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00:00One gang has become synonymous with Birmingham in the 1900s.
00:15But were they really the smartly dressed, ruthless family we've all seen on screen?
00:23Or was the truth much more dangerous?
00:30This is the story of the real Peaky Blinders.
01:00In 2013, an award-winning television series would burst onto our screens.
01:13But what was the real-life inspiration?
01:16Who were the real Peaky Blinders?
01:19And who was the real Tommy Shelby?
01:22Birmingham in the 1860s through to the 70s was in the process of rapid and spectacular change.
01:32Its population was exploding. It was approaching over 400,000 by 1871.
01:38We made anything that the world wanted.
01:41It was buttons, it was guns, it was jewellery, it was brassware, it was pens.
01:46Tell us what you wanted, we can make it.
01:47Birmingham at the turn of the century is really a city of two halves.
01:52On the one hand, it's doing really well in relation to the other major industrial cities of the Midlands and the North.
01:59However, that wealth comes at the expense of the people who labour for it, the working class.
02:05And their lives are extremely different.
02:06There was hundreds, thousands of people flooding to the area for work, for better prospects, to improve their lot for themselves and their families.
02:15There was lots of deprivation, people coming in for quite poorly paid manual labour jobs and really struggling to make ends meet.
02:23The living conditions for the poor were horrendous. Thousands of hard working families crowded into back to back houses.
02:34Three, maybe four families to one house, sharing one communal toilet outside.
02:39They were entombed almost in this cycle of poverty. It was a battle every day against king poverty and that king was relentless and he was on caring.
02:53They are expected to labour for the prosperity of the British Empire until eventually they die.
03:01There are some aspects of human nature that don't seem to change from one age to the next.
03:07When people are given no opportunity, no outlet, no escape from the situation, you will only ever get one result. Violence.
03:18Fighting was almost a leisure activity for some men. They're living in poverty. They own nothing.
03:25They are looked down upon. They're disparaged. But the one thing that they've got is their fighting prowess.
03:32So in a poorer street, those men that were regarded as tough gained status. It was something that they had.
03:38Under these circumstances, it's pretty clear that violence wasn't just a means of survival. It was a way of expressing the frustrations and discontent with their lives.
03:53They're called sluggers from 1872 because they slog. And they are the worst gangs for violence and the most notorious gangs in Birmingham from late 1860s really to the turn of the 20th century.
04:07When you think about crime at that time, if we just try and make sense of it with some compassion, some of that crime would have been in many ways perceived to be out of necessity.
04:17So if you don't have any food and you want to keep your family alive, you're going to steal food for them.
04:22So I think, again, compassion for where some of that early criminal behaviour comes from.
04:26It was a very violent time and you can see lots of records and evidence of different weapons that would be used and they would use anything they could get their hands on.
04:39So generally, steel toe cap boots, belt buckles, any bits of brick or stones or anything they find on the floor, lots of evidence of assaults where objects and missiles have just been thrown at the other person.
04:50Their main weapon is their belts. They wrap the belt round the wrist. They grab hold and make sure they've got it caught in the palm of the hand and then they buckle it leaving about eight inches and then they slash and they slash, cause terrible injuries.
05:08They are not organised criminals. These are all hooligans.
05:11If you've got to work six days a week from morning till night for pennies, and with no way out, violence is a language.
05:23It's just the only way to be heard.
05:26But where do the Peaky Blinders fit into all this?
05:30Who were they?
05:33The term Peaky Blinder is a fashion statement.
05:36The Peaky Blinders are often called the bell-bottom crew.
05:39They wear bell-bottom trousers tight to the knee and then wide, 22 inches wide.
05:46And they have something like this scarf called a daff, a silkish type scarf.
05:52They're wearing a billycock.
05:53They have prison cropped hair, really almost bald.
05:56But they're like a quiff.
05:58They like to show it off.
06:00So they steam the billycock and they make the brim into like a funnel and they pull it over one eye.
06:06Hence the brims blinding the eye.
06:09And when the flat cap comes in, all they do, they just pull the cap over the eye to blind it.
