THE BIRMINGHAM GANG LEAVE THEIR MANOR
THE BIRMINGHAM GANG TAKES LIBERTIES
‘Racing Roughs Held Off by Armed Man’ shouted the Evening News headline on 23 March 1921. Exciting scenes had unfolded at Greenford Trotting Track the previous afternoon when a man was attacked by ‘Twenty Birmingham Racing Pests’. A police inspector had been in the betting ring when he heard shouting and saw Charles Sabini facing a crowd of men. There were cries of ‘Shoot the –!’ Some of the crowd had pieces of wood and others empty beer bottles. There was a shot and smoke arose from above Sabini’s head. In his hand was a revolver. The inspector ran towards him and commanded him to drop the weapon, but the crowd was trying to rush him and Sabini was pointing it from right to left, from left to right, saying, ‘I’ll shoot.’ He then ran backwards and a police sergeant threw his arms around him, securing him. But the crowd rushed on top of them. Men struck at Sabini with bottles and one had a piece of wood about three feet long. He was holding it above his head with both hands, shouting, ‘I’ll murder him!’ There was a struggle to get the weapon from Sabini, but eventually a constable managed it. During the melee, he heard the hammer of the revolver click. Because of the menacing attitude of the crowd, the police took Sabini to the local station, where he told them, ‘I had the revolver given to me to-day when I looked like getting murdered. I don’t know by whom. About twenty of those Birmingham racecourse pests got hold of me. I did not shoot anyone; I did it to frighten them.’ When the revolver was examined, one empty cartridge was found and four live ones. Three had been struck by the hammer, which had misfired.82
Charles Sabini was actually Octavious Sabini, although he was rarely known by these names and was best known as Darby Sabini or Fred Handley and sometimes Ottavio Sabini. The attack on him signalled the start of the Racecourse War of the spring and summer of 1921. It also heralded the surge to power of the Sabini Gang and the end of the Birmingham Gang’s short-lived domination of the racecourse rackets in the south of England. That control had arisen from the ambitions of former peaky blinder, William ‘Billy’ Kimber. Hailing from Birmingham’s Summer Lane neighbourhood, well known for its gangs, he was engaged in ‘peaky blinderism’ throughout his teenage years as a violent petty criminal who assaulted the police and gambled illegally. At just over 5 foot 8 inches, he was sturdy and physically strong. Quickly, he gained a reputation as a fearsome street fighter. But unlike most peaky blinders, he did not stay a backstreet thug. Instead, he and his brothers, Joe and Harry, formed the core of a travelling pickpocketing gang, one amongst many in the Birmingham Boys. Possessed of clear leadership skills, through his thieving Kimber palled up with equally tough men from the capital: the McDonald brothers of the Elephant Boys in South London, and George ‘Brummy’ Sage from North London, who will be discussed in more detail later.
Fully aware of the richer pickings from crime on the racecourses around the capital, Kimber moved there in about 1910, abandoning his Birmingham wife, Maude, to live and die in poverty.83 Swiftly, Kimber and Sage became well known as racing men and habitués of boxing events.84 Before the First World War, as highlighted by the noted referee Moss Deyong, ‘the seamier side of boxing and racing were one and the same thing. The same tough crowd of racketeers and hoodlums that frequented and at one time terrorized race tracks were, for a period, an inseparable part of the boxing scene. When they were not operating at racecourses, they were at the boxing shows.’85
Kimber was a key figure amongst these men, as recognised by the celebrated bookmaker, Thomas Henry Dey. On one occasion at Newbury Races, Dey refused to take a £10 bet from ‘Joe’, one of the ‘Boys’. No payment was offered, and instead Dey was ordered to, ‘Put it down for “Issy” for whom I am working, I will go and get the money and bring it up to you in a minute’. Dey insisted that there was no bet, even after ‘Joe’ returned with the cash. With a flood of expletives, the gangster flung the £10 at the bookie, who let it flutter to the floor. Throughout the race, the gangster stood beside the joint, making himself a nuisance and exclaiming at the top of his voice that he had a bet. As it was, the horse lost and then ‘Joe’ demanded ‘his’ £10 back as it had been no bet. Ignored by Dey, ‘he stormed and ramped and raved, and threatened me with all sorts of penalties, threatening to tear the money out of [his] hand’. After racing, Dey boarded his train, followed by ‘Joe’, who explained in detail what he would do when they reached London. Nothing happened, but worried that he would face vengeance, at the next meeting Dey sought out Billy Kimber, telling him what had occurred. This ‘gentlemen interviewed Joe, and gave him to understand that I was not to be molested’.86
It is likely that Dey had employed Kimber as a minder to protect him from gangs of the ‘Boys’ until racing was mostly ended during the First World War. Kimber joined up but soon deserted and went to Ireland, where racing continued, and he was arrested for pickpocketing in a Dublin railway station on the day of the Leopardstown races. Dey sent his chief clerk to the court, explaining that Kimber was employed to collect large sums of money that was owed. He always acted honourably and ‘racing being quiet in England, some of the people owing debts to Mr Dey had come over to Ireland, and Kimber crossed over from Liverpool to meet those people’. Dey’s clerk added that the bookmaker had ‘full knowledge of the past career of Kimber who had been an honest man for the seven last years’ – which, of course, he had not been. Dey was prepared to keep Kimber employed and give the substantial sum of £50 for bail.87
Kimber’s authority with ruffians like ‘Joe’ and the respect from bookies such as Dey rested on his reputation as a very hard man. Tommy Garnham’s father, John, led a small gang from the Chapel Market locality in Islington and was a close friend of Kimber. Growing up, Tommy heard many stories about Kimber.
