The REAL Tommy Shelby: What Peaky Blinders Got Wrong HT

You know this man. You’ve seen the sharp cheekbones, the ice blue eyes, the three-piece suit cut like a weapon. [music] Tommy Shelby, head of the Peaky Blinders. A man who rose from the mud of Birmingham to control a criminal empire stretching from the racetracks of England to the corridors of Parliament.

Six seasons, over 500 million viewers worldwide. [music] Killian Murphy gave him a soul. Steven Knight gave him a legend. And the legend says it was all based on a true story. But here’s what most people don’t know. There was no Tommy Shelby. Not in real [music] life. Not ever. The real Peiquey Blinders weren’t sophisticated empire builders in tailored suits.

They were teenage street thugs from the 1890s, not the [music] 1920s, who mugged passers by, stole bicycles, and attacked police officers with belt buckles and bricks. Um, the razor blades sewn into flat caps. Never happened. The man the show portrays as their dimwitted enemy and Billy Kimber was actually one of them.

And he built the real empire the show credits to Tommy Shelby. This is the real story of the Peiquey Blinders. And almost everything the show told you was wrong. To understand the real Peiquey Blinders, you have to understand the world that made them. And that world was Victorian Birmingham, a city that called itself the city of a thousand trades, but looked more like a slow motion catastrophe.

By the late 1800s, Birmingham had exploded. The population went from about 73,000 in 1801 to nearly 745,000 by 1901, a t-fold increase in a single century. The economy ran on thousands of small metalworking shops, [music] guns, brass fittings, buttons, pen nibs, jewelry, and the workers who fed those shops lived in conditions that would shock you.

They called them backto back houses. Cramped brick dwellings, sharing three of four walls with neighbors, no indoor plumbing, no ventilation, no natural light worth mentioning. In some blocks, 11 families are more than 60 people shared a single building. Life expectancy in 1873 was 37 years. Infant mortality ran at 158 per thousand.

Children worked 12-hour days in factories. If they fell asleep, they were beaten. A grown man, a working man, earned roughly 75 to 80 a week. The streets stank. Open sewers ran between the houses. Tuberculosis, cholera, and typhoid moved through the neighborhoods like rent collectors. Regular and merciless.

Families shared outdoor privies. Sometimes one toilet for an entire court of 10 or 12 households. Drinking water came from the same wells that sat feet away from cess pits. Women did peacework at home, sewing buttons, making matchboxes for fractions of a penny per piece. And the children, the children either worked or they roamed.

There was no compulsory education until 1880. And even after that, enforcement was spotty at best in neighborhoods where every pair of hands was needed to keep the family fed. And into this misery, gangs were born. Not because these men were evil, because they were desperate. Because when you pack that many people into that little space with that little hope, violence becomes a language.

It becomes a currency. It becomes the only thing some of these boys ever learned to trade in. The show skips all of this. It opens in 1919 with the Shelbies already running a bookmaking operation, living in houses that while modest would have been palatial by real peaky blinder standards.

The real story starts 30 years earlier in the mud, [music] in the dark, in streets where the air tasted like coal and the only way out was through somebody else. The earliest gangs appeared in the 1850s and60s. They called themselves slogging gangs after the pugilistic term for heavy hitters. They clustered around gambling dens and bare knuckle fighting pits and they fought each other over territory measured in street corners, not miles.

Then came the Murphy riots of 1867 as anti-atholic mobs tore through Birmingham’s Irish quarter while police largely stood aside. The Irish [music] communities already crammed into the worst housing in the city, organized for self-defense. And that self-defense hardened into something more permanent.

Territorial gangs named crews. The Cheapside Sloggers, the Aston Sloggers, the Milk Street Ruffs, the Garrison Lane Gang, each one controlling a handful of streets, each one ready to fight for them. These weren’t criminal masterminds. These were young men, boys, some of them, with no education, no prospects, and no one telling them there was another way.

Manufacturer Arthur Mat, who lived on Summer Lane in the early 1890s, put it plainly, “Youth violence,” he said, grew out of harsh social and economic conditions and unemployment. That’s not an excuse, but it is an explanation, and it’s one the show never bothers to give you.

