘addicted to drink and when under its influence is regarded as being very violent. He is constantly in the company of low-class thieves and prostitutes.’35
Three other men arrested at Epsom appear to have been in Banks’s Mob, as they also came from streets near to his home and business. They were Thomas Conway, Thomas Eivers and Alfred Jackson. In 1919, Conway was fined twenty shillings for running a crown and anchor board at Gosforth Park races in the North East. This was an illegal gambling game favoured by other members of the Birmingham Gang because the odds were stacked in their favour.36 As for Eivers, he had convictions for wilful damage and assault and was a thief and frequenter of race meetings.37 Neither man did regular work.38 Nor did Alfred Jackson, another associate of low thieves. In March 1914, aged twenty-three, and soon after he had been arrested for frequenting in Burnley, Jackson was found guilty of housebreaking and stealing jewellery in Liverpool. Because he did not have a serious record and appeared to have got among a body of men worse than himself, he was imprisoned for only six months.39 He had indeed fallen amongst bad men and he would become as bad as them. Allegedly a carter, in June 1919, he was one of several Birmingham pickpockets arrested in Newcastle. Now calling himself Alfred John Thomas, he stole £3 from a man boarding a bus to Gosforth races. Pickpocketing gangs operated with an ‘obstructor’, who took up a position at the entrance to a racecourse bus, and a ‘tickler’, who actually picked the pockets of the ‘lamb’, who was squeezed between them. Others in the gang acted as a ‘cover up’ for their companions.40 On this occasion, Jackson was the tickler. He was sentenced to three months in prison, having other convictions for larceny and wounding.41
SLOGGERS AND PEAKY BLINDERS
The coach trip to Epsom organised by Banks included men from other bands within the Birmingham Gang, one of which was that of the three Tuckey brothers. Unlike the pickpockets and sharpsters connected with Banks, they were not from the markets area but came from Aston, to the north of the city centre. Nor were they career criminals. Two of them were bricklayers and another was a wire drawer and it seems they didn’t go racing regularly. When they did so, it was not as thieves but as blackmailers, intimidating bookies into giving them money. Hard men, they emphasise that the Birmingham Gang was the legacy of the peaky blinders, as two of them had been in a notorious street gang. The eldest brother was fifty-three-year-old Thomas Tuckey, who had been a slogger like Bayliss. Raised in badly built and insanitary back-to-back housing, as a nineteen-year-old in 1887, Tuckey had thrown a glass at the back of the head of a detective called to a pub disturbance. He was sentenced to three months’ hard labour. Hard fare, hard board and hard labour, such as stepping on the treadmill for relentless hours a day, failed to reform him. Two years later, Tuckey and a friend were called sloggers when arrested for assaulting a policeman taking a man into custody. In the company of well-known members of the slogging gang, they’d beaten the officer ‘savagely about the head and body, destroying his hat, and inflicting a wound which bled profusely’. This time, Tuckey was imprisoned for nine months’ hard labour.42
He came from the Aston Cross locality, which was notorious for its slogging gang, and it is apparent that Tuckey was a leading figure within it. So too was his younger brother, Henry ‘Harry’ Tuckey. Aged eighteen in September 1894, Harry Tuckey and a friend were charged with violently assaulting a third man. All three had been at a fight between rival slogging gangs by the canal. Afterwards, they were walking along the towing-path when Tuckey struck the victim, who was then kicked. He was fined merely ten shillings with costs.43 A violent man, Tuckey was also a petty thief, as were many peaky blinders. In particular, he and his younger brother, Edward, had a liking for stealing bicycles. In 1908, they took two in Bristol and each was given three years’ hard labour. Six years later, in October 1914, they were found guilty of breaking and entering a house, after which they rode away on bikes. In passing lengthy sentences of hard labour for both of them, the judge remarked that ‘the prisoners were not only brothers in name, but, judging by their past records, they were also brothers in crime’.44 They were indeed, and Harry Tuckey’s misdemeanours continued after his release. In February 1918, when he was in a relationship with a serviceman’s wife, he attacked her husband, kicking him in the mouth, loosening four teeth and causing a wound needing three stitches.45
At 5 foot 9 and 5 foot 8 inches respectively, Thomas and Harry Tuckey were tall for sloggers and peaky blinders. Most of them were smaller like Edward Tuckey, who was 5 foot 5 inches, and who joined his brothers at Epsom. According to his great-grandchildren, Lesley and Robert Staight:
Despite the evidence he was a very bad lad, he was considered a good man to the family. There is no history or stories of any domestic violence. Of course, he did drink bucket loads and we know he’d be off out with his brothers and ‘clan’ lots. He’d get his brick hammer out sometimes and disappear out on ‘business’. His tools seemed to be stored in the coal shed for long periods (possibly when he was doing time) but he is remembered as a hard worker in his job as a bricklayer.