He was the boss. And when he come down [to Warren Street] everyone used to lock their doors. Of course he aint going to do nothing but they just kept away. Me Dad always used to say he was coming up once to some race, I don’t know if it was Cheltenham or what race track, or York I can’t remember, and him and the Wizard was on the train going up and it was gambling weren’t it and on the train was a couple of these hard bastards, big fellas. They had a game of cards and they took all their money. They was in the compartment with them. They went up overnight and the blokes said, ‘We want our money back’. The Wizard said you won’t get your money back so they said, ‘We’ll see you at the track’. That’s where they were all going and when they get in there they went straight over to Bill, ‘See them two over there. Took their money off them last night and they want their money back’. ‘Alright’. Bosh, bosh. And they were both carried out, both, yeh. Bill Kimber on his own.
His favourite punch was up the solar plexus. My Dad said he didn’t like a tool and my Dad never used a tool. He [Kimber] weren’t a tool merchant. Punch up the solar plexus. And my Dad’s said three or four, he’s been there, shit themselves. Completely shit themselves. He’s hit them so hard you lose it. Shit yourself. He’s carried a few out the race tracks, my Dad.
Garnham used to say of Kimber, ‘He was a dangerous bastard. Some dangerous man. I’ve seen him being horrible to people. Look he was a dangerous man. When he hurt a person they hurt bad. But he was a respected man. Well respected.’88 Kimber was indeed a most dangerous man and, contradicting the belief that he did not use weapons, he and Sage were tooled up in a callous assault on another racing man in a Whitechapel pub in 1913. Both were arrested for cutting and wounding their victim, who was in a serious condition in hospital suffering from stabs to the neck and face. When arrested, Kimber became violent and on the way to the police station, he dropped a brass harness buckle.89 He and Sage were soon discharged, as the publican’s daughter stated that she could prove the stabbing had been done by the Kidderminster Kid.90 It was an improbable story, and it’s more likely that she had been intimidated into coming up with this account to exonerate Kimber and Sage.
Brian McDonald’s uncles were the leading family in the Elephant Boys and they admired Kimber. In his important and insightful book on the gangs of London, he praised the Brummie as having ‘a reputation for brains and brawn, that desirable combination that produced many a gang boss’. McDonald believed that soon after Kimber’s move to London in 1910, a compromise was reached between race organisers and rogues. In effect, if the ‘Boys’ regulated themselves they would be allowed to operate their enterprises unchecked. Kimber was acknowledged as their leader because of his cunning and strength, and because he had the backup of the strongest gang from Birmingham. Crucially, he also had the support of many London gangsters.91
It is impossible to verify this arrangement as if it had been made there would have been no records. But McDonald’s work is well informed and it’s interesting to note that between 1910 and 1914, there were few reports on racecourse rogues and no outcry about ruffianism on the turf as there had been in 1898. The belief in Kimber’s authority before the First World War is bolstered by Arthur Harding’s unique memories of the East End underworld. He recalled that most of the racing people were from South London, with some from Islington. Billy Kimber was their gaffer, and by 1910 he had control of ‘all the racecourse meetings down south – Newbury, Epsom and all the Park meetings belonging to London – Alexandra Park, Earls Park, Kempton Park’.92
Whatever rackets Kimber and Sage were involved in, they ended soon after the First World War started. With railways crucial to the movement of troops, transportation to racecourses was disrupted, and increasingly it was regarded as unpatriotic to enjoy sport. Attendances tumbled, and in May 1915 all racing was abandoned except at Newmarket, the home of racing. Although a few meetings were sanctioned thereafter, the ‘Boys’ had lost their livings.93 Like Kimber, some joined up, and like him many deserted.94 With the end of the war in 1918, all restrictions were lifted. The public was looking for entertainment and many found it in horse racing. The Flat season began at Lincoln in the following March and there was a massive attendance. Captain Eric Rickman was there and, after making his first bet, he was unable to move away because of the press of the crowd. ‘And there I had to stay for the rest of the afternoon, pushed by the surging multitude a few yards this way and that, and just managing to be carried towards my bookmaker when I wanted to make a bet or draw over the two winners I backed.’95 Attendances boomed everywhere, so much so that this ‘abnormal interest in racing’ was one of the most remarkable features of the immediate post-war period.96
As Rickman observed, racegoers ‘were spending their war-made wealth freely and thousands of demobilized servicemen having received their gratuities in lump sums and not having any immediate employment, began at once to dissipate this money’. Unsurprisingly, the bookmakers had the time of their lives. Many of them were taking so much cash that instead of putting it in their satchels they employed ‘cashiers’. Standing each side of their joints, they held ‘a huge bundle of bank and treasury-notes as much, perhaps, for advertisement as for convenience’. But where so much money was spent so liberally, so too was it a magnet to racecourse pests and, rapidly, ‘welching, pocket-picking, blackmail and even robbery with violence developed to an extent unprecedented in modern England’.97
In the Midlands and the North, the Birmingham Gang reasserted its control over the major rackets on the racecourses–up to the limits of their allies, the Newcastle Boys. Smaller gangs of rogues from other places were allowed to operate as card sharps and the like, probably subject to paying tribute. But there was no doubting the Birmingham Gang’s dominance, as emphasised by Tom Divall, a former chief inspector at Scotland Yard employed to keep order at various racecourses. During the first meeting at Doncaster after the war, he took charge of the ten-shilling ring. An enormous crowd attended and the queues on the main day’s racing almost reached from the course into the town. In the middle of the afternoon, there was what Divall euphemistically called a ‘misunderstanding about a bet’. It was more likely a case of welching.