So, where did the name come from? The show would have you believe it’s about razor blades sewn into the peaks of flat caps. A weapon so distinctive it became a brand. It’s a great image. It’s also completely made up. Peaky was Birmingham slang for any flat cap [music] with a peak. Blinder meant someone of dapper or striking appearance.

Put them together and you get a name for young men who wore their caps at a distinctive angle and wanted you to know they were somebody. It was about fashion, about identity, about intimidation through appearance, not weaponry. And here’s the thing most people don’t realize. The earliest Peaky Blinders didn’t even wear flat caps.

According to Professor Carl Chin, the foremost historian on this subject, they wore what was called a Billy [ __ ] a working man’s bowler hat. They’d wet the brim, heat it over a fire, and funnel it down over one eye. That was the look. That was the original peaky blinder style.

Not Killian Murphy in a newsboy cap with a hidden blade. a teenager in a [music] bent bowler hat looking for trouble on a Saturday night. And on a Saturday night in March of 1890 at a pub called The Rainbow in Small Heath, that trouble finally made the newspapers. What happened that night would give the Peaky Blinders their first headline and begin a story that the BBC wouldn’t tell for another 123 years.

March 24th, 1890. The Birmingham Mail ran a story under the headline, “A murderous outrage at Small Heath. Two nights earlier, a man named George Eastwood had been drinking at the Rainbow Public House on Adalie Street when a group of young men set upon him. They fractured his skull so badly he needed a trapanning operation, a hole drilled into his head to relieve the pressure.

” Eastwood spent more than 3 weeks in hospital. His attackers were identified as members of a group the paper called the Small Heath Peaky Blinders. That’s the first documented reference. March 1890, not 1919, not after the First World War, 30 years earlier. The gang was founded in Small Heath, likely led by a man named Thomas Mucklo.

Their territory covered small Heath, Bordisley, and Cheapside, a few square miles of workingclass Birmingham. By the late 1890s, the name had spread across the city. An 1898 letter to the Birmingham Daily Mail complained, “No matter what part of the city one walks, gangs of peaky blinders are to be seen.

” But what were they actually doing? Not running a criminal empire, not fixing horse races, not meeting with politicians. The court records tell a different story. Street robbery, pickpocketing, assault, protection rackets on local shopkeepers, illegal gambling, and something the police reports called constable baiting.

Unprovoked attacks on police officers carried out for sport. Members ranged in age from 12 to 30. Newspapers describe them as foul-mouthed young men who stalk the streets in drunken groups, insulting and mugging passers by. That’s the real peaky blinders, not the sharpsuited empire builders of the show. Could drunken teenagers harassing people on street corners? And here’s the detail that matters most.

There were no real Shelbies. Not [music] one. The Shelby family is entirely fictional. The name was borrowed uh on legal advice from a real Birmingham family called the Sheldons who were related to show creator Steven Knight. But the characters Tommy, Arthur, Polly, John, Adah made up every single one.

So who were the real Peaky Blinders? Their names survive. Their mug shots hang in the West Midlands Police Museum, and their stories are nothing like the show. The closest real analog to Tommy Shelby was a man named Thomas Gilbert, who also went by the alias Kevin Mooney. Gilbert was the most powerful documented member of the gang.

He routinely changed his surname to dodge the police. He organized the Peiquey Blinders into something resembling a unified group and led territorial expansions across Birmingham’s neighborhoods. But his criminal record tells you everything you need to know about the gap between fiction and reality. His documented convictions were for thievery and deception, not empire building, not political manipulation, theft.

His mugsh shot preserved in the West Midlands Police Museum shows a hard-looking man with flat eyes, not a mastermind, a survivor. Then there’s Thomas Mucklo, the probable founder, the man who led that first documented attack in 1890. Muckllo cycled through the justice system for years. In 1902, he served 6 months for maliciously wounding a man named George Groom, who was ironically believed to be a fellow peaky blinder. G.

