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Lady swindlers: 6 women who turned to lives of crime and became queens of the underworld
The BBC series, Lady Swindlers with Lucy Worsley, tells the stories of female criminals from the 18th to 20th centuries. Their chicanery often earned them great riches, yet, as series consultant Rosalind Crone reveals through six case studies, their schemes didn’t always go to plan
Alice Diamond: the “queen of the forty thieves” who amassed a fortune While the Peaky Blinders, Brigton Billy Boys and Charles Sabini’s mob terrorised the streets of Britain’s major cities, there was another, equally notorious all-female gang whose shoplifting sprees brought havoc to London’s West End. Read more | The real Peaky Blinders The Forty Elephants, named after the thieves in the legend of Ali Baba and their geographical home (Elephant and Castle), were active from about the 1880s. By the mid-1910s, the gang had a new leader, Alice Diamond (alias Diana Black), described in newspapers of the time as “Queen of the Forty Thieves”. Alice was born in 1896 in the Lambeth workhouse infirmary, and grew up alongside seven siblings in the grim tenements of Southwark, south London. According to the 1911 census, Alice had begun working as a servant when she was just 14 years old. While this was an age of growing opportunities for some working-class women to move into better-paid employment in factories and offices, others – domestic servants, dressmakers and laundresses – found themselves stuck in low-paid work, unable to participate (legally) in new forms of leisure and consumerism. Read more | What was life like for women in Edwardian Britain? The new West End department stores, with their accessible displays of ready-to-wear clothes, proved an irresistible temptation to many. Some shoplifters worked alone, others formed groups, and for Alice and her gang shoplifting became a career. New members were inducted and trained. All had to abide by a ‘hoisters’ code’, which bound them to support each other, share proceeds equally and abstain from “drinking before a raid”. A Metropolitan Police detective explained that the women would dress up and “descend upon a West End store like a plague of locusts… practically clean[ing] the place out inside an hour”. Stolen clothes, fabrics and furs were rolled up and stuffed inside their grafter’s bloomers (pants with giant pockets). Getaway cars transported the ladies back to Southwark where they would sell the clothes on as quickly as possible. Alice didn’t always get away with it. She appeared regularly before the London magistrates and served numerous short prison sentences between 1915 and 1936. Still, at the peak of her career, Alice was making about £30 a week, a small fortune in those days. She spent the money on glamorous clothes, expensive jewellery and entertainment, leaving almost nothing behind when she died in 1952. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2024/11/GettyImages-1053521524web-b9ec6dc-e1731338240983.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="Shoppers head towards the Swan & Edgar department store at Piccadilly Circus, c1908. The upmarket shops in London’s West End often attracted ‘professional’ shoplifters (Photo by Reinhold Thiele/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)" title="Shoppers head towards the Swan & Edgar department store at Piccadilly Circus, c1908. The upmarket shops in London’s West End often attracted ‘professional’ shoplifters (Photo by Reinhold Thiele/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)" /> Fanny Davies: the cross-dressing con artist with quick fingers, but a loose tongue On 2 September 1785, cattle dealer John Wigglesworth secured a room at the Sign of the Three Rabbits, an inn in Little Ilford, Essex. Wigglesworth was on his way from his home in Gosfield to Smithfield Market in London to purchase some new stock. While drinking in the bar, Wigglesworth began a conversation with a young and amiable horse dealer whom Wigglesworth assumed was a man. They shared a pipe of tobacco, and Wigglesworth unwisely disclosed that he had with him a large sum of money to conduct his business. After supper, both retired to their respective rooms. Wigglesworth put his canvas bag containing his money in his breeches and tucked them under his pillow. Read more | ‘She didn’t cry’: how this Tudor woman’s lack of emotion condemned her to death Then, “about the hour of one in the night”, his new friend broke into his room, stole his breeches and his bag containing around £1,200, and crept out of the inn. It was an audacious act of thievery – even more so because the young horse dealer was a 21-year-old woman called Fanny Davies. Born in Southwark c1762, Fanny’s early life was marked by great hardship. According to her biographer, by the time Fanny was just five years old, her father had died and her mother had been transported to America. Fanny was apprenticed to a milliner, but supplemented her wages through petty theft and casual prostitution. By the 1780s, she had allegedly become the mistress of a nobleman, the girlfriend of a highwayman, and a cross-dressing thief. The theft at the Three Rabbits brought Fanny’s exploits in London to an end. Feeling flush, on 4 September Fanny visited a female friend imprisoned in Newgate Gaol and “gave her a guinea and a pair of silver buckles – and boasted of the exploit”. The friend, “being a favourite of the executioner”, informed the authorities. Fanny was arrested. Read more | Were there any real highwaywomen, and did they dress up as men? At her trial on 6 March 1786, she was convicted of robbery and sentenced to death, the judge warning her that she could not “anticipate a pardon or expect that your sex will protect you from the hand of justice”. Despite this, Fanny’s sentence was commuted to 14 years’ transportation to Australia. On 31 January 1787, she boarded the Lady Penrhyn at Gravesend with around 100 other convict women, to travel as part of the First Fleet. They remained on the ship for more than a year, disembarking at Sydney Cove on 6 February 1788. Fanny settled in New South Wales, unusually returning to England three times before she died, in her mid-60s, on 11 November 1828. Sarah Rachel Russell, aka Madame Rachel: the beauty expert with an ugly secret In the 1860s, the beauty industry was expanding. At the centre of it was a shop at 47a New Bond Street, Mayfair, run by Madame Rachel. Described as a ‘Temple of Renovation’, Madame Rachel’s shop lured in customers with its attractive displays of bottles and soaps, exotic products such as ‘Pearl Powder’, ‘Circassian Beauty Wash’ and ‘Magnetic Rock Dew Water of the Sahara’, and exclusive treatments, including enamelling and Arabian baths. A sign above the door claimed Madame Rachel was “Purveyor of Arabian Perfumery to the Queen”. In her prolific advertisements, Madame Rachel promised to make customers “beautiful for ever”. Read more | A bodice-ripping revolution: how Victorian women cast off deadly fashion trends Madame Rachel was a middle-aged and illiterate woman called Sarah Rachel Russell. She was a former fried-fish seller and a (mostly) single mother of seven children, some of whom worked alongside her in the shop. At a time when youthful looks were highly prized, well-to-do women flocked to see her. In the pursuit of beauty, some became hooked on Madame Rachel’s expensive treatments and ran up large debts. When they couldn’t pay (married women had limited access to money), Madame Rachel demanded their jewellery in lieu of suing their husbands. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2024/11/GettyImages-3107334web-cabe3b3-e1731338415328.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="New Bond Street beauty store proprietor ‘Madame Rachel’ (pictured c1868), who sold fake products and treatments to her gullible customers, some of whom ran up huge debts with her (Photo by Southwell Bros/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)" title="New Bond Street beauty store proprietor ‘Madame Rachel’ (pictured c1868), who sold fake products and treatments to her gullible customers, some of whom ran up huge debts with her (Photo by Southwell Bros/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)" /> In 1868, Madame Rachel tricked one of her customers, 50-year-old widow Mary Tucker Borradaile, into believing that an aristocrat called Lord Ranelagh had fallen for her. (The subterfuge followed a chance meeting between Borradaile and Ranelagh, and was sustained by forged love letters.) He had also, according to Madame Rachel, proposed marriage, but only if Mrs Borradaile underwent a series of expensive beauty treatments. The widow was soon broke, and Madame Rachel even had her imprisoned for the debt she owed the beautician. Friends and relatives convinced Mrs Borradaile to prosecute Madame Rachel for obtaining money by false pretences. At the Old Bailey trial, both women were censured by the court, press and public. Mrs Borradaile was accused of being vain and gullible, and ridiculed for her use of cosmetics, which were still associated with sex workers and other unrespectable women. Madame Rachel was condemned, not just for her crime, but as a retailer in the beauty industry, which was regarded as a devious trade that encouraged women to hide their true appearance, to the detriment of men. Read more | Challenging gender in the Victorian Age: the 'masculine' New Woman and 'effeminate' New Man Madame Rachel was found guilty and sentenced to five years’ penal servitude. On her release, she resumed her thriving business. But in 1878, she was back in court, and this time the true ingredients in her expensive products were exposed. According to her maid, Madame Rachel’s famous Magnetic Rock Dew of the Sahara combined with water from the river Jordan contained “starch and Fuller’s earth and something out of a paper” put in bottles and mixed with “water from the ordinary water-tap of the house”. Madame Rachel was sentenced to another five years’ penal servitude and died in prison two years later. Mary Willcocks: the imposter masquerading as the enigmatic Princess Caraboo On 3 April 1817, a young woman arrived in the quiet village of Almondsbury near Bristol, dressed in “a black stuff gown” with “a black cotton shawl on her head, and a red and black shawl round her shoulders… in imitation of the Asiatic costume”. She knocked on the door of a cottage. When the inhabitants answered, she began to make signs that suggested she wanted a place to sleep. When she spoke, the “cottagers, not comprehending her language, reported the case to Mrs Worrall”, mistress at the local country estate, Knole Park, and wife of a banker and local magistrate. Mrs Worrall paid for the woman to stay at the village pub. The next day, Mrs Worrall returned to find the young woman in a state of distress. She took her back to Knole Park, and through perseverance discovered the woman’s name was Caraboo. Read more | 8 scandals that shocked Georgian Britain Next, Mrs Worrall found a Portuguese sailor in Bristol who was familiar with Asian languages and willing to interpret. He revealed that the woman was a princess from the island of ‘Javasu’ who had been kidnapped by pirates and escaped when sailing up the Bristol Channel. Princess Caraboo became an honoured guest at Knole Park. Visitors from all over the country came to see her, bringing exotic items, books with pictures of foreign lands, and dictionaries of languages they hoped she might recognise. Everyone was enchanted with her behaviour. According to one account, “She oftentimes carried a gong on her back… and a tambourine in her hand… and a bow and arrow slung as usual, her head dressed with flowers and feathers.” <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2024/11/BAL63289web-38aba29-e1731338528409.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="A portrait from 1817 shows ‘Princess Caraboo’ as an Asian royal. In fact, she was Mary Willcocks, a cobbler’s daughter from north Devon (Photo by Bristol Museums, Galleries & Archives/Civic painting, transferred 1972/Bridgeman Images)" title="A portrait from 1817 shows ‘Princess Caraboo’ as an Asian royal. In fact, she was Mary Willcocks, a cobbler’s daughter from north Devon (Photo by Bristol Museums, Galleries & Archives/Civic painting, transferred 1972/Bridgeman Images)" /> But in early June 1817, a Mrs Neale came forward in response to a description in the newspapers and declared that Princess Caraboo was, in fact, her former lodger, an English woman called Mary Willcocks. When it was clear that her game was up, Caraboo, or Mary, told Mrs Worrall the truth. She was a cobbler’s daughter from Devon, who had worked as a domestic servant in London, suffered the loss of a child, and become a vagrant in Bristol where she learned she could earn more from begging if she wore a turban and pretended to be foreign. Read more | Imposters in history: 16 famous con-artists and pretenders On hearing her story, Mrs Worrall took pity on Mary, and gave her money for a passage to America. Delighted, Mary left Bristol with ambitions to exhibit herself, with the help of an agent, as Princess Caraboo. The show was a flop. By 1825, Mary had returned to Bristol. In September 1828, she married Richard Baker, a local man, who was a supplier of leeches for the local hospital. Mary joined the business until her death in 1864. Tilly Devine: The brothel-owning, razor-blade-wielding gangster with more diamonds than Queen Mary “I’ve been hounded out of Australia. They’ve chased me all over the place. I’m sick of it!” Reading Matilda (Tilly) Devine’s words, uttered to a reporter in 1930, you’d be forgiven for thinking that she was the innocent victim of a cruel system that had never given her a fair crack of the whip. The truth, however, was rather different. Recent research by historians has demonstrated that female gang members could be every bit as ruthless and violent as their male counterparts – and that they sometimes played a central role in organising criminal activities. That was certainly true of Tilly Devine. In fact, she was so ruthless, so ambitious and so at ease with violence that she became one of the ‘Queens of the Underworld’ in Sydney during the 1920s and 1930s. Tilly was born thousands of miles from the Antipodes – in Camberwell, south London, in 1900 – and in her teens began making a living as a sex worker on The Strand. It is here that she likely met her future husband, Jim Devine, an Australian serviceman sent to fight in the trenches during the First World War. They married in August 1917, and Tilly followed Jim back to Sydney on the Matatua, a war bride ship, in 1920. In Sydney, Jim became Tilly’s pimp and she was described by police as “a prostitute of the worst type”. She was also ambitious, and had dreams of becoming wealthy. Jim and Tilly soon became involved in drug-dealing and sly-grog (unlicensed liquor stores). After a spell in prison in the mid-1920s, Tilly took advantage of a loophole in the law that made it illegal for men – but not women – to profit from prostitution. She bought a property at 191 Palmer Street in the Darlinghurst suburb of Sydney and set up a brothel. By the late 1920s, she had built an empire of 18 brothels frequented by politicians and businessmen as well as working-class men. With their increasing wealth, Jim and Tilly bought a house by the sea. Tilly declared that she had more diamond rings than Queen Mary “and better ones too”. To maintain their ascendancy, Jim and Tilly frequently resorted to violence. While Jim was charged (but acquitted) with the murder of several gangland figures, Tilly took part in the razor wars of the late 1920s (in which the shaving instrument became Sydney gangsters’ weapon of choice). At one point, she was overheard screaming at a police officer: “I will slash your face to pieces on Monday with a razor!” Read more | Gangs and knife-crime fears: how has Britain responded through history? In 1930, Tilly was arrested for consorting with known criminals, thanks to new legislation passed to help the police suppress the gangs. To escape conviction, Tilly agreed to return to England, which is when she lamented that she’d been hounded out of Australia. Within a year, she had returned to Australia – and to her criminal business. In 1955, however, she suffered a huge blow when she was ordered to pay $20,000 in unpaid income tax and she was brought to the edge of bankruptcy. Tilly sold her last brothel in 1968 and died two years later. Violet Charlesworth: the fake heiress who faked her own death... then found fame on the stage On 2 January 1909, a motor car crashed through a safety wall on the coast road near the village of Penmaenmawr, north Wales, coming to a stop a mere 18 inches from the edge of the cliff. The two passengers emerged from the vehicle unharmed, but the driver, Violet Charlesworth, a well-known heiress in the local area, had vanished. Her notebook and tam-o-shanter hat were found on the rocks, but there was no body and little chance that the sea could have swallowed her. The police soon became suspicious. Superintendent Rees was puzzled that Violet’s family had offered a reward of £20 for the recovery of the body, “but they have not worried me for details of the search. I have had to send to them for details and particulars.” The crash also took place just before Violet’s 25th birthday on 13 January, the day she was meant to receive a substantial inheritance from a Mr Alexander MacDonald, an Australian of Scottish descent whom she supposedly met at a party when she was 17. On the promise of this windfall, Violet, with her mother’s encouragement, had borrowed significant sums from a neighbour called Mrs Smith, and a fiancé, Dr Edward Hughes Jones. Her family had moved from their modest house in Derby to a grand residence in north Wales. Violet had also acquired motor cars and St Bernard dogs, rented further properties in Scotland and Wiltshire, and begun to speculate on the stock market. In January 1909, it soon became apparent that there was no inheritance and that Violet was a fake heiress. She was found, three days after her 25th birthday, at a hotel in Oban, Scotland, pretending to be a Miss Margaret McLeod. Once discovered, Violet tried to capitalise on her situation. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2024/11/GettyImages-541793765eb-2f529af-e1731338786769.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="Violet Charlesworth (pictured by her car) apparently disappeared after a motoring accident near Llandudno, but in reality she had fled to Scotland (Photo by ullstein bild/ullstein bild via Getty Images)" title="Violet Charlesworth (pictured by her car) apparently disappeared after a motoring accident near Llandudno, but in reality she had fled to Scotland (Photo by ullstein bild/ullstein bild via Getty Images)" /> She sold her story to the Weekly Dispatch, and offered readers the chance to buy a song she had composed, entitled ‘Good-bye Girlie, I Must Go’. She starred in a silent film called The Welsh Cliff Mystery. And she hired an agent who secured for her a major music hall tour to perform a sketch called ‘A Clever Woman’ for £300 per week. But the music hall tour was a flop and on 12 October 1909 Violet was declared bankrupt. Four months later, Violet and her mother were convicted of fraud against Mrs Smith and Dr Jones and sentenced to five years’ penal servitude (later reduced to three). In his summing up, the judge described Violet as “an exceedingly clever and ingenious woman… who might have had an honourable, and possibly distinguished career [if] half her ingenuity had been properly directed”. He could probably have said the same about most of the women on this list. Rosalind Crone is the historical consultant on the BBC Radio 4 series Lady Swindlers with Lucy Worsley, available on BBC Sounds This article was first published in the November 2024 issue of BBC History Magazine
Your guide to Oswald Mosley and the British Union of Fascists (BUF)
He was Britain’s most notorious fascist, known for his violent anti-Semitic rhetoric and for maintaining friendships with the likes of Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini. But how much do you know about Oswald Mosley and his political party, the British Union of Fascists (BUF)?