Tuckey’s wife, Florence, was ‘a lovely lady, always with a chuckle and humming. A strong matriarchal figure, known to regularly send Teddy off to bed if he was drunk, to sleep it off.’ Their only child, Violet, was ‘positively spoiled. Piano lessons, ballet, and both she and Florence had very nice clothes. Florence had fur stoles.’46 The part-time blackmailing of bookmakers obviously paid well for Edward Tuckey, but it’s likely that he and his brothers were drawn to join Banks’s Mob in the Epsom Road Ambush less by the chance of making money on this occasion and more by the prospect of having a row with Londoners. That would also seem to have been the motivation of other former sloggers-cum-peaky blinders such as Jack Allard.
Born in 1870, Allard was from Sparkbrook, two miles to the southeast of the Bull Ring. At 5 foot 9 inches he was also tall for his background, and with scars from fighting between his eyes and on his forehead, he was a frightening man. Like all peaky blinders, he hated the police, and when he was twenty-three he had struck a constable on the nose and kicked him.47 Two years later, he was named as the ringleader of a trio of burglars when sentenced to twenty-one months in prison.48 But it was as a fighting man that Allard became notorious. One Thursday in February 1907, he was drinking in a pub with some out-of-work bricklayers. Generously, he paid for several rounds of drinks. Then the bricklayers demanded that he give them half-a-crown. He refused, and in the ensuing row he ran amok with a heavy stick in his hand. Leaving the pub, he hit two other men before he was arrested. The magistrates were lenient – for drunkenness and assault, they fined him ten shillings with costs or one month’s hard labour.49
Ostensibly a plumber, from about 1900, Allard had become an associate of low-class racing men and one of the Birmingham Boys. Over the next eleven years, he was convicted for frequenting at Lincoln races and, under an alias, at Brighton and Bath.50 It seems likely that a dispute relating to racing led to his next crime – the manslaughter of Charles Cutler, a racecourse bookmaker’s assistant. Both men lived close to each other: Allard on the Ladypool Road, Sparkbrook and Cutler just off this shopping thoroughfare. There had already been some bother between them, in which Cutler’s head had been cut and his ear bitten, and on the afternoon of the fatal attack on 29 February 1912, Cutler told his mother that he’d met Allard, who had vowed to ‘bodge his eye out with his umbrella if he were by him’. Later that evening, Cutler walked his girlfriend to her house nearby, and soon after Mrs Cutler heard the sound of police whistles. Going out into the street, she found her son lying in the gutter. He was bleeding and dying. There was a crowd, and she saw Allard held by a policeman. She heard him say words to the effect of: ‘I have been waiting for him all day; I’ve done him, and I meant to’, and ‘I will blow the policeman’s brains out’. Her account was corroborated by the arresting officer, who added that Allard had sworn: ‘If I had my revolver I would have blown his brains out and done for him.’
A witness explained that he had passed Cutler and Allard in the street and then heard a thud and a groan followed by the words, ‘Take that, you dirty dog.’ Turning round, he saw Cutler lying in the gutter. Allard was standing over him with an umbrella in his hand as though he were about to jab or had jabbed. When the constable arrived, Allard swore that, ‘It’s a matter of getting your own back, and I have – well got mine back.’ (The use of the dash in newspaper reports indicated a profanity.) Cutler was rushed unconscious to the General Hospital. He was bleeding freely from the nose and had a deep wound on the inner angle of the right eye. Internally, the wound extended to a fracture of the bone forming the inner wall of the eye socket. There was another fracture of the base of the skull, with a half-inch piece of bone detached. Grievously injured, Cutler died of laceration of the brain following the penetration of some instrument through the wall of the eye socket into the skull. It was a terrible injury, and a doctor reported that it could have been caused by an umbrella point, although that would have required the exertion of considerable force.
On the afternoon of the killing, another witness had been in a pub in Birmingham city centre drinking with Cutler, who had pulled out a knuckleduster. When questioned if ‘that is the gentleman you are going to do Allard in with’, Cutler had replied, ‘What do you think I’ve got it for?’51 A bloodied knuckleduster was found beside the unconscious Cutler, and this provided Allard with part of his defence when charged with manslaughter. He claimed that Cutler had threatened him on several occasions. They had met earlier on the day they clashed, and Cutler had supposedly vowed that he would ‘put him through it’ at the first opportunity. That night, after having plenty to drink, Allard stated that he was returning home when the two men came face to face. Cutler drew his hand back and was wearing a knuckleduster. Saying, ‘You dirty dog. Take that,’ he went to hit Allard. Trying to ward off the blow, Allard reckoned that he had held up his umbrella and that Cutler had rushed onto it so that the point penetrated his eye.
