GANGSTER REALITY & MYTHOLOGY
THE MYTHS DISPELLED
‘I’m the Gangster Who Runs London’s Underworld’ splashed the People on its front page on 5 September 1954. The main story, it featured a photo of Billy Hill, England’s first ‘celebrity’ gangster. Previously unknown to the public, crime reporter Duncan Webb exclaimed that Hill was ‘in fact the Al Capone of this country – the most successful and desperate gangster in the history of British crime’. By wielding the knife and the cosh better than his rivals, he had smashed all the other gangs in London, welding them into one big fraternity with him at the top. The cleverest safe breaker ever known by Scotland Yard and the mastermind behind most of the big robberies in recent years, now he was sunning himself in Cannes on the French Riviera. Fingering a six-carat diamond ring, he announced that he was retiring from his position as ‘Gangster No. 1’ and was ready to tell his story.
His ‘confessions’ revealed a London underworld ‘every bit as organised and determined as Dillinger and Capone ran’. Serialised for four weeks in a newspaper that sold 4.5 million copies weekly, Hill told of how, in 1947, he grabbed power in ‘One Night of Terror’ from the Black Gang. This was actually the White Gang, led by one of the sons of Alf White. A key figure in Darby Sabini’s inner circle, White had eventually become the leader of the gang after Sabini’s move away from London and active involvement in its gangland. Hill ignored this reality, transforming Sabini into a legendary figure.
Don’t think, though, that I invented the gangster set up in London. That was the creation of the notorious Darby Sabini. He started it in the late 1920s when he brought a gang of Italian cut-throats out of Saffron Hill and Clerkenwell and took over the West End. Sabini was the big shot of the underworld when I came out of Borstal in 1931, and he stayed on top for years. Soho was as tough as Chicago in those days. It was a lawless jungle of concentrated crime and vice in which you could drink and gamble round the clock if you knew the right spots.
Slot machines . . . gambling . . . booze and girls – that was the combination which made Al Capone rich. And Darby squatting like a fat spider the middle of the same gilded web in London couldn’t go wrong either. With the income from his racecourse and dog-track rackets his personal cut was hundreds of pounds a week. That kind of dough spells trouble and there were terrible gang fights almost every night as ambitious rivals tried to muscle in on Darby’s pitch.
But the Sabini’s Boys always came out on top, and the tough and ruthless Darby ruled the roost right up until the outbreak of the Second World War. Then, almost overnight, his power was broken. Sabini and dozens of his mob were interned overnight . . . The Sabini Gang was bust, and at once its biggest rivals took overtook over . . . This mob was led by a man I’ll call Bill Black.709
Striving to liken himself to a Mafia boss, Hill was keen to be seen as the successor to the ‘Italian’ Darby Sabini. But this intense portrayal of Sabini’s power bore little connection to actuality. The Whites (Blacks in Hill’s account) were not the Sabini Gang’s rivals, having emerged from the gang. And the Sabinis had been at their most powerful in the early and not later 1920s. Sabini and his brother, Harry, were interned in the war on the ground of hostile origin – but were not joined by their brothers or dozens of their mob. And there is no evidence connecting Sabini with Soho following his move to Brighton and Hove in 1926. Officers of the local CID came to know him well, reporting that outside racing he did not appear to have any other interests and that no longer could he be described as a dangerous gangster and racketeer of the worst type. When in drink he was apt to turn violent, but such instances were very rare and a detective inspector observed that ‘such conduct can be obviated by the use of tact and firmness’.710
Ignoring such realities, the ‘Sabini myth’ spread. In 1957, the New York Times included a ‘highly coloured article’ about how contemporary Brighton was ‘a far cry from the days of the Sabini gang two decades ago’. These protection racketeers had ‘terrorised the town with razor slashings and worse from the race track on the chalk downs above Black Rock to the sea front’, but their violence had finally ended when they were driven out by the police.711 Yet the Sabini Gang had not terrorised the town and Darby Sabini was not driven out, living there until he died in 1950. Eight years later, following a murder in Clerkenwell, blood was said have flowed again in Little Italy for the first time since 1925 when the Sabini Gang had been fighting to control the racecourses. One resident told the Daily Mirror’s crime correspondent of remembering when the Birmingham Gang came down and fought the Sabinis, ‘And the streets were covered in blood. They had razors, knives, and shooters.’712 Even at their height, the Birmingham Gang had never confronted the Sabinis in Little Italy, where there had been no major gang violence other than the shooting by local rivals, the Cortesis.