Ahead of the sixth season of the BBC gangster drama Peaky Blinders, which features Sam Claflin as Oswald Mosley, the show’s newest antagonist, we explore the fascist leader’s life and legacy… Oswald Mosley biography: key facts about the fascist leader Name: Sir Oswald Ernald Mosley [the title was inherited, not awarded, via a baronetcy] Born: 16 November 1896, Mayfair, London, England Died: 3 December 1980, Orsay, near Paris, France, aged 84 Famous for: Being Britain’s most notorious fascist. He founded and was leader of the British Union of Fascists (BUF) from 1932 to 1940. He was also leader of the BUF’s successor, the Union Movement, from 1948 until his death Spouse(s): Diana Guinness (née Freeman-Mitford, m 1936–80), who he married at the home of Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels; and Lady Cynthia Mosley (m 1920–33) Children: 5 – Vivien Mosley, Nicholas Mosley & Michael Mosley (with his first wife, Cynthia); and Oswald Alexander Mosley & Max Mosley (with his second wife, Diana) Who was Oswald Mosley? The eldest son of a baronet, Sir Oswald Mosley was born into an aristocratic family in London in 1896. He rose to fame as a Member of Parliament (MP) in the 1920s before becoming the founder and head of the British Union of Fascists (BUF) in the 1930s. As leader of the BUF, Mosley led Britain’s vitriolic anti-Semitic fascist movement. The BUF embarked on a militant campaign of intimidation, harassment, and violence against Britain’s Jewish population, particularly in London’s East End – home to around 100,000 Jews at the time. When was the British Union of Fascists active? The British Union of Fascists was established by Oswald Mosley in October 1932. It disbanded shortly after the beginning of the Second World War, in May 1940, so it was active for around seven-and-a-half years in total. What was Oswald Mosley’s childhood like? Born into an aristocratic family, Mosley enjoyed a privileged upbringing – he was educated at a preparatory school before entering Winchester College and then the Royal Military College at Sandhurst. At school he became an excellent fencer and boxer after being trained by two ex-army officers. According to Robert Skidelsky’s 1981 biography of Mosley, the future politician was considered odd by many of his peers at school and had few friends. Mosley was expelled from Sandhurst after just six months, following a violent altercation with a fellow student (reportedly related to a defeat on the polo field to rival military academy Aldershot). How did Oswald Mosley become famous? Oswald Mosley rose to fame as an MP after becoming the youngest member of the House of Commons to take his seat in 1918 at the age of just 22, when he was elected Conservative MP for Harrow. Mosley had served in the First World War in the Royal Flying Corps and the 16th Lancers, before working in the Ministry of Munitions and the Foreign Office. Before leading the BUF, Mosley spent time on both sides of the House of Commons, serving both as a Conservative and a Labour politician – he once even stood as an Independent. Just a few years after being elected as the Conservative MP for Harrow in 1918, Mosley became disillusioned with the party. In 1922 and 1923 he was re-elected in Harrow as an Independent, before joining the Labour party in 1924. He was elected as a Labour MP in a by-election in 1926. By the early 1930s, Oswald Mosley was a young rising star in the Labour party under Ramsay MacDonald, historian Nigel Copsey explains on the HistoryExtra podcast. Mosley’s ministerial brief as Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster (a minister without portfolio – i.e., not in charge of specific department of state) was to deal with the unemployment crisis caused by the 1929 Wall Street Crash, which by that time had reached about two million in the UK. He did not want to adopt what he saw as an orthodox deflationary response to the economic crisis and instead proposed public work schemes and the nationalisation of main industries, says Professor Copsey. This “very dynamic and interventionist approach” was considered too radical by the cabinet and was rejected. Mosley was furious and resigned from the cabinet in May 1930. Read more | Why did the Wall Street Crash happen? Oswald Mosley’s wives – who was he married to? Lady Cynthia Curzon In 1920 Mosley married Lady Cynthia Curzon, a Labour politician and daughter of the prominent Conservative statesman Lord Curzon of Kedleston. The wedding was a major social event attended by King George V and his wife, Mary. But Lord Curzon (and many others) were convinced Mosley had married his daughter in a shameless bid for advancement through the ranks of the Conservative party. The marriage was tarnished by Mosley’s numerous affairs, including relationships with both of his wife’s sisters, Alexandra and Irene, and with their stepmother, Grace Curzon. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2022/02/GettyImages-641156106-b66cb2b.jpg" width="3660" height="5066" alt="Oswald Mosley and Lady Cynthia Curzon on their wedding day in 1920" title="Portrait of Oswald Mosley and his first wife, Lady Cynthia Curzon, on their wedding day in 1920. Note that, though the photograph is dated 5/6/20, the wedding actually took place on 11 May 1920. (Photo by PhotoQuest/Getty Images)" /> From the early 1930s onwards, Lady Cynthia Mosley diverged politically from her husband, and she reportedly had grave concerns about his move to the far right. Mosley and Cynthia had three children together – Vivien (b 1921), Nicholas (b 1923), and Michael (b 1932). Lady Mosley died of peritonitis [an infection of the inner lining of the stomach] in 1933, the year after her youngest son was born. It was also the year Adolf Hitler became chancellor of Germany. Diana Freeman-Mitford Oswald Mosley married his second wife, Diana Freeman-Mitford, in 1936, at the home of Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels. Diana had been Mosley’s mistress for several years while he was married to Cynthia – she had left her husband, Bryan Guinness, heir to the brewing fortune, to be with Mosley, but he had refused to walk out on Cynthia. Diana was the third eldest of the six Mitford sisters – a family of famous aristocratic socialites who held controversial political views and were friends with the likes of Adolf Hitler. Hitler was one of only six guests present at the wedding of Oswald and Diana; he attended as a guest of honour. The wedding took place in secret at Goebbels’ house in Berlin. Afterwards, Hitler presented the newlyweds with a photograph of himself in an eagle-topped frame. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2022/02/GettyImages-613471254-36c536e.jpg" width="2736" height="3564" alt="The former Diana Mitford sits for a portrait in 1933, during her marriage to the Hon. Bryan Guiness. In 1936 she married Sir Oswald Mosley, founder of the British Union of Fascists. (Photo by © Hulton-Deutsch Collection/CORBIS/Corbis via Getty Images)" title="Diana, the Honorable Mrs. Bryan Guiness" /> Diana was as committed to fascism as her husband – she regularly took tea with Hitler and later admitted having a peculiar affinity with him. The pair discussed launching a pro-Nazi radio station in Britain, though it never materialised. Diana and Mosley spent much of the Second World War in prison – more on that below – but MI5 documents from 1940 released in November 2002 showed that the security services regarded Diana as the greater threat. One read: “Diana Mosley, wife of Sir Oswald Mosley, is reported on the best authority, that of her family and intimate circle, to be a public danger at the present time. Is said to be far cleverer and more dangerous than her husband and will stick at nothing to achieve her ambitions. She is wildly ambitious.” In her obituary in the Guardian following her death in 2003, Diana was described as “the most hated woman in England”. Mosley and Diana had two children together – Oswald Alexander, born in 1938, and Max, the famous Formula One racing mogul, born in 1940. Max Mosley revolutionised the sport and was known as the ‘Godfather’ of Formula One. In later years became a prominent privacy campaigner fighting for tighter press regulation after winning substantial damages from the News of the World newspaper when it wrongly published a story alleging that he had attended a Nazi-themed orgy. How was the British Union of Fascists founded? After resigning from the government in May 1930, Mosley set up the New Party – the immediate precursor to the British Union of Fascists. It was a curious hybrid of radical left and conservative right, but failed to take off, Professor Copsey explains. New Party meetings attracted disruption – by Communists who detected an “incipient fascism” and by Labour party activists angry at Mosley’s betrayal. Oswald’s bodyguards – dubbed ‘Biff Boys’ and led by the England rugby captain Peter Howard – damaged the New Party’s reputation with their violence and thuggery. These bodyguards would later become known as Mosley’s Blackshirts. After the failure of the New Party, Mosley headed to Italy where he met Italian prime minister Benito Mussolini, the first of 20th-century Europe’s fascist dictators. Mosley was so impressed by Mussolini’s fascist system that when he returned to Britain, he decided to set up the British Union of Fascists, directed modelled on Mussolini’s system. “With his matinee idol looks and dramatic oratory, Mosley cut a darkly glamorous, radical figure,” writes Nicola Baldwin in this article for HistoryExtra. His failed New Party “morphed into the quasi-military British Union of Fascists in October 1932, with Mosley himself as the leader”. What did the British Union of Fascists do? The BUF wanted to project itself as a radical, dynamic force – the exact opposite of the conventional political parties that were governing Britain at the time, says Professor Copsey. To convey a sense of struggle, action, and unity, they adopted a paramilitary style – this involved donning Blackshirt uniforms inspired by those in Mussolini’s Italy, which in Britain were in the style of a fencing tunic. They also adopted the fascist salute – a right-arm-extended salute said to have origins in ancient Rome, which was adopted, with small variations, by fascist-styled groups elsewhere. The BUF also adopted the ‘fasces’ as its symbol [a bundle of wooden rods and an axe bound together by leather thongs] – again imitating Mussolini – but this was later replaced by the lightning flash in a circle, which was supposed to represent action and unity. The BUF held a vast number of marches, meetings, and public rallies. Some of the largest were held in 1934, including Olympia in London; the Albert Hall; Hyde Park; and Belle Vue Gardens in Manchester. These meetings were often met with anti-fascist resistance. In fact, around 60 per cent of BUF meetings in London in 1936 saw some form of organised resistance. On 7 June 1934, a rally at Olympia in London was infiltrated by several hundred anti-fascists with forged tickets. They heckled Mosley and were forcibly ejected. Many suffered fierce treatment in the foyer before being thrown out on the street, with several requiring hospital treatment. Public reaction to that violence was indignant, and membership and press support for the BUF were negatively impacted. From the end of 1934 onwards, in light of the bad press generated by Olympia, the BUF embarked on a militant anti-Semitic campaign of intimidation, harassment and violence against Britain’s Jewish population, particularly in London’s East End – home to around 100,000 Jews. In October 1936, Mosley organised a march through the East End. Between 100,000 and 300,000 people mobilised to prevent the march. At Gardiner’s corner, around 50,000 people formed a human barricade, and at Cable Street, barricades were erected. As a result of clashes between anti-fascist protestors and police, the police forced Mosley to abandon the march. Read more about these famous BUF marches here. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2022/02/GettyImages-545719057-43db4ce.jpg" width="2797" height="2201" alt="Battle of Cable Street, 1936" title="Riots between anti-fascists and Oswald Mosley's Blackshirts, in what is now called the Battle of Cable Street, 4 October 1936. Here, anti-fascists are pushed back by police. (Photo by ullstein bild/ullstein bild via Getty Images)" /> What was the aim of the British Union of Fascists’ political ideology? One obvious key aspect of the BUF’s ideology was anti-Semitism. Following violence at Olympia in 1934 and the withdrawal of lingering establishment support, the BUF turned to militant anti-Semitism in an effort to revive its flagging fortunes, Professor Copsey explains. There was an element of political opportunism to this, but there had been latent anti-Semitism even in Mosley’s New Party. The BUF’s anti-Semitism is best understood as a form of conspiratorial cultural anti-Semitism, rather than the racial form of anti-Semitism put forward by the Nazis, says Professor Copsey. Mosley promoted the idea that Jews were behind Britain’s cultural and social decline in the 1930s, fostering a conspiracy that Jews were responsible for the spread of decadence within art, literature, cinema, and sport. Listen| Historian David M Kennedy explains the Great Depression – the economic crash that devastated the United States and other countries across the globe in the 1930s In terms of its economic and political ideas, the BUF can basically be seen as a response to the Great Depression, says Professor Copsey. A signature theme was the ‘corporate state’, which Mosley envisaged as a parliament based on an occupational franchise [voting according to occupation – whereby, for example, engineers would only have a right to vote for engineering candidates, and so on] rather than an electoral franchise. This would run alongside a form of industrial self-governance, where each industry would be organised in corporations that would provide a form of partnership between employers and employees. “Over and above that, you would have Mosley’s fascist government, answerable only to the king. Mosley called this a ‘modern dictatorship’, which he claimed would be implementing the will of the people.” Read more | Will Oswald Mosley feature in season 6 of Peaky Blinders? How popular was the British Union of Fascists? In terms of membership, the BUF initially enjoyed a very swift rise in popular support, largely fuelled by sponsorship from the press baron Lord Rothermere, Professor Copsey explains. In January 1934, Rothermere’s newspaper the Daily Mail featured the infamous headline “Hurrah for the Blackshirts!”, and on the back of Rothermere’s support, BUF membership was said to have approached a peak of 50,000 by the summer of 1934. However, Rothermere’s support for Mosley ended after violence erupted at the Olympia Rally of 1934, and by late 1935 membership had haemorrhaged down to around 5,000. It recovered somewhat to around 22,500 in the run up to the Second World War, largely because of the BUF’s anti-war appeasement campaign. Listen | Historian and journalist Tim Bouverie explores the failed diplomacy that led to World War Two and the Nazi domination of Europe Electorally, their support was negligible, and they never came close to winning a seat at Westminster, says Professor Copsey. They did have some representation locally, with BUF members elected as town councillors in Worthing and Suffolk. A fair measure of the extent of BUF’s electoral support would come in the London County Council elections of 1937: the BUF put a huge effort into those elections, but despite the fact they were taking place in their real stronghold constituencies – in Bethnal Green North East, Stepney (Limehouse), and Shoreditch – they only captured about 7,000 votes out of 80,000 votes cast. How connected was the British Union of Fascists to the regimes of Hitler and Mussolini? To begin with, Mosley’s closest connections were with Rome, says Professor Copsey. On a visit to Italy in April 1933, he was accorded the honour of a 100,000-strong Blackshirt parade. And from 1933 onwards, the BUF received a subsidy from Mussolini’s government in Rome, equivalent to around £2m a year in today’s money. Read more | How did Italian dictator Benito Mussolini become the first face of fascism? Back in Britain, Mosley made a number of violent anti-Semitic speeches that received praise from Hitler. On 11 May 1935, Mosley sent Hitler a telegram: “Please receive my greatest thanks for your kind telegram in relation to my speech in Leicester, which was received while I was away from London. I esteem greatly your advice in the midst of our hard struggle. The forces of Jewish corruption must be overcome in all great countries before the future of Europe can be made secure in justice and peace. Our struggle to this end is hard, but our victory is certain.” According to Morris Beckman’s 2013 book, The 43 Group: Battling With Mosley's Blackshirts, Mosley “modelled his movement on that of Nazi Germany and, like Hitler, selected the scapegoat upon whom the disenchanted and workless could vent their spleen. Thus, anti-Semitism became the main thrust of Mosley’s manifesto. Emulating Goebbels, the successful Nazi propaganda minister, Mosley threw in large visible doses of patriotism by holding mass rallies coloured by seas of Union Jacks and fascist flags.” But by 1937, Mussolini had begun to lose faith in Mosley. The Italian subsidy was withdrawn, leading to major expenditure cuts at the BUF’s London headquarters, the closure of its Northern Command HQ, and the dismissal of some leading officials. It also meant that Mosley became more reliant on the Nazis. In 1936 the party was rebranded the British Union of Fascists and National Socialists. There were also funds being channelled in from Berlin, but they were always more modest than the subsidy from Mussolini. “I think Hitler regarded Mosley as more of a thinker than a doer,” says Professor Copsey. Listen | Richard Bosworth explains fascism, the authoritarian ideology that emerged in Italy a century ago How important was Oswald Mosley as leader? Mosley was a leader with a capital ‘L’, says Professor Copsey. “He was projected as the quintessential new fascist man – a charismatic, flamboyant, virile, athletic, supremely masculine figure, and a great orator. “This image was used to contrast him with the supposedly feminised and decadent political classes ruling Britain at the time. The deferential cult of leadership built up around Mosley was an important aspect of the party culture.” Read more | Britain’s tearoom fascists Was there ever an attempt to assassinate Oswald Mosley? Oswald Mosley features as the primary antagonist in the fifth season of the 1920s gangster drama Peaky Blinders and is expected to feature heavily in the sixth and final season, due to air in February 2022. At the end of season five, a plot unfolds to assassinate Mosley during a Blackshirts rally at Bingley Hall in Birmingham (but the plan goes spectacularly wrong and the fascist leader walks away unharmed). But did this really happen? As far as we know, there was never an assassination attempt on the real Oswald Mosley. In one incident in Hull in 1936, one of the windows of Mosley’s car was photographed with what appeared to be a bullet hole through it, but this may well have been a publicity stunt, says Professor Copsey. The nearest Mosley came to losing his life as a result of anti-fascist disturbances came in October 1937 in Liverpool, when Mosley was struck on the head by a stone, knocked unconscious and taken to Walton Hospital. Peaky Blinders BBC drama – the real history behind the show Peaky Blinders season 6 – what can we expect? In pictures: what did the real Peaky Blinders look like? Who were the real Billy Boys, the Glasgow gang in Peaky Blinders? Podcast: who were the real Peaky Blinders? Who joined the British Union of Fascists, and why? A wide variety of social groups supported the BUF. In the east end of London, there were large numbers of non-unionised working-class supporters, but also a hefty number from the middle class, says Professor Copsey. With its paramilitary elements, the party particularly appealed to young men. Around 75 per cent of its membership was male, 25 per cent female. The reasons for joining were largely dependent on the phases of the party’s development. Initially, when Mosley had the support of the Daily Mail, middle-class people saw him as somebody who could offer a more dynamic form of conservatism; someone who could give the Conservative party a “shot in the arm”, says Professor Copsey. But as the support became more focused on certain areas such as London’s East End, it was anti-Semitism that drew people to Mosley’s movement. Finally, at the end of the decade, the support became a little more middle class again, largely due to its super-appeasement, anti-war strategy. In terms of women, what’s interesting is that, despite Mosley’s intensely masculine image, the BUF didn’t project themselves as being radically anti-feminist, says Professor Copsey. They recognised women’s right to work and to equal pay, and they even attracted some former suffragettes. Read more about the young people drawn to Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists here. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2022/02/GettyImages-613505900-ec897a0.jpg" width="2874" height="3576" alt="Three female blackshirts, 1934" title="Three female blackshirts salute as they leave their Chelsea headquarters for Birmingham, where they will attend a meeting addressed by their leader, Oswald Mosley, 1934. (Photo by © Hulton-Deutsch Collection/Corbis via Getty Images)" /> How did the British Union of Fascists get disbanded? With the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939, the British government had become increasingly suspicious of fascist activity, particularly connections with Berlin, says Professor Copsey. Concerns were further magnified by the rapidity of the Nazi blitzkrieg in the spring of 1940. The government feared that Mosley’s fascists would act as a ‘fifth column’ should Hitler invade Britain – Churchill is reported to have said that, in the event of a German victory, Mosley would serve as “Hitler’s puppet” in Britain. Read more | WW2 timeline: 20 important dates and milestones you need to know In May 1940, Mosley and leading members of the BUF – including Mosley’s wife, Diana, whose arrest followed a few weeks later – were arrested and interned under Defence Regulation 18b, which enabled the wartime arrest and detention of enemy sympathisers. It suspended the right of habeas corpus to permit arrest without charge, and detention without trial, Nicola Baldwin explains. Detainees were interviewed at tribunals, without legal representation, to determine what they knew and any threat they posed. Further sweeps followed and around 750 members of the BUF were interned in total. Diana had given birth to the couple’s second son, Max, just weeks before she was interned, and their eldest son, Oswald, was only a toddler. The young boys went to live with extended family while their parents were held firstly at Holloway Prison and later under house arrest. Diana and her husband were released in 1943 due to Oswald’s ill-health. In July 1940, all BUF political activity ceased when the organisation itself was shut down. What did Mosley do after the war? Those that were interned during the Second World War “kept the flame alive” and continued to support Mosley, but among the general population he was widely deemed to be a traitor, says Professor Copsey. Mosley attempted to return to politics after the war – he set up a new far-right organisation called the Union Movement in 1948, focusing on anti-Semitism – but never reached the prominence he had in the pre-war years. After the war, Oswald and his wife, Diana, set up Euphorion Books with the aim of publishing the writing of right-wing authors including Mosley himself. Euphorion Books also published a far-right magazine called The European from 1953–59, which Diana edited. According to Morris Beckman’s book The 43 Group: Battling With Mosley's Blackshirts, Mosley “never expressed a single word of regret for the Holocaust wrought by fascism; his lust for power remained intact, his ability to see only what suited him undiminished.” Many historians also consider Oswald Mosley a central player in the emergence of Holocaust denial in post-war Europe. “His Union Movement newspaper derided ‘concentration camp fairy tales’ while he also sought to deny the existence of a conscious mechanical extermination program by the Nazis and shift responsibility for any deaths which did occur elsewhere,” says Dr Joe Mulhall, author of British Fascism After the Holocaust (Taylor & Francis Ltd, 2020). Mosley also promoted the theory – later taken up by Holocaust deniers such as David Irving – that Hitler knew nothing about the Final Solution. Read more | How do we explain Holocaust denial? Having moved to Ireland for a time, Mosley returned briefly to the UK to run – unsuccessfully – as an MP in the 1959 General Election for Kensington North and in 1966 for Shoreditch and Finsbury. After his second defeat he and his wife retired to France. There he wrote his autobiography, My Life, which was published in 1968. In it, he denied that he had ever been an anti-Semite. Oswald Mosley’s final years were blighted by ill-health and Parkinson’s disease. He died at his home in Orsay, near Paris, on 3 December 1980. With special thanks to Nigel Copsey, Professor of Modern History at Teesside University, who was interviewed for a forthcoming HistoryExtra podcast with our podcast editor, Ellie Cawthorne, due to be released on Monday 28 February 2022. Professor Copsey has a long-standing research interest in right-wing extremism, fascism, and anti-fascism. He co-edits the book series ‘Routledge Studies in Fascism and the Far Right’
Peaky Blinders: The story so far, plus the real figures to expect in season 6
Flat-cap-wearing Birmingham gangster Thomas ‘Tommy’ Shelby and his motley crew are set to return to television screens this month for the sixth and final season of Peaky Blinders. The gritty BBC drama takes inspiration from the gangs of late 19th-century Birmingham – but was there really a gang named the Peaky Blinders who hid razors in their caps? And are characters like Alfie Solomons, Oswald Mosley and Jessie Eden based on real people? Here’s our recap of the plotlines behind seasons one to five, plus what to expect from season six…
**This article contains spoilers for seasons 1­–5 of ‘Peaky Blinders’** When is Peaky Blinders set? Set in 1920s Birmingham, Peaky Blinders follows the exploits of a back-street razor gang in the aftermath of the First World War. At its head is war veteran, bookmaker, and criminal entrepreneur Thomas Shelby (Cillian Murphy). But Tommy’s ambitions stretch far beyond running the streets of Small Heath and making money for his Irish-Romani family: he is determined to move the Shelbys up in the world and make the family bookmaking business a legitimate enterprise. In an astronomic rise through British society, by the end of season four Tommy buys himself a sprawling countryside mansion and even manages to get elected as a Member of Parliament (MP). Follow the links below to jump to each section: What happened in season 1 of Peaky Blinders? What happened in season 2 of Peaky Blinders? What happened in season 3 of Peaky Blinders? What happened in season 4 of Peaky Blinders? What happened in season 5 of Peaky Blinders? What can we expect from season 6 of Peaky Blinders? How much of Peaky Blinders is drawn from history? Steven Knight’s BAFTA-award-winning drama was inspired by the real gangs who operated in Birmingham in the late 19th century. But in reality there was no single gang named ‘the Peaky Blinders’. Writing for HistoryExtra, historian Andrew Davies explains it was “quite the reverse: opposing gangs, all sharing [an] outlandish style, sought each other out on the streets of Birmingham and in late-night confrontations outside the city’s music halls”. The term ‘peaky blinders’ was first coined in Birmingham in the 1890s, Davies explains. It was used to refer to a young man who was assumed to be a gang member and who dressed in a particular style – more on that later. The term was distinctive to Birmingham. “In Manchester and neighbouring Salford, gang members were known as ‘scuttlers’,” says Davies. “In London they became known by the more enduring label ‘hooligan’”. But the show undoubtedly takes its inspiration from history. In an interview with HistoryExtra in 2016, its creator, Steven Knight, who himself grew up in Birmingham, said he had been influenced by stories told to him by his family about a local group of gangsters, the Sheldons – who eventually became the Shelbys in Peaky Blinders. “People in Small Heath knew these people [the Sheldons] as peaky blinders,” said Knight. The Sheldons were his dad’s mum’s brothers. “One of the stories that really made me want to write Peaky Blinders is one my dad told me,” Knight explained. “He said that, when he was eight or nine, his dad gave him a message on a piece of paper and said ‘go and deliver this to your uncles’. “My dad was told to go and deliver this message, so he ran through the streets barefoot, knocked on the door, the door opened and there was a table with about eight men sitting around it, immaculately dressed, wearing caps and with guns in their pockets. The table was covered with money – at a time when no-one had a penny – and they were all drinking beer out of jam jars because these men wouldn’t spend money on glasses or cups. Just that image – smoke, booze and these immaculately dressed men in this slum in Birmingham – I thought, that’s the mythology, that’s the story, and that’s the first image I started to work with.” Inspired by such stories, when Knight decided to create the television show Peaky Blinders, he said “I thought I’d better look it up and see what really happened. And of course, it was much more violent than I’d been told. “That’s when I started to fit this together, but I always gave priority to the stories I’d been told rather than what the books said, because I think people who write history look for patterns and they look for order, and they look for things that would make sense. In reality, a lot of the stuff that happens makes no sense; there is no pattern.” Read more | Behind the scenes of Peaky Blinders with its creator Steven Knight Did peaky blinders really wear caps lined with razors? In the BBC show Peaky Blinders, the Shelby brothers are instantly recognisable thanks to their trademark attire – a sharp three-piece suit, Oxford-laced boots, a peaked flat cap, and a heavy overcoat. True to history, peaky blinders really did wear “a distinctive uniform” which marked them out as belonging to a gang, says Davies. The Shelby brothers’ flair for fashion also has some basis in truth. Davies refers to the memoirs of Birmingham paint and varnish manufacturer Arthur Matthison, who saw the city’s warring youths at close quarters and described the typical peaky blinder as “intensely style-conscious”. Read more | In pictures: what did the real Peaky Blinders look like? Matthison’s memoirs describe how a peaky blinder “took pride in his personal appearance and dressed the part with skill. Bell-bottomed trousers secured by a buckle belt, hob-nailed boots, a jacket of sorts, a gaudy scarf and a billy-cock hat with a long, elongated brim.” This hat “was worn well over one eye” and “his hair was prison cropped all over his head, except for a quiff in front which was grown long and plastered down obliquely on his forehead.” Thanks to their hob-nailed boots, peaky blinders would have made “quite a racket” while moving in large groups through the city. “You would hear them coming,” says Davies. But did these Birmingham gang members really wear razor blades in the peaks of their caps to be used as weapons, as is shown in the BBC television drama? Speaking on the HistoryExtra podcast, Davies explains: “The idea that a peaky blinder is named after the razors in the cap is pretty much a Birmingham urban myth. There [were] stories to that effect circulating in local newspapers in Birmingham in the 1930s, but this [was] something like 30 to 40 years after the fact… it’s very much a myth that grows up in Birmingham in the decades after the peaky blinders have effectively died out.” Listen: Historian Andrew Davies discusses the real Birmingham gangsters who inspired Peaky Blinders Where did the name ‘peaky blinder’ come from? So where did the name ‘peaky blinder’ really come from? It originated with the headgear worn by the gang members, says Davies. They wore ‘billycock’ or bowler-style hats, made of hard felt, with a rakish, curved rim, two-and-a-half inches wide. They moulded the brims of their hats into an elongated peak, worn tilted over one eye. “So ‘peaky blinder’ very literally is the name given to a young man who [was] wearing this extraordinary, adapted hat and almost blinding himself in one eye by pulling it right down over that side of his forehead.” But although in Peaky Blinders Tommy Shelby and his crew dominate the streets of 1920s Birmingham, in fact peaky blinders were obsolete by the 1920s and 30s. “In the early decades of the 20th century, young people in Birmingham, as elsewhere across Britain, began to look to Hollywood for a new sense of glamour,” Davies explains. “Had a youth dressed as a peaky blinder made an appearance in Birmingham in the 1920s, he would have been greeted with astonishment – although middle-aged passers-by might have chuckled in recognition.” By the 1920s and 30s, peaky blinders were “very much a thing of the past… [they were] figures now in local folklore. They [were] not figures that you’d encounter on the streets.” What do we know about the real gangs of the late 19th century? From around 1870 onwards, there were reports in Birmingham, but also in Manchester, Liverpool and London, of a spike in the number of young people forming gangs. These gang members were increasingly fighting with weapons, including knives, says Davies. Why did these young, working-class men decide to form and join gangs? Living in areas plagued by unemployment and underemployment, as well as chronic ill-health, young men joined gangs “partly [as] a quest for excitement, no doubt a quest for belonging as well,” says Davies. Their decision was also “fuelled by territorial pride”. Early reports of gang fighting in Birmingham dating to the 1870s “appear to have what we might almost understand as a sectarian dimension to them,” says Davies, with some accounts explicitly referring to hostilities between youthful English and Irish gangs. Meanwhile in Manchester, gang hostilities were explained “in terms of English versus Irish or Protestant versus Catholics”. Interestingly, though, “within five to 10 years, that kind of ethnic and religious dimension seems to [have been] eclipsed by much narrower territorial allegiances,” Davies found. By the 1880s it was the street or the immediate locality that became the point of identification for gang members. Read more | The real Peaky Blinders Peaky Blinders season 6: what can we expect? The sixth and final season of Peaky Blinders was released on 27 February 2022. We find the Shelby family “in extreme jeopardy”, as the show’s creator, Steven Knight, describes it – the stakes have never been higher. Fascism in Britain is expected to play a big part – at the end of season five we saw Tommy’s plot to assassinate the fascist leader Sir Oswald Mosley (Sam Claflin) during a rally. Steven Knight told NME: “In series six, we’ll be looking at 1934 and things are worse. The drum beat is getting louder, tensions are worse and Tommy is right in the middle of all that. Again, it will be an exploration of what was going on in the ‘30s and how certain things transpired.” Read more | Was there ever an attempt to assassinate Oswald Mosley? Tommy will be fighting fires on all fronts, not least within his own family: in a clip shared by the BBC’s Twitter account, his sister, Ada Shelby, is seen to issue a warning. “Take a good look, Tom. Because one of us isn’t gonna be here for long.” We also expect the American family of Michael’s wife, Gina – and their possible links to Oswald Mosely – to feature in the new series. There will be some new faces on the streets of Birmingham, with Line of Duty and Boardwalk Empire star Stephen Graham joining the cast in an as-yet-unknown role (there has been speculation he will play Al Capone). Also joining the cast is actress Amber Anderson – director Anthony Byrne said she will play a “pretty dark” woman who will “give Tommy a run for his money”. Cillian Murphy, who plays Tommy Shelby in the hit drama, told Rolling Stone: “I think it’s going to be very intense. The word we keep using is ‘gothic’. Yeah, it’s going to be heavy!” Will there be a season 7 of Peaky Blinders? Season six will be the last and final television installment of the Peaky Blinders saga, but fans will be relieved to hear that the story won’t end there. Knight said Peaky will continue “in another form” and later confirmed to Deadline that the show will conclude with a film. A Peaky Blinders movie, which is expected to venture into the Second World War and beyond, is due to shoot in 2023. When will season 6 air? Season six of Peaky Blinders will reportedly premiere on Sunday 27 February 2022. Is there a Peaky Blinders season 6 trailer? Yes! Here’s the first glimpse of the new season: View oEmbed on the source website Peaky Blinders season 5: plot recap and historical spoilers The fifth season of Peaky Blinders picks up four years after the fourth, in 1929, in a world thrown into turmoil by the Wall Street Crash. The series centres on Tommy’s plot to assassinate the fascist leader Sir Oswald Mosley (Sam Claflin), the show’s newest antagonist. Having been elected as an MP at the end of season four, Tommy strikes up a friendship with Mosely, who is the MP of the neighbouring constituency as well as being the Minister of the Duchy of Lancaster; the deputy to the Chancellor of the Exchequer; and the cabinet adviser to Winston Churchill. (Peaky Blinders plays with the timeline here – in reality it was Churchill himself who was Chancellor of the Exchequer in 1924). Mosley tries to entice Tommy to join the fascist movement, and while Tommy seems to be along for the ride, we soon learn he is double-crossing the politician and plans to assassinate him at a Blackshirts rally at Bingley Hall in Birmingham. We learn that Alfie Solomons (Tom Hardy), who we thought Tommy had shot dead at the end of season three, is alive and well, having survived the attack. Tommy recruits him to help with the assassination of Mosely, hiring Solomons’ men to disrupt the Blackshirts rally while Tommy’s war comrade Barney Thomas (Cosmo Jarvis) pulls the trigger on the politician as he delivers a speech on stage. Read more | Was there ever an attempt to assassinate Oswald Mosley? But the plan goes spectacularly wrong – in the end it’s Barney who is shot dead, and Aberama Gold is fatally stabbed (he had wanted to avenge the murder of his son, Bonnie, by knocking off his murderer, Jimmy McGavern, but McGavern’s men got to him first). Worst of all, Mosley walks away unharmed. Someone, somewhere leaked Tommy’s plan to kill Mosley – but who? Elsewhere in the series, we learn of Michael Gray’s proposal to turn the Peaky Blinders into a drug smuggling gang in America – with him at the head of the operation. Tommy is having none of it, but the power-hungry Michael, who is feeling cocky with his new American wife, Gina (played by The Queen’s Gambit star Anya Taylor-Joy), at his side (who supposedly has connections to Al Capone back in the US), vows to go ahead with his plan anyway and splits from the family. It’s later implied that Polly Gray may join her son in his venture, as she hands in her resignation to Tommy. Tommy learns of yet another betrayal when his barman, Micky Gibbs (Peter Campion), is outed as a leak of information to the Titanic gang in London – a leak which saw Arthur’s opium exchange with Brilliant Chang hijacked by the new gang. Micky pays for his betrayal with his life, taking a swift bullet to the head from Tommy. The season ends with the cliffhanger to end all cliffhangers – Tommy, wandering alone in a misty field seeing visions of his dead wife, Grace, who is luring him to take his own life. He takes a gun to his temple and screams – and that’s where the series ends. Read more | What were the Opium Wars? The real Oswald Mosley Peaky Blinders’ newest villain, Oswald Mosley, was based on a real fascist leader of the same name. Born into an aristocratic family in 1896, the real Oswald Mosley rose to fame as an MP in the 1920s before becoming the head of the British Union of Fascists (BUF) in the 1930s. He led “Britain's virulently anti-Semitic fascist movement, whose streetfighters – known as blackshirts – were notorious for their violence against Jews and left-wing opponents,” this BBC biography explains. He was on friendly terms with Mussolini, and Hitler was guest of honour at his second wedding – which took place at the home of Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels. Read more | Who were the young people drawn to Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists? <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2022/02/GettyImages-3311264-4006450.jpg" width="3465" height="2773" alt="Sir Oswald Mosley inspects members of his British Union of Fascists (BUF) in Royal Mint Street, London, 4 October 1936" title="Sir Oswald Mosley inspects members of his British Union of Fascists (BUF) in Royal Mint Street, London, 4 October 1936. Their presence sparked a riot which became known as the Battle of Cable Street. (Photo by Central Press/Getty Images)" /> Mosley served in the First World War before working in the Foreign Office. He was elected Conservative MP for Harrow at the age of 22 but later became a Labour politician – the MP for Smethwick (in Tommy Shelby’s West Midlands patch in Peaky Blinders). As chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, Mosley was tasked with finding ways to solve the unemployment crisis caused by the Wall Street Crash, but his proposals were rejected. He left the Labour Party and formed the New Party, before setting up the British Union of Fascists in 1932, “blending his economic programme with explicit anti-Semitism”. By the time the Second World War broke out in 1939, Mosley was firmly on the British authorities’ radar. In May 1940 he was interned as a suspected enemy sympathiser and “it was widely assumed at the time that, had the Nazis