The jury accepted this unlikely explanation, finding Allard guilty not of murder, for which he would have hung, but of manslaughter and, despite all the evidence, somehow recommended the judge to show mercy. He did so by imposing a sentence of only seven years’ imprisonment.52 After his release, Allard worked at the Austin Motor Company from October 1917, where he was a good timekeeper, and his general character was given as good. Subsequently, he was unemployed, so he bought a horse and cart to hawk vegetables around the streets. Yet, as the Birmingham police stressed, he remained ‘an associate of racecourse thieves and with them attends the majority of meetings’.53
Purportedly a painter, John Lee was another murderous member of the Birmingham Gang and was also tall for the period, at just over 5 foot 10 inches. He was from Bordesley, which adjoined Sparkbrook where Allard lived; he had also been in a gang of peaky blinders, and in 1899, aged nineteen, he was sentenced to twelve months in prison for manslaughter. One of his accomplices was Arthur Griffiths, and two years later they assaulted a carter.54 After he was convicted for another attack in January 1902, Lee must have fallen out with Griffiths, for he was later found guilty of maliciously wounding his former friend. Despite a sentence of eighteen months’ hard labour, Lee was now infused with violent behaviour, and in September 1903 he was charged with having attempted to murder Charles Connor, who was soon to be involved in the Garrison Lane Vendetta mentioned earlier.55
There was bad blood between their friends, and in the Sailor’s Return in Bordesley on the August Bank Holiday, Lee had attacked a man with a chopper. Later that evening and armed with a revolver, he met Connor in Garrison Lane and shot him in the arm and leg. In court, when a witness called Julia Kane was called, Lee’s rage ‘knew no bounds. He used the most filthy and violent language, and to the surprise of everyone . . . took from his pocket a large road stone and with an oath slung it viciously at the woman.’ Fortunately it missed, as did a second stone. Clambering over the dock from all directions, eight policemen strove to stop Lee. Mad with rage, he fought savagely until he was overpowered and cried for mercy. Hands cuffed behind his back, he was forced to sit but carried on swearing at the witnesses and violently threatening them and the police. He shouted that even if he got twenty years he would not forget them, and if he had a shooter he would die for them at once. Lee reserved special hatred for Kane, whom he vowed to kill straight away if he could reach her.56
Found guilty of wounding and attempted murder, he was sentenced to five years’ penal servitude. After his release, he lived with a young woman called Ada Bailey, whom he abused. Still only twenty-seven, in February 1908, Lee was charged with unlawfully wounding her. Witnesses said that she had been in a butcher’s shop when he had rushed in and stabbed her between the ribs and in the thigh. Despite this, when Bailey came out of hospital, she went back to live with Lee, who continued to ill-treat her. Yet even after his arrest she brought him food in his cell. Obviously fearful of him, at first Bailey denied that he had knifed her, telling the improbable story that she had fallen on a spike. She later withdrew this account. Lee refused to accept his guilt, saying that Bailey had charged him out of jealousy because he would not live with her any more as she was a drunk. His appeals were ignored and he was imprisoned for another five years.57
Lee was irredeemable, returning to crime after his release. Like others in the Birmingham Boys, he travelled far and wide, and in July 1917 he was found guilty of housebreaking and the theft of £350 worth of jewellery in Surrey. Because he had a long record of crime, he was sent to prison for five years.58 He was released shortly before the Epsom Road Ambush. So too was Joseph Witton, another man inured to violence who lived in the same street as Lee. Born in 1886, Witton had scars on his right temple, forehead and beneath his left eye. Distinguished by tattoos of Buffalo Bill and a pugilist on his right arm and by a wreath and flowers on his left forearm, Witton was convicted fourteen times between his first offence in 1900, when he was fourteen, and 1908. His crimes ranged from stealing three tins of brawn and a tin of sardines to the theft of a purse; from using indecent language to drunkenness, and from loitering to assault.
