Alfie Solomon’s life was changed irretrievably when he was beaten up by Thomas Armstrong in 1921. Once of good character, he was transformed into one of the most dangerous men in the race gangs. A razor merchant as ready to use a shooter as a knife, he returned to violent ways following his release in 1927 for the manslaughter of Barney Blitz.765 With Darby Sabini having left London and Alf White taking over the remnants of the Sabini Gang, Solomon formed his own ‘gang of thieves’ blackmailing bookies, which included Jackie Burman, originally one of Emanuel’s tearaways. Although extortion was less profitable, and would soon be limited to the open parts of racecourses and some dog tracks, it also attracted Dodger Mullins when he came out of prison and restarted his Bethnal Green mob. The two gangs feuded but Mullins was soon back inside, sentenced in 1931 to six years for demanding money with menaces. A notorious terror who hated the Sabinis and their associates, he was released in December 1935 and reignited the vendetta with Solomon’s gang. In early 1936, led by a gangster known as ‘Conky’, they slashed Mullins badly across his face and back. Vengeful, he teamed up with the Hoxton Gang led by Jimmy Spinks and the Elephant Boys under Wag McDonald.
In June, they all set off to Lewes to ‘to wipe out the Jewish toughs’, arriving with hatchets, knuckledusters, truncheons, hammers and chisels. When they saw Solomon, Spinks shouted, ‘There they are, boys, get your tools ready.’ Flourishing a hatchet above his head, he led the charge at Solomon, who was struck with several blows and wounded on his head but still managed to run away. His clerk was not so fortunate and was beaten savagely. Having been alerted to trouble by anonymous sources, the police were prepared and swiftly stopped the violence. Mullins and McDonald escaped, but heavy sentences were passed on the sixteen men who had been arrested and found guilty. It has been presumed by most writers that the attack was aimed at the Sabini Gang.766 It was not, as there was no longer such a gang and amongst those arrested was Thomas Mack, who had been a prominent member of the Sabinis. The attack was clearly against Solomon and his men, as emphasised by the arrest of Albert Blitz, supposedly a relation of Barney Blitz who was killed by Solomon.767 This was the last reference to Solomon, one of the most violent gangsters of the 1920s.
The misnamed ‘Battle of Lewes’ gave Graham Greene the idea for his first masterpiece, Brighton Rock.768 Starting out as a thriller, as Norman Sherry remarked, the strangest aspect of the novel was ‘the development of the religious theme, which changed it from a story about gang warfare into a struggle between good and evil’.769 Yet it’s the ‘gangster’ aspect of the novel that gained popular attention. Greene avidly read the newspaper reports of the Lewes affray and soon after, invited his brother to join him at Brighton races.770 A frequent visitor to the town, he later wrote that ‘I once spent an evening with a member of a gang who introduced me to a certain amount of slang in use and took me to one of the meeting places of his fellow gangsters’.771 Though from an upper middle-class background, Greene’s research brought a reality to the novel with its blackmailed bookies, their fear of a carving, the Bank Holiday racing scene, the lines of bookmakers, the changing of the odds, the half-crown enclosure, the race-gang attack, and the razor slashing of Pinkie, the main character. Though but a teenager, he heads his own mob. A murderer who is merciless towards his enemies, he falls foul of Colleone, a major gang leader. Small and with a neat round belly, he wears a grey double-breasted suit, whilst his hair is thin and grey and his eyes gleam like raisins. And his base is the grand Cosmopolitan Hotel.772 Was Pinkie named after Jimmy Spinks, who was known as Spinkey by his pals?773 And was Colleone based on Darby Sabini, for Greene did acknowledge that, ‘My novel Brighton Rock, it is true, deals a little with something similar to the Sabini Gang’.774
Whether or not Sabini was the inspiration for Colleone, it was the Sabini Gang rather than its rivals that linked most strongly with London’s organised gangs after the Second World War. Yet when Darby Sabini moved to Brighton and Hove in 1926 and began his move away from criminality in the capital, the Sabini Gang could have disintegrated like the Camden Town Gang and Birmingham Gang. It did not do so because he had formed a well-organised band of loyal gangsters, and those who were not ‘legitimised’ by the bookmakers looked for leadership to one of Sabini’s tight inner circle. Following his release from prison, Joe Sabini was not interested, whilst although Harry Sabini continued to have some connections with the gang, he was mostly focused on his legal earnings as a commission agent. Of the other potential leaders, George Langham was also shifting away from gangsterism, Jim Ford followed Sabini to the south coast, and Alfie Solomon was in prison. This left only one of Sabini’s original lieutenants – Alf White. It is likely that he had begun to take over operations in the capital as early as 1925, when Sabini was embroiled in the libel case with D. C. Thomson, and it is noteworthy that White was the Sabini Gang leader that year who was beaten up by Benneworth and Mullins and their mob.