successfully invaded the UK, he would have been installed as head of a pro-German puppet regime,” writes the BBC. As it was, the war put an end to Mosley’s political career. After trying to revive his party and twice standing (unsuccessfully) for election in London constituencies, he retired to France. His final years were blighted by Parkinson’s disease, and he died in 1980. But while the Peaky Blinders antagonist was inspired by the real Oswald Mosley, the show’s creators have tweaked the timeline – in real life, Mosley didn’t speak at the Bingley Hall until some years later, in 1934. And this speech was pretty uneventful – it was his 1931 address at Birmingham’s Rag Market that ended in clashes between stewards and anti-fascist protestors. Read more | Should we be glad the plot to kill Hitler failed? Who were the Glasgow Billy Boys? Season five also sees the Shelbys clash with the ‘Billy Boys’, a Protestant street gang from the East End of Glasgow led by Billy Fullerton. True to history, the Brigton Billy Boys were the biggest and most powerful gang in Glasgow during the 1920s and 1930s, writes historian Andrew Davies in this article for HistoryExtra. They took their name from the Dutch Protestant monarch William of Orange (‘King Billy’), who later became William III, king of England, Scotland, and Ireland. His victory at the battle of the Boyne in 1690 had secured Protestant rule in England and Scotland, as well as Ireland. The ‘Billies’ recruited Protestant youths from across Bridgeton (‘Brigton’) and surrounding districts in Glasgow’s East End. At their peak in the late 1920s the Billy Boys numbered 800, making them the largest gang in Britain by far. You can read more about the real Billy Boys here. Peaky Blinders season 4: plot recap and historical spoilers Opening with a bang, episode one of season four sees Polly, John, Arthur and Michael being led to the noose, ready to pay the ultimate price for the train explosion they carried out in season three. But with just moments to spare, Tommy saves the day by securing reprieves for all four family members. (He blackmailed the Crown into releasing his family using incriminating correspondence from George V discovered in the Russian jewel heist in season three). Read more | Could George V have saved the Romanovs? But the trouble has only just begun for the Shelby family – looking for payback for the murders of Angel and Vicente Changretta in season three, Vicente’s son Luca brings his gang over from New York to avenge the murders and, it transpires, plans to take out the entire Shelby family on Christmas Day 1925. Luca serves each member of the Shelby family with a ‘Black Hand’ – a thinly veiled threat to kill them all (more on that below). Tommy sounds the alarm and alerts his family to the threat, but the message fails to reach his brother John (Joe Cole) in time, and he is brutally gunned down outside his home. Michael, Polly’s son, is also injured in the attack but survives. In the aftermath of John’s death, Tommy decides there’s safety in numbers so recalls the entire Shelby family to his countryside mansion, where they hunker down and prepare to counter any further threats from the Changrettas. Tommy strikes a deal with Romani hitman Aberama Gold (Aiden Gillen), securing his men’s protection in exchange for the Peaky Blinders taking on his son, Bonnie, as a professional boxer. Meanwhile Polly, still furious with Tommy over her arrest and traumatised by her brush with death, strikes a deal with the enemy ­– or so it seems. She meets Luca Changretta in person and offers to sacrifice Tommy in exchange for the lives of Arthur, Michael, and Finn. Really, she’s in cahoots with Tommy all along. Tommy and Polly fake Arthur’s death to draw Luca out, and in a tense final meeting between the rival families, Arthur shoots Luca dead. We also say goodbye* to Alfie Solomons (Tom Hardy), with whom Tommy had struck up an alliance earlier in season four. In a tense meeting in the season finale, it becomes clear that Alfie has sold Tommy out to the Mafia for his own protection. So Tommy heads to Margate to kill Solomons (who, it transpires, is dying from cancer and wanted Tommy to finish him off anyway). Elsewhere in season four, Tommy, who now owns and runs a number of Birmingham factories, uses his sexual relationship with unionist factory worker Jessie Eden to get hold of the names of various members of the Communist Party, which he then sells to the British government in exchange for his election to parliament. In the season finale Tommy is named the new Labour representative for Birmingham South. Tommy also becomes a father for the second time, with Lizzie Stark (the ex-prostitute with whom Tommy continues an on-off relationship) giving birth to a baby girl named Ruby. Meanwhile Arthur’s wife, Linda, becomes deeply troubled by the Peaky Blinders’ way of life and in an attempt to cope “swaps cups of tea for whiskey and cocaine”. *Read more about what really happened to Alfie Solomons in our season 5 recap below… The real Jessie Eden Socialist and activist Jessie Eden causes trouble for Tommy in season four of Peaky Blinders when she leads the female factory workers of Birmingham out on strike, protesting poor working conditions and pay. Tommy strikes up a sexual relationship with Jessie, but it later transpires he was merely using her for information about the communists she works with. True to history, Jessie Eden’s character was inspired by a real Birmingham activist of the same name. The real Jessie Eden (née Shrimpton) was born in 1902 to a young mother of just 17 who would later become a munitions worker during the First World War, and a father who gave his occupation as “jeweller journeyman” on his daughter’s birth certificate. Jessie Eden played an instrumental role fighting for women’s rights in the 1926 General Strike, which was the largest industrial dispute in Britain’s history. Working at the Joseph Lucas Motor Components Factory and as a shop-steward for the Transport and General Workers’ Union, in 1926 Eden led her fellow female employees at the car factory out onto the streets as part of the General Strike. When she was interviewed by the Birmingham Post on the Strike’s 50th anniversary in 1976, Eden recalled: ‘Sacrifices had to be made. We had practically no meat during the strike. We lived on bread, jam and marge.’” A few years later, in 1931, Eden spearheaded a groundbreaking strike in which she led 10,000 women out of the Lucas factory on a week-long walkout over new, gruelling working practices. Having noticed factory management monitoring her production, Eden discovered they were planning to link pay to production outputs and had chosen to time her as the benchmark because she was known to be a fast worker, the TUC explains. “This caused an outcry amongst the women who were already having their toilet breaks timed”. The strike was successful and the proposed new system linking pay to production outputs was dropped. The walkout was credited with triggering a mass movement towards unionisation among female workers and marked a turning point in the creation of basic working rights for women. Read more | 5 women’s rights activists you might not know about But Eden herself paid a high price – she was victimised at work and eventually lost her job. She would later receive victimisation pay from the Transport and General Workers Union, and for her commitment to helping improve the working conditions of English factory workers she was awarded a gold medal from its then leader, Ernest Bevin. Eden joined the Communist Party during the 1931 strike. Later, the party sent her to live and work in Moscow for a time during the early stages of Soviet industrialisation. There she protested with Soviet women construction workers employed to build the city’s metro line. She also attended the Comintern’s Lenin School for cadre development, where she honed her public-speaking skills. Eden later told her daughter-in-law, Andrea McCulloch: “I went there but I couldn’t tell anyone where I was going; nobody knew where I was for two years.” Eden later returned to Birmingham and was a key figure in the 1939 Birmingham Rent Strike, which saw 49,000 tenants successfully demand rent control in the council and private sectors. She brought together more than 8,000 female tenants on one march to the council – some estimates say as many as 10,000. She also contested the 1945 General Election as a Communist Party candidate in Handsworth, winning a respectable 3.4 per cent of the vote, but ultimately lost to Conservative MP Harold Roberts. Eden continued to protest until late in her life – in the late 1960s she marched alongside her husband Walter against the war in Vietnam. Eden was twice-married – she wed her first husband, Albert Eden, in the summer of 1923, acquiring the surname she would become famous with. But the marriage was short-lived, and she later spoke of the “folly” of being married to someone who did not share her interest in politics. The couple adopted a son named Douglas, known as ‘Douggie’ to friends, who was a blood relative of Albert. (Later in life Eden told her daughter-in-law she believed she had sustained injuries during a traumatic birth that had left her unable to bear children herself). In 1948 Eden got married for a second time, to fellow Communist Party activist Walter McCulloch. In 1950 the couple adopted a five-year old boy from an orphanage in Bromsgrove, which was run by a fellow Communist Party member. “One of the many ‘GI babies’ of the Second World War, Jessie viewed his adoption as being something of a social duty,” wrote the late Eden biographer Graham Stevenson. Jessie and Walter stayed together until his death from lung cancer in 1977. Jessie Eden died in Birmingham on 27 September 1986, aged 84, from heart failure and dementia. “Mainstream historians are only now just beginning to grasp the essential importance of her role in the 1930s,” writes Stevenson. “Jessie was a real history-maker, and her life and personality deserves to be better known.” Read more | 20 inspirational quotes from women through history What’s a ‘Black Hand’? A Black Hand – or Mano Nera in Italian – was a note printed with a menacing black hand or dagger sent to extort money from its victim on pain of death, bodily harm, kidnap, or destruction of property. The tactic was used by immigrant Sicilian and Italian gangsters living in the Italian communities of US cities such as New York and Kansas City from about 1890 to 1920. The Black Hand practice died out in the mid-1920s amid negative public opinion. American newspapers in the first half of the 20th century also often referred to an Italian criminal organisation in the US known as the “Black Hand Society”. In a 1908 edition of The North American Review, Gaetano D’Amato wrote: “Most Americans believe that a terrible organization named the ‘Black Hand Society’ exists in Italy and is sending its members to establish branches for the purpose of plundering the United States, since nearly every newspaper in the country conveys that impression to its readers.” But in reality, there was no such organisation. “In the United States, the ‘Black Hand Society’ is a myth,” wrote D’Amato. He explained how Italian criminals living in the US at this time were “no more organized… than are the many thousands of lawbreakers of other nationalities in America” and concluded that newspapers “manufactured a ‘Black Hand’ scare” in a shameless bid to increase sales. Peaky Blinders season 3: plot recap and historical spoilers Set in 1924, two years after the events of season two, the third season of Peaky Blinders sees Tommy and his crew go to war with another Italian mafia family, the Changrettas – with tragic consequences – and become embroiled with the Economic League and a family of Russian aristocrats. The series opens with the lavish wedding of Tommy to his beloved Grace, following the hushed-up suicide of her husband. Tommy and Grace now have a son, Charlie, who was conceived during their extramarital fling in season two. The marriage proves to be short-lived; Grace is shot dead in a revenge attack ordered by the head of the Changretta mafia, Vicente Changretta. But the bullet had been meant for Tommy. In retaliation for various acts of violence inflicted upon Changretta’s son Angel by the Peaky Blinders, a gunman had been sent to a Shelby charity foundation fundraiser, and, aiming for Tommy, shot and killed Grace by mistake. A devastated Tommy avenges his wife’s death by having Angel Changretta and his mob boss father killed. There’s more high drama in season three when Tommy goes into business with a family of Russian aristocrats ousted by the Soviet Revolution, agreeing to help move artillery vehicles for them in exchange for a large sum of money and jewels smuggled from Russia, which are being kept in a secret vault underneath the River Thames. The Economic League – a far-right organisation who worked to suppress the threat of communist revolt – ostensibly arranged the arms deal between the Peaky Blinders and the Russian aristocrats but were in fact double-crossing both parties. As part of the arms deal, the Peaky Blinders agree to blow up a train thought to contain the artillery as a decoy while the goods are secretly exported out of the country. Tommy later backs out of the plan and decides to rob the Russians instead. Tommy then recruits the Jewish mob boss Alfie Solomons, who is also a jeweller, to value the hoard of Russian gems, which includes an incredibly valuable Fabergé egg and other delights. Looking to make a quick buck, Alfie betrays Tommy to the Economic League in exchange for a cut of the loot the League planned to take from Tommy after he and his men had robbed the Russians. But the story doesn’t end there – the Peaky Blinders also get caught up with a villainous priest named Father Hughes (Paddy Considine), a key player in the Economic League. But it transpires that the holy man is working as an informant to the Soviets, and Tommy becomes intent on killing him. In short, Father Hughes was hoping to provoke an attack on British soil that would force the British to sever diplomatic relations with the communists. Upon discovering that Tommy plans to betray the Russians, Father Hughes has him badly beaten in an attack it takes the Peaky Blinder months to recover from. The priest then blackmails Tommy into doing his bidding by kidnapping his young son, Charlie, and threatens to kill him unless Tommy blows up the train. But in the end, it’s Father Hughes who gets killed – at the hands of Michael Gray, Polly’s son, who, it transpires, was sexually abused by Father Hughes as a boy while in the care of the parish. Tommy gets his son back safely and successfully robs the Russians. Elsewhere in the series, Arthur meets his future wife, Linda – a devout Christian and Quaker who tries to keep her husband on the straight and narrow. She announces to Arthur that she is pregnant with his child. But it isn’t happily ever after for the Peaky Blinders – in the dramatic season finale, police officers descend upon the house and arrest Arthur, John, Michael, and Polly. “I’ve made a deal with people even more powerful than our enemies, trust me… it’s all taken care of,” Tommy assures his bewildered relatives. The Economic League True to history, there really was an anti-socialist organisation named the Economic League operating in Britain in the 1920s and 30s. Many other such organisations existed, but the Economic League was by far the most active and the most powerful – it was essentially a private employment vetting agency that worked with MI5 to blacklist workers suspected of associating with left-wing groups such as Communists and trade unionists, and, later in the 20th century, those campaigning for nuclear disarmament. Such individuals posed a threat to capitalism, the League believed. Founded in 1919 by conservative politicians and industrialists, the Economic League had the published aim of “preserving the good health of British industry for all engaged in it”. In leaflets handed out at factory gates, the League vowed to “fight all kinds of extremist activity seeking to undermine that good health”. The League was heavily investigated by the press during the 1980s and there was a parliamentary investigation into its blacklist. Consequently, the League was forced to disband in 1993. In season three of Peaky Blinders, the Economic League is also referred to as ‘Section D’; ‘The Vigilance Committee’; and ‘The Odd Fellows’. “One could never quite grasp who they are – it’s like gripping wet soap,” says Father Hughes. The Russian civil war Season three sees Tommy get into bed with a family of Russian aristocrats ousted by the Soviet Revolution. The Romanov-Petrovna family strike a deal with the Economic League to purchase tanks and weaponry to supply their compatriots fighting the Bolsheviks in Georgia. The real civil war in Russia began in June 1918. Writing for HistoryExtra, historian Nick Hewitt explains: “Russia’s tsarist autocracy had been tottering for decades. In 1917 it finally broke under the pressure of a world war for which it was ill-equipped to fight, and growing demands for greater freedom by a resentful and hungry population. “Tsar Nicholas II’s regime collapsed in March, to be replaced by a Provisional Government. The new administration, however, failed to extricate Russia from the war, and paid the price when Vladimir Lenin’s Bolsheviks seized the capital, Petrograd, on 7 November 1917. Less than three weeks after the Bolshevik revolution, Lenin began negotiations with the Germans, which ended with the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk on 3 March 1918. “But no sooner had Russia quit one conflict than it entered another. Counterrevolutionary armies and alternative governments, known collectively as ‘White Russians’, now began to form all over the country. They were soon posing a serious threat to Bolshevik authority. By the end of July 1918, Nicholas II and his family had been executed, and Russia had disintegrated into a chaotic civil war.” Faced with this anarchy, Russia’s former Allies in the First World War opted to intervene on behalf of the ‘White Russians’. “The Allied intervention utterly failed, costing a fortune in blood and treasure which the exhausted Allies, Britain and France in particular, could ill afford, and leaving a legacy of bad feeling between Russia and the west that arguably still persists today,” says Hewitt. The Russian civil war effectively ended with the founding of the Soviet Union on 30 December 1922, although some insurgencies continued into the 1930s. In total, the conflict may have cost as many as 12 million lives. Read more | Was Nicholas II to blame for the Russian Revolution? Peaky Blinders season 2: plot recap and historical spoilers Season two of Peaky Blinders picks up two years after Grace and Officer Campbell’s train station cliffhanger. Grace, we discover, shot Campbell first with a hidden purse-gun – wounding him seriously but not mortally. She’s now married and living in America but returns to London to seek fertility treatment with her husband (where she ends up spending the night with Tommy and becoming pregnant with his child). Meanwhile, Ada Thorne is mourning the loss of her husband, Freddie, who we learn died of “the pestilence” – probably a reference to the Spanish Flu of 1918–20. Ever the shrewd businessman, Tommy has decided that now is the time for the Blinders to expand into London territory. There, rival Italian and Jewish gangs – led by Darby Sabini (Noah Taylor) and Alfie Solomons (Tom Hardy) respectively – are engaged in a brutal turf war. Tommy eventually agrees to ally with Solomons and his Jewish gang, and with Solomons’ blessing the Blinders quickly and violently start taking over the capital. But the alliance does not last – Solomons and Sabini call a truce and hatch a plan to take down the Shelbys together. As for Officer Campbell, who now walks with a cane after having been shot by Grace at the end of season one, he has been tasked by Winston Churchill with assassinating a traitor, Field Marshal Henry Russell, and he partners up with a faction of the IRA to make it happen. Tommy is chosen to be the gunman. Season two introduces another new character: Polly’s long-lost son, Michael Gray (Finn Cole), who was taken from her as a child and put into care. Tommy tracks down the 17-year-old Michael and tells him who his mother is. Michael and Polly reunite, and Michael becomes involved with the family business – but when he is arrested by Campbell as part of the police officer’s crusade against Tommy and the Blinders, Polly is forced to sleep with Campbell in exchange for her son’s freedom. Tensions escalate at Epsom Racecourse where, in a bid to distract Sabini’s bookmakers so that the Peaky Blinders can burn their licenses, Tommy assassinates the Field Marshal with the help of his secretary and ex-prostitute Lizzie Stark. Meanwhile, Polly exacts revenge on Officer Campbell, shooting him dead in a phone box. “Don’t f**k with the Peaky Blinders,” she whispers in his ear as he breathes his last. The series reaches its climactic conclusion with the abduction of Tommy by three IRA members in police uniform, under the orders of the now-deceased Officer Campbell. But as Tommy stands in a field over an open grave waiting for the end, one of the