Event Details

The Iredell Lecture is a free annual public lecture organised by the Departments of History and Law at Lancaster University.

Historical Drama and Historical Realities: the Real Peaky Blinders

An Illustrated Talk with Professor Carl Chinn MBE

Stylish and dark, the BBC series the ‘Peaky Blinders’ highlights the exploits of the charismatic Thomas Shelby and his violent Birmingham criminal gang in the aftermath of the First World War. Well-dressed, captivating, and powerful, these dramatised gangsters are nothing like the real peaky blinder gangs of the 1890s and early twentieth century. Along with the scuttlers of Manchester and Salford, they were mostly unskilled men and teenagers who battled each other, baited the police, and bullied the decent poor of the back streets. Thugs and often petty criminals, the peaky blinders inflicted a reign of ruffianism that was ended by 1910 thanks to the provision of youth clubs, more severe sentences, and vigorous policing especially. Under Chief Constable Charles Haughton Rafter, a Protestant Irishman, and his deputy, Michael McManus, a Catholic Irishman, the Birmingham force recruited tall, fit, and strong young men who took on the peaky blinders, having fulfilled three criteria: “Can they read, Can they write, Can they fight”.

However, a former peaky blinder, Billy Kimber, went on to lead a vicious throng of rogues known as the Birmingham Gang, which plagued the racegoers of the Midlands and North of England, pickpocketing and blackmailing bookmakers for protection money. By 1921, they’d palled up with London gangsters and taken control of the highly profitable rackets on the racecourses of Southern England. Kimber’s rich pickings aroused covetous eyes, leading to Britain’s first major gangland war with London’s Sabini Gang headed by the Anglo-Italian Darby Sabini and allied to Anglo-Jewish toughs. The lives of these gangsters were as bloody and compelling as their fictionalised counterparts.

This, then, is the story of the Real Peaky Blinders, an illustrated talk with Professor Carl Chinn MBE. A great grandson of a real peaky blinder, in 1987, he interviewed the younger brother of the gangster Alfie Solomon, dramatised as Alfie Solomons, along with others connected to the real gangs. The author of the Sunday Times number one bestseller, Peaky Blinders. The Real Story (2019) and the historical consultant for the BBC 2 documentaries, ‘The Real Peaky Blinders’, he’s been researching them for 40 years.