Chapter Three

THE REIGN OF THE PEAKY BLINDERS ENDED

EPIDEMIC OF BRUTALITY

A bell tolls ominously as a lone rider gallops down a cobbled street. A big man, he is straight-backed and wears a bowler hat, an unbuttoned long coat, and a suit and tie. He pulls up at a row of mounted policemen, each with truncheon at the ready. Lined up threateningly across the street, they are the only people about. Behind them looms a big, ugly factory. Its presses pound, intensifying the gloominess of the setting and the sombre mood. The horseman speaks forcefully to the officers in a distinctly Northern Irish accent. They are to leave no stone unturned and to bring him every gun and bullet that they find for his inspection.

The mounted police ride down the street, each one turning at intervals to face the houses on either side. They are accompanied by a large force of caped constables who run along the street and stop two by two. Upon the signal of their leader, the policemen on foot smash through the front doors of each home and force themselves inside looking for communists. As police whistles blow, men are dragged out roughly. The sound of truncheons hitting flesh can be heard. Children run frightened down the street as women shout and are pushed aside.208

It is another vivid and absorbing scene from series one of Peaky Blinders. The man in charge of the attack on this street at the centre of the Shelby’s power base is Chief Inspector Campbell. Physically imposing, he is full of guile and comes with a reputation for ridding Belfast of crime and corruption. Now he has been sent to Birmingham by Winston Churchill to recover a consignment of guns and other weapons that has gone missing from the BSA, the Birmingham Small Arms Company. The prime suspects are the Peaky Blinders led by Tommy Shelby, for whom Campbell quickly develops an intense hatred. He also loathes IRA Fenians and the Communists. Along with the Peaky Blinders, they are ‘the three-headed beast’ and he believes that it is his job to decapitate them.

Distrusting the Birmingham police, he brings in new men from Belfast, obviously Protestants like him. It is they who are his shock troops in the attack on the Shelbys’ heartland. Campbell ultimately fails in taking down the Peaky Blinders. However, a Protestant police officer from Belfast did in fact play a leading role in ending the reign of the real peaky blinders and street ruffians of Birmingham. His name was Charles Haughton Rafter. He was appointed chief constable in 1899 following the furore over the ‘epidemic of brutality’ that was sweeping Birmingham.²⁰⁹

After the murder of PC Snipe, demands were made for the introduction of flogging for street violence, given that the law only allowed that punishment if an assault was accompanied by robbery. Chief Constable Farndale agreed and feared that he could do nothing more with the strength of the police force.210 Complaints were also made against the perceived leniency of the magistrates in punishing assaults on police constables with fines rather than six months’ imprisonment as the law allowed. In response, in August 1897, Arthur Chamberlain, chairman of the magistrates and brother of Joseph Chamberlain, asked his fellows ‘to look at the cases from the point of view of the patient householder, and not from the offenders who went before them very penitent, but who, when in the streets on Saturdays and Sundays, were a most terrible nuisance to quiet people’. It needed to be made clear that offences against the person were more serious than those against property.²¹¹

Charles Anthony Vince was an academic, leader writer for the Birmingham Post and staunch supporter of Joseph Chamberlain, and, in his volume on the History of the Corporation of Birmingham, he strove to present the city in the best light possible. Yet even he admitted that in the 1890s public attention was drawn to the serious increase in crimes of violence. Popular feeling culminated in the demand for more drastic measures for ‘the repression of this evil which was made after the murder of Police Constable Snipe’.²¹² This widespread feeling reached a zenith in 1898. That year, according to Geoffrey Pearson, the word ‘hooligan’ made an abrupt entrance into the common English usage during the hot summer ‘in the wake of an excessively rowdy August Bank Holiday celebration in London which resulted in large numbers of people being brought before the courts on charges of disorderliness, drunkenness, assaults on police officers, street robberies and fighting’.213

In Birmingham that year, the number of prosecutions for assaults on police constables reached a high of 623 –relating to a police force, including officers, of 700.²¹⁴ The attacks on the police in 1898 included that on Police Constable Leach, a twenty-three-year-old of ‘fine physique from Cheltenham’. In taking a troublesome drunk to the police station, he was attacked by a gang of youths in Lister Street. One of them threw either a bottle or a brick at him. It struck him and fractured his skull, so that he needed a trepanning operation. Soon after, Detective Sergeant Brown and several constables arrested seven local men aged between seventeen and twenty-two.²¹⁵

What distinguished peaky blinder gang members like these from other youths was their hairstyle and clothing. But much of that style was also adopted by roughs who were not necessarily in a gang. This meant that increasingly the name peaky blinder was also applied to a violent person fighting and causing damage in public places. As the Daily Mail informed its readers, ‘Birmingham, like certain districts of London, has its Hooligans, though in the Midlands the ruffians are known by the euphonious name of “peaky blinders”.’ John Groves was such a young man. Described as a promising youth of eighteen, in May that year he had thrown a bottle at a police constable. The glass had cut the officer’s left cheek badly and he had to be treated at the hospital. As Groves had no previous convictions he was sentenced to prison for three months’ hard labour. Although no evidence was provided that he was in a gang, he was called a peaky blinder, one of those ‘terrors who are accustomed to maltreat defenceless persons they meet in the streets’. This widening in the use of peaky blinder was accompanied by the appearance of two new terms to describe violent men and petty thieves – ‘peaky types’ and ‘peaky class’.

THE COMING OF RAFTER

The epidemic of brutality in Birmingham led to growing demands to stamp out the dangerous element of ‘Peaky Blindism’. As one commentator expressed it, the bell-bottomed fraternity ‘had reigned far too long, and the assaults committed on the police and citizens have not been sufficiently met by the magistrates who have been far too lenient’.216 The clamour for action grew louder and was heard nationally.

In January 1899, the Globe, a London newspaper, reported that ‘not without good cause the citizens of Birmingham make bitter complaint of the brutal tyranny exercised by street ruffians’. It explained that some time back, the magistrates had imposed deterrent punishment instead of the ‘absurdly lenient sentences they had been wont to pass’. The effect was immediately beneficial, they said, but latterly the justices of the peace had relapsed into their old merciful mood, so that ruffianism had again lifted its head. Recently, a gang armed with buckled belts and knives had pounced upon an inoffensive man as he was going home, and ‘stabbed him nearly to death, besides beating him unmercifully’. A witness who gave evidence was attacked and badly stabbed by some of the gang as he was leaving the court. This was a case for exemplary severity but the ringleader was only given two months in prison.217

Three months later, Chief Constable Farndale resigned owing too ill health. Although he did so in the midst of the ‘epidemic of ruffianism’, some observers praised him. In particular, The Owl, a local publication, wrote that he was an admirable servant who had done much to curtail the spheres of influence of the slogging gangs.²¹⁸ This claim was debateable. Whilst large-scale battles between slogging gangs from different streets had declined, assaults on the police had not, and nor had the power of the peaky blinders in the back streets.²¹⁹