A vital part of Billy Hill’s inflation of Sabini’s power was the comparison with Al Capone and Chicago, and even in death, Sabini’s ‘foreign origins’ overwhelmed his Englishness. In 1963, crime writer Norman Lucas wrote that Sabini ‘reputedly was a member of the notorious Mafia’.713 He was not. Nor was he the ‘leader of a Sicilian “razor” gang’ who had imported over 300 henchmen from Sicily as enforcers, as some accounts have stated.714 But the Mafia connection became accepted. In June 1971, Joe Colombo, ‘America’s most notorious Mafia chief ’, was shot at a rally and within yards of him was Englishman George Sewell. No ordinary bystander, as one newspaper recounted, he had been the lieutenant and bodyguard of Italian gang leader Darby Sabini in the 1920s and 30s, when the Sabini Gang ruled the British underworld. After the Second World War, many of the Sabinis had moved to New York and were adopted into the Mafia family of Joseph Profaci, but Sewell, ‘forsaking his violent ways, had remained in London to become a reformed and highly respected citizen’. On this occasion, he had been on a brief holiday ‘to meet old comrades-in-arms’.715
This, again, is untrue – none of the Sabini brothers or their inner circle went to New York and joined the Mafia. And George Sewell had not been a lieutenant in the Sabini Gang. As Brian McDonald expressed it, ‘Sewell, who some called an enforcer, was more enforced upon than not.’716 A boxer out of Hoxton, an enemy territory to the Sabinis, he joined the Bethnal Green Mob of Dodger Mullins, and Harding revealed that Sewell was knocked about by the Sabini Gang at Brighton races in 1920.717 There is no mention of Sewell in the racecourse wars of 1921 and 1922, but in 1930 he and another man were attacked by a gang including Johnny and Toddy Phillips. Formerly of the Titanics and the Camden Town Gang, they had become allies of Mullins. Johnny Phillips went up to Sewell in a Soho pub and said, ‘So you are with the Italians now? Why can’t you be with Dodger?’ Phillips then struck Sewell with a broken glass, resulting ‘in serious injuries which would disfigure him for life’. In the ensuing court case, reference was made to the Sabini Gang and the judge remarked that he thought it had been broken up. The police informed him that there were still some rival gangs in London and that the old Sabini Gang was now known as the Italian Gang.718 That name change itself emphasised that the Darby Sabini was no longer involved in what had been his gang. And in 1931, the year in which Billy Hill proclaimed that Darby Sabini was ‘the big shot of the underworld’ running Soho, the district was described as the home of ‘the survivors of the old Sabini gang’.719
Despite his lack of involvement with the Sabinis in their heyday, Sewell was prominent in the biography of Darby Sabini by Edward T. Hart. A crime correspondent in Fleet Street in the 1950s and ’60s, his information was gleaned from a variety of sources such as club-owners, doormen, boxers, jockeys, bookmakers, robbers and racketeers. There is no evidence of any of the interviews with these men, whilst Hart wrote in the style of a gangster novel. He included long conversations and musings from Sabini, who had been dead for many years before the book was published and whom Hart had never met, and he drew heavily on tropes of Italian immigrants rather than Sabini’s Englishness. Hart stressed that his big breakthrough in researching Sabini’s life came when he first met Sewell, ‘Darby’s lieutenant and right-hand man’. Known as ‘the Cobblestone Fighter’, he was the most feared of Sabini’s warriors. Yet there is no evidence to suggest this was true, or that he was in Sabini’s inner circle like Harry Sabini, Joe Sabini, Alf White, George Langham, Alfie Solomon and Jim Ford. Moreover, Sewell was not included as one of the British subjects associated with Italian gangsters compiled in 1940 by the Metropolitan Police.
