AFTERWORD

In a brutal fight in episode two, series three of Peaky Blinders, John Shelby single-handedly assaults Angel Changretta and his minder. The son of the Birmingham Italian gangster, Vicente Changretta, he has been caught unawares after walking downstairs to a cellar-like area in a Chinese laundry. Directed to a hanger laden with cleaned suits, he pulls them apart to find the one marked with his name – but is startled to see John Shelby smirking dangerously through the gap. Swiftly the peaky blinder punches Changretta to the ground and then, with a heavy cosh, batters his minder into unconsciousness. His boss is struggling to get up but Shelby turns, kicks him back down and drags him around. Changretta slumps on to his back and Shelby takes off his peaky cap and slashes the right cheek of his enemy. In terrible pain, Changretta covers his face as blood seeps between his fingers.⁶¹⁴ In the ensuing wars between the two gangs, Angel Changretta is killed and his father is assassinated. Their deaths enrage another son Luca Changretta. A mafioso from New York, he vows revenge and becomes Tommy Shelby’s main protagonist in series four.

The Changretta Gang did not exist, but from the late nineteenth century there was a real Changretta family in Birmingham. Its members were the antithesis of the fictional Italian gangsters of the series, and the use of their unusual name draws into sharp relief the tension between historical fiction and historical realities.

The real family arrived in Birmingham with Martino Ciangretta, which became spelled as ‘Changretta’ in England. Hard-working and peaceful, he was devoted to his family and made a positive and long-lasting impact upon Birmingham. He belonged to a small and law-abiding Italian community which had no connections with Sicily, the Mafia or gangsters. That community had developed from the late 1870s, when burgeoning numbers of southern Italians emigrated because of severe poverty.

The first links of a striking chain migration were formed by young people from the communes of Picinisco, Atina and Gallinaro and the village of Carnello in the Comino Valley. Now in the province of Frosinone, they are close to the town of Sora.615 The emigrants settled in Bartholomew Street and Duddeston Row, close to the modern Millennium Point. They did so because of the availability of cheap back-to-back housing for rent; the proximity to the Bull Ring, which gave the opportunity to earn money by playing barrel organs to shoppers; and the closeness of St Michael’s Roman Catholic church on Moor Street – which came to be regarded as the Italians’ church.616

Baptismal and marriage certificates point to the importance of a Giuseppe Delicata in beginning the chain in the early 1880s. He and his family were the base for newcomers connected to them by communal and kinship loyalties.⁶¹⁷ But he was also a padrone, a man established in England who returned regularly to Italy to find youths whom he could bring back to Birmingham. He would pay for their passage and board and keep, but they had to reimburse him by labouring for him for a specified time. Their task was to walk the streets playing a barrel organ.⁶¹⁸ One of them was Martino Changretta.

Born in 1868, he stated that he was from Sora, as did all the Birmingham Italians from the Comino Valley.⁶¹⁹ He arrived in 1887 in his late teens.⁶²⁰ Six years later, in February 1893, Ciangetto Martino, as he was named in a newspaper report, and another ‘piano grinder’ were assaulted. Speaking through an interpreter, he told the court that they had been playing on the Hagley Road when they were told to leave by two other Italians as their padrone had worked the road for thirteen years. If they did not do so, they would be killed. The threat was ignored, but soon after, one of the men struck Changretta on the lip and the head with a small knife and beat him with an iron bar. The assailant was fined merely two shillings.⁶²¹

By this time, Martino Changretta was twenty-five and he had met his wife, Ann Kitchen. Their granddaughter, Victoria Hooper, wrote that although her grandmother had been born in Chipping Norton in the Cotswolds in 1873, the family had moved to Bartholomew Street by the mid-1880s. In the Italian Quarter: ‘Gran met Martino Ciangretta, a strapping dark-eyed, curly-haired Italian. He was well over six foot while Gran was a tiny, little young woman of 4 foot 10 inches with long blonde hair that was waist length. The cart was put before the horse, so to speak, and they were married at St Michael’s in October 1893 and my Aunt Chris was born a month later.’622

The Changrettas had fourteen children. Another granddaughter, Pam Ovethrow, explained that the oldest was born in 1893 and the youngest in 1917. Four of them died in infancy. She was told that her grandfather had gone to America, ‘to see if it would be a better life for his family. It didn’t work out and he came back to Annie and the children.’⁶²³

Sometime after his marriage, Changretta left Delicata’s service and became a bricklayer. By 1922, he was the foreman in charge of the work to clear the Broad Street site for Birmingham’s Hall of Memory, which would honour the men from the city who had died in the First World War. Amongst some, that role aroused anger and letters were written to the local newspapers asking why foreigners had been taken on instead of those who had fought and helped pay for the memorial. The contractors replied that of the sixteen men employed, the only foreigner was an Italian, who was an expert in demolition work, whilst their foreman was a naturalised Englishman.