It was Farndale’s successor, the Northern Irish Charles Haughton Rafter, who was acclaimed popularly as the man who ended the reign of the peaky blinders. His death in office in 1935, after 36 years’ service, was front page news locally and was headlined in the Birmingham Daily Gazette as ‘Cleaned Up Black Spots’.²²⁰ Rafter’s funeral was a civic event attended by government officials and with a guard of honour of hundreds of police officers. But the real tribute to his life and work lay not so much in the official memorial service at St Martin’s in the Bull Ring, and rather in the fact that the funeral ‘filled the streets in the vicinity of St Martin’s and the roads about Harborne Parish Church, with men and women with no official status who mourned the death of a man who was a man first and an official if necessary’. The average man and woman of Birmingham came from their homes and lined the streets in their thousands upon thousands in ‘humble tribute to an official who, in addition to doing his job excellently well, had gained the affection of the people’. For the majority of law-abiding working-class folk, that affection had been won through Rafter’s leadership in stamping out the peaky blinders and making the streets safe.221

Raised in a Protestant family in Belfast, he had joined the Royal Irish Constabulary as a cadet officer in 1882. It was a turbulent time when Ireland was increasingly divided between mostly Catholic Nationalists seeking an independent Ireland and mostly Protestant Unionists wishing to remain within the United Kingdom. He rose to district inspector and was given charge of the Ballinrobe area of Mayo, where the Land League was active. This was a popular campaign against landlordism – when bailiffs arrived to serve eviction notices they were met with huge demonstrations. Those forced from their homes were given succour by their neighbours and embargoes were placed on farms from which tenants had been thrown out, whilst those people who did not fall in with the land leaguers were ostracised.

Rafter was later involved in policing in Tipperary, where he gained the admiration of Count Arthur Moore, a Home Rule MP, who wrote a glowing testimonial for Rafter in his application to the Birmingham Watch Committee. Moore emphasised that so high had been the feeling in Tipperary during Rafter’s tenure there that ‘any want of tactic or judgement might have precipitated an encounter at a moment’s notice between the two excited parties. During all that time, Mr Rafter kept a cool, clear head, and got well through the troubles of that eventful period, handling large numbers of armed and excited men with unfailing good temper and tact.’222 Rafter was also known for his organisational ability and the thoroughness and skill he gave to his work.²²³

Out of 50 candidates for the position of chief constable of Birmingham, he was one of the eight shortlisted and was the only one to attend his interview in full uniform. Impressive though this was, more impressive was Rafter’s obvious ability to deal not only with potentially violent situations in a calm and effective way, but also to oversee a reduction in crime. These were the very qualities needed to suppress the peaky blinders.²²⁴ He began his job in 1899 ‘feeling with extreme caution’, according to the Birmingham Mail. He thoroughly studied the town and its characteristics, whilst he was keen for his men to be smart, of good physique and to be knowledgeable as to the law under which arrests were made.

Rafter had shown his own personal courage in Ireland, and in his quiet and unassuming way he demonstrated this at meeting about the South African War at the Birmingham and Midland Institute. The meeting had pulled in a howling crowd and a menacing movement was made by some of them. As soon as that happened, Rafter left his unobtrusive spot in the corner of the room and went to the front of the platform, prepared to intervene if necessary. According to the newspaper, ‘then came an ugly rush and some men got past the police cordon and made for the speakers. At once, Rafter singled out the leader and went for him, taking him by the collar.’ Small of stature, he struggled in vain against the chief constable’s clutch. Determined but not too vigorous in his hold, Rafter said something quietly but decisively and the man left.225 In that incident was revealed some of the techniques with which the peaky blinders would be dealt with: through physical strength, resolve, bravery and determination. They would be needed as Rafter’s early years were marked by ongoing violence.

CONSTABLE BAITING

In June 1900, and upon reports of disorder, five constables were sent to Barford Street. This was one of the streets associated with Birmingham’s sloggers and street gangs since 1870. When they arrived and sought to arrest two brothers, PC Hurst was struck with a buckled belt by eighteen-year-old brass polisher Albert Harris. Percy Langridge, a sixteen-year-old polisher, then stabbed PC Barker in the back with a knife and also kicked the legs of constables Lawson and Watson, who were also assaulted by Fredrick Long, a fifteen-year-old filer. Finally, PC Macaulay was stabbed in the arm by Henry Attwood, aged twenty. All four offenders were described as the peaky blinder type. Harris was sentenced to three months and Long to one month in prison, both with hard labour.

Due to the seriousness of their charges – unlawfully and maliciously wounding police constables – Langridge and Attwood could not be tried by magistrates and instead were sent to the assizes, the most important court in any county and which was held four times a year by a travelling judge. Born in Brighton, Langridge was 5 foot 5½ inches tall and had a number of tattoos. Both he and Attwood were given the long sentence of five years’ imprisonment, in itself emphasising that the courts were now beginning to treat attacks on the police with severity. Following Langridge’s release, aftercare was provided for him by the Discharged Prisoners’ Aid Societies, which found him work as a striker in London.226

Reporting this case, the Birmingham Mail expressed the feelings of many people, when stating that ‘the policeman’s lot is not a happy one’. It was revealed that, in 1899, 585 prosecutions had been made for assaults against the police and, at that time, nine men were disabled because of assaults against them.²²⁷ The next year, the police force totalled 700 men and there were 496 prosecutions for assaults on them. This figure was not as high as in 1898 but it remained obvious that there were still too many attacks, and in 1901 the figure rose to 507.²²⁸

Constable Bennett was one of those injured that year. In January 1901, the blade of a long pocket knife was plunged into his back. The wound was a very deep one and would have been instantly fatal if the blow had fallen an inch lower. PC Bennett was stabbed by Thomas Walters, who was one of a party of youths ejected from the Saltley Theatre for disorderly conduct and with whom PC Bennett remonstrated. Walters was sentenced to five years’ penal servitude for malicious wounding.229 Named as a peaky blinder in some newspapers, in others he was called a ruffian, and interestingly, a hooligan.²³⁰

The ongoing problems caused by the peaky blinders was emphasised in the summer of 1901, when a deputation approached the Watch Committee to seek a police station in the Garrison Lane neighbourhood because of rowdyism. They did not wish to exaggerate, they explained, ‘but at the present time there is a state of terror and lawlessness as to constitute scandal to the city. Every night, and Saturdays and Sundays, the place was a veritable pandemonium, the peaky blinder and the rough reigned supreme.’ So bad was the situation that recently one of the deputation had been made to fly for his life when he was seen by about 50 roughs who were pelting a works building with stones.²³¹

My great uncle Wal told me of the notoriety of the gangs of Garrison Lane and Summer Lane. Born in Studley Street, Sparkbrook in 1897, he recalled that in his childhood, it was ‘the practice to team up after a session of beer drinking, after getting equipped with knuckledusters, buckled belts, and other weapons, to make for the locality of the rival gang that had a “dust up” owing to them, when invariably it meant a set-to when no quarter was asked or given’.²³²

As the Birmingham Mail lamented in November 1901, ‘still the peaky is with us, and the notion that the policeman exists only as a target for brick-ends has not yet been expelled from his mind’.²³³ The violence directed towards the police was highlighted that year by a series of searing articles in the Birmingham Daily Gazette written by its leader writer, J. Cuming Walters. Called Scenes in Slumland: Pen Pictures of the Black Spots in Birmingham, its revelations about the extent of poverty and ‘slum landlordism’ in the ‘best governed city in the world’ caused an outcry. He drew his readers into what he perceived as the wretched streets of ‘slumland’, half of which were:

. . . crossed by the gloomy blue-stoned railway bridges over which the trains are continually passing with a roar, and these archways themselves are the finishing stroke to a dismal and unredeemed picture. A ‘peaky’ or two will almost certainly be found slouching about the corners, and in the less-frequented thoroughfares the menace they present is not to be disregarded. Police are not rare, though it would be thought they might be more readily encountered; but one fact not to be deemed insignificant is that they are almost always to be found in couples. Where a constable is regarded as a natural enemy, and his mere presence an affront to the mob, too much care cannot be taken. Ere now a lonely policeman has been half-murdered or maimed for life in this quarter of Birmingham in revenge for the arrest of an offender, and it has never mattered whether the revenge – which usually takes the form of bricks and belts – was inflicted upon the actual officer who had incurred resentment, or one of his colleagues. Next to constable-baiting comes the less exciting but very satisfying pastime of wife-beating, but the prosecution of the brutes who engage in it is seldom undertaken for reasons perfectly well understood.234

A few months after this dismal observation, another police constable was killed in the back streets of Birmingham. On the evening of 22 July 1901, George Fowles, a nineteen-year-old brass filer, along with Joseph Adey, 23, and John Davis, 33, both polishers, were drinking in the vicinity of Staniforth Street in the Gosta Green locality. Close to midnight, they began singing in the street. PC Gunter ‘made the very reasonable request that they would move on and desist from disturbing the neighbourhood’. He then went to quell a domestic row nearby at the home of the Bruce family.²³⁵

At the inquest into his death, a number of witnesses from the neighbourhood gave evidence against the three men. They included Mary Ann Bruce. She stated that when PC Charles Gunter came into their house to quieten the quarrel he was followed by seven men, amongst whom was Fowles and Adey. Her cousin, Emma Butler, explained that as PC Gunter left the house, ‘they all got round him’. When asked by the coroner what happened, she replied tersely, ‘bricks went. About four. I should think.’ More bricks were thrown from the direction of Fisher Street, and the constable was surrounded by about fifteen men. He fell to the ground.

Butler’s mother, Fanny, said that William Willis, who had lodged with the Bruce family, told her that after PC Gunter had ordered the young men who were singing in the street to move on, one of them had said, ‘Let’s go down and do him in.’ What took place next was witnessed by Thomas Smallbone, the night watchman at the nearby large pen factory of Perry and Co. in Lancaster Street. He had seen a man in a trilby hat pick up a brick and break it on the kerbstone. A girl standing at the bottom of an entry called out, ‘If you do, I’ll blow you,’ (inform the police), upon which she was struck by the man.

He was then joined by two men, one in his shirt sleeves and the other wearing a straw hat. They moved up the street a few yards. One of the men threw something and the police officer fell. Smallbone ran from the works and found the constable lying on the ground, bleeding from a wound to the forehead. The next morning a police sergeant went to where PC Gunter had fallen and found that it was strewn with brick ends. That day, another local witness, Alice Lee, heard Fowles telling his wife that he had been in a row and had ‘broken a brick or two’.

Constable Gunter was admitted to the General Hospital on 30 July. He went on to have eight fits and was operated on, but he remained in a critical condition and was paralysed on the right side and unable to speak. Three more operations were carried out, in each case for an abscess in the brain. After the fourth operation, PC Gunter’s condition improved but he suffered a relapse and died on 26 October due to meningitis caused by a cerebral abscess set up by the wound in his forehead.236 He left a wife and child and was taken back to Carmarthenshire for his funeral. His body was escorted to Snow Hill Station by 100 police constables and officers. They were led by Chief Constable Rafter.²³⁷

The jury at the inquest had given a verdict of wilful murder, but at trial of the three accused they were found guilty of manslaughter – to the surprise of the judge, Justice Bigham. He sentenced each to 15 years’ imprisonment, hoping and trusting that this ‘would be a warning to the people of your class in this town, who don’t know how to control their passions and who through drink or other causes allow themselves to be carried away, so that they carry out violence’. The passing of the sentences created a sensation in court and several women became hysterical – although the Birmingham Daily Gazette fulminated that the men should have been sent down for life. It also vilified the neighbourhood of Staniforth Street as ‘the haunt of the accursed “peaky blinder” a savage beast in human form’.238

Constable Gunter was killed in the parish of St Laurence, an area widely condemned as one of the blackest spots in ‘Blackest Birmingham’ and yet his memorial service was held at that church in that very parish. Gunter had worshipped there, having been based at the nearby Duke Street police station. So many people attended the service that an overflow had to be held in the school rooms.²³⁹ And it was the witnesses from this supposedly low and rough neighbourhood who provided the testimonies that were vital to the convictions of the three men accused of his murder. They did so despite intimidation. It would be the brave support for the police by poor people such as these, angered and weary as they were of the reign of terror of the peaky blinders and street ruffians, which would be a crucial factor in bringing an end to the back-street gangsterism.²⁴⁰

Soon after the death of PC Gunter another brutal attack on a police constable shocked and disgusted Birmingham. In January 1902, PC Ernest Blinko ‘was struck down and mercilessly hacked with a chopper [small axe] to the point of death’. His assailants were two brothers, David and Frank Cherry, who were noted as of the ‘peaky blinder’ persuasion.241 The previous day, Constable Blinko had accompanied PC Stevens in serving David Cherry with a police summons. It seems that he and his brother sought revenge for this, as before the attack the brothers were seen prowling about the district in a suspicious manner as if they were looking for someone.

When PC Blinko appeared, the brothers ran up Sherbourne Road and followed him down Longmore Street. Overtaking the constable, David Cherry pulled a chopper from his pocket, and ‘struck him a severe blow on the head which felled him’. Whilst the defenceless constable was on the ground, he was again struck by Cherry with three or four heavy blows on the head. His brother, Frank, was present throughout and, according to a lad called Thomas Steadman, he said to his brother, ‘Come on, you’ve done him in.’ This account was corroborated by other witnesses.²⁴²

The screams of women who had seen what had happened brought a number of men to the scene, and the two brothers fled, whilst their victim was rushed to hospital in a cab.²⁴³ He was unconscious and losing a lot of blood. Only once did he recover to speak, stating, ‘Raise me up: I am going.’ By now, parties of police were seeking the brothers. They had no difficulty as many people had seen them, conspicuous as they were because one of them was carrying the chopper. Eventually the brothers were found in the George pub on the Ladypool Road, Sparkbrook. There was a struggle to arrest them, which ended when Frank Cherry remarked, ‘We will go quietly. David. We are beat to the wide.’