A lot of men lost their tempers, and high words and ugly threats passed between some miners and bookmakers’ runners. Both the course officials and the police quite lost all control of the mob. I was fearful of an awful scrimmage taking place, when up came Billy Kimber, a host in himself among his fellows, and he soon settled the disturbance between the bookmakers and their discontented backers. What would have occurred if Kimber had not offered his most timely help, I can’t imagine; nor do I like to conjecture, for there were thousands of men about and most of them of the roughest class. Billy afterwards came up to me and calmly told me that what he had done was to save me from any trouble and worry.98
The evidence strongly suggests that Divall had an ‘arrangement’ with Kimber.
In the South things were different. There was no dominant gang and violent thugs from across London and elsewhere swept across the racecourses. In September 1919, newspapers reported on ‘a desperate hand-to-hand encounter’ between three detectives and about fifteen crooks returning from Alexandra Park races. Having smashed several sticks for weapons, the villains kicked and rained heavy blows at the policemen, and one shouted ‘Who has a shooter? Let them have one!’ Eventually, six men were arrested. They were identified as members of a Sheffield gang considered as one of the most dangerous combinations of racecourse sharps in the country.99 But only one actually came from Sheffield; the rest were from London. Three of them were imprisoned for grievous bodily harm.100
In July the next year, the Daily Mail covered ‘disgraceful scenes’ at the Salisbury races. ‘Pests’ had arrived from across the kingdom ‘to plunder, where and whom and how they can’. Some of the largest and worst gangs came from the Midlands and Lancashire, and pickpockets and rowdies infested the open part of the course, which wasn’t enclosed and so was free for spectators to stand. Later in the day, knots of roughs forced chauffeurs of hired cars to take them to the railway station. Those who refused were badly manhandled.101
These shocking events prompted The Times to call for immediate action against ‘rogues of the racecourse’. It thundered that since the war, rowdyism and robbery had been going on to an ever-increasing extent at practically all the race meetings up and down the country. There had never been so many rascals making a living by preying on racegoers, and undoubtedly they were capitalised because they used a new form of transportation – luxurious motor cars. That way, they avoided the London police watching for them on trains; whilst the local police were unable to cope as they didn’t know the ruffians and nor could they spare the resources to supervise racecourses properly. Differing from three-card tricksters and other conmen, these organised gangs maltreated punters and bookmakers alike and openly robbed with violence in the rings, covering each other to allow the workers of the more desperate assaults to escape.102
The police agreed with this assessment. In August 1920, five men were arrested at Hurst Park for obtaining money by threats and picking pockets. Detective Inspector Grosse of Scotland Yard explained that they were members of an organised gang that frequented the outside of racecourses and railways. Each was found guilty and sentenced to various terms of hard labour.103 Brian McDonald has shown that they were members of Alf White’s King’s Cross Boys and Jack ‘Dodger’ Mullins’s Bethnal Green Gang.104 The same month, another gang of racecourse roughs from London was convicted for terrorising bookmakers at Brighton. Emphasising the fluidity of the gangs, two of them would become connected to the Birmingham Gang, but the third, James ‘Jim’ Ford, would become a major figure in the Sabini Gang.105 Brian McDonald believed that the racecourse managements in the London area were concerned that neither they nor the police could counter the widespread gangsterism that had erupted, which was making race-going an alarming prospect. Consequently, once more they turned to Billy Kimber to restore order.106 He did so and this takeover by the Birmingham Gang was noteworthy. Ali Harris, a bookmaker from the East End of London, remembered they ‘come down here because obviously there was money down the South’. Other gangs ‘wouldn’t really leave their own manor. The only time I’ve heard of them leaving their own manor was when the Birmingham Boys come to London . . . because they were probably the strongest.’107 Importantly, Kimber was again supported by the McDonald brothers and the Elephant Boys, and by Brummy Sage. This partnership expelled the other gangs, including a small one led by Joe Sabini.108 Its success was facilitated by a falling out between Alf White’s King’s Cross Gang and the Bethnal Green Mob, who also lost their leader, Dodger Mullins, for unlawful wounding. His imprisonment in June 1920 was a crucial factor contributing to Kimber’s takeover.109
Although later describing himself as a bookmaker from Bordesley, in reality Kimber was nothing of the kind.110 As bookie Sam Dell explained, at each meeting Kimber controlled the most prominent five or six pitches, the ones taking the most money and thus the most profitable. On them he put either his own men or bona fide bookmakers for a return of ‘ten bob in the pound’ – 50 per cent of the winnings.111 A police report divulged another money-making racket: buying up portions of the open areas at racecourses. These were sub-let as pitches to bookmakers ‘at exorbitant prices almost amounting to blackmail’. In addition, a daily toll was levied on practically all the bookmakers on the course, who paid up ‘for the sake of saving their skins’.112 The going rate was between £5 and £20 per day.113
Dell well remembered that to get their pitches, bookmakers had to arrive at a meeting early in the morning to stake a claim and ‘you had to be prepared to bung or be prepared to fight’. But that was not the end of the scams, because ‘to be a successful gangster they had to have money coming in to pay their hirelings see. You had to have plenty of money coming in to keep a team together. Once they couldn’t keep the team together well that was the end of the gang.’114 Kimber did make plenty of money and kept his team together supported by one of the key figures in the Birmingham Gang, Andrew Towey. Also known as Cochrane, Towey was a mysterious figure but was another convicted Midlands thief who moved south to be closer to the busiest racecourses. Dell declared that he was ‘a man of great respect . . . a tremendous gambler. In those days he’d have a monkey (£500) on a horse and he used to sit there on a stool, I can see him now, and they’d come and give him information about the prices and he’d send them away to have a bet. But he was the one they all looked up to in Birmingham, and of course Billy Kimber.’115 Charles Maskey, a well-known racing man from Hoxton in London, once benefitted from Towey’s advice when he and his friend, Dick, were at a night race meeting at Kempton Park:
We’d got about eight bob between us and we’d put it on the one (horse) and that come up and we got about six quid, so Towey says ‘How y’doin’ Dickie boy?’ So he says, ‘Well we’ve had a bit of a double up’. So Towey says, ‘Now back this one’. The big race was the third race so we had odds of 50 to 3½ that one (£3.50 to win £50). Oh fuckin hell (it won). Oh Andrew, lovely boy. Andrew ‘back this one’ Andrew Towey.116
It was Towey who either came up with or developed the idea of selling dots and dashes cards for each race. This was a simple operation whereby each horse on the card was pricked with symbols to alert bookies to its form and its chances in the race. In fact, this ‘service’ told the bookmaker nothing more than he knew already and it was merely a means to obtain money. Jim Cooper was a bookie from 1926 onwards and, as he clarified, there would be ‘a dot here, that would be the favourite, and a cross there, that was a tip’.117 Then there was the selling of tissues with the names of the jockeys on them and the payment for the calling out of the numbers of the horses in a particular race. The runners were declared three days in advance and printed on a race card, but between then and the race itself some horses were pulled out. About half an hour before the ‘off ’, one of the course officials would put up on a board the numbers of the horses that would actually run. These would be marked on a race card by touts or ‘runners’ paid by the gangs, and they would run around the bookies, trying to take in about ten at a time, shouting out the numbers of the horses.118
Bookmakers were also ‘encouraged’ to ‘cough up’ for ‘tools of the trade’: pieces of chalk to mark up the prices of the horses on their blackboards; water from buckets and sponges with which to rub them out; and stools on which to stand. Dell emphasised that ‘it was the Birmingham mob that used to run the stools at Cheltenham and places like that. And they used to have to cart the stools from track to track and they used to have a big van to do it in. And then when they got there, they were collapsible stools, used to have to bang the legs in, and they used to have to set all the stools up.’ Excessive prices could be charged, as if a bookie did not have a stool to stand on to shout to the crowd, he was at a disadvantage. Bookies usually paid 2s 6d for each ‘facility’, and with between 200 and 300 of them at many meetings, this added up to a lot of money.119
There was one other money-making racket and it was entrusted to John Garnham and his small team from Chapel Market. His son, Tommy, was told that his father was ‘a watch-out’ for pickpockets who had not sought Kimber’s permission to work the meeting and who had not paid tribute. One of Garnham’s men was Henry Thorne, who was well in with Kimber and better known as ‘the Wizard’. He would report back on which pickpocketing gangs were around: ‘He was like the Wizard of Oz, he’d go and spy on some gangsters somewhere.’ Then there was Pio, ‘who always had my Dad’s back’, and Scouser, who was ‘a bit of a back-up for my Dad. Any problems he was always there’. If ‘unauthorised’ pickpockets were spotted, John Garnham would go over and look for their boss, ‘the fuckin main man’. He would give him a good hiding in front of the others, in effect saying to them, ‘This is your fuckin boss, look what I’ve done to him.’ With him beaten the rest would go, but if Garnham thought that he couldn’t handle the hard man of the pickpocketing gang, then he would call for Kimber as no one messed with him.120
Given the chaos that had pervaded southern racecourses in 1919 and early 1920, it’s likely that Kimber did bring some order. But the demands of the Birmingham Gang and its allies were resented. Born in 1901, Lou Prince was a racecourse bookie with a Jewish father, and although he regarded Towey as a gentleman and respected Kimber, he was contemptuous of the roughnecks who took liberties.
These Birmingham tearaways come down South and terrorised the bookmakers down here. It was common practice for them to kick the bookmaker’s tools out of their rightful position and institute their own favoured one in that pitch. It had gone on for years, blackmail and what have you, demanding money and monopolising anything that was profitable. 121
Former chief inspector Divall revealed that some of these liberties were taken by ‘three low blackguards, always more or less full of liquor’. These ‘loonies’ visited the cheap ring and ‘terrified and blackmailed a small number of East End bookmakers. If the latter did not shell out, they were cruelly assaulted and badly damaged’.122 The bookies were Jewish, and those who terrorised them were Elephant Boys. They were arrested in April 1921 at Kempton Park, where, with hammers on view in their coats, they had demanded money from bookmakers. One of them was George Moss, the maddest man in South London when he was in drink – hence why he was called Mad Mossy. He was imprisoned for twelve months’ hard labour.123
But it was not the ‘Loonies’ who provoked the racecourse war of 1921. It was an enforcer from the Birmingham Gang with a vicious attack on Alfie Solomon, a Jewish bookie from Covent Garden. Unlike Kimber and most gangsters, Solomon had served loyally throughout the First World War and then followed two of his brothers into racing.124 On 12 March, ten days before the attack on Sabini at Greenford, Solomon was bookmaking at Sandown Park. Boxing referee Deyong saw what happened. Solomon called out odds of 11 to 4 on a horse called Morganatic Marriage. As he was doing so, a mobster passed and shouted, ‘I’ll lay 33 to 12 on!’ – meaning that he wanted a bet of £12 to win £33 if the horse won. Solomon knew the gangster as one who betted ‘on the nod’, collecting if he won and refusing to pay up if he lost, and so he snapped back, ‘No bet!’ But the horse won and, after the race, the mobster came looking for his money. Solomon steadfastly refused to pay, saying that he had not laid the bet. Suddenly the gangster swung his race-glasses, heavy and solid, into Solomon’s face. Falling to the ground, his ‘assailant promptly stepped on his unprotected face’, immediately afterwards slipping away into the crowd. Solomon was picked up, his face a bloody mass and with several teeth missing. In Deyong’s words, ‘from that moment the gang wars between the North and South began in earnest’.125