The seeds of Hart’s biography had been sown, though, not with Sewell but in a conversation with Jack Capstick, Scotland Yard’s legendary commander known as ‘Charlie Artful’. In the summer of 1956 he told Hart that ‘compared to Darby Sabini, all the other British gang leaders down the years have been merely messenger boys’. He had it all: charisma, strength and intelligence. Though he could barely read or write, ‘he possessed a tactical genius such as few army commanders will ever know’. Setting up to protect his people in Little Italy, he created a criminal empire ‘the like of which Britain had never seen before . . . or will most likely see again’.720 Capstick has rightfully been acclaimed as one of Scotland Yard’s greatest detectives by writer Dick Kirby, a noted detective and an expert on the history of the Flying Squad. However, Capstick did not join the Metropolitan Police until 1925, becoming a detective three years later and joining the Flying Squad in the summer of 1929.721 This was three years after Darby Sabini had left London for Brighton, meaning that Capstick’s first-hand knowledge of Sabini must have been limited.
THE FINAL CHAPTER
Sabini’s later life was nowhere near as startling as the Sabini Myth. After arriving in Brighton in 1926, he soon made his family home in Old Shoreham Road, Hove, a three-storey terraced house now divided into flats.722 He did not remain for many years in a hovel in Little Italy with a holiday home in Brighton’s Grand Hotel, as Hart claimed.723 Although seeking to make his family respectable, Sabini’s transition from gangster was unsure, and in 1928 he was discharged from assaulting three men in Brighton after two of them declined to say that he was the culprit.724 A year later, after a dispute at Hove greyhound racing stadium, he was named as Darby Sabini when he twice assaulted a bookie, knocking him unconscious the second time. As usual there was a lack of witnesses, because, as the victim complained, ‘It is impossible to try to get them. How can I get witnesses against a man like this, when everyone goes in fear of their life of him.’ Sabini was fined only £5.725 Then in 1931, and now in the name of Fred Handley, he and his old gang member, James Ford, were each sentenced to a month’s hard labour for drunkenness. Returning from racing in a hired car, they had punched the driver and caused trouble in the police station after they were arrested. On appeal, the sentence was reduced to a 40-shilling fine.726 This was Sabini’s last conviction before the Second World War.
By the late 1930s, Sabini was bookmaking at Hove dog track under the name of Dan Cope, working on commission with Emanuel’s firm, the Portsea Press, and selling racings lists for the Bookmakers’ Association – although he did not travel outside his patch in the South East. He also controlled services to the bookies. ‘Mad’ Frank Fraser became one of post-war Britain’s legendary villains and, in his memoirs, he recalled that for three years from when he was about nine in 1932, he was a bucket boy for Darby, or ‘Darbo’ as called by his real friends. Fraser’s task was to go round with a bucket of water and sponge so that bookies could wipe off the chalked-up odds of the horses after each race. They would pay Sabini and, depending on how things had gone, the youngster would receive 2s 6d or 7s 6d a day.
‘Darbo’ would tap me on the head and say, ‘Take that home to your Mum’, and I’d say, ‘Thank you, Darbo’. He took a chuckle from it because he knew I was copying what I had heard; saucy little kid, but with the right style. ‘Darbo’ didn’t have a menacing sort of style, just a nice man, but he didn’t look a mug either. To me, even then, I could tell he was something special.727
Sabini had other sources of income. In the South East, he sold the pitches on the outside (unenclosed) parts of meetings like Epsom, which were not covered by the bookmakers’ pitch committees and where the public gathered for free. He and his lifelong friend George Langham did the same at point-to-points – meetings where amateur riders raced hunting horses over the land of farmers. Unsupervised by the inspectors of the Jockey Club and National Hunt, they still gave opportunities for the blackmailing of bookies by small gangs of thugs. These were kept away by Sabini and Langham, who ensured that everything was ‘all kept under control and that there was no fracas or trouble’.