06:16So they've got a distinct fashion.
06:18And the first time that the term Peaky Blinder is used in the press in Birmingham is March 1890.
06:22The mythology surrounding the Peaky Blinders is that they kept razor blades in their caps and that they use these as lethal weapons when required.
06:31I don't believe any gangster ever had a razor blade in their cap because it would be mentioned in the newspapers.
06:39I found no authoritative evidence that there were ever razor blades in caps.
06:43An inoffensive chap called George Eastwood goes into the bar of the Rainbow Pub on the corner of High Street, Bordsley and Adlai Street, not far from the ball ring.
06:57He's a teetotaler. Sadly, he's picked the wrong night.
07:01He's drinking a ginger beer.
07:08And three hard men with an evil reputation come in.
07:12And they insult him for drinking a soft drink.
07:15And a chap called Thomas Mucklow, the captain of the gang.
07:20Says, what are you drinking that tack for?
07:22He says, mind your own business. I can drink what I want.
07:43And a 14-year-old lad was a witness.
07:46And he said, they shouted, give it to him hot, lads.
07:51Oh, poor George. They did give it to him hot.
07:53So, after the attack on George Eastwood, the next day there was an article in the newspaper reported on it saying it was by the Peaky Blinders gang.
08:12During the 1880s, you get the rise of the sensationalist press, the kind of modern tabloid press.
08:23And the way in which the media reports on crime is completely different at this point.
08:28They have these sensational headlines that are extremely eye-catching.
08:32The media is a really important part of the creation of a new criminal stereotype at the end of the 19th century.
08:39So, looking through the original newspaper articles at the time, it would appear that there isn't one specific gang called the Peaky Blinders.
08:51Even judges start to refer to poor criminals as being of the Peaky class.
08:57Any criminal involved in theft, gambling, assaults, attacking police officers, they're all just called Peaky Blinders.
09:04And among the Peaky class criminals, some of the very worst were the Sheldon brothers.
09:13Stephen Knight, the creator of the television series, has said that the spark for the Shelbys was the Sheldons.
09:19The Sheldons had five brothers. Two of them were respectable. Three became three of the worst criminals and violent men in late Victorian and Edwardian Birmingham.
09:33John was the oldest. By 1881, when he was 15, he'd already got convictions. And throughout the 1880s and 90s, he's a professional thief. He's not a man to be messed with.
09:47He, on one occasion, with a friend, he's coming out of a pub, and they've taken a dislike to an Irish bloke, an old man, and they batter him in the street.
09:57He lives opposite with his daughter, the Irish bloke. His daughter comes over to try and stop them, pleading with them, please leave my father alone.
10:04Oh, no, they don't stop. Sheldon grabs hold of the poor young woman by the air, throws her to the ground, they drag her along the street, kicking her. That's the kind of man he was.
10:13The next oldest brother was Samuel. Only five foot one and a quarter. Despite his small size, he's a nasty, vicious man.
10:24And he's scarred with the results of his fights on his arms, on his legs, on his hands. He's another man that you don't mess with.
10:33Like his brother, he has no respect for women. He's one of a group of men that burst into the house of a 16-year-old young woman.
10:40They smash the door down, she flees upstairs, and then, in court it said, they all committed a most disgusting assault upon her.
10:49Joseph is the youngest brother.
10:52In 1899, he's named as a member of the feared Bar Street Gang, and it's pretty certain that his two older brothers were in that gang.
11:01He's also given as a Peaky Blinder.
11:05So it appears what we have is this rapid rise in street violence, with people like the Sheldons at the forefront.
11:13That perception being fuelled, of course, by what we could call early tabloid journalists, fanning the flames of middle-class panic.
11:20In 1899, the gang problem was so bad in Birmingham that the Chief Constable resigned, and the Birmingham Watch Committee, the counters that ran the police, fetched over from Ireland Charles Horton Rafter.
11:35Rafter realised, as soon as he'd come in, the Birmingham Police was badly on demand.
11:42So he worked on a rapid recruitment campaign.