assassins shoots dead the other two. The assassin tells Tommy that Churchill has another job for him and lets him go. And that’s where season two ends. The real Alfie Solomons Tom Hardy fans might be interested to learn that there was a real-life Jewish gang leader named Alfie Solomon (not Solomons) operating in Camden Town in the 1920s. According to the Jewish Chronicle, Alfie and his brother Harry, aided by an Italian gang run by Charles ‘Darby’ Sabini (who also features in season two of Peaky Blinders) “controlled north London and terrorised racecourses around the country”. Other gangs also operated in London at the time, but few were as well remembered as the one run by Solomon. While carrying out his research, Peaky Blinders creator, Steven Knight, found that Sabini and Solomon kept “recurring in court records as immigrant gangs rose to control the betting and protection rackets”. In his interview with the Jewish Chronicle, Knight explains how Solomon’s men would offer protection to Jewish people who flocked to the races to place bets. “They would be carrying a lot of cash and might be a bit drunk, so they would be easy prey for straightforward robbery. A lot of the bookies were Jewish and, as they became the target for people stealing money from them, they got themselves protection from the Jewish gangsters. One gang would be protecting, while another would be attacking.” This, says Knight, is how the gang run by Alfie Solomon became both famed and feared. “His gang became a formidable force, and inevitably they came into contact with powerful Birmingham gangs.” However, while the Alfie Solomons in Peaky Blinders is based on a real-life gangster, the way in which the character is portrayed is pure fiction. In the BBC drama, Solomons is larger-than-life, unpredictable, and borderline unstable – often to comic effect – but in fact little is known about the real Jewish gang leader’s personality. “But when you have an actor of the standard of Tom Hardy you want to make the most of him,” says Knight, “so we have portrayed him as funny but with an edgy character.” The real Alfie Solomon “disappeared from history in the early 1930s,” writes Professor Heather Shore of Leeds Beckett University. Listen | Tim Grady reveals how German Jews played a central role in the First World War, and considers how they were impacted by the legacies of the conflict The real Darby Sabini Alfie Solomons isn’t the only star of season two who was inspired by a real person. So too was Tommy’s newest adversary, the Italian gang leader Darby Sabini. At the centre of what were dubbed the ‘racecourse wars’ of the 1920s and 30s, where gang activity coalesced around betting and gambling, was an Anglo-Italian family from Little Italy, in Clerkenwell, London – the Sabinis. The family, who had lived in the Clerkenwell area since at least the 1890s, included Charles Sabini, better known as ‘Darby’, along with his brothers Harry, Joseph, George, and Fred. “Charles ‘Darby’ Sabini was a central figure in the police records and press reporting about the racecourse wars, with dramatic references to the ‘Italian Gang’ or ‘Sabini Gang’ commonly dropped into reports,” writes Prof Shore. “Their Italian origins drew inevitable comparisons to the hot-blooded feuds of Italian history.” Writing for The Racing Post, David Ashforth explains how although Sabini “preferred persuasion to violence”, his gang of villainous crooks “owed its success to physical intimidation”. “There is no doubt that some, perhaps many, police were in the pay of the Sabinis, and gang leaders who controlled teams of violent thugs were sometimes referred to in surprisingly complimentary terms, even by senior officers,” he writes. In 1928, an anonymous ‘Londoner’ informed the Home Secretary that: “Upon the racecourse, the Sabini gang reign supreme. The police never interfere with them. It is foolish to cry ‘God save the King’ – one is safer if one shouts ‘God save the Emperor, Darby Sabini’, a far more powerful monarch.” But in the late 1920s, with their racecourse operations being increasingly curtailed by police, the Sabini brothers turned their attention to West End clubs and greyhound tracks. Darby moved to Brighton while his brothers remained in London. “As the 1930s progressed, blatant intimidation of racecourse bookmakers became rare, and Darby Sabini, reaching his fifties, reduced his involvement,” says Ashforth. “This left the way open for Alfred White, his former lieutenant, who was also active at point-to-point meetings, to challenge the Sabinis' control.” And whatever control Darby Sabini retained ended when Italy joined the war on Germany’s side in 1940, Ashforth explains. Darby and his brother Harry were both interned as ‘persons of hostile origin’. But Darby appealed and was released shortly afterwards, after it was concluded that “the Sabini gang can rightly be said to be non-existent”. Darby had lost his reputation as a dangerous gangster. While Darby Sabini faded into insignificance, a new generation of gangsters took control of London in the postwar period. He died “barely noticed, in 1950, aged 62, his death certificate giving his occupation as ‘turf commission agent’”, writes Ashforth. “It was a quiet end to an explosive life.” Read more | The A-Z of British gangs and gangsters Peaky Blinders season 1: plot recap and historical spoilers It’s 1919, Birmingham, England. Having returned from the Great War, the eldest brothers of the Shelby family – Arthur, John, and Tommy – run the Shelby Company Limited, with the help of their Aunt Polly, who managed the business while the brothers were fighting abroad. Polly, played by the late Helen McCrory, who died in 2021, is the matriarch of the family, having raised the Shelby brothers along with their sister, Ada, and youngest brother, Finn. She is Tommy’s trusted confidante and one of the few people he will listen to. Determined to establish the Peaky Blinders as the largest bookmaking operation in the region, Tommy sets his sights on taking out his main rival – the incredibly wealthy and powerful crime boss Billy Kimber, who controls the legal and illegal bookmaking sites at racecourses across England. Tommy makes a strategic deal with Kimber but plans to betray him further down the line. The action in season one centres around a consignment of stolen machine guns and ammunition, which the Peaky Blinders come to acquire by mistake but decide to keep to use as leverage. The Home Secretary Winston Churchill sends Inspector Campbell (played by Sam Neill) – an Irish agent of the British crown – to Birmingham to hunt down the guns. Campbell places his agent Grace (Annabelle Wallis) as an undercover barmaid in the Garrison pub, which the Shelby family frequents (and later buys). But they’re not the only ones looking for the guns – the IRA and the communists want them too. Tommy strikes up a deal with Officer Campbell, agreeing to tell him where the guns are in exchange for assurances that the Peaky Blinders will be left alone while they expand their business. Tommy wants to join forces with Billy Kimber to defeat the rival Lee family. Tommy and Campbell agree that once the Blinders have achieved their goal, Tommy will tell him where the guns are hidden. But Grace – who has fallen in love with Tommy – scuppers the plan by making her own agreement with Campbell, disclosing the location of the guns in return for his assurance that Tommy will not be harmed. Crucially, she also tells Campbell about the Peaky Blinders’ plan to betray Billy Kimber, on what Tommy has told her in confidence will be ‘Black Star Day’. In a final bid to bring the Peaky Blinders to their knees, Officer Campbell tells Kimber about Tommy’s plan to betray him, knowing that a war will break out. The season ends with Kimber dead (shot in the head by Tommy during a standoff outside the Garrison), and Grace, who has resigned from the police, at the train station fleeing Birmingham for America – but will Inspector Campbell let her get away? Elsewhere in the series, Tommy’s sister, Ada – the fourth and only female Shelby sibling initially not involved with the Peaky Blinders – becomes pregnant by the known communist Freddie Thorne. Freddie fought alongside Tommy in the First World War and has been in a long-term secret relationship with Ada. He proposes to Ada when he learns about the pregnancy and the pair secretly marry before Freddie is forced into hiding by a police crackdown on the Peaky Blinders gang. Season one ends in dramatic fashion, with Officer Campbell confronting Grace with a pistol at a train station. Gunshot rings out as the credits roll… The real Billy Kimber True to history, there really was a Birmingham gangster named William ‘Billy’ Kimber. He was the leader of the Brummagem Gang (also known as ‘The Birmingham Boys’), a powerful street gang that operated in the north of England and in London in the 1910s and 1920s. But in reality, Kimber’s death was much less eventful than Peaky Blinders suggests. The real Billy Kimber died not at the hands of a Brummie gangster, but after a prolonged illness at the age of 63, writes historian and writer Carl Chinn. And by the time of his death, in 1945, Kimber seems to have restyled himself as a legitimate businessman. In the mid-to-late 1920s, with the authorities determined to “stamp out the gangs that preyed on bookies and onlookers”, Kimber fled to America, escaping first to Los Angeles and then to Chicago, where he was hidden by a friend from England named Murray Humphreys – who was a member of Al Capone’s notorious gang, Chinn explains. Kimber is thought to have returned to England some years later and remarried. In 1938, the Western Morning News featured several advertisements urging readers to “Bet with a reliable man Bill Kimber”, in notices that included a Yeovil telephone number, and in 1940 the same newspaper noted Kimber as the president of the Devon and Cornwall Bookmakers’ Association. “There was a certain irony in that, as it was the founding of the Bookmakers' Protection Associations that had sounded the death knell for [Kimber’s] protection rackets on England’s racecourses,” writes Chinn. William Kimber died in 1945 at the Mount Stuart Nursing Home in Torquay. “His obituary in the local newspaper asserted that ‘his great interest in life, both personal and professional, was racing and he was well known and respected on every racecourse in England’”, writes Chinn. Shellshock and post-war trauma Several characters in Peaky Blinders are seen struggling with shellshock after witnessing the horrors of the First World War. Throughout season one (and beyond), Tommy suffers with flashbacks and bouts of aggression, while his brother Arthur struggles to control his anger. During the first season, Tommy’s friend and fellow veteran Danny ‘Whizz-Bang’ Owen suffers from psychotic breaks where he believes he is still in the conflict. And in season two, becoming increasingly unhinged, Arthur accidentally beats to death a young boy in the boxing ring. True to history, many servicemen suffered from shellshock and struggled to readjust to civilian life after the war. Some 80,000 cases of shellshock were recorded in the conflict. Listen | Dan Snow explores the history of war trauma from the First World War onwards It was the British psychologist Charles Myers who first coined the term ‘shell shock’, in 1915, at the height of the war. “Hysteria had previously been understood as a female malady; now shell shock was framed as a ‘male hysteria’, implying a lack of masculine stoicism,” historians Emma Butcher and Hannah Partis-Jennings explain in this article for BBC History Magazine. “Given that soldiers were expected to adhere to masculine ideals of bravery and resilience, shell shock… was not always treated with sympathy. For example, while he was working at London’s National Hospital for the Paralysed and Epileptic, Dr Lewis Yealland applied electric shocks to men with mutism until they started to speak again.” Read more | What was life like for WW1 soldiers after the Armistice? What was Churchill’s position in Peaky Blinders? In season one of the BBC drama – which is set in 1919 – Winston Churchill is depicted as the Home Secretary. But Churchill was in that job almost a decade earlier – from February 1910 until October 1911. In 1919, Churchill was the Secretary of State for Air, a position he held until 1921. Where to watch Peaky Blinders season 6? Season six of Peaky Blinders will reportedly premiere on Sunday 27 February 2022 on BBC One and iPlayer. It is likely to consist of six episodes, though this is yet to be confirmed. It is not yet known when the episodes will be made available on Netflix internationally. You can watch every episode of seasons 1–5 on iPlayer now. Click here to read more about the real Peaky Blinders, and see what they really looked like here.
From the Krays twins and the real Peaky Blinders to football hooligans and the gunpowder plot, historian Julian Humphrys guides us through the dark alleys of Britain’s criminal underworld
A… is for Armstrongs In the years before the union of the English and Scottish crowns in 1603, gangs from reiving families like the Armstrongs would regularly descend on isolated farms on the Anglo-Scottish border and carry away loot, livestock and hostages. In 1583, Willie Armstrong of Kinmont led 300 men of his clan on a raid across the English border, ransacking the farms of the Tarset Valley and murdering eight of its inhabitants. He returned ten years later, this time in an alliance with the Elliots of Liddesdale. In 1596, even though there was an immunity from arrest so that border families could attend a meeting, Armstrong was seized by the English and incarcerated in Carlisle Castle. Undeterred, 80 of his supporters broke into the castle at night and brought their leader safely back to Scotland. B… is for Basingstoke The small town of Basingstoke in Hampshire seems an unlikely location for mass civil disobedience, but in 1881 matters there had got so bad that they were even debated in parliament. At the time, Basingstoke boasted 50 pubs and a reputation for drunkenness, so when the Salvation Army turned up in 1880 to preach temperance the new arrivals enjoyed the backing of many leading inhabitants. But Basingstoke also had a large brewing industry, whose employees were alarmed that their livelihoods were under threat. Egged on by their employers, they formed a mob with the express aim of disrupting the Salvation Army’s activities. The Massaganians, as they called themselves (because they would ‘mass again’ if dispersed), began with heckling and jostling, but as time went on their activities escalated into-full scale rioting. Troops had to be deployed before order was restored. Murder, Inc: the rise and fall of New York City’s mafia hitmen The real Peaky Blinders C… is for Cock Road Gang Not all gang violence was townbased. The Cock Road Gang was an infamous gang of robbers and protection racketeers which flourished in Bitton (outside Bristol) in the late 18th century. Led by the Caines family and operating from their base in the Blue Bowl Inn at Hanham (the pub is still there), they preyed on travellers and demanded protection money from their neighbours until 1815, when a night raid by the authorities netted 25 prisoners. D… is for Damned Crew No 16th-century Londoner wanted to get on the wrong side of the ‘Damned Crew’. e crew in question was a bunch of gentleman louts who would swagger drunkenly through the streets of the city, causing trouble and picking fights. Chief swaggerer was Sir Edmund Baynham, a ne’er-do-well who later narrowly escaped execution after joining Essex’s Rebellion of 1601, against Elizabeth I. Four years later he was implicated in the gunpowder plot and spent the rest of his life roaming Europe as an exile. E… is for Elephants One of London’s most effective criminal gangs was the Forty Elephants, an all-female crime syndicate, which operated out of Southwark in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Although they indulged in a wide variety of criminal activities, a particular speciality of theirs was shoplifting, which they often carried out wearing coats equipped with extralarge or hidden pockets and hiding places for stolen items sewn in their underclothes. Listen | From Jack the Ripper to the Kray twins, historian and tour guide John Bennett explores four centuries of crime and disorder in the London neighbourhood F… is for Folville Today it’s a quiet Leicestershire village, but in the 14th century Ashby Folville was the lair of the dreaded Folvilles, a gentry family that terrorised the county for 20 years. Led by Eustace Folville, they carried out acts of violence - sometimes for themselves, sometimes at the behest of others. In 1326, they assassinated Roger de Beler, the right-hand man of the hated Hugh Despenser and four years later they kidnapped the judge sent to arrest them and held him to ransom. The many faces of Robin Hood (and what does Eustace Folville have to do with the legend?) G… is for Glasgow Like most major cities, Glasgow has spawned its share of violent gangs over the years. One of its most infamous was the Bridgeton ‘Billy Boys’ – a Protestant gang set up by William ‘Billy’ Fullerton in the 1920s to challenge what it claimed was an influx of hostile Irish Catholic immigrants. The gang grew into a small army, and is remembered in We are the Billy Boys, the controversial song sung by some Glasgow Rangers fans before matches until it was banned in 2011. H… is for Hawkhurst Gang Of all the smuggling gangs of the 18th century, the Hawkhurst Gang was by far the most formidable. Between 1735 and 1749, the gang established a smuggling network that stretched from the Thames estuary to Dorset, and protected its interests through intimidation, violence and, on occasion, murder. Smuggling gangs often enjoyed a good deal of local support, but the brutality of the Hawkhurst Gang turned many people against them. In April 1747, the inhabitants of Goudhurst formed a militia and defeated an attempt by the gang to storm the village. But the Hawkhurst Gang wasn’t finished yet. Later that year, they raided a government Custom House in Poole and recovered a large stash of contraband that had previously been seized from the gang. A few months later the gang kidnapped an elderly customs officer and the witness he was taking to identify a captured smuggler, and brutally murdered them. For the authorities it was the final straw. Within a year nearly all the leaders of the gang had been arrested, tried and executed. An A-Z guide to the history of executions I… is for Ice Cream Wars The 1980s Glasgow Ice Cream Wars was a turf dispute fought between rival criminal gangs who were using ice cream vans to sell drugs and stolen goods. Van operators were frequently subjected to violence and intimidation and in 1984 one driver, Andrew Doyle, and five members of his family were killed in an arson attack. Two men were wrongfully convicted for the crime and were only released in 2004 after spending 20 years behind bars. J… is for Jock Elliot Jock Elliot was a border reiver whose family rivalled the Armstrongs in criminal activity. In 1566, the Earl of Bothwell – the future husband of Mary, Queen of Scots – mounted a major sweep against local reivers from his base, the grim border castle of Hermitage. Bothwell finally caught up with Elliot and, pulling out his pistol, shot him from the saddle. But when he leaned over to inspect what he thought was Elliot’s lifeless body, the wounded reiver jumped up, set about Bothwell with his sword and made good his escape. Bothwell’s men took their bleeding leader back to Hermitage, only to find that the reivers they had already rounded up had taken over the place. They were forced to promise to allow the reivers to leave before Bothwell was allowed back into his own castle. The downfall of Mary, Queen of Scots K… is for Kray twins Probably the best-known gangsters in British history, twins Ronald and Reginald Kray headed an underworld empire that ruled the East End of London by fear in the 1950s and 1960s. The Krays courted celebrity, regularly entertaining actors, pop stars and sportsmen in Esmeralda’s Barn, their Knightsbridge gambling club. But there was darkness behind the glamour. The Krays’ fortune was based on a protection racket imposed by threats and defended by acts of violence. In 1966, Ronnie shot George Cornell, a member of the rival Richardson gang, in the Blind Beggar pub in Whitechapel for calling him a ‘fat poof’. The following year they lured an unmanageable associate - Jack ‘The Hat’ McVitie - to a Stoke Newington basement flat where Reggie stabbed him to death. Scotland Yard had been on the trail of the twins for years and now they struck. The Krays were arrested and in March 1969, sentenced to life imprisonment with a recommendation that they serve at least 30 years in prison. L… is for Liverpool The citizens of 1880s Liverpool lived in fear of gangs of organised robbers – real or imagined. One such group was The Cornermen, whose members would supposedly wait on a street corner for a victim to pass by before they pounced. Even more feared was the High Rip Gang. If the papers are to believed, they were an organised and ruthless gang that announced their existence by murdering a Spanish sailor in 1884. They then went on to prey on sailors, dockers and shopkeepers. Such was the