The Cherry brothers were found guilty of malice and aforethought with intent to kill and murder. Justice Bigham pronounced that if not for the skills of Dr Jordan Lloyd, who had saved the life of PC Blinko, they would have been hanged. He went on to stress that, ‘There seems to be a disposition in Birmingham for men in your position of life to hunt policemen to death. So I am going to do my best by the punishment I shall inflict upon you to stop it.’ The Cherrys were each sentenced to life imprisonment. It was an announcement greeted by applause at the back of the court, whilst the Birmingham Daily Gazette hoped that these exemplary sentences would check the ‘unruly hooliganism which exists among the peaky type’ and which led to unprovoked and murderous attacks upon the police.244

THE PEAKY BLINDERS’ DISAPPEARANCE

Initially, it seemed that the sentences passed on the killers of PC Gunter had not been effective. Prosecutions for assaults on police constables did drop by 91 in 1902, and although this was a ‘a gratifying decrease’, the high number of other violent offences led the Birmingham Daily Gazette to announce that, ‘The result is not conducive to any hope that the peaky-blinder has been tamed and the hooligan robbed of his most characteristic attributes.’²⁴⁵ The figures seemed to support this conclusion as then, in 1903, prosecutions for assaults on the police rose dramatically to 459 and reached 487 in 1905.246

Despite this, on 13 September 1905, the Birmingham Daily Gazette announced that, whilst the city was known as the abode of the peaky-blinder:

His palmy days when he flourished in triumph, and disgraced the city’s record by his outrages, have long since passed by. The ‘peaky’ of today, fortunately, is living upon his past reputation, and thanks mainly to the exertions and vigilance of the police he has practically retired from active service. Nevertheless, periodical outbreaks of ruffianism occur to remind us that the spirit which animated the Birmingham roughs of other years is liable to occasional revival among the present day city hooligans. Our news columns today contain evidence of this spirit of lawlessness in the city, but we need not be alarmed at the prospect of a return to the old days of street rowdyism and ruffianism. The police assure us that Birmingham is a well-conducted city, and is in no danger of lapsing into bad ways. The magistrates can materially help in the work of suppressing the Birmingham rough by passing exemplary sentences.²⁴⁷

A week after this positive report, on 20 September 1905, William Lacey, a member of a slogging/peaky blinder gang, shot one of the Summer Hill Gang. He died five days later. Both men and their associates were declaimed as belonging to ‘a class of which no city could be proud, roaming the streets in gangs, constantly meeting rival gangs, and entering into conflict with them, more especially on Saturday nights’. Nevertheless, the Mail’s piece was perceptive as such gang fights were increasingly rare and the days of the peaky blinders had indeed passed, with not much longer to go before they were retired from active service.248

The next year, 1906, the number of prosecutions for assaults on constables dropped dramatically by 150 to 337.²⁴⁹ There is reference in the Birmingham Daily Gazette to a ‘hooligan outrage’ in Newton Row in January 1907 – which had formerly been a peaky blinder stronghold – when three men of the peaky blinder type savagely attacked and robbed a businessman late at night, but there appears to be no mention of assaults or fights by peaky blinders after that.²⁵⁰ Their disappearance was so complete that in 1912 the paper could write that, ‘There was once a time when a midnight walk from Birmingham through Slumland to any of the suburbs was an adventure fraught with danger. Dark deeds were done in side streets, a warfare waged by the notorious “Peaky Blinders” made night wanderers fearsome.’²⁵¹

CLUBS, SPORT AND THE PICTURES

What had led to the rapid disappearance of the peaky blinders? In 1898, they were rampant and seven years later, they were still inflicting serious injuries on policemen and civilians alike. Yet, by 1907, they were beginning to be referred to in the past tense and by the 1920s they were only a memory. There were a number of contributory factors to this phenomenon, as there was with the disappearance of the scuttling gangs of Manchester and Salford. In his deeply researched book on the gangs there, Davies has noted that the gang conflicts diminished between the late 1890s and the outbreak of The First World War. This coincided with a change in attitudes towards ‘Outcast Manchester’, ‘Blackest Birmingham, and ‘Squalid Liverpool’. There were fears that in the polluted and overcrowded big cities, poor youths were suffering as a result of their dismal environment, becoming physically unfit and unwell due to the poor conditions in which they lived. An important response was the development of clubs for working lads. These had begun to gain momentum from the late 1880s, but it would be a decade before they would make a significant contribution to the development of more peaceable pastimes amongst the rising generation of youths.252

Gooderson discerned a similar process in Birmingham, focusing on the work of Arnold Pinchard, a High Church of England clergyman in charge of St Jude’s from 1896. This church was in Hill Street, one of the poorest parts of Birmingham and close to where the Navigation Street Riot had occurred in 1875. Pinchard started a club for ‘budding peaky blinders’ and street-corner loafers aged eighteen to twenty with a subscription of a penny a week. It was open every evening and Pinchard was helped by his curate, a layperson and a Church Army captain. Boys could play draughts, dominoes and cards but, as Gooderson recognised, ‘more important were two pairs of boxing gloves’.

Recognised as a hard hitter and clever boxer himself, Pinchard was able to hold a boxing competition within two months of starting his club – ‘although there were no ropes, so the boxers fell into the laps of the front-row spectators’. The boys fought in ordinary dress of flannel shirts, corduroy trousers, belts and heavy boots for a first prize of a suit of clothes and a second of a pair of boots. The winner was called Copestick and he had ‘a peaky fringe shown to best advantage’. Pinchard also provided a recreation club for girls, and a Church Lads’ Brigade for those under eighteen who were drilled as if in the military and taught gymnastics.253

Known nationally for his clerical efforts amongst the peaky blinders, Pinchard was of the same ilk as the celebrated Father Jay, the vicar of Holy Trinity in the Old Nichol, decried as the most infamous criminal area in Late Victorian London.²⁵⁴ After he took over the parish in 1886, he set up a gymnasium and boxing ring in the basement of his church. By then, boxing was an important part of East End mission work to the poor. This was because, as historian Sarah Wise has indicated, charitable and university settlement outreach workers ‘had come to realise that the best way to engage poor men was to formalise an already existing passion; so street prize-fighting – often, horrifically, undertaken with bare knuckles, and leading to serious injury – was transformed into a disciplined, structured, and therefore more “moral” pursuit’. What distinguished Father Jay’s efforts was his coup in removing boxing from the pub so breaking the association between the sport and alcohol.255

Boxing to the Queensbury Rules – a code that enforced the use of gloves – was a new sport which had a deep and a positive impact, particularly on those youths who might have been more prone to becoming peaky blinders. In an insightful article on them from 1899, one writer acknowledged that, despite the work of many organisations, he knew ‘of no existing agency ready to go in and win over the Peakies to decent manhood and law-abiding citizenship’ other than one city church which had been successful in its mission. This was undoubtedly Pinchard’s church of St Jude’s, the success of that was ‘obtained through the medium of the gymnasium and the gloves’.²⁵⁶

Boxing did indeed have a constructive effect on many young men, inculcating most with a respect for fair fighting rather than dirty fighting. The Birmingham Amateur Boxing Club began in 1881, but it was based in the centre of town and catered mainly for skilled working-class young men and as such did not reach out to poor youths as did Pinchard’s club.²⁵⁷ But from the early twentieth century, smaller-scale boxing clubs began to open in working-class neighbourhoods. They included the Sparkbrook Amateur Boxing Club. Founded in 1906 by Albert Smith in Main Street, within two years its membership had reached about 80 and it had to move to larger and more suitable ground floor premises in Sampson Road North, close to Camp Hill.²⁵⁸

Like Jay, Pinchard was an Anglo-Catholic, and upon his death in 1934, the Birmingham Daily Gazette drew attention to his pioneering work in the city: ‘the founding of a “Boxing Club”, the institution of a club for girls who had worked all day in a factory were perhaps new departures in Christian philanthropy, but the Vicar knew his people, and what was of more importance the people got to know their Vicar’.259