11:47Rafter insisted, though, that his recruits had to be tall, they had to be fit.
11:51That meant that these young, fit officers could now go about in pairs in the toughest districts, where the reign of the ruffian was imposed by the Peaky Blinders.
12:04Before, many of these areas only had one policeman on a beat.
12:08Now there's two. They're big, strong lads.
12:09And the story that was passed on for generations in the Birmingham Police was that Rafter asked three things of his recruits.
12:18Can you read? Can you write? Can you fight?
12:22Because they'd have to.
12:23In 1914, the outbreak of the First World War drained Britain of a great many of its fighting-age men.
12:40Perhaps unsurprisingly, the crimes that had been associated with the Peaky class dropped.
12:44But we know that history never gives us any short answers.
12:49So what else contributed to this decrease in gang activity?
12:55There's organic factors that are working together.
13:00There's a High Church of England vicar called Father Pinchard, who starts a rudimentary boxing club.
13:05So they're learning respect, discipline.
13:08Football is becoming a really popular participation sport,
13:12as well as a spectator sport.
13:15And instead of gathering on waste ground to play pitch and toss, they're playing football now.
13:22And just as the gangs are disappearing, the cinema comes in.
13:26And instead of joining a street gang, lads are going to the pictures two or three nights a week.
13:34But of course, all the social programmes in the world wouldn't be able to erase criminality completely.
13:42There were some who were already too embedded in a life of crime to ever step away.
13:49And there's one name that keeps coming up again and again in history books, police records and arrest warrants.
13:59Not just in Birmingham, but up and down the country.
14:02William Kimber, born 7th of February 1882.
14:11Born and raised in the tough Summer Lane area, notorious for his peaky blinders.
14:16It wouldn't be long before Kimber would have his first run in with the law.
14:19His mum was an Irish Bromby. His dad was English.
14:22There is no suggestion that either of them were ever involved in any crime.
14:26But Kimber at the age of 12 is birched for a petty theft.
14:30Now, that means that he's forced to lie down and they pull down his trousers.
14:36Then they take a bunch of robust birch twigs, wired at one end and whip him.
14:45Again, I'm not excusing Billy Kimber's later criminality.
14:49But at an early age, the state is using violence against him.
14:52It would be remiss to think that it hasn't had an impact, something that significant in terms of being punished in that way.
15:03Possibly being shamed.
15:05Shame is something that we don't talk about when we look at these acts.
15:07We just look at the act itself and we don't think about how vulnerable you are when you're in that position.
15:12And the shame that comes with that.
15:14And I think these are all things that he used as fuel to get out and do anything he could to get out of that situation and never experience that again.
15:31He obviously learned to fight early on.
15:34The only Bromby I ever met who knew him said,
15:38Carl, he was strong as an ox and he fought like a lion.
15:43Then, with that reputation as the top man, the top fighter, he can control things.
15:50When you really get down to it on the streets, right here, right now, where it matters, violence is everything.
15:56But the threat of violence, just in a moment, is even more powerful.
16:02That's why people are very happy to let their deeds to be known, no matter how gruesome.
16:07Because this sends a message. It's like psychological warfare.
16:12He came from a place where fear lived all the time.
16:17I imagine he lived in a state of fear.
16:20Am I going to get my next meal? Am I going to be beaten up?
16:23Are we going to be attacked as a family?
16:25So fear fuelled this.
16:28He felt fear as a young person.
16:30And then he wanted to become the instigator of fear, because that's how you stayed safe.
16:35His favourite punch was to the solar plexus.
16:38Once you hit somebody really hard in the stomach, it makes them soil themselves.
16:43Now, can you imagine that?
16:45Not only are you being beaten up, not only are you bent over in pain, but you have been humiliated.
16:50He was very brutal, but the difference, you know, with him was he just had a polish that showed so much more street smarts.
16:59Billy Kimber was a fighting man, a feared fighting man, who, through his physicality, his fierceness, his viciousness, became the leader of a group of the most feared criminals in England at the time, the Birmingham Gang.