Formerly a feared fair fighter and right-hand man to Sabini in their gang days, Langham had also moved into legitimacy. His son, Dave, became a respected bookmaker and he emphasised that by the time he and his siblings hit their teens in the 1930s, all the fighting had died out and, ‘As far as I was concerned the Old Man was always a gentleman. He always dressed well. My Dad always had his own house. As a kid I always did very, very well. We were always looked after. I had plenty of food and he tried to see that we had a first-class education. We wasn’t allowed to swear indoors at all.’ Dave Langham revealed that his father also made money from controlling the runners who called the numbers of the horses on the racecourses around London. At these meetings and at White City and Haringey dog tracks, he shared the selling of the dots and dashes cards with Sabini. In the late 1930s, this led to problems with Harry Sabini.
My Old Man never used a tool. He always used his fists, except for one time. The Old Man had a row with Harryboy. But it was over the dots and dashes. They wanted them from the Old Man and they wanted to get him out and he said no. They were shooting at each other with guns. They came with numbers so he had to [use a gun] because they were all fitted up. I think they expected it ‘cus they knew it weren’t going to be a give in. He was frightened of no-one, whichever way you wanted it he’d uses his fists except that one occasion. I know the Old Man got a cab and they shot at him. So it finished up, ‘cus the Old Man at the time was getting old, it finished up he was on a pension, so there was wages every week. I can remember that ‘cus I used to go to their house [Harry Sabini’s] every Sunday to get the money. It was in an envelope.
This fall out with Harryboy did not spoil Langham’s friendship with Darby Sabini and ‘the Old Man used to go religiously every Sunday down to Brighton to visit him till he died. That’s how thick they were.’728
Sabini’s more peaceful life in Brighton and Hove was a stark contrast to his life in London, and in 1940 the local police stressed that over the previous twelve years he had caused them very little trouble. In fact, the well-informed CID confidently stated that ‘the Sabini gang could rightly be said to be non-existent’.729 Yet, in July that year, Darby Sabini was arrested and interned at Ascot Prisoner of War Camp. MI5 had suggested that if Italy were to join the Second World War then ‘Italian consuls and leaders of the Fascio will employ Italians of the gangsters or racketeer type for certain acts of violence’. In response, the CID in London compiled a list of such men, including British subjects of Italian origin. Sabini was one of them. Reported as having Italian sympathies and as a ‘violent and dangerous criminal of the gangster type’, he was thought liable to lead internal insurrections. His internment was strongly supported by the London Police, though its officers had not had dealings with him for several years. The Assistant Commissioner even admitted that there had never been any intimation that Sabini was politically minded. The only justification for his detention was that he was a thorough rascal and an expert in racecourse gang terrorism who had never done an honest day’s work. Nevertheless, it was asserted that if anybody wanted to employ persons prepared to engineer acts of violence he could not make a better choice than Sabini – and the same went for his brother, Harry.
For all Sabini’s previous criminality, this was preposterous. In appealing against his detention, he stressed that he was as fit as a fiddle and would ‘protect my country and our home any time. I will have a go.’ England was the only country for him and he had collected enormous sums of money for various hospitals. The Advisory Committee to the Home Office on Italian internees itself acknowledged that there had never been a very strong case against Sabini, other than that ‘he was a low type person of Italian origin and an unscrupulous ‘tough’ who might do anything for money’. Consequently, he was released in 1941.730 Afterwards, and perhaps because he had lost all his sources of income, he was tempted back into crime, and in June 1943 he and another man were sentenced to two years’ hard labour for receiving stolen goods valued at £383.731 It was not the kind of sum that might have been associated with a major gangster.