A vicious and dangerous man, in March 1909, Witton was convicted on two charges of robbery with violence.59 The previous October, he had been one of three men who had attacked a manufacturer on a street close to Snow Hill Station. The victim ‘was rendered insensible by kicks on the head, and practically all the contents of his pockets were stolen’. In the judge’s opinion, it was one of the worst cases of its kind that he had met with. Five months later, in February 1909, Witton was one of seven or eight men ‘who made a murderous attack upon a dealer in precious stones in a house in a low quarter of the city’.60 It seems that racism also played a part in the assault, for the victim was Ismail Razagoff, who was named as a Muslim. Visiting Birmingham on business, he had gone with a woman to a house in Thorp Street, a locality that had long been notorious for its street gangs. When Razagoff tried to leave, the woman and a gang of men set about him and robbed him. For this and the previous attack, Witton was sentenced to four years’ imprisonment and fifteen lashes of the cat.61
The cat o’ nine tails was brutal. A rope whip consisting of nine knotted thongs, it was used to flog prisoners and could only be inflicted for robbery with violence. As a punishment, it had gained widespread publicity in 1887 when Justice Day had sentenced members of the High Rip Gang of Liverpool to flogging; but it had not been passed in Birmingham for many years. The decision was praised in a local newspaper’s editorial. It pronounced that unfortunately there were ‘some members of the criminal class who are so little removed from barbarians to be impervious to any other form of punishment’ and for them flogging was a deterrent. It was not. In Liverpool robberies with violence had increased after Day’s sentences, whilst in Birmingham Witton went on to commit more violent crimes.62
Following his four-year stretch, he was given eighteen months’ hard labour for stealing a purse in March 1914.63 Previously a part-time soldier, after his release he joined the Worcestershire Regiment in June 1915. He served in France and Gallipoli and was wounded, but his military character was classed as ‘indifferent’. In August 1916, when on leave, he was named as a soldier in a fracas after a policeman was attacked.64 Two years later, he had deserted and was arrested for shopbreaking. In mitigation, it was disclosed that he had saved a comrade’s life in Gallipoli, but still he was sentenced to twelve months’ hard labour.65 Released from prison in July 1919, Witton was unable to steer himself away from criminality. Within days he was arrested for loitering at a tram terminus in Birmingham. He and his accomplice were described as the associates of thieves and pickpockets and part of a well-known gang. When arrested, Witton told the detective, ‘I am a fool. I have only been out of prison six days, and I know what this will mean for me.’ He was a fool but a dangerous one. After serving twelve months’ hard labour, Witton was sent back to prison in September 1920 for larceny in Worcester.66 He now stated that he was a commission agent. Because of their knowledge of horse racing, some men did make a living as agents, placing bets for others and taking a commission for doing so. However, the term commission agent was also a favourite catch-all used by racecourse pickpockets, thugs and fraudsters like Witton to disguise their criminality and to give them a semblance of legitimacy.
A CITY-WIDE GANG
Although coming from different parts of Birmingham, racing men like Witton, Allard and the Tuckeys would have met travelling across the country to different racecourses and drinking in the same pubs. As recalled by Mr Gilliver, who knew members of the Birmingham Gang, ‘the Birmingham mobs used to hang around just there in town by the Fish Market and the Rag Market and that’s where they used to hang around when there was no racing on’.67 Such ‘hanging around’ would explain the involvement in the Epsom Road Ambush of Ernest Hughes, who had no fixed abode and who had also been fined for running a crown and anchor board, in his case at Warwick races in 1919.68 It also explained the inclusion of William Henry ‘Harry’ Stringer, the only arrested man from the Ladywood district to the west of the city centre, and another deserter and rogue. Having previously been a part-time soldier in the Militia, he joined the Worcestershire Regiment in 1907 when he was eighteen. It is noteworthy that on his attestation papers he was unable to record where his father or mother lived, and later he would also be noted as being of no fixed abode. His Army record was grim, and within weeks he was charged with being absent without leave. A few months later, he was in detention for using insubordinate language, after which he deserted. Sentenced by a civilian court to six months’ imprisonment for theft, Stringer was discharged from the Army in January 1909.69
Like others of those arrested, he was a constant associate of thieves and racing men, and by 1912 he had accumulated nine convictions for obstruction and other minor offences, and three for stealing, one of which was in Dover and another in Cheltenham. That year he was imprisoned for twelve months for uttering base coins (trying to pay for something with counterfeit coins). Reoffending after his release, he was branded a dangerous thief.70 In January 1916, Stringer once again joined the Worcestershire Regiment but, as before, went on to desert. Soon after, he was convicted in Liverpool as well as Birmingham.71 Then in January 1920, and stating that he was a bookmaker’s clerk, he was sentenced to twelve months’ hard labour for loitering at tram queues in Birmingham.72 Damned in court as an ‘incorrigible rogue’, he was discharged from the Army with the military character of ‘bad’.73