17:22According to police reports, by 1918, Kimber has become the leader of several small gangs.
17:32But street fighting was no longer the name of the game. Kimber was after money, real money.
17:38And where was he going to find that?
17:39Racing booms in the immediate aftermath of the First World War. Lots of men are coming home with payments from the army neighbour. A lot want to drink and gamble, enjoy themselves. There's masses of people going to race courses.
18:01So all the money populated there. And, of course, all the people who wanted money populated there behind them.
18:08And by the early 20th century, he's got a gang with his brothers Joe and Harry and other hard men who were going to the race courses of the Midlands and the north of England.
18:21They're known as the Bromager boys. They pickpocket. And if you know you've been pickpocketed and tried to stop them, what's going to happen to you?
18:27They're going to doff you up badly. Because there's hardly any race course security and the few policemen there are scared.
18:35These gangs also blackmail bookmakers. You want to stand on that pitch, that's a good pitch, you've got to give a survivor.
18:44You've got a stall you're standing on. Two and sixpence, that's 12 and a half pence a race.
18:49Six races, that's 15 shillings, 75 pence. That's as much as a poor man could earn in a week.
18:53You've got a blackboard, you write on the blackboard the names of the horses.
18:58What do you need for that? A stick of chalk. Two and a tanner, two and sixpence a race.
19:03At Epsom, Doncaster. The big meetings. There could be hundreds of bookmakers. This is big income.
19:09Billy Kimber and his gang made at least £400 a day, which translates to £22,000 a day. About £8 million a year in today's money.
19:21Now, Billy Kimber and the Birmingham gang were running the race course rackets in the Midlands and the North.
19:29No challenges in the Midlands and the North. Up towards Newcastle, they've got their own gang.
19:34And they don't bother with Scotland because the Glaswegian gangs run the race courses up there.
19:37So it's no longer just fighting each other over territory, but actually the organisation of criminal rackets around betting, gambling, liquor licences.
19:48So they're a really distinctive new period of organised crime in the city.
19:53So, in a short space of time, Kimber's influence had become widespread. His gang, known as the Birmingham Gang, had terrorising race courses up and down the country with no regards for the consequences.
20:13Could this man be the real Tommy Shelby?
20:16Will be.
20:21By the beginning of the 1920s, almost all of Britain's race courses are under the control of one man.
20:28Billy Kimber.
20:30The Birmingham Gang and their London allies are extorting money from the bookmakers, but they're racist. They're anti-Semitic.
20:40He would target Jewish bookmakers in the East End.
20:43One of whom is a man called Alfie Solomon.
20:47Now, compared to Kimber and most other members of the gangs who deserted in the First World War, Solomon served with honour.
20:57He received three service medals.
20:59And he comes out and he becomes a bookmaker.
21:02He's a secular Jewish man.
21:04His dad's got a green grocery business in Covent Garden.
21:07They had a servant growing up.
21:09But he's bookmaking.
21:11One event will change the course of Alfie Solomon's life like no other.
21:17And a really vile man called Tommy Armstrong, slugger, member of the Birmingham Gang, comes past.
21:26And he's offering 11 to 4 on a horse.
21:30And Armstrong says, I'll have 12 quid on that, on the nod.
21:35That meant he wanted it on credit.
21:36If it loses, is he going to pay up? Of course he's not.
21:41But if it wins, does he want paying? Of course he does.
21:45Solomon says, no, I ain't taking the bet. I'm not having that.
21:48Anyway.
21:50It kicked off.
21:56The horse won.
21:58Armstrong's mucky drunk by now.
22:00He comes back, demands his money.
22:03Solomon refuses.
22:05Armstrong took his field glasses, his heavy viewing glasses.
22:10Smashed them into the face of Alfie Solomon.
22:13He collapsed on the floor in a bloody mess.
22:18And then Armstrong slammed him in his face with his boots.
22:29Solomon's left there, prone.
22:32His face a bloody mass and with several teeth missing.
22:35This attack on Alfie Solomon transforms him.
22:39I've got no evidence at all before the attack that he was a vicious criminal.