Changretta himself also responded to the critics in the name of T(homas) Martin, the English name he had adopted. He emphasised that he had been in Birmingham for thirty-five years, that he was married to an Englishwoman and that he had served in the Boer War. Moreover, his oldest son had made the supreme sacrifice, having been killed in action during the First World War. The other ‘foreigners’ were his sons-in-law, ‘born of an English mother in this city’. They had each served ‘in the late war and went through the thick of it’. Expressing his personal hurt at the criticisms, Changretta stated that he was in ‘in charge of a job that is to be a memorial to the fallen, among whom, if the names are inscribed, will be that of my son’.624 So it was. Gunner K. G. Changretta of the Royal Garrison Artillery is remembered in Birmingham’s Roll of Honour in the Hall of Memory.

Changretta went on to start his own demolition business in Lawley Street, doing some large jobs for Birmingham Council and also clearing out all the inside walls of Curzon Hall so that it could be converted into the West End Cinema.⁶²⁵

However, the ageing Martino and Annie Changretta were to suffer more sorrows in the Second World War. Their house in Belmont Row was bombed in 1942 and, as Hooper recollected, ‘Gran and my cousins, Alfie and Ray, had to be dug out of the ruins with petrol pouring down the street from the garage next door. Thank God they were all OK, although Gran went stone deaf afterwards. More sadness was to follow with the death of Uncle Vic in Italy in September 1943. His name continues to live on in the family as he was so loved by all his nieces and nephews.’⁶²⁶

Victor Changretta was the youngest child, having been born in 1917. He served as a private with the 1/6th Battalion, the Queen’s Royal Regiment (West Surrey). A married man aged twenty-five, he was killed in action on 30 September 1943. Poignantly, he died in the Allied landings at Salerno, Italy – his father’s country. A year later, his extended family remembered him with ten notices in the ‘In Memoriam’ column of the Birmingham Mail. His wife, Florrie, wrote that he had marched bravely away to fight for Britain.627 Industrious, law-abiding, honourable and true, the real Changrettas gave to their country and to their city, unlike the real gangsters of England in the 1920s.

Yet it is not respectable and respected real families like the Changrettas that have an alluring appeal for drama, it is glamorised fictional gangsters. As with the mafiosi, they are held up as caring for their families and defenders of their communities. Men of honour, they inflict violence only upon opposing gangsters or on people who have violated a code of conduct that is regarded as ‘moral’. Those who have no dealings with such mobsters have nothing to fear; wives and motherly women are respected, the elderly are honoured, and children are protected. Loyal, truthful, unafraid, trustworthy and principled, they are admired as anti-establishment figures who have created an ‘alternative’ society. Though outsiders and criminals, they are successful, moneyed, well-dressed and respected. Psychologically distant from onlookers, the gangster thus becomes a romanticised figure – like Tommy Shelby.⁶²⁸

In reality, there was nothing romantic or glamorous about the racecourse gangsters of 1920s England who have been brought to the fore in the series Peaky Blinders. Billy Kimber was a pickpocket and extortionist who became prosperous through brute force and the fear of violence. Disloyal to his first wife and their children, he abandoned them to a life of poverty. Though regarded by some as ‘the gentleman of the gang’, Darby Sabini was another thug who gained his wealth through open intimidation and ruthless attacks on those who crossed him. Although not as powerful as either Sabini or Kimber, like them Alfie Solomon was violent and after he killed a man in a row in the Eden Club, was fortunate to be found guilty of manslaughter and not murder, for which he would have been hanged.

None of them, nor others such as Edward Emanuel and Harry ‘Boy’ Sabini, were men to be admired as honourable, principled or moral. And nor were the real peaky blinders and sloggers of back-street Birmingham. Vicious youths and men who revelled in inflicting pain and bloody injuries upon their enemies, many were akin to John Sheldon, who shunned fair fighting and instead fought mob-handed and with weapons.

Others were the same as my great grandfather, Edward Derrick, a petty thief who physically abused his wife, assaulted a policeman and wounded another person. They were despicable men and those who should be admired are those who stood up to them. People like Edward Cook, who confronted sloggers; like Constable Lines, who was killed by a gang in saving another officer; and like the courageous Harriet Chaplin, who followed ruffians who had assaulted a number of men and identified them to the police.

And we should also admire the great majority of the poor, who did not turn to criminality and violence and who had to endure the reign of the peaky blinders until it was ended. Despite living in an unfair and mostly uncaring society, and despite the unending battle against the unrelenting enemy of poverty, they strove daily to stay clean, honest and decent. In the midst of what ill-informed onlookers denigrated as ‘slums’, mothers, aunts, grandmothers and big sisters, in particular, forged viable neighbourhoods through their kinship and neighbourly relationships. Unlike the peaky blinders and the racecourse gangsters, it was these women who were the ones who were loyal, honourable, truthful and principled and who adhered to a moral code of conduct. It is they whom we should respect.