William O’Brien was of the same ilk. Born in 1892, he was from Small Heath, not far from where Lee and Witton lived. At a little over 5 foot 4 inches, O’Brien joined the Army Reserve in 1910, and four years later he was called up to serve with the Lincolnshire Regiment. In October 1914, days after reaching the Western Front, he was wounded on his right hand whilst being shelled. He was discharged in November 1915 to work in munitions and his character was given as ‘very good’.74 It did not stay that way. In July 1918, he was arrested for loitering in Manchester city centre. Saying that he was an Army pensioner, he was bound over to be of good behaviour for twelve months.75 A few days later, though, O’Brien was apprehended in Blackpool as one of a gang of notorious Birmingham pickpockets who had been giving the police a lot of trouble. After he was arrested, he appealed to the two detectives with him to, ‘Give us a chance; let me go this time, and I will give you all the money I have got and leave the town.’ His plea fell on deaf ears and he was sentenced to three months’ hard labour.76 On his release, he returned to Birmingham and pickpocketing, and at the end of December 1918 was imprisoned for loitering in the city centre. A detective told the court that O’Brien had not been following any employment for the previous three months and instead had been working tram queues with other men.77
Two of the arrested men who were convicted did not fit into the categories either of travelling pickpockets like O’Brien or former sloggers-cum-peaky blinders such as Bayliss. They were William Goulding and Arthur Vincent. Aged forty-five, Goulding was a widower from Aston and had no previous convictions. After his arrest, his daughter stated that he had worked as a labourer on the construction of a large factory but had to leave at Easter 1921 because of ill health. Since then he had been out of work. The Birmingham police knew nothing detrimental about him and he appeared to be well respected in the district where he lived. Goulding was clearly the odd man out and struggling for money; he may have been pulled into the Epsom Road Ambush by a connection with the Tuckeys, who were also from Aston.
As for Arthur Vincent, like Hayden he was an ex-serviceman who had done his duty and who had grown up in poverty. The only convicted man from Hockley, in 1901 and aged twelve, Vincent was living with his mother, Elizabeth, his older sister and younger brother. Elizabeth was forty-four and, although married, she was recorded as the head of the household – indicating that her husband had deserted her and their children. A hardworking woman, she kept them out of the hated workhouse through working as a charwoman, cleaning the houses of the better off. Her wages for long hours and laborious work would have been pitifully low and the household income was supplemented by her daughter, who worked in a factory, and by rent from a boarder.
Six years later, Vincent was working for a metal merchant when he joined the Militia. He was called up from the Reserve in August 1914 to join the Coldstream Guards. Immediately drafted to France as one of the British Expeditionary Force, Vincent was in the Retreat from Mons and was severely wounded at the Battle of the Aisne in September 1914.78 Discharged, he was awarded an Army pension and the British War Medal and Victory Medal.79 Additionally, he was entitled to wear the Silver War Badge, issued to service personnel who had been honourably discharged from military service due to wounds or sickness. His Army character was praised as very good. Vincent went on to keep a fruiterer’s shop and do some hauling with a van. Birmingham’s police indicated that he was in ‘a sound financial position, but he commenced to associate with well-known thieves and others and attended race meetings playing “Crown & Anchor”. Eventually he lost his business.’ Married with a wife and four children under nine, Vincent had convictions only for street betting and was regarded as ‘more or less a tool of the party’ in the Epsom Road Ambush.80
As can be noted from the different characters explored above, Banks’s charabanc trip for that attack drew in tough nuts from across poorer working-class Birmingham and from different mobs within the Birmingham Gang, including several of the twenty-eight arrested men who were not convicted of the Epsom Road Ambush. Such a large gathering was unusual and was driven by the need to make a show of strength against the Sabini Gang. Behind this rallying of rogues, as the Birmingham Police emphasised, was a syndicate that had provided the money for this affray and others. Waxing wealthy through their illegal earnings, it’s most likely that Kimber and his closest associates were that syndicate. In the immediate aftermath of the First World War, through his fighting prowess and leadership qualities, he had brought the shifting conglomeration of the Birmingham Boys into a slightly more ordered grouping able to enforce the paying of tribute by bookmakers on a much wider scale.81 He was not the kind of man to give up that powerful position and the riches it brought. Once a peaky blinder and a pickpocket, Kimber was now England’s first gangland leader on a national scale, and his determination to resist the challenge of Sabinis was the catalyst for the Racecourse War of 1921.