22:45But afterwards, he certainly becomes one.
22:48Alfie Solomon seems to suddenly become violent out of absolutely nowhere.
22:52That shows to me underlying rage and it needed to be unlocked.
22:56Someone doesn't just become violent one day out of absolutely nowhere for no reason.
23:02I mean, he had a reason, he was beaten up.
23:06But that's not a reason to start a criminal career.
23:08So I think that unlocked a rage in him that he had for a very, very long time.
23:13Alfie Solomon was just another link in the chain.
23:17There are different groups.
23:18So you have the money earners and you have the people who need to enforce that, the enforcers.
23:23They'll go out and they'll do the street work and they'll break arms and they'll kill people
23:27and they'll dominate people and they'll collect the money.
23:29But really that's all they're good for.
23:31But the bosses, the real organised crime figures that do very well at this and rise up, they can do both.
23:36Billy Kimber had gone from a backstreet thug, a petty criminal, to one of the first organised crime bosses in England.
23:51I think some of the crimes that we see Billy Kimber engage in are narcissistically driven.
23:57I think he became a little bit addictive to what he was getting and it felt really, really good and he felt he deserved more because of that.
24:04And I think that drove him to then want to go to London and kind of pursue crime there as well.
24:09Kimber and his boys had been raking in money, working the country's racecourses like their own personal gold mine.
24:18But one thing we know about organised crime is that when money's flowing, you better watch your bike.
24:24March 1921 and London bookmaker Alfie Solomon has just been severely beaten by Billy Kimber's lieutenant, Tommy Armstrong.
24:37Alfie Solomon then turns to the governor of the Jewish East End underworld, Edward Emanuel.
24:43He was king of the underworld with the Jewish people of the time in the East End.
24:49He was really cunning, he knew how to put things together.
24:52Like Kimber, he's a fearsome fighter, a thug, a man who people are scared of.
24:58On one occasion he has a fight, he gets shot. Even though he's shot, he chases the bloke down the street and batters him.
25:06But he's also, like Kimber, got something up here. He's got a brain.
25:12Edward Emanuel is a very clever figure. He's very, very good at what he does.
25:17Because he's one of them people who understands to keep in the background is where the real power is.
25:22And he was very good at moving guys around, which is another real trait of an organised crime boss.
25:29In my opinion, Edward Emanuel is England's first godfather.
25:35He wants to get rid of Kimber and his London allies from down south.
25:40But he's got a team of Anglo-Jewish tearaways, but on their own they're not strong enough.
25:46Things move very rapidly after Solomon turns to Edward Emanuel for help.
25:51Emanuel turns to an up-and-coming young gangster.
25:55His mum is English. His dad was Italian but came to England as a youngster from Palmer in northern Italy.
26:04The Sabini gang were quite interesting. They were vicious thugs.
26:08There was about 300 members of the Sabini gang at its prime.
26:12Where they settled was in Clerkenwell in Little Italy, of course.
26:17Just the other side of the East End of London.
26:21He started off as a bounce-up, really. That was his first kind of innings into that world.
26:27He was a very rough-and-tumble, very, you know, in-your-face street brawler.
26:32And they're called in to back up Alfie Solomon and Emanuel's Anglo-Jewish tearaways
26:39against Billy Kimber's Birmingham gang and their London mates.
26:43And so began the biggest gang war this country had ever known.
26:54So, the Birmingham gang and their London allies realise Sabini's been called in.
26:59They corner him at Greenford Trotting Track.
27:02They're shouting, we're gonna murder him.
27:04They've got wood, planks of wood, they're hitting him.
27:07Somebody says, get a gun, shoot him.
27:09Luckily, he's saved by the police.
27:11It turns out that the gun wasn't registered.
27:15He should have really been prosecuted for it, but he got away with it.
27:20Throughout the spring and summer of 1921,
27:23there are shootings, beatings at racecourses and in London
27:28and around railway stations in the capital.
27:30It really was dangerous.
27:32Things are getting out of hand. This isn't good for business.