Another Jewish bookmaker was attacked soon after. Aged fifty-three and from Whitechapel, Philip Jacobs died a few months later. At the inquest, his widow said that he had returned from the Sandown Park meeting with his head bandaged, telling her that he had been struck on the head with a hammer. His injury was explained by Samuel Hirschowitz, who had been with Jacobs and a man called Abraham Joel. Someone named Armstrong had struck Joel and the two began to scuffle. As Hirschowitz tried to separate them, he was also hit by Armstrong, who forced him to the ground and ‘kicked him for all he was worth’. There were plenty of people about, but they were all too afraid to intervene – all that is, bar Jacobs. As he did so, he was hit on the head and then struck with a chopper. Badly injured, he received medical aid from the ambulance men. After all the evidence had been heard, the widow of Jacobs stated clearly, ‘Everybody knows Armstrong. He is a big and desperate man. My husband told me that after he had been assaulted Armstrong said to him, “I am very sorry, Phil. I did not know it was you.”’ 126
The day after the inquest, Thomas Samuel John Armstrong was charged with the wilful murder of Jacobs. He was arrested in Birmingham, telling a detective:
I know I had a fight with two men in the small ring at Sandown Park on that day, and I know I hit one of them and knocked him down. I didn’t hit him with a hammer, because if I had I should have killed him then . . . I had been on the booze all that day, and don’t know what I did. I was at a club all the night before. I got laid out myself at Brighton after the last meeting there, and they nearly did me in. I was knocked unconscious, and in Brighton Hospital for two or three days.127
At the remand hearing, Armstrong was now charged with manslaughter through striking Jacobs and occasioning or hastening his death. Another witness in the various court proceedings was Morris Forman, a bookmaker from Brixton. At first, he said that he not seen anything in Armstrong’s hands in the fight, but he contradicted this later, stating that Armstrong had hit Jacobs on the head with a pair of field glasses. When challenged about changing his evidence, he replied that he had been threatened with his life if he spoke the truth, after which he had asked for police protection. Despite this new evidence, Armstrong denied that he had struck Jacobs and was found not guilty.128 Given Forman’s information about the field glasses, it is most likely that Armstrong was the mobster who had beaten Solomon.
Although stating he was a bookmaker, Armstrong was a habitual criminal. However, unlike others of his age in the Birmingham Gang, there is no indication that he had been a slogger or peaky blinder. Born in 1875 and from Aston, at aged fifteen he was sentenced to four months in prison for breaking into the house of his uncle. He was no longer living with his parents and he had been in trouble before for petty theft and sleeping out. 129 Two years later, he joined the Militia. He was just under 5 foot 6 inches, sallow complexioned, brown haired and blue eyed.130 Armstrong married Alice Fisher in 1895, but by 1911 it appears that he had abandoned her and their three children, as they were living without him in overcrowded conditions with Alice’s mother, her two sisters and brother. In October 1915, Armstrong joined the Royal Garrison Artillery but deserted two years later. A few months afterwards, he was arrested for loitering in Bolton. Thereafter, Armstrong became one of the most alarming men in the Birmingham Gang with a nominal address in Highgate, Birmingham.131
THE SABINIS TAKE UP THE CUDGELS
Alfie Solomon’s youngest brother, Simeon Solomon, had started up as a bookie in 1919 but because of anti-Semitism he betted in the name of Simmy Lewis, as ‘if I’d put up Simmy Solomon I wouldn’t have took a penny’. After his older brother was beaten up by the Birmingham Gang, it became ‘us against them, the North against the South. They came down here. We were not up North. They came down here’.132 The targeting of the Jewish bookies was stressed by Alan Harris, who was bookmaking at Brighton races when ‘some Birmingham people had had a row with some Jewish people and they came along, the Birmingham mob, and cut everybody up, everybody was just running about and they just cut them’.133 But it was the attack on Solomon that provoked a fierce backlash. Dell insisted that the ‘Jews were very game. In the old days, in the poverty-stricken days, every fighter was a Jew. Nearly every champion was a Jew. Why? Because they were poverty-stricken. I could run through them all. Johnny Brown, Kid Lewis, Kiddy Berg, all of them.’134 Fellow bookmaker Prince agreed, indicating that a Jewish team emerged and that ‘they found their power in strength and gameness. They wouldn’t be dictated to.’ This team involved Alfie Solomon, who was transformed into a gangster by his mauling, and the tearaways attached to Edward Emanuel because he was ‘a financial power’ and ‘the guvnor before Darby Sabini’.135
Emanuel was indeed a power, with Arthur Harding saying that he governed the whole Jewish underworld: ‘He was the Jewish Al Capone – everything was grist to his mill – he got in the spieling business and through that with the racing. He used to fix the boxing fights and all.’ Emanuel’s group of terrors included Jackie Burman, a man called ‘Do-Do’, Bobby Nark and Bobby Levy.136 They were from the Jewish East End, as was Ralph L. Finn. He noticed that as they grew up, the local youths who gambled with cards and dice joined the race gangs. They gathered in the forecourt of Aldgate East Station at the corner of Golden Street. The most feared of these was the Aldgate Mob, ‘a razor slashing gang of hoodlums who protected bookmakers – for a fee – and fleeced those who would not be protected. The lucky punter coming away from the races discovered to his cost that winnings were not meant to be won permanently. They were only on loan. The race gang would take his money. Or cut him up. Or both.’137 The Aldgate Mob were also pickpockets, as Dell remembered.