Sister Beta, later Mrs Hornabrook, was another person from a well-off background who worked for the wellbeing of poor youngsters. The daughter of a Wesleyan minister, she became a Wesleyan Sister attached to the Central Hall Mission in Corporation Street. She worked there for six years and ‘started several enterprises – a Saturday party for the little boys who in those days sold matches and evening papers in the street, and a club for the Aston “peaky-blinders”, young hooligans who greeted her first appearance in their midst with a shower of stones, but afterwards thought better of it, and formed themselves into a bodyguard to protect her as she walked the roughest districts’.²⁶⁰

The biggest and most successful club of this period, however, was that started in July 1889, by the Kyrle Society when it opened a boys’ club in Lawrence Street. This experiment was sited in what was deemed as Birmingham’s Seven Dials – at the time a notorious London rookery.²⁶¹ Soon after, a girls’ club was begun and in 1893 new premises were opened nearby in Sheep Street.²⁶² Kyrle Hall would have a long-lasting and positive impact and become famed for its boxing club. In 1911, it was given to the Birmingham Boys and Girls Club Union. This had been started five years before by Canon Carnegie, Rector of Birmingham Cathedral, who had been he upset when he had arrived in the city to see barefooted lads in ragged clothes touting newspapers at the station. Determined to help them, he set up a club where they could have a chat, drink a cup of tea and play games. Within two years, he had eight clubs, and from 1909 there were also clubs for girls.263

However, despite this success, only a small number of lads joined the clubs, and it was hard to involve those who were regarded as the roughest. In Birmingham, the Street Children’s Union was formed expressly to help the large class of boys and girls ‘whose occupations or bad home conditions cause them to spend most of their lives on the streets’. Yet, by 1914, the Union had only 400 such boys over the age of fourteen in its eight senior clubs, whilst the numerous other clubs in the city appealed to boys from a more ‘respectable’ working-class background.²⁶⁴ Still, as Davies maintains, it is possible that the indirect influence of the clubs was more important in that they encouraged active participation in sports. This rose significantly in the 1890s, a decade which also saw the massive growth in popularity of association football, especially on the streets. Importantly, in Manchester and Salford, street-based teams gave a new outlet for territorial rivalries, other than violence.²⁶⁵

In Birmingham, association football was as popular. School teams were competing in leagues from the later 1880s, whilst by early in the twentieth century, teams based at factories, churches, chapels and also pubs in the back streets were involved in leagues such as the Small Heath and District League.²⁶⁶ In addition, many working-class lads played ad hoc games on an almost daily basis.

‘H. V.’ was one of them. He kept a diary for one week as part of a detailed investigation in early 1914 into the conditions of ‘boy labour’ in the city. This was carried out on behalf of the Council by Arnold Freeman. He focused on a carefully chosen sample of 71 boys aged seventeen that was believed to be ‘typical of the mass of uneducated boy labour in Birmingham’. Each weekday dinnertime, H. V. revealed that he went home to eat and then played a short game of football with the other lads before starting work again. Then on the Saturday morning, he and his workmates talked about football, as they always did, and after dinner he and his pals ‘went to a football match with our shop and Cape Hill Mission’.

‘K. L.’ also took part in the survey. In his diary he wrote in detail about the Birmingham City match against Preston North End which he watched on the Saturday. After breakfast on the Sunday, he got ready and went out for his friends at 9.50. They played football on some waste ground until about 2pm. Later that afternoon, he says, ‘We gathered together and saw some lads who live in the other end of our street and asked them if they would play us at football.’ They agreed and K.L.’s team won 8–5, after which they all went to the coffee house.267

The cinema was another form of popular entertainment that had a positive effect, emerging as it did as the peaky blinders and scuttlers were declining. From 1900, Pat Collins was showing moving pictures at his fairgrounds and his example was soon followed by other entrepreneurs who put on cinema shows in theatres, halls and meeting rooms, some of which were converted into ‘penny gaffs’. These were cramped and uncomfortable, with the patrons prodded by the cane of the usher or barker to crush together on tightly packed wooden benches. Little wonder that they were called ‘the penny crush’, or else the ‘flea pit’ because of the unhygienic press of people. Then from 1910, the Cinematograph Act ensured that ‘the pictures’ had to be shown in permanent premises that were licensed and subject to inspection.

As Davies made clear with regard to Manchester and Salford, senior police officers were ‘grateful to see so many lads and lasses spending as many as three or four evenings a week in picture houses rather than on the streets’.268 Cinema going proved so popular, that in his study, Freeman said he ‘gave up asking the lad if he went to the Cinema because the response was invariably in the affirmative’. Each boy went to one of Birmingham’s 46 picture palaces about twice a week, spending practically the whole evening there.

Freeman identified one other factor which, in his opinion, had a positive influence on youths – schooling. Because of the reforms of the New Liberal government of 1906, schools had been partially transformed into organisations concerned not only with the education of children but also with their medical treatment, feeding and even housing. If this great influence on the lives of the nation’s children were taken away then, Freeman believed, ‘we should be manufacturing a race of hooligans’. Instead, schools rescued children from a hundred sinister influences and imperfectly yet steadily and forcefully shaped them productively into good workers and capable citizens.²⁶⁹

CAN THEY FIGHT

For all the importance of social forces, the putting down of the peaky blinders depended on three other causes. First, the stronger sentencing on violent men from the turn of the century. Second, the support of working-class people for the police and against the peaky blinders. And third, forceful policing. All three factors were interconnected. Chief Constable Rafter initiated the stronger policing, which gave confidence to working-class people to support the police, and it was also he who pushed the magistrates into taking a tougher line with offenders who assaulted the police.

In its article on the peaky blinders in November 1901, the Birmingham Mail drew attention to the stern action recently taken by Mr T. M. Colmore, the stipendiary magistrate, against roughs of the peaky blinder class. The sentences passed on them ‘could scarce be complained of as unduly lenient’. He sent to prison without the option of a fine even those offenders against whom there was no record of rowdyism.270 The local newspapers had been calling for this shift in approach for many years and it came about because of Rafter.

At his instigation, the prosecuting solicitor had asked Mr Colmore to inflict exemplary punishments of substantial terms of imprisonment upon those convicted of attacks on policemen. The aim was to make it possible for a police constable to do his duty unmolested.²⁷¹ Magisterial confidence in Rafter and his police force was matched by that of working-class people, some of whom were now emboldened to take a stand against the peaky blinders.