Soon after he was imprisoned, on 16 August, his only son, Flight Sergeant Harry Sabini, died of his wounds from a flying accident whilst serving with the RAF in Egypt. The loss of his son, of whom he was so proud, must have been a devastating blow. Later described as a dealer, Darby Sabini also continued bookmaking in and around Brighton. He died in 1950 after a debilitating illness, penniless according to some, whilst a story went around that his clerk was stopped leaving the country with £30,000.732 There is no evidence of this though, and although Sabini left no will, he was not penniless. His wife survived him, living in the house in Hove that had been bought in her name until she died in 1978, leaving £16,730.733
Joe Sabini had moved away from gangsterism alongside his older brother. After his release from prison in 1925, he carried on as a racing man, but as the police made clear, there was no indication that he rejoined the Sabini Gang even behind the scenes. He became a bookmaker at Haringey Greyhound Stadium, under the name of Harry Lake, and in 1939, was recorded a professional gambler. Like Darby, he married an Englishwoman, and by the outbreak of the Second World War, they were living in a large, three-bedroomed terraced house with a good-sized back garden in The Drive, Wood Green. They were still there when Joe Sabini died in 1969, leaving £6,000. His wife died five years later and left £14,500.734 Joe Sabini’s bookmaking and betting obviously paid, as these were large sums of money.
The youngest Sabini brother, Harry, made much more – both legally and illegally. By 1931, he and his English wife from Hoxton, the bastion of the Titanics, were living in Hamilton Park West.735 Tinged with jealously, Inspector Greeno wrote that it was ‘palatially decorated’, and it was a most impressive detached Georgian house in Highbury, now worth between £2 and £3 million.736 Nine years later, the house was paid for and Sabini owned other freehold property worth £12,000 and had savings of £1,500 in War Bonds. A further £3,600 was invested for his three children, and £3,000 was in his wife’s name. He was a very wealthy man, much more so than his brother Darby who had no investments and a house mortgaged in his wife’s name. There is some evidence to suggest that Harry Sabini made some of his money criminally, in particular from extorting protection money from nightclub owners. In 1935, four of his associates caused trouble in the Majestic Social Club. They smashed up windows and furnishings, and panic-stricken members ‘flew for their lives’. As they did so, Thomas Mack, one of the original members of the Sabini Gang, shouted at the club owner, ‘You ruined Harry Boy and we are going to ruin you. We warned you a few months ago. As you haven’t carried out our warning we have come to enforce it.’737 There were also suggestions that Harry Sabini was implicated in the theft of £21,000 of bullion from the Croydon airport strong room in 1935.738
Whatever his involvement or otherwise, he also earned substantial sums legally. From 1921 until 1932, he was employed by the bookmakers Beresford and Smith, afterwards becoming a professional backer of horses and a commission agent putting on bets for others. Walter Beresford died in 1931, and in all probability some of his customers were picked up by Sabini as he soon operated on a big scale, with upper-class customers like Lord Thomas Grave and thousands of pounds going through his accounts.
Harry Sabini was also arrested and interned in 1940, although it quickly became obvious that he had no trace of hostile intentions and that there were no grounds for his detention. In spite of this, he was swiftly charged with perjury, as in his appeal against his detention he’d denied that he’d been known as Harry Handley. Flimsy evidence was found to refute this, and in July 1941 he was sentenced to nine months’ imprisonment.739 When racing resumed at the end of the war, Harry Sabini started up again as a commission agent, putting on bets for other people. On one occasion, he was driven to Newmarket by Bert ‘Battles’ Rossi, for whom it was a special day.
On the way, he takes out these yellow telegrams, opens them up and starts making notes. You learn as you go along. Now, he was a commission agent and had the trust of the trainers to get their bets down. And of course he gets paid, and he also knows for himself what horse is trying and which isn’t.
When we get there and I’ve got parked Harryboy goes into the Members [enclosure] and talks to one or two people about the horses. This impressed me no end.
