This is the 1 thing the Peaky Blinders creators got absolutely wrong, according to expert

As one of the most critically acclaimed historical crime dramas on TV, delving into the post-First World War Birmingham gangsters, Peaky Blinders, shone a light on street violence, racketeering and the rise of organised crime in Britain.

With super-stylish cinematography and charismatic performances, coupled with a period of English history rarely explored on television, the British public couldn't get enough of Tommy Shelby, played by Cillian Murphy, and his dangerous criminal family.

And creator Steven Knight isn't done with the infamous street gang either, following the sixth and final series in 2022. A Peaky Blinders movie, The Immortal Man, is due for release "soon" on Netflix (although an exact date hasn't been announced), proving our fascination with no good gangsters remains undiminished.

But how much of what we know from the drama is true of the real Peaky Blinders?

A new documentary on Sky History tonight, delves into the brutal truth behind the glamourised fiction. Forming part of a four part series, Original Gangsters, presented by Game of Thrones star Sean Bean, the standalone episode explores the Birmingham-based gangster gangs who terrorised an entire city during the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Starting in the labyrinthine alleyways of the industrial Midlands city in the 1860s where ruffians battled with police, it goes on to examine the rogue street mobs who became more organised and united under one man: Billy Kimber, one of the inspirations for Cillian Murphy's Thomas Shelby.

"It was a very violent time and we can see that from lots of court evidence and police records," says one of the documentary's key contributors, Corinne Brazier, the heritage manager at the West Midlands Police Museum and an expert on UK policing in the Midlands between the late 1800s and early 1900s.

"We can also see it from the different weapons used - anything that came to hand, such as steel toe cap boots, belt buckles, bricks and stones used as missiles, axes and occasionally guns as they were made here in the Gun Quarter of the city."

Intriguingly, and despite the Peaky Blinders' infamy, Corinne reveals there was no single gang that went by that name - even if the term was widely used.

"There is only one single reference to a Peaky Blinders gang from the Small Heath area of the city in one letter written to a newspaper in 1890," she says. Instead, the term Peaky Blinder was a "generic term" used to refer to an "underclass" that was involved in theft, dishonesty, violence and drunkenness.

Judges of the era would refer to these criminals as "peakies", a reference to the peaked caps fashionable among working class men at the time.

"When you scroll through the mugshots most of the young men of the time have got the flat cap on, it was a common fashion," says Corinne.

"They would pull the cap down over one eye and have a fringe hanging over the other, to disguise themselves and blend in, a bit like wearing a hoodie or balaclava today."

And there is one thing she'd like to set the record straight on.

"There is no evidence whatsoever that the Peaky Blinders kept razor blades in their caps," she smiles. "That's a myth."

Corrine has poured over hundreds of newspaper reports of crimes at the time, all of which gave extremely vivid details of any court cases involved, none of which, to her knowledge, mentions the razor blades. Nevertheless, the myth persists.

"There are local Facebook history groups with people saying they were told their granddad would hang his flat cap on the back of a chair and they were told never to touch it, therefore it must have contained a razor blade," she explains.

"You can see how these things spiral."

Like many industrial cities at the turn of the 20th century, Birmingham was full of extreme poverty, fuelling rocketing crime rates.

"There was a lot of deprivation," says Corinne. "People were flooding the city to take up poorly paid manual labour, struggling to make ends meet and living in horrendous conditions. There was back to back housing with often three or four families living in one house sharing one outside toilet."

By the end of the century, crime in Birmingham had become so rife with "peakies" operating all over the city, that the Chief Constable resigned. A man called Charles Haughton Raffter was brought over from Ireland to take over the policing of Birmingham.

Carl Chinn, an historian and author and leading authority on the Peaky Blinders, says Raffter realised the police force was seriously undermanned and began a programme of rapid recruitment of tall, fit officers to patrol in pairs.

The criteria was simply: "Can you read? Can you write? Can you fight?"

Corrine adds: "Charles Haughton Raffter did change policing in the city to try and take back control from the gangs. But what is often forgotten in the glamorisation of the gangsters of this period is those fallen police officers, and there were many at the time, who were often just very young men facing violence on the streets."

The new police chief, who served the city from 1899 to his death in 1935, also introduced new concepts such as crime prevention and neighbourhood watches. Meanwhile, the criminal gangs of Birmingham were organising and moving into horse racing, bookmaking and liquor licences, cashing in on the popular vices of drinking and gambling.

The documentary states that characters from the BBC TV series including gangsters Billy Kimber, Darby Sabini, and Alfie Solomon - played on screen by Tom Hardy - were real criminals engaged in violent turf wars to control England's betting industry.
"As the legislation around gambling changes the criminals are trying to stay one step ahead and make money," says Corrine.

The documentary also examines how the Birmingham gangs operating on the race courses would extort or blackmail £400 a day from bookmakers, totalling £22,000-a-year - the equivalent of £4million in today's money. That was a long way from street fighting in Small Heath.

Peaky Blinders writer Steven Knight is said to have based his legendary Shelby family on the Sheldons, five brothers from Birmingham, three of whom, were known criminals.

But Corrine isn't convinced."Unfortunately police records do not tell us if they were gang members," she says.
What is certain however is that "peakies" didn't look anything like the handsome, well-dressed Thomas Shelby played by Cillian Murphy.

"Believe me, they were not glamorous," she laughs. "You want to see the mugshots of the real Shelby family. People like the romanticism, the glamour of it all, and the suggestion of a different society in Birmingham that people might not have been aware of."

The Sky documentary also puts the Peaky Blinders in context in terms of the poverty and hopelessness of where they came from.

It notes that street violence decreased during the First World War when many gang members were fighting in Europe. Furthermore, it reveals that as more leisure opportunities like boxing clubs, football and the cinema became more available following the end of war, street violence dropped off. This is when the serious gangsters moved into more organised racketeering on the race courses.

And Billy Kimber? The notorious gangster, born in 1882 to an Irish Brummie mother, was head of the Birmingham Boys. It was he, not the Peaky Blinders, who built a large criminal organisation that focused on racketeering bookmakers, particularly at horse races, and expanded his operations from the Midlands into London and the South leading to gang warfare with the Sabini Gang from Soho.

As Sean Bean concludes in Original Gangsters: "Make no mistake though these people were not Robin Hood characters. They did not help or protect the poor, they bullied them.

"What is fascinating to me is how little attitudes have changed. Street gangs still exist today in working class communities. Maybe it is something innate in people, that fellowship, of not having a community so they construct their own. It is where the legends are made but the legends do not live for the ordinary folk."

• Original Gangsters: The real Peaky Blinders is on Sky History tonight at 9pm; catch up on History Play