Following the Navigation Street Riot of 1875, the police had the utmost difficulty in securing witnesses because of the ‘terrorism exercised by the roughs in the quarter’. It is not surprising, given the attack on Mary Ann Bell. Suspected of having given some information to the police, she was brutally assaulted by a number of people, headed by the mother of one of the accused, and suffered blackened eyes and severe cuts to her scalp.272

The peaky blinders were as vengeful and vicious. Ministering in one of the poorest areas in the city, Reverend T. J. Bass gained widespread notice for his parish in 1898 through his pamphlet, Everyday Life in Blackest Birmingham: Facts Not Fiction. The district was:

. . . the home of the ‘Peaky Blinder’, and awful is the vengeance of this blackguard king to those who refuse obeisance. These thoroughfares constitute his little kingdom, and the terror of his anger is manifest on all hands. His methods of repaying a distasteful act are unpleasant – to use a very mild expression. A blow or a stab in the dark, the total destruction of your windows, and a hundred petty tyrannies are exercised in so ingenious a manner as to defy detection. Even were he discovered in some illegal act, a rapid retreat to the intricacies of the courts with which he is familiar, renders pursuit not only difficult but practically unavailing.²⁷³

Yet within a few years, some working-class people were no longer paying homage to blackguard peaky blinders, rather they were acting against them and in support of the police. This was made plain in May 1901 when a gang of ruffians paraded Bromsgrove Street, jostling and assaulting everyone who came across their path. A doctor was hit by a piece of offal and then punched; a labourer who went to help him was struck on the head with a buckled belt, knocked down and kicked about the face, and another man was hit on the face and had a tooth knocked out.

A young woman called Harriet Chaplin, who lived locally in Hurst Street, witnessed what happened. Unheeding of the violence meted out by the gang, she followed them and told the police what had happened and where the attackers were. James Thornton, aged twenty-four, was identified as the one who had struck the doctor and labourer. He was sentenced to two months’ imprisonment. The magistrates then thanked Harriet Chaplin for ‘her courageous conduct in following the men and recommended that the chief constable should make her some allowance’. Her bravery was all the more remarkable given that the offender, Thornton, also lived in Hurst Street.274

Four years later, in March 1905, there was an ‘exciting struggle between the police and three peaky blinders’ at Key Hill. PC James Smith found James Brough drunk in Park Road, Hockley. Aged twenty-two, he was a polisher from St Mark’s Street in Ladywood. He resisted arrest and, after knocking down the constable, kicked him about the body and face. Other officers appeared but then two of Brough’s friends tried to drag James Brough away. They would probably have succeeded ‘but for the prompt assistance rendered by several bystanders, who clung tenaciously to the prisoners and rolled over on the ground with them’. In particular, a Mr Tiller ‘displayed conspicuous courage, and it was mainly through his instrumentality that the prisoners were handcuffed, after an hour’s struggling’. PC Smith was unconscious and had to be taken to hospital, as was James Brough, whose clothes were almost torn off him. He and Mullis were each given a month’s hard labour, whilst William Brough was fined 20 shillings or a month’s hard labour. The chairman of the magistrates complimented the members of the public who had rendered prompt and valuable assistance to the police.275

The willingness to actively help the police was facilitated by the strong policing enforced by Chief Constable Rafter. From the beginning of his office, he was acutely aware that he had insufficient men for the needs of a city the size of Birmingham. Fortunately, this view was quickly confirmed by Her Majesty’s Inspector of Constabulary. In 1900, Captain the Hon. C. Legge declared that the Birmingham was much under-policed and recommended the addition of 220 men, as the beats were undermanned by about 200, whilst the detective department was understaffed and overworked.

The Watch Committee was convinced by these representations, but still did not ask the council for ‘the full augmentation suggested at one blow’. Probably influenced by ongoing cry for action against the peaky blinders and ruffianism, in February 1901, the council ‘assented without demur to an immediate increase of one hundred, to be followed by six annual increments of twenty men each’. This was to take the force to a strength of 920 by 1907.276

This marked rise in the number of men under his command ensured that Rafter could end the practice of single officers walking the beat. Working in pairs, the police were more able to defend themselves and fight against the peaky blinders. Rafter understood that there were ‘some parts of the city where police patrols literally carry their lives in their hands, and where the Hooligan looks upon it as his privilege and amusement to assault anyone who wears a policeman’s uniform’.²⁷⁷ Still, local newspapers were concerned that PC Gunter had been on his own when he was attacked, but as Rafter informed the Watch Committee, the constable had been joined by PC Heeley until ten to midnight, when everything seemed quiet. The murderous assault happened shortly after they had parted. Rafter also revealed that there were fourteen beats which worked double that night, and when PC Gunter blew his whistle it was heard by three other members of the force as well as other people in the neighbourhood. Moreover, the division in which PC Gunter served had already received its full quota of 100 men, authorised by the Watch Committee, whilst ‘the acquirement of the men was being proceeded as rapidly as it was possible for the training of staff to deal with the recruits’.²⁷⁸

According to a tradition in the city’s police force, Rafter asked three questions of his recruits: ‘Can they read? Can they write? Can they fight?’ An advertisement from the Sheffield Daily Telegraph of October 1901 suggests that the qualities he sought did include literacy and physical strength. It invited applications to join the Birmingham City Police from young men of good character and some education, who were at least 5 foot 9 inches tall and had a chest measurement of 36 inches. Nine years later, recruits were sought from ‘smart intelligent men of good character, physique, and education; single; age twenty-one to twenty-six; height, 5 foot 10 inches; chest measurement, 37 inches’. Wages were 25 shillings a week, rising to 33 shillings.279

Recruits who were not prepared to fight were not welcomed. In September 1903, a singular case of cowardice was brought before Rafter. A police constable had gone to arrest two youths for gambling, when he was assaulted violently by another man. The officer had been accompanied by a young recruit who had ‘not only failed go to his senior’s assistance, but, it is stated, he took to his heels to save his own skin’. The older constable was severely maltreated and was in hospital for over a week, whilst the recruit was dismissed.²⁸⁰

The belief that Rafter’s tall and well-built constables used physical force to put down the gangs is supported by the memories of Chief Inspector James McArdell. Hailing from Berkshire, he joined the Birmingham Police in January 1896 and ‘soon afterwards was mixed up with the notorious “Peaky Blinder” gangs which terrorised Birmingham. Month after month he was engaged in the repression of this hooliganism’, and recalled that ‘often we had to fight for our lives with these gangs’.²⁸¹ Looking back on these years in 1955, a reader of the Birmingham Weekly Post, R. W. Hawkins stated that it was recognised that if a member of a peaky blinder gang was arrested he should resist the police and ‘the gang would endeavour to rescue him. As the police of the period were mostly big and stalwart, and the tykes (as they were called) were usually short and tough, the gang usually had the worst of the deal.’282

There is a little official evidence for this claim that the police were willing to seek out physical fights with the peaky blinders, however, in the summer of 1900, certain police officers were found guilty of unjustifiable violence towards civilians and were punished.²⁸³ Two years later, on 1 May 1902, the Police Order Books recorded that complaints had been made to the chief constable by the justices of the peace regarding ‘certain cases where prisoners had been brought to Police Stations and complain of having been assaulted by the Constable arresting them, no memorandum of such complaint is made by the Reserve Sergeant or the Constable and no report on the subject is made to the Superintendent of the Division’.