They were led by a face among them called Dychell. Right villain and he was the leader. And they used to operate mostly on bank holidays and high days and holidays and they’d be 20 handed . . . and what they would do, they would lift a guy in the air, someone would take his money. And I’ve seen ‘em come up to your joint and as you see their hands, Bank Holiday Monday, you’d see their hands coming out to give them, you know, their stake (protection money).138
For all that the Aldgate and other Jewish tearaways were ‘terrors’, they were not strong enough to take on the Birmingham Gang. As one of the city’s newspaper admitted, ‘its members were utterly unscrupulous. They visited racecourses in the Midlands and the South, blackmailed bookmakers and any members of the public who were unfortunate enough to fall into their clutches, and generally made themselves so terrifying that the bookmakers in self-defence engaged for their protection a number of men of a similar character from the King’s Cross and Saffron Hill districts.’139 Those men from Saffron Hill were the Sabinis, ‘the Italian push’ as Prince put it, and they were called in by Emanuel as he was ‘pally’ with them. As Divall recognised, the persecution of the East End Jewish bookmakers had become unbearable and ‘the Sabinis took up the cudgels in their defence’.140 A mixed gang quickly emerged, with all the Jewish terrors joining the gang led by Darby Sabini.141 He justified his involvement because the Birmingham Gang of very tough and rough people was ‘blackmailing these Yiddisher people for years’.
The Jews had all these best pitches. To stop in those pitches they had to pay money to these people. If they did not pay money to these people, they could not bet, or they were set upon. They used to charge £10. If you did not give them the £10, you would very likely be knocked down and you would not bet anymore.142
But Sabini’s motives were not as benevolent as he made out, for he saw an opportunity to wrest control of the rackets on the southern racecourses from the Birmingham Gang.
Born in 1888 to an English mother and a father from the villages around Parma in northern Italy, Sabini had been a minder at spielers, illegal gambling clubs for mostly Jewish businessmen. The main operator of these was Emanuel, and it’s likely that it was through this connection that the two men came together.143 Harding mentioned that he first heard of the Sabini Gang about 1910–11, and certainly within a few years it was an established force in Clerkenwell.144 In her major study of London’s criminal underworlds, Heather Shore suggested that like the other London gangs of the 1920s, the Sabini Gang may have had roots not only in the territorial street-fighting gangs that had long been a feature in areas like Clerkenwell, but also in forms of defence against incursions from other local youths. Bound together by a shared background and neighbourhood loyalty, the Sabini Gang was strengthened by personal relationships and blood, for as Shore has discerned, ‘the most enduring “structure” connecting the Sabini Gang was family and kinship’.145 To a large extent, the core of the gang was so connected. It included Darby’s two youngest brothers, Joe and Harry, nicknamed ‘Harryboy’; his childhood friend, Angelo Gianicoli, better known as Georgie Langham; and two of the Cortesi brothers. Yet it also included Jewish toughs led by Alfie Solomon, and those with a solely English heritage like Alf White and Jim Ford.
In his book Gangs of London: 100 Years of Mob Warfare, Brian McDonald includes a rare and important photograph from his family’s collection. Taken in 1919, it shows leading gangsters, ‘when the Brummagems, McDonalds, Cortesis and Sabinis were still friends’. It includes Darby, Harry and Joe Sabini; Harry and George Cortesi; Wal, Jim, Tom, Bert and Wag McDonald; and Billy Kimber. Well dressed in suits and ties, they are sporting a mixture of straw boaters, flat caps and bowlers, and all of them have a flower in their jacket buttonhole. It is apparent they are going off on ‘a jolly’, most probably to a race meeting, and that they are on sociable terms.146 That friendly relationship broke down when Kimber and his pals found out Sabini had been called in by the Jewish bookmakers, and that knowledge led to the attack on him at Greenford on 22 March.
Charged with shooting at persons unknown with a revolver, Sabini disclosed that he’d been employed by George Harris, one of the biggest bookmakers in London. Bail was granted for the large sum of £200 from Sabini himself and a surety of £200. His ability to pay, and the support of Harris, suggests that Sabini also had the backing of big London bookies who had tired of the Birmingham Gang’s extortion.147 In the final hearing of his case, a police officer reported that when Sabini was arrested, he was very agitated and in fear of his life; whilst a police inspector stated that his character had previously been good. The charge of shooting at persons unknown with a revolver was dismissed and he was fined £10 for possessing a gun without a certificate. The magistrates appeared more concerned to prove that the men who had attacked Sabini were not from Greenford and were pleased to learn that they were from Birmingham and belonged to a violent and dangerous gang who would do anything, even shoot to kill. 148 The leniency shown towards Sabini and the favourable police report led Brian McDonald to believe that ‘money changed hands’ – an allegation given support by Arthur Harding’s recollections that Emanuel ‘had the police buttoned up’ and could get criminals out of trouble.149
It is unlikely that Sabini would have turned up at Greenford without support and nor did he. Two men from his gang were arrested for disturbing the peace and loitering with intent to commit a felony. They were Sandy Rice, real name Alex Tomaso, and Fred Gilbert. It was alleged that they had led an attack on the police and incited others to join them. During the disturbance, after Sabini had fired, a policeman saw Rice and Gilbert fighting their way through the crowd. Rice said that he was trying to reach Sabini to help him, but some of the attackers spotted him and shouted, ‘Here is one. I then had help myself and I ran in self-defence.’ Seeing Gilbert, the Birmingham gangsters called out, ‘Here is a pal of one of them.’ They knocked him to the ground and kicked him. He denied attacking the police, maintaining they were his friends that day. Gilbert’s account was corroborated by Harry Joel, a bookmaker: ‘How he escaped being killed I don’t know. Both of us were attacked by the mob.’ Gilbert and Rice were discharged.150
Three days after the fracas at Greenford, Robert Charles Harvey and ‘a number of other racecourse frequenters’ were beaten with a baton at London Bridge Station. The Railway Police intervened and the attackers boarded the train to Plumpton races. Harvey was taken to hospital with scalp wounds and body bruises. He told the police that he had no idea as to who had assaulted him, and if he had known he would not prosecute. This was to become a common refrain. However, the police believed that Harvey had welched at the Greenford Trotting meeting and was associated with the Birmingham Gang. 151 With the violence escalating, the gangs approached each other to try to settle their differences. Accompanied by the McDonalds and Sage, on 27 March Kimber went to Sabini’s house. 152 The meeting was dramatised in Britain’s Godfather, Edward T. Hart’s biography of Sabini, which, ignoring his Englishness, imaginatively depicted him as a Mafia-style godfather.