There were no Sabini brothers in the Sabini Gang led by White, and whilst it wasn’t as big and powerful as it had been, it remained a feared force. This successor gang included Thomas Mack, who had been with Darby Sabini from the start, as well as younger Anglo-Italians. No longer operating racecourse rackets, White and his ‘confederates’ deliberately used violence to ‘impress’ publicans and illegal street bookmakers ‘with a view to intimidating them and subsequently to extort money’.775 He was a dangerous man himself and, in 1927, aged forty and still also running his floristry business, White was charged with a brutal attack on two policemen, one of whom was lucky not to lose his sight. White was imprisoned for merely three months.776 Seven years later, he and his sons were damned as ‘the most notorious hooligans in North London’ against whom no one would come forward and testify.777
Those accusations were proven in April 1935, when the Whites were at a charity dance and attacked a man they didn’t know, ‘without apparent rhyme or reason, striking him on the face and body with fists, kicks, tables and chairs’. The assault was so extremely violent that the victim lost the sight of his left eye. White and two of his sons were arrested, but the injured man’s wife was the only witness to come forward on his behalf, whilst the Whites summoned twelve people to say that they had not been involved. The jury didn’t believe them and the Whites were each sentenced to twelve months’ imprisonment. During the proceedings, forty of their ‘confederates attended either at or in the vicinity of the courts’, and after the conviction, the prosecuting counsel received a threatening letter and sought police protection. In a police report of the case, White was described as ‘one of the leading lights of the Sabini Gang’, but although the name lingered on, it was now clearly White’s gang.778 Later known as the King’s Cross Mob, its leadership was passed on to one of his sons, Harry. He controlled the protection rackets in the West End, and following Darby Sabini’s internment in 1940, Harry White took over the running of the bookmakers’ pitches on the free parts of meetings like Epsom and Brighton and also of the point-to-points. These racecourse interests were forcibly taken over by Jack Spot (Jacob Cromer) early in 1947, and as James Morton indicated, soon afterwards the Whites were finally routed by an alliance of Spot and Billy Hill, who would quickly become enemies.779
The power exhibited by the Whites until their fall was matched by other noteworthy figures in London’s post-war gangland – men who had once been considered part of the ranks of the old gangs. One such prominent personality was Bert Marsh, who had been in the Sabini Gang. Born in 1901, his real name was Pasqualino Papa. A hairdresser from Clerkenwell and later an illegal off-course bookie, he had been a very good boxer. One of London’s foremost bantamweights, he had been picked out as amongst those youngsters who would go to the top of the tree if only he had plenty of practice.780 He was trained for a time by Darby Sabini, who recalled that Marsh ‘did not turn out as good as we thought’.781 Wonderfully game though he was, unfortunately he possessed ‘the common fault amongst many of our boxers – a deep dislike of any form of strenuous training, which has hitherto kept him from earning titular honours’. Marsh did not mend his ways and, in 1925, he stopped boxing soon after he was imprisoned with others in the Sabini Gang for the beating of two bookies at Wye races.782
Having convictions for unlawful wounding and common assault, in 1936 he was found guilty of the manslaughter of a childhood friend, Massimino Monte-Colombo. It is no wonder that he was regarded by the police as ‘a most violent and dangerous individual and leader of bullies who frequent racecourses and clubs’. Marsh was interned with Darby and Harry Sabini in 1940.783 Morton, an expert on London’s gangs after the Second World War, revealed that after his release, Marsh became a major figure in Soho and supporter of gambler and high-profile gangster, Albert Dimes. Once Jack Spot had been pushed out and Billy Hill had all but retired, Dimes was regarded as the ‘King of the Point-to-Points’ and ‘the almost unseen Godfather’ in the late 1950s.784 It is clear that the Sabini name still had a magnetism, and as late as 1955, five years after Darby Sabini had died and almost thirty since he had moved away from his gang, Dimes was identified as the leader of the Sabini Gang.785
Although there was no longer such a thing as the Sabini Gang itself, the name continued to resonate in post-war Britain. But what of the peaky blinders and the fearsome Birmingham Gang that was formed by some of the most vicious amongst them? Contrastingly, its name was not even a faint echo. Lacking the overall leadership of Kimber after the truce with the Sabinis, the Birmingham Gang fell apart. With no nightclubs or any other opportunities for protection rackets in strongly-policed Birmingham, it disappeared so quickly and completely that it didn’t pass into Brummie folklore let alone gangland mythology. Yet it had been the first major gang in England to operate on a national scale, and after it took over the rackets on the southern racecourses in 1920, it had seemed in an unassailable position of power. Such power, though, was illusory because of the very nature of the Birmingham Gang. It never became a fully organised combination of criminals, but instead remained a rampaging, ramshackle jumble of disparate groups of ruffians. Dangerous and frightening they may have been, but apart from Kimber they were petty-minded villains who carried on acting as peaky blinders, relishing fighting and violence above all else. What they extorted and stole, the majority of them ‘blew’ on drink and good times. Feckless, thoughtless and unruly as they were, they were incapable of creating a disciplined force to consolidate their hold in the South, as was shown by their racist persecution of Jewish bookmakers.
It was that hatred that provoked a fierce backlash, instigating the rise of the Sabini Gang and the most vicious gang rivalry Britain had ever seen. This disturbing development alarmed not only journalists but also police chiefs and even the Home Secretary. Rightly abhorred for their brutality and blackmailing, these British gangsters did however become a distinctive though unfortunate feature of the Roaring Twenties. Would that have happened without the peaky blinders? Perhaps it might have, but as it was the legacy of the peaky blinders was the Birmingham Gang and Britain’s most notorious 1920s gangs.