The Real-Life ‘Peaky Blinders’: Here’s the True Story Behind the Show
OPINION: This article may contain commentary which reflects the author's opinion.
The on-screen story of Tommy Shelby (Cillian Murphy) and his crew of Birmingham miscreants may be a work of fiction, but the Peaky Blinders? Well, they aren’t just a myth. A real gang that operated in the late 1800s, the crew ran in most of the same circles as the Shelby family on Peaky Blinders: They were bookmakers and racketeers who regularly clashed with other gangs and with the authorities. But the Steven Knight–created series also has its share of exaggerations and wholesale inventions, mostly derived from the local folklore of the Blinders in Birmingham, England. Below, we break down exactly what on Peaky Blinders is true — and what’s a blind of its own.
True: The Blinders wore peaked newsboy caps — and more.
One of the things that set the Blinders apart from other gangs of the era was their sense of style. In stark contrast to their violent outbursts, the real Peaky Blinders dressed with a sense of colorful pizzazz, sometimes even adding a silk scarf to an outfit. Contrary to popular opinion (see below), the name of the gang may have actually originated with style: Peaky for their peaked caps and Blinder as Birmingham slang for a striking gentleman.
False: The Blinders sewed razor blades into their caps.
One of the gang’s most memorable sartorial choices on the show: their razor blade–enhanced caps. It’s a common urban legend about the real gang, but not an entirely accurate one. As the story goes, these caps were used to smuggle weapons into places where they could be used to slice and blind the Blinders’ enemies. However, it seems unlikely that such hat/weapon would have been possible during the crew’s reign of terror.
“[Razor blades] were only beginning to come in from the 1890s and were a luxury item, much too expensive for the Peaky Blinders to have used,” historian Carl Chinn told the Birmingham Mail. “And any hard man would tell you it would be very difficult to get direction and power with a razor blade sewn into the soft part of a cap.”
True: The Blinders clashed with the Birmingham Boys.
While the real-life Peaky Blinders were never quite the united front that they present in the series, Birmingham’s various groups did have their own sets of rivals, including the Birmingham Boys, led by Billy Kimber (played by Charlie Creed-Miles in the show). Kimber, presented as a London-born gangster, was in fact a Birmingham native; in fact, Chinn says at one point he was even a Peaky Blinder himself.
False: The Blinders continued to hold influence over England after World War I.
In the series, the Blinders expand their influence into racehorses and even politics as time goes by. The series is set in the aftermath of World War I; the latest season reaches as far as 1934. In reality, the Birmingham Boys had usurped the Blinders bythe 1920s. (They would, in turn, be overthrown by the Sabini Gang.) As time passed, the name Peaky Blinders would come to be synonymous with any Birmingham street criminals, paving the way for the urban legends that would inspire the series.
Bonus round: Who’s real and who’s not?
The Shelby family: Fictional! Cillian Murphy’s Thomas Shelby tragically exists only in our dreams.
Winston Churchill: Played by Andy Nyman, Richard McCabe and Neil Maskell, this future British prime minister was, in fact, a real guy. For more on this, see the first season of The Crown. (Or, you know, read almost any history book.)
Billy Kimber: The leader of the Birmingham Boys (also known as the Brummagem Boys) was a real gang leader and possibly the biggest crime boss in England. In real life, he died of a prolonged illness rather than a shot from Thomas Shelby’s gun.
Darby Sabini: Noah Taylor’s Italian kingpin was a real English criminal who clashed with Kimber and his Birmingham Boys over control of racecourses for years.
Alfie Solomons: Solomons is based on a real-life gangster named Alfred Solomon. Like most Tom Hardy characters, the accent is purely of his own invention. No one but Tom Hardy would ever talk like that.
Sir Oswald Mosley: The founder and leader of the British Union of Fascists was a real political leader. During World War II, he was considered a threat to national security and interned for the duration of the war. In Peaky Blinders, he’s played by Sam Claflin.
Diana Mosley: Oswald’s wife (played by Amber Anderson) was also a real figure, a member of an aristocratic English family who shared her husband’s proclivity for European fascists. Hitler referred to her as his “angel” and even attended the couple’s wedding. She was also interned during the war: MI5 documents show that the government considered her an even greater threat than her husband.