Darby welcomed Billy Kimber politely to his home, but without any display of warmth. He seated him at a table laid in the Italian tradition . . . a freshly baked loaf, great chunks of cheese and a carafe of anisette, a liquorice-flavoured wine. As a concession to Kimber’s essential Englishness, there were also six bottles of beer.153
Heather Shore has described Hart’s book as ‘the pulp fiction account of Darby Sabini’s life’, and his representation of the meeting with Kimber does read as sensationalised and swayed by images of American gangsters.154 According to Hart, the meeting turned sour over the terms of a truce and Kimber went for the gun hidden in his powder-blue suit. But Sabini was swifter and pulled out his own big, flat gun and shot Kimber, whose ‘own hand hadn’t even reached his gun butt’. The force of the bullet drove Kimber backwards, toppling the chair and sending him sliding to the floor. He groaned and lay still, but as if Sabini were a gunslinger, Hart claimed that ‘even during the reflex action of firing Darby had been careful to aim for a non-lethal part of the human body, the thigh’. Hart was not at the meeting and had never met either Sabini or Kimber, and he wrote that this incident occurred at Sabini’s home in Little Italy in Clerkenwell and after the Epsom Road Ambush.155 Neither statement is correct. The two gangsters met before that event and after Sabini had been saved by the police at Greenford, and by then he was no longer living in Little Italy but in Collier Street, King’s Cross. And whilst Kimber was shot it was not by Sabini.
In his reminiscences, ex-Detective Chief Superintendent Greeno was also prone to colourful language.
Sid F–, second-in-command of the Birmingham boys, went to Darby’s £2 6s 6d-a week three-roomed flat at King’s Cross to ‘shake hands and make up’. That’s what he said. Darby wasn’t home but his wife, having been round to the Prince of Wales for two dozen Guinness, was throwing a party. Sid arrived at midnight and at 2 a.m. he was found lying in the street with a bullet in his right side and a cut over the eye. ‘Who did it? I never come copper on anyone and I ain’t starting now.156
Sid F– was Kimber, not the second-in-command but the overall chief of the Birmingham Gang.157 In court, he recounted that late on the evening of 27 March, he had gone with Darby Sabini to his house in Collier Street, where others arrived. There was plenty of drink and Alfie Solomon was among the company. They had a few songs and the party broke up about 2am. When Kimber was leaving, someone hit him on the eye, others assaulted him, and ‘I was shot by a third party, but all I saw was a shadow’.158 The only witness to give evidence remembered the events differently. This witness stated that Solomon arrived later and was spotted by Kimber and his pals when they moved into the passageway. One of them then turned round, demanding, ‘What do you want, you Jew!’159 Shots were fired and Kimber was later found unconscious on the pavement. He had suffered a wound in the side and was rushed to hospital.160
Handing himself in to the police, Solomon was charged with unlawful wounding. He accepted that he had shot Kimber, but insisted that it was an accident after the head of the ‘Birmingham gang of terrors’ had shouted, ‘What are you doing here, you Jew? Get out or I’ll shoot you.’ He knocked a revolver out of Kimber’s hand, and in the struggle, the weapon went off. Frightened, Solomon ran away. Throughout the court hearings, Kimber continued to maintain that he did not know who had shot him, declaring that if Solomon ‘said that he shot me then he is a coward. Only cowards carry revolvers. I would rather blow out my brains than use one on anyone.’161 With Kimber refusing to say anything and acting as a hostile witness, the judge at the trial at the Old Bailey directed the jury to return a verdict of not guilty.162
Although he had appeared at Solomon’s trial, Kimber was out of action over the next couple of months whilst he recovered from his wound. Given his hatred of Jews, especially of Solomon, and of the necessity of striking back to show that he was still a force to be reckoned with, it is likely that Kimber brooded over taking revenge. Tommy Garnham heard a larger-than-life story of how he supposedly did so.
When Bill (Kimber) got shot they surrounded the hospital, the gangsters, you know. Dad was down there. They surrounded the hospital. The police was outside, you know. In case they wanted to come and get him again, do him in the hospital. So he got out, they asked him questions and he didn’t want to know about who done it.