It was ordered, therefore, that the superintendent would take steps to ensure that in future all such complaints would be noted down by the reserve sergeant and reported in due course. The chief constable also stressed that self-defence was the only circumstance in which policemen could use their staffs – and then only in the case of absolute necessity. Moreover, it was forbidden to strike anyone on the head with a staff, and they could not be used on prisoners who had to be treated with no unnecessary violence.²⁸⁴

From the late 1880s, the staves used by the police had been made of lignum vitae, a hard wood. However, in 1890 there was an outcry in the press as several of them had broken when constables had been using them against violent offenders. As a result, tests were carried out and, from 501 staves, 157 either snapped off short or cracked such a way as to be unfit for further use. It was said that, if properly cut, the staves should be almost unbreakable, but most of those that broke had not been cut with the grain of the wood, and in almost every case they snapped off short at the tapered portion above the grip.285 Given this evidence, the Watch Committee decided to arm the police with new staves made of hickory wood. This was chosen because it was tough but pliable, did not break readily, and a good sharp blow could be dealt with it.²⁸⁶

My great-uncle Wal told me that before the First World War, some of Rafter’s police, though, preferred another weapon to fight with:

They were nearly all Irish coppers at the time. Charles Haughton Rafter was Chief Constable and his recruits come from Ireland and they were all big, broad Irish blokes. They could carry out a job that he wanted them to; a bit of order . . . They used to come round, a couple of ’em if they found a disturbance at the Gate or any other pubs and they used to wear a cape rolled up on their belt. They’d find out who the culprits was and give ’em a warning, get ’em out the road and say, ‘Off home!’ If they didn’t comply with the coppers’ orders, they used to set about them. They hadn’t used to use their truncheons, they used to use their capes.²⁸⁷

The police cape was usually made of Melton cloth, although in Birmingham it was of wool serge.288 Thick, solid and hard-wearing, it made a hefty weapon that was easy to use and quick to hand, rolled up as it was on their belt.

Interestingly, former Royal Irish Constabulary men were not accepted by Rafter as, despite his own background, he did not believe in having ex-policemen in his force.²⁸⁹ Moreover, in February 1901, it was reported that he would only take on former soldiers if they had been discharged with a character of very good or excellent, but preferably the latter. It was also noted that most of the applicants for the force were Irishmen.²⁹⁰ This led to suggestions that the city’s police was becoming ‘Hibernianised’.²⁹¹ But, as was explained in the Birmingham Mail in October 1901, a large number of applications were continually received from young men in Ireland because the rate of pay for the police was better in England, whilst there was a lack of English applicants because of the good state of trade.²⁹² In reality, the Irish made up a small but significant minority of the Birmingham police force. In 1909, its actual strength was 950 men and they included 832 English, 64 Irish, 45 Welsh and nine others.²⁹³ The Irish made up almost 7 per cent, at a time when only 1 per cent of the general population was Irish.

One of the leading Irish policemen in Birmingham was Michael McManus, Rafter’s deputy chief constable, and the man who had knocked down a peaky blinder with his fist in defence of Pat Collins, the fairground showman. McManus had an outstanding and remarkable career. Brought up in Newfield, Mayo, and formerly a labourer, he joined the force in 1873, retiring in 1918. For several years, he was attached to the Duke Street Division, in what was deemed the roughest part of the town. A tough and determined man, he started his career when ‘there was good deal more lawlessness than there is to-day – when it was unsafe for policemen to venture singly into some of the streets in the slum quarters of Birmingham’. One of his earliest experiences was ‘a scrimmage with a crowd of roughs, one of whom struck him on the head with a brick necessitating his detention in hospital for five weeks’.294 On another occasion, McManus took on a gang of highway robbers on his own. Kicked, stabbed and beaten with belt buckles, he was mauled severely, but ‘he had some consolation as the ruffians had to accompany him to hospital’.²⁹⁵ Well known for riding a large white horse around Birmingham, McManus and many other Irish police officers passed into local working-class folklore.

Tough policing was also evident in Aston. Here, the police fightback against its feared slogging gangs was led by Superintendent H. A. Walker, who was appointed to his position in 1882. Upon his retirement in 1900, he emphasised that ridding the streets of these infamous bands was easier said than done. The sloggers ‘resented any interference on the part of the police, and in the course of the crusade which ensued a large number of officers were not only badly maltreated, but some of them so seriously injured as to be practically incapacitated from further service’. At the start of Walker’s campaign against the sloggers, heavy fines were imposed in the hope that these would have an effect. They failed as the gangs had collections for their members so punished. Fines were replaced by short terms of imprisonment, but they did not have the desired effect. The sloggers continued to flourish and ‘the police were daily flaunted and frequently brutally assaulted’. Then magistrates began to impose the maximum sentence of six months for each separate offence and the sloggers slowly disappeared. But it is apparent that the Aston police also fought fire with fire, breaking up the gangs with ‘severe repressive measures’.296 One policeman who was especially feared by the sloggers was ‘Big Jimmy’, PC Hodson, who never hesitated to tackle the gangs, no matter how threatening their attitude’.²⁹⁷

WHAT HAPPENED TO THE PEAKY BLINDERS?

Outbreaks of ruffianism did occur in Aston after Superintendent Walker’s retirement, but the reign of the slogging gangs was almost over in the district. Within a few years, the peaky blinders in Birmingham had also been put down. So what happened to them? In 1915, the Birmingham Mail reported that, like the rigorous young vagabonds who preferred a roving life to one in which work formed a part’, many peaky blinders had joined the Army and made good soldiers, too. Others had found respectable jobs with employers prepared to engage unskilled workers. It was emphasised that, ‘No one is more delighted than the local police, to whom these young “peaky blinders”, as they used to be called, were a never-ending source of trouble.’²⁹⁸

Reminiscing forty years later, Hawkins, the letter writer to the Birmingham Weekly Post, agreed that the First World War saw the end of the gangs: ‘Many were in the old militia and were called up and many joined the Regular Army. Few returned and they were older and more disciplined and settled down.’299

Henry Lightfoot, the first man to be specifically called a peaky blinder, exemplifies the perceptive observations of Hawkins. So too does George Hickling. Hickling was one of the notorious Ten Arches Gang of Aston, named after the railway viaduct crossing the Birmingham to Fazeley Canal at Holborn Hill, and first mentioned in 1883.³⁰⁰ In May 1900, George Hickling and his brother, Thomas, ‘two young men of the peaky type’ were charged with having thrown stones and brickbats that broke a window at the Church Inn on the Lichfield Road, where a man they disliked was drinking. The brothers were found guilty and jailed for one month as they could not pay the damages, fine and costs required of them.³⁰¹

Fifteen years later, George Hickling joined the Army, but as he was temporarily unfit he was transferred to the Reserve before he re-joined the colours with the Royal Berkshire Regiment in May 1916. Just five feet, 4 inches tall, he was aged thirty-nine and a bill poster. Soon after, Hickling married Clara Timmins at St Mary’s, Aston Brook. They had been cohabiting for seventeen years and had two illegitimate children. Living in a back house in Powell Street, they wed so that, presumably, Clara and their children could receive a separation allowance. Later, Hickling was assigned to the 17th Company, the 3rd Labour Battalion. It included men who were medically rated as below the ‘A1’ condition required for front line service. Hickling was BII. He was discharged in March 1919 with a 20 per cent disability of deafness and a pension for 26 weeks of 5 shillings and sixpence a week. His character was given as good.302

The peaky blinders continued to be written about, but now in the past tense. In 1925, in an article on the improvements in Birmingham, it was stressed that one important positive change was in the keeping of the peace, for the ‘bell bottom trousered and outrageously capped roughs who were a real source of annoyance, if not danger, to the general public and authorities a few decades ago’ had gone.³⁰³

The ridding of the city of the peaky blinders was further emphasised in 1929, when the Birmingham Daily Gazette informed its readers:

A slight on Birmingham by a London newspaper was refuted by returns the Chief Constable (Sir Charles H. Rafter) submitted to the Birmingham Watch Committee, yesterday. In a recent article the newspaper in question declared, ‘Three British cities are notorious for crimes of violence: Birmingham, Sheffield and Glasgow.’ Sir Charles Rafter, in presenting a return of crime in Birmingham from 1899 to 1928 said the article in question gave the city an extremely bad name, and so far as its remarks applied to Birmingham, they were wide of the truth. The returns would show that the city was in a comparatively happy state in regard to crime; instead of there being an increase, there had been a considerable diminution.