public obsession with the High Rip Gang that virtually every violent crime was attributed to them and their criminal exploits were luridly emblazoned across the front pages of the local newspapers. M… is for Mohocks Deriving their name from the Mohawk people – an Iroquoian-speaking North American Indian tribe – the Mohocks were allegedly a gang of aristocratic ruffians who terrorised the streets of early 18th-century London, attacking and disfiguring men and sexually assaulting women. Lurid accounts of the Mohocks’ outrageous exploits began to appear in broadsides and pamphlets, and poet and dramatist John Gayeven wrote a play about them. Others, like essayist Jonathan Swift, questioned whether such a gang even existed at all – he argued that the panic surrounding them was a form of mass hysteria. To many historians, it seems likely that if such attacks ever did take place, they were few and certainly not the work of an organised gang. N… is for Narcotics Although more and more gangs are getting involved in activities such as gun smuggling, people trafficking and money laundering, a great deal of organised crime in the UK is bound up in the control and supply of drugs. A hundred years ago this would have been unthinkable, as most drugs weren’t illegal and were readily available, but a series of laws have pushed the supply of recreational drugs off the counter and into the hands of racketeers. One of the first such laws came in 1916, when concern over drugs taken by off-duty soldiers led to an amendment to the Defence of the Realm Act. The drug was cocaine, and the law restricted its sale and possession to “authorised persons” The year Mexico legalised drugs O… is for Outlaws Mention the word ‘outlaw’ and there’s a good chance people will think of Robin Hood and his Merry Men. But did Robin Hood ever exist? The first known mention of such a figure comes in 1225 when a fugitive called Robert Hod is reported to have failed to appear before the York assizes. Evidence suggests that by the second half of the 13th century Robin Hood (or variants of that name) was being used as a nickname, applied to other criminals, and the man of the legend was actually based on a number of people, all merged together under a single name. P… is for Peaky Blinders Thanks to the BBC series, Birmingham’s Peaky Blinders are now a household name but while the TV series is set in the years after the First World War, by that time the Peaky Blinders had been supplanted by another Birmingham gang. The real Peaky Blinders gang operated from the end of the 19th century until the start of World War I, fighting other Birmingham gangs for dominance over territories in the city. Their signature outfit included tailored jackets, silk scarves and, of course, peaked flat caps. Listen | Andrew Davies discusses the Birmingham gangsters who inspired the BBC drama, and explains how late-Victorian society contributed to a rise in gang violence Q… is for Quadrophenia Based on the 1973 album by The Who, Franc Roddam’s 1979 film Quadrophenia tells the story of Jimmy, a sharply-dressed scooterriding Mod from the 1960s. The film focuses on the events of the summer of 1964 when, according to the media at least, gangs of Mods battled it out in Britain’s seaside towns with their mortal enemies, the leather-jacketed, motorbike-riding Rockers. R… is for Richardsons The South London gang, led in the 1960s by Eddie and Charlie Richardson, was at least as prolific as that of the Krays and certainly more violent. Operating from behind the cover of a scrap metal business they controlled a criminal empire involving protection racketeering and drug dealing. Anyone ‘taking a liberty’ with them risked a painful encounter with their enforcer, ‘Mad’ Frankie Fraser. The pair were arrested in 1966 following a murderous brawl in Catford, and at their subsequent trial accounts were given of the tortures Fraser had inflicted on those who had crossed his bosses. These included electric shocks and the painful use of pliers. Because Charlie Richardson’s custom was to give his bloodied victims a clean shirt to go home in, a beating from the Richardsons became known amongst the criminal fraternity as ‘taking a shirt from Charlie’. S… is for Scuttlers In the 1870s, people in Manchester watched in horror as ‘Scuttlers’ – neighbourhood gangs of young, working-class men – fought ferocious battles with each other using fists, knives and belts. Like many youth groups, the Scuttlers developed a distinctive appearance, wearing colourful neckerchiefs and long fringes. Scuttling was largely brought to an end by the establishment of lads’ clubs, which offered young boys who might become the next generation of Scuttlers an alternative form of competition – football. T… is for Arthur Thompson Arthur Thompson senior was one of Glasgow’s most feared gangsters. Though he was reputed to have made a vast fortune from protection rackets, he was never convicted of any serious offences and always referred to himself as a ‘Glasgow businessman’. Although he’s now often called ‘the Godfather’ of Scottish crime, any newspaper that did so during his lifetime could expect a very rapid communication from his lawyers. "ompson survived numerous murder attempts, including a car-bomb which killed his mother-in-law (his son was also gunned down outside the family home) and at least two shootings. He died in his bed from natural causes aged 61, in 1993. U… is for Undercover In a bid to gather the evidence needed to convict criminal gangs, members of the police force have often gone ‘undercover’. In 1977, the police seized the largest LSD haul in history largely thanks to the efforts of one of their officers, who spent two and a half years posing as a hippy in order to infiltrate the gang producing and distributing the drug. Efforts have also been made to infiltrate gangs of football hooligans – an extremely risky job requiring an in-depth knowledge of the football team in question. One such operation, codenamed ‘Red Card’, successfully infiltrated a gang of Birmingham City hooligans and led to a number of convictions in 1987. The rise of the Great British 'bobby': a brief history of Britain's police service V… is for Victorian In Victorian times, the big cities of London, Glasgow, Manchester and Birmingham were not the only places to be plagued by gangs of fighting youths. The completion of Cobden Bridge over the River Itchen at Southampton in 1883 almost immediately led to a series of pitched battles between the ‘townies’ of Kingsland, Northam and St Deny’s, and those from the new estates across the river. W… is for Weapons Did the Peaky Blinders really sew razor blades into their flat caps and use them to slash the foreheads of their enemies, causing blood to pour down into their eyes and blind them? Almost certainly not. Razor blades were still a novelty when the Blinders were plying their trade. One item of clothing that was regularly used as a weapon, however, by the Blinders and by many other gangs, were the thick leather belts they wore. Their buckles could be sharpened to produce a deadly flail. Peaky Blinders: behind the scenes with creator Steven Knight X… is for Xenophobia Hatred of foreigners has often led to mob violence. One early example is the Evil May Day Riots of 1517, when mobs of Londoners rampaged through the streets, looting and destroying all property they suspected to belong to foreigners. Hundreds of rioters were arrested, but only 13 were executed. The rest were pardoned, largely thanks to Henry VIII’s Spanish queen, Catherine of Aragon, who begged her husband to show mercy. Y… is for York York was the birthplace of a member of one of the most famous gangs of all – Guy Fawkes of the gunpowder plotters. An experienced soldier, his job was to light the fuse that would blow the Houses of Parliament sky-high in 1605. He was captured before he could do so and, under torture, revealed the names of his accomplices. Sentenced to be hanged, drawn and quartered, Fawkes jumped from the scaffold and broke his neck before the full horrors of the execution could be inflicted. Z… is for Zulus Football hooligan gangs of the 1970s and 1980s frequently had names. Chelsea had the Headhunters, Millwall the Bushwackers, while Birmingham City’s had the Zulus. That’s because, whereas the gangs they came up against were predominantly white, theirs had members of various ethnic backgrounds. Julian Humphrys is a historian and author specialising in battlefields. His books include Enemies at the Gate (English Heritage, 2007) This article was first published in the September 2019 issue of BBC History Revealed
Who were the real Billy Boys, the Glasgow gang in Peaky Blinders?
Series five of Peaky Blinders has Tommy Shelby and his Birmingham clan clashing with a Glasgow gang known as the ‘Billy Boys’ – and gang chief Billy Fullerton is the inspiration for one of the villains in the drama. Historian Andrew Davies reveals the real history of the 1920s Scottish gangsters
During the 1920s and 30s, the Scottish city of Glasgow was home to a number of well-organised sectarian gangs. The most famous of these was the Billy Boys, a Protestant street gang from the East End of Glasgow. Here, historian Andrew Davies shares a closer look at the city’s gang wars… The Brigton Billy Boys were the biggest and most powerful gang in Glasgow during the 1920s and 1930s. They took their name from the Dutch Protestant monarch William of Orange (‘King Billy’), who later became William III, king of England, Scotland, and Ireland. His victory at the battle of the Boyne in 1690 had secured Protestant rule in England and Scotland, as well as Ireland. The ‘Billies’ recruited Protestant youths from across Bridgeton (‘Brigton’) and surrounding districts in Glasgow’s East End. Most joined in their late teens. Many stayed active in the gang into their twenties and thirties. At their peak in the late 1920s the Billy Boys numbered 800, making them the largest gang in Britain by far. They were divided into sections 40-strong, each with its own leader. They in turn took their orders from Billy Fullerton, the gang’s ‘chief’. Who was Billy Fullerton, gang chief of the Billy Boys? Billy Fullerton was a street fighting man. On leaving school, he found work in a shipyard. However, in common with many young men of his generation, he experienced repeated bouts of unemployment in his teens. He gained a following and became adept at marshalling the Billy Boys in activities such as church parades and religious processions, using them as an opportunity to march his gang through what were identified as Catholic thoroughfares. Fullerton also played the newspapers and was fond of giving interviews that portrayed himself as a local celebrity, someone who had left behind the world of the gangs and ‘gone straight’. In pictures: What did the real Peaky Blinders look like? As well as marshalling parades, Billy Fullerton also acted as the gang’s ‘secretary’ – a full-time job, as he explained in 1932: “I had to make plans for fights, look after the funds, and attend to a hundred and one other matters connected to the gang and its members.” The Billy Boys engaged in bitter feuds with Catholic gangs across Glasgow’s East End. During the 1930s, when the Billies numbered closer to 500, their fiercest opponents were the Kent Star and the San Toy from the adjacent district of the Calton. Between them, the rival gangs could raise as many followers as the Billy Boys. The Norman Conks (Conquerors, from Norman Street in Dalmarnock) were another long-standing adversary, targeting Billy Boys in tit-for-tat stabbings and occasional razor-slashings in seemingly endless cycles of reprisal. Read more | Who were the real Peaky Blinders? In court, members of the Billy Boys claimed that the gang had been formed to protect those marching in the annual parades of the Orange Order (‘Orange Walks’), held each July. The processionists’ noisy return to their home districts took them past the gathering places of Catholic gangs like the Kent Star, who viewed the arrival of the Billy Boys at the head of the marchers as an affront. The clashes that followed were the stuff of legend. On one occasion, Ross Prete, ‘leader-off’ of the Kent Star, was reputedly thrown head-first through a plate-glass window. On the podcast | Andrew Davies discusses the Birmingham gangsters who inspired Peaky Blinders The two football teams in Glasgow – Rangers and Celtic – are famously Protestant and Catholic respectively. On the day of the Orange Walk, or a match between two teams, the Catholic gangs of the East End would join forces to oppose the Billy Boys, such was the Protestant gangsters’ strength in numbers. The Billies, of course, were avid followers of Rangers – Billy Fullerton had risen through the ranks of the gang first by organising their trips to matches, and then by assuming responsibility for collecting the gang’s funds. How were the Billy Boys funded? The Billy Boys’ funds came from a variety of sources. Members paid subscriptions of sixpence or a shilling per week according to whether they were in or out of work (many were unemployed by the late 1920s, as Glasgow’s shipyards were hit by global recession). Shopkeepers, too, made regular contributions in return for ‘protection’. Read more | The A-Z of gangs and gangsters Unscrupulous politicians also bankrolled the Billy Boys. Fullerton took payments in return for breaking up left-wing meetings and even led assaults on demonstrations by the communist-inspired National Unemployed Workers’ Movement. The Billy Boys even acted as stewards at Unionist (Conservative) election meetings in Glasgow’s East End, until a Daily Mirror headline – “GANGSTERS” AS TORY STEWARDS – so embarrassed Unionist leaders that they turned instead to Glasgow University’s rugby club. Read more about the real history of the Peaky Blinders. Andrew Davies is the author of City of Gangs: Glasgow and the Rise of the British Gangster (Hodder & Stoughton, 2014)
Gangs and knife-crime fears: how has Britain responded through history?
British cities are in the midst of a crime epidemic. Or are they? Two experts consider the historical precedents for the moral panics over knife-crime and moped robberies that have swept the nation in recent times | Compiled by Chris Bowlby, a BBC journalist specialising in history
Current concerns about gangs and knife-crime are not new – far from it. Similar anxieties were voiced across England’s major cities during the latter decades of the 19th century. Then, as now, most gang members were young men, and gangs were overwhelmingly concentrated in districts already blighted by poverty, ill-health and unemployment. Like their modern counterparts, the ‘Scuttlers’ or gang fighters of Victorian Manchester and Salford fought with knives, although they also used the buckle ends of their heavy leather belts. Scuttlers, like Birmingham’s ‘Sloggers’ and ‘Peaky Blinders’ (who emerged during the 1890s) were fiercely territorial. Encroachment into a district colonised by a rival gang was the surest way to spark a fight. In Birmingham, as in Manchester, members of rival gangs also sought each other in city-centre music halls and nearby beerhouses. Considerable kudos was at stake. Peaky Blinders: behind the scenes with creator Steven Knight 6 notorious unsolved crimes from history Young men who courted women from rival districts also found themselves at risk. Male gang members regarded local women as their property – and viewed a youth from a rival district walking his ‘sweetheart’ home from a music hall as an affront. Retribution might be meted out on the spot, or a battle with the gang from the offending youth’s district might be arranged. Today, these confrontations arise out of infringements of ‘respect’. Victorians didn’t use that word as we use it, but the sparks that ignited fights, leading to countless stabbings, are startlingly similar. That said, the two eras diverge in one key respect: Manchester’s scuttlers and Birmingham’s Peaky Blinders seldom killed one another. They set out to scar and maim opponents. They fought for status, not profit, and most of them grew out of gang-fighting by their early twenties. Scuttlers and Peaky Blinders attracted extensive newspaper coverage, but only made headline news in the local press. London’s street gangs of the time, by contrast, attracted national – even international – notoriety following disturbances over the bank holiday weekend in August 1898. The ‘Hooligans’, originally a south London gang, became infamous overnight. It’s no accident that the London term ‘hooligan’ became the generic label for a disorderly youth. The national press tends to pay much more attention to offences committed in the capital, and it’s easier to persuade governments to attend to law and order problems close to the seat of government. Official responses to gangs and knife-crime have tended to be highly punitive, egged on by the media. In Manchester and Salford, Scuttlers were jailed in their hundreds. But even exemplary sentences of penal servitude for life imposed in the 1880s and 1890s had no visible deterrent effect. Criminals of the Blitz How bloody was medieval life? The most successful interventions were those by the ‘working lads’ club’ movement. Lads’ clubs, established in the poorer districts of England’s cities during the 1890s, provided alternative outlets for youths, effectively cutting off the supply of recruits into gangs. They owed much of their success to their promotion of sports – football, but also athletics, gymnastics and boxing. In the decade prior to the First World War, Manchester’s Scuttlers and Birmingham’s Peaky Blinders effectively disappeared. By the 1920s and 1930s, they were recalled – sometimes almost nostalgically – as belonging to an older, more turbulent age. Dr Andrew Davies is a reader in history at the University of Liverpool. Over the past two years, British newspapers have been full of alarming reports of rising levels of urban knife-crime. But there’s nothing new in this. Similar stories swept the media as recently as 2007–08. And they produced the same results: urgent calls for decisive government action followed by a smattering of studies and reports. Take a look back at the past century or so, and you’ll find that moral panics over crime levels are far from uncommon. They occur when a particular type of crime is suddenly perceived as being unusually threatening – often due to the rise of a new technology or tactic. So, while moped crime generated a blizzard of headlines last summer, in the more distant past bicycles were at the centre of a crime panic, just as railways were when they spread across Victorian Britain. New crime strategies are fodder for the sensational reportage that sells newspapers. The wicked boy: the mystery of a Victorian child murderer East End crime Advances in technology can make it seem that a new kind of crime is occurring. So-called ‘upskirting’, where photographs are taken underneath women’s clothes using mobile phones, is currently causing anxiety. But this form of assault has its historical echoes. Outbreaks of skirt-lifting were reported in the 1850s and 1860s because light crinoline cages made this an easy assault for Victorian roughs, or ‘baboons’, as magistrates called them. These crimes sometimes strike a chord with the public because they apparently confirm existing anxieties. For example, the idea that knife crime is on the rise is grist to the mill for those who argue that there aren’t enough police on our streets. This is how a moral panic is created and escalated: reportage ‘proves’ that a community is ‘right’ to be worried. The reality is that sober and solid research often shows little real change in crime levels. A good example of this is the Victorian panic over garrotting, which hit the headlines between 1858 and 1862. Garrotting was a form of what today we would label mugging. It was often perpetrated by two attackers, who slipped a thin rope or fabric around a victim’s neck and pulled the head back, before rifling through their pockets for valuables. It caused widespread panic, and even a change in male fashions – stiffer coat collars suddenly became popular because they obstructed the garrotter. Garrotting was a relatively new crime, and its timing was interesting, because it coincided with the decision to replace transportation with a new system of penal servitude at home. Critics of that decision argued that garrotting was learned and spread by young men who were sent, as juveniles, to the new prisons. Here, instead of being trained to be useful members of society, these men refined their criminality. Today, more people are being imprisoned for knife-related offences. As knife-crime is normalised, and loses its sensational edge, the press will lose interest, just as it’s done in the past. But the headlines may well return when something new (a reform, or advance in technology) makes it sensational again. Dr Judith Rowbotham is visiting research fellow, School of Law at the University of Plymouth. This article was first published in the September 2018 edition of BBC History Magazine
In pictures: what did the real Peaky Blinders look like?
The hit BBC drama Peaky Blinders takes inspiration from the real gangs of late 19th-century Birmingham. Its members were marked by two defining passions: natty streetwear and extreme violence. So what did they really look like?