27:35The newspapers are picking up on this.
27:37Racecourse ruffians, ruffs of the turf,
27:40all these kind of phrases are being used.
27:42There's too much attention from the police.
27:44It's interesting, isn't it?
27:46The press attention only really gets going once there's a spectacle.
27:50When ordinary bookmakers were getting extorted,
27:53no-one really paid attention.
27:55So, someone calls a meeting.
28:02It's going to be at Collier Street,
28:04the house in Kings Cross where Sabine is now living.
28:10They decide that they'll have to make peace
28:12for the sake of their businesses.
28:15Billy Kimber turns up with some of the McDonalds.
28:27They're having a good drink and he's going to leave.
28:30Who turns up?
28:31But Alfie Solomon.
28:33Now, they're racist.
28:34They hate Jewish men and women.
28:36And Kimber goes for him.
28:38Pulls a revolver.
28:40And he calls him racist names.
28:43There's a scuffle.
28:45And in the scuffle,
28:47as Alfie Solomon's trying to stop Kimber from shooting him,
28:51the gun goes off.
28:53And the bullet actually goes into Kimber's back.
28:55Everybody disperses.
28:57Kimber's found unconscious on the street outside.
29:00He's sent to hospital.
29:02Allies of Kimber told me that that night,
29:07members of the London gang supporting Kimber
29:10and the Birmingham gang surrounded the hospital.
29:13It tells you the power that Kimber had.
29:18They go to court.
29:19Solomon admits that he accidentally shot Kimber.
29:24Billy Kimber is a witness who refuses to testify
29:27and all he says is this.
29:29If he says he shot me, well, that's up to him.
29:32But only cowards use revolvers
29:35and I would rather blow my brains out
29:37than use a shooter.
29:39The case is dismissed.
29:42But the worst was yet to come.
29:50What do we actually know about Billy Kimber?
29:53We know that Billy Kimber and the Birmingham gang
30:02are determined to maintain their dominance down south.
30:06But Edward Emanuel and Derby Sabine have other ideas.
30:10Epsom.
30:11Probably the biggest meeting of the year.
30:13The Birmingham gang decide they're going to really show who's in charge.
30:18The Epsom Derby, one of the biggest racing events of the year,
30:22was attended by over 200,000 people.
30:26But get this, they had no security.
30:29This is a gift for Billy Kimber.
30:31Birmingham gang members are going down there terrorising bookmakers.
30:35After racing, some Leeds bookmakers are leaving
30:40when they get attacked by 20-odd.
30:44Really vicious, horrible men from Birmingham.
30:48They had been paying protection to Kimber before,
30:51but it looks like they're moving towards Sabine and to Solomon.
30:55The Birmingham gang really inflict terrible injuries on them.
31:01And then they decide to go for a drink in a pub.
31:05Which is where they're eventually arrested.
31:08Out of the 20-odd, 17 men are sent down.
31:12These 17 men belong to different little crews within the Birmingham gang.
31:17That weakens Kimber.
31:18He's lost 17 of his most feared fighters.
31:22He then decides he's going to make a massive show of strength
31:27at Bath in the summer.
31:30The railway station at Bath
31:33suddenly is surrounded by a horde of Birmingham hard men,
31:39many of them not part of the Birmingham gang,
31:41but are attracted to Bath
31:43by the opportunity of having a pop,
31:46having a go at the Londoners,
31:49and particularly the Jewish Londoners.
31:51Kimber's there.
31:53His main fighters, who are not in prison now, are there.
31:57They start beating up Jewish bookmakers,
32:00and Kimber and another horrible Birmingham gang member
32:04batter Alfie Solomon, who goes down.
32:08They also attack his clerk,
32:10an inoffensive bloke called Charles Bild.
32:12They hit him with everything, and then somebody smashes him with a sandbag.
32:19The poor bloke goes down and eventually when the police come to save him,
32:22he's unconscious, covered in blood.
32:25Billy Kimber gets charged for that assault.
32:27But in September 1921, when he goes to court, no-one shows up to give evidence against him.
