The Peaky Blinders film is nearly here, but not everyone’s under Tommy Shelby’s spell. Historian Carl Chinn was disgusted when he uncovered his great-grandfather’s secret past
THE grisly world of Peaky Blinders became a phenomenon, thanks to Cillian Murphy’s charismatic anti-hero Tommy Shelby. And soon we should be welcoming them back on our screens – in full force. Netflix film Immortal Man has no confirmed release date yet, but with filming and post-production wrapped it is expected to be later this year or early next. Meanwhile, a seventh season is also in discussions with the BBC.
But while fans have fallen for the charms of the working-class gangsters with their twisted codes of honour, historian and Professor Carl Chinn argues the truth was far more grim. In his new book Peaky Blinders: The Real Gangs and Gangsters, he reveals they were simply indiscriminate thugs, who beat their wives and terrorised Birmingham’s backstreets without remorse. And he should know, his great-grandfather was one…….
By Professor Carl Chinn MBE
Social Historian, Bestselling author and Great-grandson of Peaky Blinder Edward Derrick
Despite the church bells welcoming 1909, there wasn’t new year’s cheer in backstreet Birmingham for hard man Billy Beach. Going outside to empty the leavings of his teapot, he saw his loathed enemies, the Sheldon Gang, coming for him.
He’d feuded with them for months and bested their leader, John Sheldon, in a straightener – a man-to-man fight. Vowing revenge, Sheldon turned up mob-handed.
“That’s him, there on the steps,” one of the gang shouted. A shot was fired, the bullet hit the back of Beach’s ear, and he flung a paraffin lamp at the Sheldons.
Hearing glass crashing in a bedroom, his wife dashed upstairs where the window was smashed by another bullet. It grazed the head of her 10-year-old daughter, who was crying, “Oh, Mommy, something’s ‘it me”. Traumatised, she slept with a lump hammer under her pillow for the rest of her life.
Beach stormed into his attackers, striking out with his fists as Sheldon belaboured him with a pickaxe. His wife ran for the police and the gang scarpered, leaving behind a shambles. Blood was everywhere. In the snow, officers found a revolver with six spent cartridges, a pickaxe, a coal hammer covered with blood, another hammer and broken bottles. There was also a man knocked out by Beach. When asked in court if it was a free fight, Beach retorted: “If you call 10 to one a free fight.”
Soon after, Beach’s gang wreaked vengeance in the Garrison Lane Vendetta. It was stories about John Sheldon and his younger brothers, Samuel and Joseph which sparked Peaky Blinders with Steven Knight, its creator, explaining that “my dad’s uncle was from a family called the Sheldons, which in fiction became the Shelbys”.
But other than a thirst for violence there is little in common between the Shelbys and their real-life counterparts. The Sheldons weren’t charismatic anti-heroes kind to children, respectful to women, and considerate to the elderly.
They had indiscriminately attacked women and savagely battered their girlfriends and wives, as did my peaky great-grandfather, Edward Derrick, to my great-grandmother, Ada.The peaky blinders, violent, thieving and abusive, were typified by Samuel Sheldon. He was one of most dangerous men in Birmingham.
Belonging to the notorious Barr Street Slogging Gang, when he was 20, he was sent down for four months’ for stoning the police and behaving “with a violence which knew no bounds”.
The court heard how “One of the objects of his wrath” had sought shelter in a shop, and Sheldon had “set himself to wreck the place”. It was his 13th conviction for assault.
Worse was to follow. In 1889, he was one of eight or nine roughs who smashed the windows of a house where a 16-year-old girl was alone. The vile men chased after her and “committed a most disgusting assault”. She bravely raised the alarm and Sheldon, the oldest of the four arrested, was later handed six months.
In March the next year, the term term peaky blinders first appeared in the press. As told in folklore and the series, it derived from their supposedly favoured weapon: the peak of their flat caps in which safety razor blades were sewn which blinded their foes when slashed across the eyes. Yet people who lived at the time indicated the real meaning referred to a fashion taken up by sloggers like Sheldon.
Ex-superintendent W. J. May joined the Birmingham Police in 1894. He noted, they wore their “hair short at the back and sides but with a well-greased forelock plastered over the forehead nearly to the eyebrows and upwards towards the left”. The forelocks were shown off by pulling the peaks of their caps to one side, almost covering, or blinding, their one eye.
Growing up, older family members told me Derrick, my great-grandad on my Dad’s maternal side, was a thief and vicious, nasty man who badly beat up Ada. As a historian, I delved deeper into his life and background. I found reports naming him as a source of annoyance as a leader of Sparkbrook’s sloggers – making him my peaky blinder ancestor.
The reign of the peaky blinders was ended before 1914. They disappeared through combative policing, sterner sentences for assaults on policemen, and the provision of football and boxing clubs for youths. Their disappearance was welcomed. They’d maimed policemen and killed several, triggered riots and launched racist attacks on Italians and Jews.
They’d caused horrible injuries in gang brawls with buckled belts, knives, knuckle dusters and other weapons. They terrorised neighbourhoods, committing assaults on neighbours and wounding and levying blackmail on shopkeepers, publicans and concert-hall managers.
The fear and hurt they inflicted should neither be ignored nor forgotten. I hold my great-grandad’s actions in contempt. The real heroes of the backstreets were not them but the women. They strove for decency against poverty, male violence and a class-biased society, hoping one day that their children and grandchildren would have a better life with days to come and not just a day to get through.
Professor Carl Chinn MBE PhD is the son and grandson of illegal bookmakers in back-street Birmingham, his writings are deeply affected by his family’s life in city.
Peaky Blinders – The Real Gangs and Gangsters: The True Story of Britain’s Most Notorious Street Gangs is out now with Blink Publishing in paperback, £10.99.