These images from the archives of the West Midlands Police Museum are late 19th and early 20th-century ‘lock-up mugshots’ which show style-conscious criminals staring down the camera. Such men left a lasting folk memory in Birmingham, which writer Steven Knight drew upon when he created Peaky Blinders. Contrary to the myth that grew in later decades, writes historian Andrew Davies for BBC History Magazine, gang members did not wear caps lined with razors. They wore ‘billycock’ or bowler-style hats, made of hard felt, with a rakish, curved rim, two-and-a-half inches wide. The brims of their hats would be moulded into a point and worn tilted over one eye. Read more | The real Peaky Blinders Peaky Blinders could also be distinguished by wearing extravagant flared trousers known as bell-bottoms, traditionally part of a naval uniform. Andrew Davies told the History Extra podcast how gang members would wear flares that were very wide, and also hob-nailed boots which would make “quite a racket” as they moved in large groups around the city. Peaky Blinders BBC drama – the real history behind the show Was there ever an attempt to assassinate Oswald Mosley? Peaky Blinders season 6 – what can we expect? Who were the real Billy Boys, the Glasgow gang in Peaky Blinders? Podcast: who were the real Peaky Blinders? They would also wear brightly coloured and patterned scarves. These were all features of a distinctive uniform which marked the young person wearing it as a gang member, Davies says. "Had a youth dressed as a peaky blinder made an appearance in Birmingham in the 1920s he would have been greeted with astonishment," writes Davies, "although middle-aged passers-by might have chuckled in recognition." It wasn’t just in Birmingham that image-conscious young men turned to gangland life, as this photograph below of a hooligan and friends in the capital from c1900 shows. For a recap of seasons 1–5 of Peaky Blinders, plus what to expect from the sixth and final season, click here. Read more from historian Andrew Davies on the real history of the Peaky Blinders, and listen to our Peaky Blinders podcast episode. You can also read more about the Billy Boys, the Glasgow gang which features in the latest series. Andrew Davies is the author of City of Gangs: Glasgow and the Rise of the British Gangster (Hodder & Stoughton, 2014)
At the end of the 19th century, the law-abiding citizens of Birmingham were terrorised by a new breed of gang member with two defining passions: natty streetwear and extreme violence. Andrew Davies reveals why so many young, working-class men were drawn to the brutal glamour of the peaky blinders
"Surely all respectable and law-abiding citizens are sick of the very name of ruffianism in Birmingham and assaults on police. No matter what part of the city one walks, gangs of 'peaky blinders' are to be seen, who ofttimes think nothing of grossly insulting passers by, be it a man, woman or child. I venture to say that 99 times out of 100, they are not even brought to justice." This anguished letter, signed "Workman", was published in the Birmingham Daily Mail on 21 July 1898. ‘Peaky blinders’ were easily recognised. Contrary to the myth that grew in later decades – and the BBC drama series – they did not wear caps lined with razors. In fact, they wore ‘billycock’ or bowler-style hats, made of hard felt, with a rakish, curved rim, two-and-a-half inches wide. They moulded the brims of their hats into a point, worn tilted over one eye – hence their nickname. They did not belong to a single gang. Quite the reverse: opposing gangs, all sharing this outlandish style, sought each other out on the streets of Birmingham and in late-night confrontations outside the city’s music halls. The term peaky blinder, adopted in the 1890s, was distinctive to Birmingham. In Manchester and neighbouring Salford, gang members were known as ‘scuttlers’. In London, they became known by the more enduring label ‘hooligan’. Read more | Peaky Blinders: The story so far, plus the real figures to expect in season 6 The frustration of ‘Workman’ was understandable. Three days earlier, Police Constable George Snipe had been fatally injured in a disturbance that shocked the city. PC Snipe and a fellow constable named Mead were patrolling a poor district to the north of the city centre between 9.30pm and 10pm when they ‘moved on’ a group of six or seven young ‘roughs’ who had gathered outside the Tram Stores pub in Hockley Hill. As one member of the group later admitted, the men had spent the day, a Sunday, on a spree, “drinking all the day, and fighting all the evening”. The constables followed the men to the junction of Bridge Street West, where PC Snipe arrested 23-year-old William Colerain for using vile language. When the two constables tried to take Colerain in, he kicked out and the prisoner’s friends attempted to rescue him. A crowd gathered. In the ensuing melee, someone hurled a brick at PC Snipe’s head with such force that it knocked his helmet off. The stricken constable was taken by cab to the city’s General Hospital, where he died in the early hours of the following morning. A post-mortem revealed that his skull had been fractured in two places. Listen | Historian Andrew Davies on the real Birmingham gangsters who inspired the programme Peaky Blinders The death of PC Snipe caused an outcry. Editorial commentaries in the Birmingham press railed against the brutality, violence and degradation that confronted the city's magistrates on a daily basis. According to the Mail, "A large percentage of the rising generation are emerging from boyhood into manhood without acknowledging any authority whatever, and with all the instincts of the savage brute implanted in them." The Mail was not alone in demanding the introduction of flogging for crimes of violence. As it pointed out, a public meeting in St George's Ward, attended by a large number of working people – many of whom lived locally, close to the scene where PC Snipe had been assaulted – "enthusiastically applauded" calls for brutal street ruffians to be flogged. "Public feeling has reached a white heat," the Mail commented, "and very properly so." <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2019/08/GettyImages-588412423_cmyk-2617f5b.jpg" width="2126" height="1590" alt="A riot in 19th-century Birmingham" title="In the late 1860s, inflamed by Protestant orator William Murphy, anti-Catholic rioting broke out in Birmingham – disorder that foreshadaowed the gangland feuding that was to follow. (Photo by The Print Collector/Getty Images)" /> Mistaken identity A local woman named Polly Mullins identified the brick-thrower as James Franklin. Aged 19, Franklin worked as a file-cutter. He stood trial at the Birmingham Assizes on 16 December 1897, but the case against him collapsed when defence witnesses testified that the brick had been thrown not by Franklin, but by 19-year-old George ‘Cloggy’ Williams. Franklin was found not guilty. Williams went on the run as soon as he heard that PC Snipe had died. He evaded arrest until 9 January 1898. When he made his first appearance before the city’s stipendiary magistrate, reporters noted that, “his hair, which is of a light colour, was dressed in the approved ‘peaky blinder’ style, short at the back, and pulled down in a fringe over his forehead”. His former employer testified that Williams had worked as a glass-beveller for four years before leaving abruptly, without drawing his wages, on the day of Snipe’s death. Contrary to the prevailing depiction of peaky blinders as workshy, the employer said Williams had been “very industrious”. Read more | In pictures: what did the real Peaky Blinders look like? Williams in turn stood trial at Birmingham Assizes on 17 March 1898. After just two days of hearings, he was found guilty of manslaughter and sentenced to penal servitude for life. Passing sentence, the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Russell, described the crime as "atrocious", noting that it was "thinly removed" from murder. The judge evidently thought the jury had been unduly lenient in finding Williams guilty only of manslaughter. The local newspapers applauded the sentence. As the Birmingham Daily Post put it: "We hope that every rowdy in Birmingham will take the lesson to heart." If the term peaky blinder was new in the 1890s, concern at violence among youths in Birmingham’s industrial districts was not. As historian Barbara Weinberger notes, clashes between rival youth gangs were first reported in the city during the early 1870s, their origins in territorial wars fought between English and Irish street gangs. Hostility towards Birmingham’s Irish-Catholic population had intensified during the previous decade. In June 1867, Park Street in the city’s Irish quarter had been largely demolished during the Murphy riots, provoked by an anti-Catholic tirade by the militant Protestant orator William Murphy. Anti-Irish feeling was subsequently inflamed by reports of ‘Fenian’ activity. During the 1870s, according to Weinberger, anti-Irish sentiment “offered a focus and a target for the frustrations of inner city youths which… became institutionalised in gang warfare”. Peaky Blinders BBC drama – the real history behind the show Was there ever an attempt to assassinate Oswald Mosley? Peaky Blinders season 6 – what can we expect? In pictures: what did the real Peaky Blinders look like? Who were the real Billy Boys, the Glasgow gang in Peaky Blinders? Podcast: who were the real Peaky Blinders? No work, no prospects Weinberger offers two further explanations for a reported upsurge in street disturbances and gang warfare in Birmingham from around 1873–74. The recession that followed the boom of the early 1870s threw thousands of unemployed and disenfranchised youths onto the streets. At the same time, police clampdowns on drunkenness and street gambling were resented in working-class districts. Young men featured prominently in the disturbances that ensued. Weinberger contrasted the vigour of campaigns to reform “public manners” with the indifference shown by the civic authorities to the “welfare or rights of a section of the community who had no power or votes… and for whose behaviour they had nothing but disdain”. Youthful members of Birmingham’s street gangs described themselves as ‘sloggers’. According to historian Philip Gooderson, the ethnic hostility that sparked gang conflict in the 1870s was later eclipsed by narrower, territorial loyalties. Most of the feuds reported in the press during the 1880s and 1890s involved gangs from adjacent districts. Conflicts spread across the Birmingham conurbation, extending from the central ‘slums’ to Aston, Perry Barr and Balsall Heath, all of which lay outside the jurisdiction of the Birmingham police in 1890. Street gangs also confronted each other at music halls. On 23 December 1893, John Metcalfe, aged 20, was fatally stabbed in the neck during a fight between rival gangs from Park Street and Barford Street. The gangs clashed outside ‘the Mucker’, the concert hall in Digbeth, fighting with the buckle ends of their belts as well as knives. Thomas Cherry, a 19-year-old nailmaker, was subsequently convicted of manslaughter. He was sentenced to five years’ penal servitude. By the 1890s, Birmingham’s sloggers had adopted a distinctive uniform. One of the witnesses at Cherry’s trial, William Bond, sported a “cropped head and bell-bottomed trousers”. It was a style shared by the sloggers’ counterparts in Manchester and London, the scuttler and the hooligan. Read more | Who were the real Billy Boys, the Glasgow gang in Peaky Blinders? <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2019/08/GettyImages-1022860792_cmyk-9d74ea2.jpg" width="2598" height="1820" alt="A steam tram travels past Smithfield Market in Birmingham in the 1890s" title="A steam tram travels past Smithfield Market in Birmingham in the 1890s. It was a decade when different areas of the city each had gangs that jealously guarded 'their' turf. (Photo by English Heritage/Heritage Images/Getty Images)" /> Bootboy style The Birmingham paint and varnish manufacturer Arthur Matthison saw the city’s warring youths at close quarters when his family moved to Summer Lane, close to the spot where PC Snipe was fatally injured and notorious as a rendezvous of the ‘peakies’. In his memoirs, Matthison painted the peaky blinder as intensely style-conscious: “He took pride in his personal appearance and dressed the part with skill. Bell-bottomed trousers secured by a buckle belt, hob-nailed boots, a jacket of sorts, a gaudy scarf and a billy-cock hat with a long elongated brim. This hat was worn well over one eye, hence the name ‘peaky blinder’. His hair was prison cropped all over his head, except for a quiff in front which was grown long and plastered down obliquely on his forehead.” As Matthison pointed out, most peakies belonged to a slogging gang. He saw these youths as “the product of poverty, squalor and slum environment”. To Matthison, living in Summer Lane with “slums abounding all around”, it was all too apparent that youth violence was the by-product of harsh social and economic conditions. Historian Philip Gooderson qualifies this assessment, pointing out that gang conflicts not only extended beyond the city’s slums but also drew in many youths in full-time work. The occupations of the sloggers who appeared in droves before the magistrates, according to Gooderson, read like “a roll-call” of Birmingham’s industrial workforce: “brass caster, iron caster, fender maker, striker, hinge maker, filer, stamper, chandelier maker, gun polisher, coach builder, spectacle maker, glass blower”. Half of them worked in the iron or the brass industries, the dominant sectors of the local economy. None of them, however, could be described as middle-class. Slogging, like scuttling in Manchester and Salford, was a working-class pastime, reflecting the kudos attached to displays of fighting prowess and toughness in working-class neighbourhoods. Middle-class youths, with greater opportunities and better prospects, had no incentive to risk injury and imprisonment. The Mail dispatched a reporter to Summer Lane, where Matthison lived in the early 1890s, and the correspondent relayed an encounter with a peakie's 'moll'. She too was easily identified by her appearance, since it mirrored those of the peaky blinder himself: "There was the same lavish display of pearl buttons, the well-developed fringe obscuring the whole of the forehead and descending nearly to her eyes, and the characteristic gaudy-coloured silk neckerchief covering her throat. Her head was hidden beneath an elaborate hat of considerable dimensions and decorated with feathers and poppies." (Interestingly, by the late 1890s, the peaky blinder's uniform incorporated the pearl buttons typically associated with the London costermonger.) The reporter concluded, ruefully, that Summer Lane's molls were a "long-suffering lot". The glamour fades In the years before the First World War, Birmingham’s peaky blinders faded from view. Gooderson attributes the decline of slogging gangs and the concomitant disappearance of the peakies to a number of factors, ranging from the growth of football as an alternative source of excitement for working-class youths to a belated clampdown by the police and judiciary. Like all youth fashions, peaky blinder style had a limited shelf-life. In the early decades of the 20th century, young people in Birmingham, as elsewhere across Britain, began to look to Hollywood for a new sense of glamour. Had a youth dressed as a peaky blinder made an appearance in Birmingham in the 1920s he would have been greeted with astonishment, although middle-aged passers-by might have chuckled in recognition. Read more | The rise of the Great British 'bobby': a brief history of Britain's police service In 1936, nearly 40 years after their demise, memories of the peaky blinders were stirred by a series of letters published in the "Notes and Queries" column of the Birmingham Weekly Post. One reader had seen "many a policeman" and civilians alike "laid out" by them. In reply, "Bred and Born Brum" insisted that the peaky blinder was "just an ordinary working man… He could always be found at work during the day in some brass foundry, doing his bit at the lathe or vice or perhaps as a polisher or in the casting shop." Another correspondent, F Atkins, was adamant that “a good many readers have a wrong conception” of peaky blinders: “Their actions were mostly restrained to rival gangs and the police. The general public was seldom interfered with unless they interfered.” Mr Atkins also revealed how the hat that gave the peakie his name was fashioned. It was a “Bowler hat with the brim made to fit the sides, the front of the brim came to a point almost like the spout of a jug. This was done by wetting the brim, warming it by the fire, them making it the shape required. This was worn on the side of the head to show the hair on the other side done in a ‘quiff’.” The peaky blinders had long ceased to stalk Birmingham’s toughest streets. But their fashion sense and penchant for violence had guaranteed their spot in the second city’s collective memory. Andrew Davies is the author of City of Gangs: Glasgow and the Rise of the British Gangster (Hodder & Stoughton, 2013). He discussed the real peaky blinders in a forthcoming episode of our podcast READ The Gangs of Birmingham: The True Story of the Peaky Blinders by Philip Gooderson (Milo Books, 2010) This article was first published in the September 2019 edition of BBC History Magazine
Poldark, Peaky Blinders and 6 other historical TV shows that have tourists flocking to Britain
As the backdrop to Ross Poldark's shirtless shenanigans in the hit period drama Poldark, Cornwall has seen a huge influx of tourists looking to visit the show's scenic filming locations. In 2018, tourism chiefs warned that the BBC television drama is putting the county's coastline at risk of "over-tourism". As the fifth and final series of the drama begins, we take a closer look at 'Poldark effect' and the other shows bringing tourists to Britain…