One of those he spoke with was either the Earl of Roseberry or Lord Derby, who passed on the information to bet on a certain horse owned by the King because it was trying. Rossi backed it and it won: ‘I thought it was marvellous; a different world from a slum in Clerkenwell’. After that, he often took Harryboy and Joe Sabini racing.740 In 1978, and a few months before Darby’s widow, Harry Sabini died. He was still living in Hamilton Park and he left £31,000.741
The list of gangster-type criminals compiled in 1940 for MI5 included British subjects who were associated with Italian gangsters. Amongst them was Jim Ford, one of the inner circle of the Sabini Gang, who was now living in Brighton. Imprisoned in 1929 after assaulting a bookmaker, he was fined two years later for assault, but since then had seemingly followed Darby Sabini and Georgie Langham away from gangsterism.742 Edward Emanuel, alias Edward Smith, was also listed, in his case as the ‘financier of the Sabini gang and other bullies’. As with Ford and Darby Sabini, the evidence for his inclusion was outdated. Emanuel had financed the Sabinis in the early 1920s, but for over a decade he had been a respectable and wealthy businessman. By 1930, he, his wife and their two daughters were living in a large house in Finchley Road, Golders Green – a district that was attracting middle-class Jewish families. He died in 1943, followed by his wife seven years later. She left £22,656.743
The leaders of the Birmingham Gang were nowhere near as successful as some of the Sabinis. Andrew Towey carried on selling his dots and dashes cards in the Midlands and the North until the 1940s but there is no trace of a will; and Cunny Cunnington continued to live in a jerry-built back-to-back in Ladywood.744 As for Ike Kimberley, a quick-walking man fond of drink and the company of prostitutes, it was too late for him to be anything other than an incorrigible rogue, as he was branded in 1929 when imprisoned for loitering. Purportedly a tic-tac on dog tracks, he was living in Paddington in London. Five years later, he was even arrested trying to pick pockets at an unruly fascist meeting in Brighton. After his release, he was imprisoned twice in 1935, and within days of the outbreak of war, he was sentenced to three months’ hard labour for loitering. Now ostensibly a painter, he was living in Notting Hill.745 Kimberley’s older brother, Mo, remained in Birmingham. In 1926, he was condemned as ‘a parasite on society’ when imprisoned for theft in Hereford. Within weeks of his release, he was convicted in Liverpool and went on to be arrested for frequenting at Uttoxeter races in 1932, when he said he was a bookmaker’s clerk.746 Nothing more is known of either Ike or Mo Kimberley.
The charabanc trip for the Epsom Road Battle had been organised by Edward ‘Ted’ Banks. He was a persistent criminal, but on a bigger scale to the Kimberleys. He was named as an organiser of crime and a former financer of criminals when he was finally brought to book in 1934 for a well-planned scheme to receive a large delivery of stolen bacon at his shop in Digbeth. Sentenced to four months’ hard labour, as he descended the steps of the dock, women shouted ‘Good-Bye, Ted. Good luck’.747 After his release, he returned to his real name of Edward Pankhurst and, in 1939, he, his wife and two sons were living on Belgrave Road, Balsall Heath. Recorded as a master grocer, his home fronted the street, which was higher status than a back house up a yard. He died in 1950.748
Billy Kimber was the only one of the Birmingham Gang for whom crime paid. It paid for his transformation from backstreet pickpocket to a respectable bookmaker living in a fine house on the English Riviera. That remarkable change did not benefit his first wife, Maude, and their two daughters, Maude and Annie, whom he abandoned when they were eight and six. His great-granddaughter, Juliet Banyard, believed that he must have stayed in touch with Annie as she was his favourite, ‘but he was not much bothered with Maudie and she didn’t care for him either. Maudie used to say, “You owed our dad money, you paid with your life”.’749 They were chilling but prophetic words. By 1921, Kimber was making big sums from his criminality, but Maude and her daughters were struggling to get by in a back-to-back in Hockley.750 Battling against poverty must have worn her out, and in 1926 she died aged just forty-three. Maude was buried in a pauper’s grave.751 A communal burial place with nothing above it to mark the lives of those within, it was the ultimate indignity for a poor person.