32:36So the case is dismissed.
32:38But before they leave, Kimber's lawyer announces to the court,
32:41don't worry, there'll be no more of this trouble,
32:44because this has all been sorted out.
32:48Cleverly, Edward Emanuel starts the Bookmakers Protection Association
32:53to stop the ruffianism on the turf,
32:56to stop the blackmailing of bookmakers.
33:00Well, what then happens is the jockey club like this,
33:03they're really upset by all the bad newspaper reports.
33:06People are going to stop coming racing if they don't watch it.
33:10So they back this new organisation, which appears to be legitimate.
33:13The police then are quite happy, because they can say,
33:15yes, this is a legitimate organisation.
33:18But what does he do?
33:19He employs Darby Sabini and his men as stewards to enforce order.
33:26But this was a very clever strategic move
33:28to protect the Jewish bookmakers that were constantly being threatened
33:31and attacked and preyed upon by, of course, Billy Kimber.
33:36This also legitimised Darby Sabini and everything that they needed to do next,
33:42including protecting all their organisation.
33:45Essentially, the Sabinis are untouchable,
33:48because the jockey club, in control of flat racing,
33:51and the police like the idea of an official organisation which they can support.
33:58Emanuel has won.
34:01The Birmingham boys have been outwitted.
34:04They can't operate down south any more.
34:06So, the boys insist that no southern bookmakers can operate in the Midlands or the North ever again.
34:15It says here, a meeting is finally called at Beresford's house to discuss terms of a truce.
34:21By September, newspapers are reporting that the gangs have divided England between them,
34:32that the Sabinis would have the south of England,
34:36and that the Birmingham gang would have the Midlands and the North.
34:39This means that till the mid-1920s, the Sabinis rule supreme on southern England's racecourses and those in London.
34:49But that was the time for Billy Kimber to walk away.
34:51What's fascinating about Billy Kimber and the Birmingham gang is that as soon as he steps away,
35:03the whole organisation disintegrates.
35:06They're all fighting each other again, just like the slogging gangs.
35:10Without him at the centre, it all just falls apart.
35:13Now, Emmanuel, he's moving slowly away from gangsterism into legitimacy.
35:22And he sees an opportunity to start up a legitimate printing company,
35:27which will print all the printing needs of the racecourses bookmakers, their tickets,
35:32instead of the chalk, runners, racing lists.
35:36He's clever enough to step back, pull the strings of the Sabinis,
35:39make money but start up a legitimate printing company, the Portsea Printing Press.
35:45Now, down south, the Jockey Club have decided they've got to take action.
35:50They bring in a new force of security men and the Sabinis are gradually pushed out.
35:55But what they do, they regroup in Soho.
36:00They take over the protection rackets of the illegal drinking clubs and the Spielers.
36:05They also extorted protection money from restaurant owners,
36:11publicans, not only in Soho, but in their heartlands of King's Cross and Clerkenwell.
36:23Albert Dines and Bert Marsh, leading towards Jack Spot and Billy Hill.
36:28He dies a broken man in 1950.
36:32Alfie Solomon was targeted by other gangs into the mid-1930s.
36:37And unable to get police protection, he then disappeared.
36:41Kimber, so it's said, about 1926, shoots through the windows of the Griffin,
36:48one of the Sabinis hangouts, and flees to America, where it's said he kills a man,
36:55and then he goes off to Chicago.
36:58Well, who's running Chicago in 1926?
37:00Alf Capone.
37:02Billy Kimber had a real depth of a person.
37:05And you see this all the way through his journey, from the street smarts to the brutality
37:09to the real CEO managerial decisions that he made, even back then,
37:15which, of course, positioned him as one of the leading lights of organised crime in the UK.
37:20Kimber comes back.
37:22By now, he's married to Elizabeth Garnham, the sister of one of his pals from Chapel Market.
37:29And he was then clever enough to realise, when he was beaten, that he needed to go legitimate.
37:35I think he was pushed into that as well by his wife,
37:38who, like Sabine's wife, wanted middle-class respectability for their children.