The chairman (Councillor W. E. Lee) said there were a few comparisons in the returns which were worth singling out. Comparing the position in 1913 with that in 1928, it would be seen that assaults on police had fallen from 387 to 123; common assaults from 877 to 484. All these decreases had taken place notwithstanding the fact that there were 120,000 more people in the city in 1929 than there were in 1913. The peaky blinder of 1899 had disappeared long ago, and so had the gangs.304

Of course, not all violent men suddenly became peaceful and the police still faced violence, albeit markedly less so. In September 1910, two constables asked a crowd of men to move on from outside a restaurant in Essex Street. Very filthy language was heard from one of them and, as the policemen moved towards the offenders, Robert Daly swung a military buckle belt in his hand and crashed it through the helmet of PC Clark and cut his head. He and his colleague were then both hit. Daly ran away but was caught by PC Clark and was ‘felled to the ground with his staff’. He remained on the ground for two minutes and then rose up and further assaulted the officers. By now the crowd had become hostile and bricks and bottles were thrown at the two policemen. Daly was sentenced to two month’s hard labour.³⁰⁵

Some small gangs also continued. In June 1920, six young men were each given six months’ hard labour for assaulting Robert Graves and Albert Woodin by kicking and striking them in Dale End. Whilst the Birmingham Daily Gazette called the offenders hooligans and street terrorists, the chairman of the magistrates named them hooligans and sloggers. It is suggestive that they were not called peaky blinders. This occasion appears to be the last use of the term ‘sloggers’ and came fifteen years after the previous mention of slogging gangs in the newspapers.306 Yet, and as with any big city, there were plenty of other hard men in poorer working-class neighbourhoods, some of whom had been peaky blinders in their youths and some of whom were bullies.

Notable amongst the latter were the Kirbys. In March 1927, James Kirby, aged twenty-six, and Frederick Kirby, twenty-four, were sent to prison for two months for a brutal assault on a policeman. They both lived in Tower Street in the Summer Lane neighbourhood, and in court Inspector Shereston said the district had become so troublesome that extra police had been drafted in.³⁰⁷ Three years later, the Kirbys and two others were described as the ‘most notorious men in the city’ and people in the Newtown Row neighbourhood ‘dare not come to court to give evidence against them’. Convicted of breaking into a factory, James Kirby was sentenced to twelve months’ hard labour. His brother was already in prison for violence after the Birmingham races and was give fifteen months’ hard labour.³⁰⁸

Importantly, though, no concern was raised about a revival of peaky blinderism or hooliganism in the Birmingham newspapers following the 1920 case or the reports about the Kirbys. As for the Garrison Lane/Watery Lane neighbourhood, in which the Shelbys and their gang are originally based in the Peaky Blinders series, no available working-class accounts from or relating to the 1920s make mention of peaky blinders.³⁰⁹

THE GARRISON LANE NEIGHBOURHOOD

In common with other poorer neighbourhoods, though, this area of Bordesley on the borders of Small Heath did have a family that was feared – the Harper brothers. Beattie Hamill was born in Artillery Street in 1907 and lived at number 44. As a teenager in the 1920s, she worked at the fish shop in Garrison Lane, and recalled, ‘When they got drunk they used to come in there, you know, and play up they would, and of a Friday night you could always expect ’em to come in drunk’. On one particular Friday night, the brothers arrived blind drunk and Billy Harper wanted to swap some oranges for fish and chips. Hamill told him that she could not do that. ‘Any road, the gaffer come in from the living accommodation and told ’em to clear orf and of course they started to get rough then, and they was throwing the oranges at him and one went into the pan of fat.’

At that, Hamill went ‘through the back of the house and come down the entry to look for the night policeman, which you would always find, either in Gordon Street or Wolseley Street or somewhere, ‘cus they tried every door’. The constable came and had to use his truncheon and handcuff the brothers. Billy was remembered as the biggest terror of them all, and he, his brother, Wagger, and their mates used to stand at the corner of Wolseley Street and Gordon Street, where they went into Garrison Lane. After they came out of the pub, the men would stand there singing, and it was here where they used to pitch their pennies. The gang, of which they were leading members, was named the Five Ways Albion.310

Born in 1915, and raised at 312 Garrison Lane, Victor Andrews wrote an evocative account of his younger days in the neighbourhood. Their house was ‘on the hill’, opposite St Andrew’s, the Birmingham City ground. Behind the ground’s terrace was a tip for industrial waste in the old clay pits. The digging out of millions of tons of red clay had made an enormous gash in the hill. Although it was fenced off, local people found ways of getting in, and for children it was ‘a forbidden land of excitement and danger’. And for the local unemployed men it was a place of seclusion and escape from the attentions of the police when they played at tossing coins.

Although harmless, it was illegal and police raids were frequent. Andrews was offended by the police action against poor men seeking solace and release from their miserable existence and wondered how the police justified their operations instead of apprehending ‘some gang of dangerous criminals’. One raid on a quiet Sunday morning in 1926 was etched into his memory. He was sitting on the doorstep to his house, watching other children play hopscotch, when:

A Black Maria van crossed over the tramlines from the other side of the road and braked sharply to a halt at the corner of the cul-de-sac leading to the clay pit. Another police van carried on down the hill and stopped at the other cul-de-sac by the railway bridge. The rear doors of the vehicles were thrown open and dozens of uniformed men erupted out. Some ran up the roads towards the pit, whilst others clambered over the railway bridge parapet to drop down onto the railway banking. I learned later that all the exits had been covered in this operation involving over fifty policemen. The ‘bag’ was about thirty men. They were bundled into some cars that had appeared. Some angry mothers, wives and sisters had by this time emerged from their parlours and kitchens and were giving the constables an earful of screamed abuse. The sight of the gleaming black batons in the fists of the officers deterred any thought of attempted rescue. Their passive, sullen menfolk were taken away. The wives later donned their outdoor coats or shawls and set off, some to try to raise bail money from sympathetic relatives or friends, others to go to the police station to give moral support to their imprisoned husbands.311

In the later, nineteenth century, such a police raid would have provoked a violent response from local sloggers and peaky blinders. Yet though the peaky blinders had gone, not all of them settled down and become peaceful citizens. A few went on to become part of the notorious Birmingham Gang that terrorised the racecourses of England, whilst other became involved in a bloody and long-lasting feud that became known as the Garrison Lane Vendetta. It was fought between a man called Billy Beach and his allies against a violent and vengeful family called the Sheldons, who have a connection with the fictional Shelbys of Peaky Blinders.