Kimber knew that she had died, for he stated he was a widower when, within days, he married Eliza Garnham, a sister of his friend and ally, John Garnham of the Chapel Market Gang.752 Following the truce with the Sabinis, Andrew Towey returned to operating his ‘services’ within the Midlands and North but Kimber remained in London, though more inconspicuously than in the past. He took no part in Sage’s Camden Town Gang and from at least 1923 he was living in Warren Street, Islington in the Garnham family home.753 From that base, Kimber worked point-to-point meetings. With little supervision, they gave racing rogues plenty of scope, and in March 1925, he was at one in North Devon. A welching bookie was surrounded by a hostile crowd, but as he was about to be taken away by a policeman, another bookmaker called Kimber said, ‘I will offer a hundred pounds to a shilling that he is not the man.’ Immediately the welcher was surrounded by bookmakers’ bullies, protecting him from the angry crowd.754
From the intriguing family stories passed on to him, Brian McDonald believed that Kimber also had interests in West End clubs. If he did, these ended in about 1927, when he and Bert McDonald shot through the windows of the Griffin, a pub in Clerkenwell favoured by the Sabini Gang. The two men escaped from the police by going to America, where Kimber may have killed a man in Arizona who did not pay him the money owed for a favour. After moving on to Los Angeles to meet up with Wag McDonald, who had been there since fleeing after the Epsom Road Battle, Kimber was said to have gone to Chicago. Brian McDonald was told that he was hidden by Murray Humphreys, who was prominent in Al Capone’s notorious gang, before returning to England in 1929.755 Kimber’s Birmingham daughters also knew that he had to leave for America, and he did disappear from London in this timeframe. After 1927 he was no longer on the electoral register at Warren Street, but by 1930 he had reappeared on the managerial staff at Wimbledon Greyhound Course.756 Dog racing was a highly popular new sport, but Kimber also continued to work point-to-points in the South West of England. They were now better run and, in 1938, he placed several advertisements in local newspapers. These publicised a Yeovil telephone number with the slogan, ‘Bet with a reliable man – Bill Kimber’. But Kimber himself no longer needed to attend meetings and was operating through representatives.757 Making plenty of money, he was spending it.
In 1932, he bought the freehold of a house called Beltinge in East End Road, East Finchley, moving there from a flat above a shop in Upper Street, Islington.758 As with Sabini’s move to Brighton, it symbolised a social and cultural shift away from old associates and their neighbourhoods. Kimber was propelling his family, especially his two daughters from his second marriage, into an affluent middle-class lifestyle. Born in 1920 and 1923, they had very different lives to their half-sisters in working-class Birmingham, benefiting from luxuries such as expensive cruises. A photograph sent to Eliza Kimber’s relations in Islington showed her and her two daughters dressed smartly in summer clothes standing in front of a garden and an elegant building with a balustrade balcony and shuttered windows. Written across the bottom were the words, ‘Boxing Day 1934 Madeira’. Four years later, the Kimbers returned to Southampton on the Arundel Star after a lengthy trip to South Africa that took in Durban, East London, Port Elizabeth, Cape Town and Madeira. The passenger list recorded Billy Kimber as a commission agent still living in East Finchley.759
During this time, he sent his daughter Annie in Birmingham ‘a very expensive dressing table set, but they had to sell it as they were so poor . . . She also had a picture of him on the deck of a ship with a woman.’ Annie also knew that Kimber had moved to Torquay on the English Riviera, which he did by 1939.760 Ironically, he became president of the Devon and Cornwall Bookmakers’ Association – ironically as it was the founding of the ‘Bookmakers’ and ‘Backers’ Racecourse Protection Association in London in late 1921 that had sounded the death knell for his rackets on southern England’s racecourses.761 But Kimber’s new life was highlighted in 1941 when his eldest daughter, an officer in the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force, married a flight-lieutenant from the RAF.762 Four years later, Billy Kimber died after a prolonged illness. His obituary in the local newspaper affirmed that ‘his great interest in life, both personal and professional, was racing and he was well known and respected on every racecourse in England’. His funeral was attended by many, but few would have known of his upbringing and past – few except for his brother Joe, part of Kimber’s original pickpocketing gang.763 Having spent large sums on the good life, Kimber still died a prosperous man, leaving his widow the large sum of £3,665.764 Though a far cry from his youth fighting and thieving in the back streets of Birmingham, Kimber died one of the last of the peaky blinders.