37:45Kimber would eventually settle in Devon, in Torquay, in a house overlooking the bay.
37:51He, too, would reinvent himself as a legitimate race-course bookmaker,
37:56an advert he took out with the local paper would read,
38:00Bet with Bill Kimber, a man who's reliable.
38:05And there's a real irony here, because he becomes a leading member
38:10of the local Devon Bookmakers Protection Association,
38:15the very organisation that, in effect, brought him down.
38:19Started by Kimber's nemesis, Edward Emanuel, as a means for him to take over down south,
38:25but the BPA, by the 30s, has become a legitimate and respectable organisation.
38:32We know that, eventually, Billy did retire, but prior to that, psychologically,
38:37he was on guard his whole life, right from living in the slums in Birmingham
38:41and throughout his entire, kind of, criminal career.
38:44I think what that does to a person is it sets them in this constant sense of fight or flight,
38:50which means that your adrenal system is activated, which means that you can never really rest.
38:55And I think that that is only sustainable for so long in terms of a person's lifespan.
39:02I don't think it's something that you can do forever.
39:04Kimber eventually dies in 1945 in a nursing home, and he died one of the last of the real Peaky Blinders.
39:19If we look at how Darby Sabini, Alfie Solomon, Billy Kimber are portrayed in the series,
39:24there is a fundamental difference.
39:27Darby Sabini is depicted as a bella figura, like a Sicilian mafia don, elegantly dressed with a walking cane.
39:36He wasn't. He didn't wear fancy clothes. He wasn't elegant. He wasn't a bella figura.
39:42He wore a flat cap, a collarless shirt, working man's clothes. He didn't speak Italian.
39:50He regarded himself as an Englishman. Alfie Solomon is portrayed as an Orthodox Jewish man.
39:56He wasn't. He was from a secular Jewish background whose family had been settled in England for generations.
40:02Billy Kimber is given as a Londoner, a small Londoner. He wasn't. He was a Brummie.
40:06I think people like the romanticism, the glamour of it all, and this suggestion of a different society in Birmingham
40:19that people might not have otherwise been aware of.
40:22I think people will always be drawn to gangsters because, in many ways, they feel like the stuff of myth.
40:29Partly because these men that we see, and it's usually men, sometimes women, but usually men, are very good at creating stories.
40:44They're very good at creating legacy. And human beings, we like stories.
40:49They create a mystery, and I think we're drawn to understanding that.
40:53What lessons should we take from the real Peaky Blinders and the gangs of the 1920s?
41:01Most importantly, gang members and organised gangsters are not meant to be admired.
41:08These were not glamorous anti-heroes who people would look to for support.
41:12They weren't Robin Hood characters that looked after the poor. They preyed upon the poor.
41:17They were feared members of the working class. They didn't look after the poor and the Peaky Blinders. They beat them up. They bullied them.
41:24Sabini, Kimber, Emmanuel, took money from poorer people whenever they could.
41:30I suppose it's not really surprising that a fictional portrayal of a criminal organisation doesn't match with the reality.
41:37After all, it's the job of historical fiction to impart glamour to the everyday, to make it exciting.
41:45But what's fascinating isn't so much that a brilliant television series found a devoted audience.
41:53It's how little attitudes have changed.
41:56We're still convinced that criminality is largely a working class phenomenon.
42:01And street gangs, they're not a thing of the past. They existed here in every city, in the world.
42:06But why?
42:09Perhaps there is something innate in people that makes them want to seek out fellowship.
42:15Community.
42:17And when none exists, construct their own.
42:20But I suppose that's why we need the legends.
42:23For when reality is not to our taste.
42:26Legends don't often leave room for ordinary folk.
42:29That's what we do.
42:32It's really hard to see more and one.
42:33They don't even know if the world is dark.
42:36Reading the book.
42:39The book...
42:41I remember the sickness was forever.
42:46I remember the snow videos.
42:47was forever
42:48I remember
42:51snow videos
42:54cold soft timbers
42:57the distances
42:58we covered
43:00the fistfights on the beat
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