Then he got a bit better, down here in Grant Street (Islington) he got dressed up in a right load of old clothes, like a tramp, this is the story how my Dad told me. He went down Clerkenwell looking in bins and he see him (Solomon) come out – it weren’t the ‘Griffin’– it was a place somewhere round the back. He knew where they was. And he’d been waiting a week just to get him on his own. And he got him and he said ‘all I want to do is put him in a wheelchair. I don’t want to kill him but I want to do him because the c**t shot me in the back’. And he done it Kimber. Battered him badly. Really badly. And I said ‘why didn’t he kill him, Dad?’ and he said he didn’t want to kill him he wanted him like a cabbage. He’d remember what shooting him in the back was like.163
There is no evidence that Kimber did avenge himself on Solomon in this way, but the creation of the story itself reinforces Kimber’s position as ‘the head of a gang of desperadoes’, a position which clearly inspired a fervent loyalty as much as dread. And he would go on to brutally assault Solomon in the future.164
Days after the shooting of Kimber, the police received a tip-off, as Greeno put it, that ‘the Sabini Gang and the Brummies planned a showdown at Alexandra Park on 4 April. Police swarmed all over the track and at every railway station en route, but at one o’clock a gang surrounded a couple of bookmakers’ touts from Birmingham and felled them with bottles. Then they “put the boot in”.’165 The Sabini Gang was cleared from the silver ring but the Birmingham Gang and their allies were also there in big numbers. Deyong evoked the taut atmosphere: ‘shots were fired that day, iron-bars and lead-sticks crashed on defenceless and often innocent heads, and the knuckledusters and razors ripped and slashed to deadly purpose’.166 Lou Prince was bookmaking when the violence erupted.
Things moved on rapidly and Alexandra Park could have been a right to-do. The Birmingham Mob marched through Tattersall’s in Indian file about 20 strong and a couple of them carrying shooters. They marched right through Tattersall’s looking for any member of the opposition but found none and then went onto the small ring. I will never forget those scenes for when the search started the ring was packed and as it moved on everyone dived out of the way and believe me, three quarters of the attendance did just that and likewise it was the same in the cheaper ring.167
One of the Birmingham Mob carrying a shooter was Anthony ‘Curly’ Martin. Aged forty-two, he was charged with attempting to murder a Londoner called James Best, one of two taxi-drivers who had driven the Sabini Gang to the meeting and were attacked as a result.168 A police witness described the scene: ‘I saw a number of men chasing another man and I saw the man hit on the head from behind and knocked down. While he lay on the ground I saw the prisoner (Martin) take out a revolver and point it at the man the ground. He then fired and ran away.’169 This account, however, cannot be wholly trusted, as whilst a revolver was found after Martin’s arrest, it was rusty and had not been used recently, therefore if Best had been fired at, the shot had missed for he had been taken to hospital with two wounds caused instead by a blunt instrument. In court, he said that he did not know who had hit him and nor did he know Martin, whose good character was affirmed by two bookmakers and the police in Birmingham.170 They disclosed that he was a professional backer of horses and did not know the Birmingham Gang.171
Yet Martin lived in Bridge Street West, close to where Kimber had grown up and where his parents still lived. Given that, and that he was also a racing man, it is most unlikely that Martin did not know members of the Birmingham Gang. Described as thick-set and clean-shaven, his son, Joe, remembered him ‘as always a smart feller’. He recalls that ‘he always had a bowler hat, y’know, he always got the brush and put it over the steam of the kettle and steamed it and pull his hat on. And the old lady always looked after him, polished his boots.’172 Like the Sabinis, Anthony Martin was the son of a mixed marriage, with his mother an Englishwoman and his father an Italian from Genoa.173 He recorded himself as a fish hawker in 1911, but as his son recalled, ‘My Dad wasn’t a bookie, he was what you called a minder, really.’ He did have a revolver, although, ‘You could bet your life it wasn’t loaded, I’m positive of that y’know, really. If he had, it would have been a flash, really, a frightener.’
Martin was a freelance minder, although often he protected one particular bookmaker, and he used to mix with other racing men at Howard’s pub by Birmingham’s Snow Hill Station. Like them, he was rarely at home and his wife had to bring up their family with his uncertain and irregular income: ‘She had a struggle, I can tell you that. Her had a struggle ‘cus her had nothing coming in but somehow my mother went on and her had a big family . . . It wasn’t a regular wage but somehow or other he must have earnt something.’ Martin died in 1938 aged fifty-eight. His son Joe, born in 1914, went on to become a bookie as did his older brother, Alfie.174
Following the affray at Alexandra Park, on 20 April, an undercurrent of violence between the gangs threatened to burst out into full-scale warfare in London. There was a fight between two groups outside Mornington Crescent tube station, close to where Brummy Sage lived. They were thought to have belonged to racing gangs, one from Birmingham and the other from the neighbourhood of King’s Cross – which is where Darby Sabini lived. A shot was fired and several men tried to get away in a taxicab when the police intervened. One of the officers jumped onto the footboard of the cab and directed the driver to a police station. Three men were arrested, with one of them having a bludgeon made out of the case of a German grenade tied to short stick. Two of them were discharged, including Jim Ford, who was now a main tough in the Sabini Gang. The third was merely fined 20 shillings.175 Later that month the Birmingham Police were informed that someone had been offered a job to bomb a nightclub owned by one of the Sabini Gang.176 According to the city’s chief constable, ‘a number of race course frequenters were going to London for the purpose of carrying out some raid, and that they were going to obtain Mills Bombs from Uxbridge’.177 The bombing did not happen, but Edward Banks was named as the leading participant in the plot. A few weeks afterwards, he took a similar role in the Epsom Road Ambush – an event that would soon become known as the Epsom Road Battle.