The chief executive of Cornish tourist board Visit Cornwall says the area is struggling to cope with an unprecedented surge in holidaymakers, it was reported in 2018. Visitors were encouraged to look beyond popular Poldark filming locations Porthcurno beach and Kynance Cove, which feature as Poldark’s beloved Nampara. Poldark is reported to have influenced around 14 per cent of all visitors to Cornwall, and businesses have long reported a boost in the number of tourists from overseas because of the so-called ‘Poldark effect’. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2018/05/13492300-low_res-poldark-s3_0-afbf2ae-91687ff.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="Aidan Turner (as Poldark) and Eleanor Tomlinson (as Demelza) in the BBC period drama ‘Poldark’. (Photo by Mammoth Screen/BBC)" title="Aidan Turner (as Poldark) and Eleanor Tomlinson (as Demelza) in the BBC period drama ‘Poldark’. (Photo by Mammoth Screen/BBC)" /> Poldark is one of many drama series inspiring so-called ‘TV tourism’: in 2018, in its travel trends report, Trip Advisor found that 1 in 5 global travellers visited a location because they saw it on a TV show. Significantly, says Vogue magazine, “TV’s tourism influence is now rivalling that of film – perhaps even surpassing it”. A report from the University of North Texas found that “TV viewing behaviour is the strongest predictor of entertainment-motivated tourism… television series are often watched on regular basis thus, viewers are more likely to be exposed to the destination image for a longer period.” The real history behind Poldark's 18th-century London Poldark’s Cornwall: the history behind the hit series Top 10 historical Cornish words Set in 18th-century Cornwall, the hugely popular BBC One drama Poldark starring Aidan Turner (as Poldark) and Eleanor Tomlinson (as Demelza) draws inspiration from Winston Graham’s 12 novels, which were written between 1945 and 2002. Here, we look at seven other historical TV dramas that are attracting tourists from Britain and beyond... ***Please note this article contains spoilers *** Pride and Prejudice Lyme Park in Disley, Cheshire, which starred as Jane Austen’s Pemberley in the BBC’s adaptation of Pride and Prejudice, enjoyed a 176 per cent increase in visitor numbers after the series aired in 1995. Fans flocked to the lake where, in what has become an iconic scene in television history, Mr Darcy (played by Colin Firth) meets Elizabeth Bennet after emerging from the water in a soaked, clinging white shirt. The scene was in 2013 named the most memorable moment in British TV drama. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2018/08/HDBGW8-7184929.jpg" width="3000" height="2868" alt="Jennifer Ehle and Colin Firth in the 1995 BBC adaptation of Jane Austen’s ‘Pride and Prejudice’. (Photo by Everett Collection Inc/Alamy Stock Photo)" title="Jennifer Ehle and Colin Firth in the 1995 BBC adaptation of Jane Austen’s ‘Pride and Prejudice’. (Photo by Everett Collection Inc/Alamy Stock Photo)" /> Lyme Park – a stately home on the edge of the Peak District – is still reaping the benefits of Pride and Prejudice 20 years on, the Guardian reported in 2015. “It’s a win-win for us,” said Harvey Edgington, the National Trust’s head of filming and locations. “It’s a very good way of getting people interested in a property.” Peaky Blinders The gritty gangster series set in 1920s Birmingham is filmed predominately at the Black Country Living Museum in Dudley. Open to the public, the museum’s canal arm features as the famous Charlie Strong's Yard, with huge factories added using CGI (computer-generated imagery). Tommy Shelby’s iconic walk past the firing furnaces was filmed at the museum’s Rolling Mill, and the dramatic murder of Father Hughes in the finale of season three was shot in the museum’s St James's School. Peaky Blinders: behind the scenes with creator Steven Knight 14 of the best historical TV shows on Netflix Ruby Sparks: the smash-and-grab gangster Peaky Blinders has also worked wonders for Birmingham’s local economy, with tours, themed restaurants and dedicated pub crawls taking place across the city. One pub in Dale End, in the centre of Birmingham, simply named ‘The Peaky Blinder’, serves a Peaky Blinder cocktail made with whisky and blackcurrant, and its staff dress in Shelby-style attire. Game of Thrones Not exactly a historical drama per se, but the wildly popular Game of Thrones is reported to be worth about £30 million (€34 million) a year to the local economy in Northern Ireland. Tourism NI estimates that around 120,000 Game of Thrones visitors came to Northern Ireland in 2016 to see the real-life Kingsroad or Winterfell, among other sites. Rosemarie McHugh, Tourism NI’s director of product development, told The Irish Times the show has been “transformative” for screen tourism in Northern Ireland. The fantasy drama series is also reported to have helped to turn around Iceland’s struggling economy in the aftermath of the 2008 banking crisis by bolstering its tourism sector. According to FocusEconomics: “Game of Thrones is, at the very least, partly responsible for the major uptick in tourism growth in recent years. Many of Iceland’s glaciers, lakes and national parks serve as the backdrop for the ‘lands beyond the wall’ and the popularity of the show has given rise to massive increases in tourism, as the show’s many diehard fans from around the world make pilgrimages, so to speak, to visit the show’s popular filming locations.” Game of Thrones fans have also been flocking to Dubrovnik, Croatia, which features as King’s Landing. But the mayor of the medieval city last year announced he is considering capping visitors to just 4,000 per day to prevent “ruinous overcrowding”. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2018/08/M23JDM-674a17b.jpg" width="5760" height="3840" alt="Fort Lovrijenac in Dubrovnik Old Town, Croatia, which features as King’s Landing in ‘Game of Thrones’. (Photo by John Dambik/Alamy Stock Photo)" title="Fort Lovrijenac in Dubrovnik Old Town, Croatia, which features as King’s Landing in ‘Game of Thrones’. (Photo by John Dambik/Alamy Stock Photo)" /> The Crown The wildly popular Netflix Original series The Crown, which follows the young Queen Elizabeth II from the 1940s through to modern times, is rumoured to have cost a whopping $130 million to produce – making it the most expensive television show ever made. According to a survey conducted by Barclays bank in 2017, the appeal of the quintessentially British biopic abroad is whetting travellers’ appetites for a UK holiday. Dubbed ‘The Crown effect’, the popularity of the show – plus that of Poldark, Sherlock and Downton Abbey – is encouraging overseas tourists to holiday in places such as the Peak District, the Lake District and the Cotswolds. According to the survey of 10,000 respondents, some 44 per cent of Chinese tourists interested in visiting the UK said television programmes had driven their interest. More than a quarter of Americans planning a UK visit said the same. The first two series of The Crown star Claire Foy as Queen Elizabeth and Matt Smith as Prince Philip. The third series, which will see Olivia Colman and Tobias Menzies take over, is expected to air in 2019. Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip: 8 milestones in their marriage Prince Philip: a life of duty and devotion In profile: Prince Philip Wolf Hall The six-part BBC adaptation of Hilary Mantel’s Booker Prize-winning novels Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies was a huge hit both on and off-screen. Starring Mark Rylance as Thomas Cromwell and Damian Lewis as King Henry VIII, the 2015 drama sent fans flocking to filming locations including Lacock Abbey in Wiltshire, the real-life Wolf Hall; Chastleton House in Oxfordshire, which portrayed scenes from Cromwell’s childhood in Putney; and Montacute House in Somerset, which was used as the setting for Greenwich Palace – Henry VIII’s main London seat and the site of Anne Boleyn’s arrest in Wolf Hall. Around 40 per cent of the shoots in Wolf Hall took place at sites owned by the National Trust, with the location fees providing much-needed income to help maintain the properties. The show’s producer, Mark Pybus, said: “The advantages of filming in a historic location are massive. It also helps the actors, if they’re stepping into the buildings that Henry VIII and Thomas Cromwell walked around in it helps bring a realness to the project.” 11 facts about Anne Boleyn Does historical accuracy really matter in period dramas like Wolf Hall? Not such a prude after all: the secrets of Henry VIII’s love life Outlander The time-travel drama in which a Second World War army nurse is carried back to Scotland in 1743 has brought tourists flocking to the country’s castles and other spots where much of the three series were filmed. According to the ONS Travel Trends 2017 statistics, Doune Castle, which features in the series as the fictional Castle Leoch, has seen a 227 per cent increase in numbers since 2013 when Outlander first aired. The 15th-century Blackness Castle in West Lothian, which featured as the Fort William headquarters of ‘Black Jack’ Randall (Tobias Menzies), attracted a record 43,763 visitors in 2017, while Linlithgow Palace, which is used as Wentworth Prison where Jamie Fraser (Sam Heughan) is imprisoned, welcomed a record 87,254 – up 17 per cent on the previous year, the Daily Express reports. Downton Abbey Highclere Castle was dangerously unstable and parts of the building were deemed uninhabitable when Julian Fellowes began filming his period drama Downton Abbey there in 2010. The stately home, located five miles south of Newbury in Berkshire and owned by George ‘Geordie’ Herbert, 8th Earl of Carnarvon, was facing a near £12m repair bill. “It was just after the banking crisis and it was gloom in all directions,” Lord Carnarvon told the Guardian. “Then Downton came along and it became a major tourist attraction.” Visitor numbers doubled, to 1,200 a day, and Highclere is today one of Britain’s most recognisable stately homes. The success of Downton has funded “a rolling programme of building repairs aimed at safeguarding Highclere for the next generation,” the family said. The Downton cast and crew will return to Highclere in September 2018 to film a feature-length movie. Have your holidays been inspired by a historical drama? Let us know by tweeting us @HistoryExtra or by posting on our Facebook page. You can also share your holiday photos with us on Instagram. Emma Mason is the Digital Editor at HistoryExtra.com
Peaky Blinders: behind the scenes with creator Steven Knight
Peaky Blinders, the violent BBC drama of gangsters set in 1920s Birmingham, has won the award for Best Drama at the British Academy Television Awards 2018. Here we look back at our interview with the show's creator, Steven Knight, who in 2016 on the eve of series three told BBC History Magazine's TV editor, Jonathan Wright, about the real-life inspiration for the series and the historical research that underpins it...
Q: We left Tommy Shelby, not for the first time, in a bit of a pickle last time around. What’s the overarching story in series three? A: He’s always in a pickle! In this series, he and the other members of the family have a lot of money and they’re getting richer, but it’s not solving their latest problems. As Tommy tries to get legitimate, everybody is trying to escape where they came from in their different ways. Series three is a study in 'can they get away'? Can they escape from what seems to be their destiny? Q: That’s a classic gangster narrative, yet it’s not often told in relation to UK gangsters. Why don’t we tell these stories more often in Britain? A: It’s not just a British thing, it’s a European thing. The very first things that were written in America were on the assumption that this was paradise. Cotton Mather [Puritan minister and author, 1663– 1728] and the Puritans wrote believing they were in the promised land. Everything they saw was God’s work, and Europe was bad and old, so I think the narrative of America is that what happens here is worthy of mythology. This was an even greater influence on me than gangster films. [Think of] westerns, where they’re telling the story of 19th-century agricultural labourers, cowboys. These are people who were employed to herd cows from one place to another, and their story has become [part of] the mythology of the western world. Americans have done that to something mundane. In Europe, I believe, our mythologising was done with knights and chivalry. We don’t really do that anymore. I don’t believe [this is] the result of anything other than timidity on our part. The stories in Peaky Blinders are based on what was told to me when I was a kid, and they were stories of things that happened to my parents when they were kids. They saw all of that through children’s eyes, which makes everything more mythological – everything a bit darker, and brighter, and better. I was a kid when I heard the stories [secondhand] and they were double-mythologised. I deliberately chose in that first-ever series to keep the mythology there, not to say, “Let’s make it gritty and urban, isn’t it a shame”. Why? That’s why the first scene in the [very] first episode is Tommy on a horse riding into town, which is the start of any western. That was the point: I wanted to reference westerns. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2018/01/10862047-low_res-peaky-blinders-3-26e1169.jpg" width="2000" height="1334" alt="WARNING: Embargoed for publication until 00:00:01 on 26/04/2016 - Programme Name: Peaky Blinders 3 - TX: n/a - Episode: Peaky Blinders III Ep1 (No. 1) - Picture Shows: Arthur Shelby (Paul Anderson), Thomas Shelby (Cillian Murphy), Finn Shelby (Harry Kirton) - (C) Caryn Mandabach Productions Ltd & Tiger Aspect Productions Ltd 2016 - Photographer: Robert Viglasky" title="Arthur Shelby (Paul Anderson), Thomas Shelby (Cillian Murphy), Finn Shelby (Harry Kirton). (BBC/Caryn Mandabach Productions Ltd/Tiger Aspect/Robert Viglasky)" /> Q: The First World War shapes Tommy and his family. What impact did it have? A: Historically, before the First World War happened, there was a feeling within Europe and America that science was going to solve everything. Everything was getting better: diseases were one by one being eradicated, life was getting easier and houses were getting warmer. All of the terrible problems of the 19th century and before, science seemed to be mopping them up; technology seemed to be getting rid of them. Then the First World War came along and the same technology was suddenly blowing people to pieces; it was mass murder – gas that kills people, machines that run you over and squash you into mud. At the end of that, part of the disillusionment was with modernity, if you like. With Tommy, he wants to get on a horse, he wants to be around horses because that’s the old way. That’s why I like the gypsy element [of the series] because they’re in gypsy culture. They’re in a timeless set of rules, a set of expectations and a sort of chivalry, especially among men, that Tommy is a part of. I hope, underneath all the stuff that happens, somewhere there is a virtue, which is: “I have to protect the family”. Q: That’s a very difficult line to walk in terms of not over-glamorising violence. How much research did you do into post-traumatic conditions? A: By chance, I’d just written and directed a film with Jason Statham about someone who came back from Afghanistan with post-traumatic stress, so I spent some time with Royal Marines who were all suffering and had all been in prison for crimes they committed after they returned. Some were wounded. I talked to them about it and their ways of coping. A lot of them said they would sit and replay and replay and replay particularly horrible incidents in their heads and they would suddenly become conscious they’d been doing this for about six hours back and forth. It’s very odd. They also said it gave them – and none of them could explain it – an inability to walk past what they thought was injustice. You’d think it would be the opposite. They’d say if they saw a big person picking on a small person, they’d just go and beat him up. One of them told me that he was in a bar and he blacked out. The next thing he knew he was covered in blood and he’d just beaten the hell out of a policeman. He didn’t know why, he didn’t even remember meeting the policeman. Their minds were so broken, and I wanted to put all of that into the [Peaky Blinders] brothers, especially Arthur [Shelby] and Tommy. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2018/01/10861656-low_res-peaky-blinders-3-315398a.jpg" width="2000" height="1334" alt="WARNING: Embargoed for publication until 00:00:01 on 26/04/2016 - Programme Name: Peaky Blinders 3 - TX: n/a - Episode: Peaky Blinders III Ep1 (No. 1) - Picture Shows: Linda Shelby (Kate Phillips), Arthur Shelby (Paul Anderson) - (C) Caryn Mandabach Productions Ltd & Tiger Aspect Productions Ltd 2016 - Photographer: Robert Viglasky" title="Linda Shelby (Kate Phillips) and Arthur Shelby (Paul Anderson). (BBC/Caryn Mandabach Productions Ltd/Tiger Aspect/Robert Viglasky)" /> Q: You’ve told us about how your family told stories of Birmingham gangsters. How did you go about building on these family stories? A: One of the stories that really made me want to write Peaky Blinders is one my dad told me: he said that when he was eight or nine his dad gave him a message on a piece of paper and said “go and deliver this to your uncles”. His uncles were the Sheldons, who eventually became the Shelbys [in Peaky Blinders]. Even though the history books say the peaky blinders were only around until the 1890s, they weren’t – people in Small Heath knew these people as peaky blinders. My dad was told to go and deliver this message, so he ran through the streets barefoot, knocked on the door, the door opened and there was a table with about eight men sitting around it, immaculately dressed, wearing caps and with guns in their pockets. The table was covered with money – at a time when no-one had a penny – and they were all drinking beer out of jam jars because these men wouldn’t spend money on glasses or cups. Just that image – smoke, booze and these immaculately dressed men in this slum in Birmingham – I thought, that’s the mythology, that’s the story, and that’s the first image I started to work with. Q: Were these 'uncles' blood relatives? A: Yes, they were my dad’s mum’s brothers. Then, because I had these stories in my head for years and years, when I decided to do Peaky Blinders I thought I’d better look it up and see what really happened. And of course, it was much more violent than I’d been told. When you’re a kid they keep bad things away from you. I read about the racetrack gangs, [gang leader] Billy Kimber and the fights with London gangs. That’s when I started to fit this together, but I always gave priority to the stories I’d been told rather than what the books said, because I think people who write history look for patterns and they look for order, and they look for things that would make sense. In reality, a lot of the stuff that happens makes no sense; there is no pattern. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2018/01/10862089-low_res-peaky-blinders-3-2e3c99d.jpg" width="2000" height="1334" alt="WARNING: Embargoed for publication until 00:00:01 on 26/04/2016 - Programme Name: Peaky Blinders 3 - TX: n/a - Episode: Peaky Blinders III Ep1 (No. 1) - Picture Shows: Thomas Shelby (Cillian Murphy), Duchess Tatania Petrovna (Gaite Jansen) - (C) Caryn Mandabach Productions Ltd & Tiger Aspect Productions Ltd 2016 - Photographer: Robert Viglasky" title="Thomas Shelby (Cillian Murphy) and Duchess Tatania Petrovna (Gaite Jansen). (BBC/Caryn Mandabach Productions Ltd/Tiger Aspect/Robert Viglasky)" /> Q: There are connections between Birmingham and London gangsters in Peaky Blinders, but presumably these stories must carry on - eventually you must be able to trace lines to 1960s gangsters? To what extent is there a kind of secret history of Britain here? A: Absolutely. The tradition is still around, especially in Birmingham. There is a long line of families that formed into gangs, and rivalries and alliances inevitably formed. And it goes back to the 19th century as well. It is absolutely a secret history, because, if you go back 100 years, for some reason [history] seems to have to be either politics or the aristocracy, or the general condition of the working class – in other words, how awful it was, or rickets, or the housing situation. History is never a specific analysis of a particular family or a particular person, plus the things that went on in Small Heath [Birmingham], for example, wouldn’t make the papers. The papers would never have written about things going on there because it wasn’t considered newsworthy, it was considered to be “other” to the people who wrote things down. And that’s the point: [the criminals and those who lived in Small Heath] didn’t write things down, so their history doesn’t really get told. I love the things [this kind of history] throws up: Charlie Chaplin was born in a gypsy camp, for example. It is the oddest thing, that Charlie Chaplin was reputed to have been born in London. In fact, there was a person from Birmingham who wrote a letter to him saying, “I knew your mum, I was there when you were born”. It was a letter he kept [locked in a writing desk], this letter talking about his mother. The story is he was born on a thing called the Black Patch [in Smethwick, near Birmingham], which was a gypsy camp. His mother was a travelling entertainer, so it’s known she had gypsy connections. [This refers to a story from 2011, when the existence of this letter, said by Chaplin’s son Michael to have been significant to his father, came to light]. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2018/01/10862217-low_res-peaky-blinders-3-20d1a96.jpg" width="2000" height="1334" alt="Programme Name: Peaky Blinders 3 - TX: n/a - Episode: Peaky Blinders III Ep1 (No. 1) - Picture Shows: Thomas Shelby (Cillian Murphy) - (C) Caryn Mandabach Productions Ltd & Tiger Aspect Productions Ltd 2016 - Photographer: Robert Viglasky" title="Thomas Shelby (Cillian Murphy). (BBC/Caryn Mandabach Productions Ltd/Tiger Aspect/Robert Viglasky)" /> Q: British history is in so many ways about class. Is this ‘secret history’ about people who don’t fall easily into class categories? A: Absolutely, [class] dominates the way English history is perceived. Eras are named after kings and queens and people’s behaviour is considered to be defined by births and deaths and monarchs. I just think there’s another history of England and the English, which is 10 times more interesting. The working-class weren’t hanging around either being comical or tragic; in these communities there were kings and queens and there were movements and monarchs and fashion. You find out that in the 1920s the Manchester gangs had Mohicans. When do you ever see that in a period drama? There were all these bizarre, flourishing cultures, just like punks and skinheads, all over the country. Q: Are you hoping to continue the Peaky Blinders story? A: As long as they keep commissioning it, I’ll keep writing it. I’m going to do stepping-stone jumps, because what I’m hoping to do is end the story with the first air raid sirens in Birmingham in 1940, so it’s truly a 'between-the-wars' story. The third series of Peaky Blinders begins on BBC Two on Thursday 5 May at 9pm.