But here’s where the story gets interesting and sad. The 1921 census, the year the show opens with Tommy Shelby consolidating [music] his power, lists Thomas Mucklo as a 57year-old Carter living in Bordersley with his wife Charlotte. His occupation hauling cargo for a holage company. That’s it.

The probable founder of the Peaky Blinders spent his later years driving a horse and cart. Harry Fowls, known as Babyfaced [music] Harry, was arrested at age 19 in 1904 for stealing a bicycle. He later fought in the First World War and was buried alive for 12 hours by a mortar bombardment. He survived barely. After the war, the severely wounded Fowls made a living selling postcards of himself dressed as a female nurse.

He is the only documented peaky blinder who was also a war veteran. The show builds its entire mythology around the idea that the Shelby brothers came home from France as hardened, shellshocked warriors. In reality, one man fits that description, and he spent his post-war years selling novelty photographs of himself in costume.

David Taylor was arrested at just 13 years old for carrying a loaded firearm. Steven McNichol served one month for breaking into a drapery. Ernest Bales served one month for stealing a bicycle. These are the real peaky blinders. Not criminal royalty, not empire builders. Boys and young men caught in a cycle of poverty and petty crime.

Cycling through magistrates [music] courts for offenses that wouldn’t make the evening news. And that’s the thing the show can never capture, the sheer smallness of it. The real Peiquey Blinders weren’t fighting wars. They weren’t making history. They were fighting each other over who controlled the corner outside a pub.

Their world was measured in streets, not cities. Their fortunes were measured in shillings, not millions. The show gives them grandeur. The record gives them mug shots and magistrates fines. But what about the razor blades? The iconic image and a peaky blinder pulling off his cap and slashing an enemy’s face with a blade sewn into the peak.

It’s the show’s signature, its brand, the moment everyone remembers. It never happened, not once. Carl Chin has reviewed hundreds of court cases, police records, and newspaper reports from the Peaky Blinder era. He’s also interviewed elderly men in the early 1980s who were alive during the gang’s peak. His verdict is unequivocal.

Number one, it’s not feasible. Number two, it never happened. Three facts destroy the myth entirely. First, economics. The Gillette Company introduced replaceable safety razor blades in the United States in 1903. The first British factory didn’t open until 1908. These were expensive luxury items, far beyond the reach of young men earning 75 p [music] a week.

Second mechanics. Try it. Try removing a soft cloth cap in the middle of a street fight, folding it precisely, and slashing someone with enough force to do real damage. As Chin puts it, you’d be flattened before [music] you’d done the damage. And third, the record of every weapon documented in every police report, every court case, every newspaper account of a peaky blinder attack.

Not a single one mentions a razor blade sewn into a cap. Not one. The myth can be traced to two sources, John Douglas’s 1977 novel, A Walk Down Summer Lane, and a 1950s Birmingham campaigner named Norman Tiptaft, who used the claim to promote alarmist views about crime. It’s fiction built on fiction.

The real weapons of the Peaky Blinders were crudder and more brutal. The weapon of choice was a heavy leather belt wrapped around the fist with the brass buckle swinging free. They also used hobnailed boots for kicking downed victims, knives, bricks, fire irons, and occasionally firearms, and including Webly revolvers. No elegance, no style, just blunt force trauma on a Saturday night.

But crude or not, the violence was real. And on July 19th, 1897, it turned deadly. Police Constable George Snipe was on patrol when he encountered a group of peaky blinders. A member named George Cloggy Williams threw a brick at Snipe’s head with such force it fractured the officer’s skull in two places. Snipe died the following morning.

Williams was convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to life imprisonment, later reduced to 18 years at Dartmore. The killing had an unexpected [music] consequence. Birmingham redesigned its police helmets. The spike on top was replaced with a rounded crest because it was believed the brick had driven the spike into Snip’s skull.

Four years later in 1901, another officer, Constable Charles Phillip Ga was also killed. These murders changed everything. Public outrage reached a tipping point. The court stopped going easy on gang members and in 1899 to Birmingham appointed a new chief constable, an Irishman from Belfast named Charles Horton Rafter, recommended as a man skilled in the preservation or restoration of peace in troubled districts.

Rafter expanded the police force. He recruited taller, fitter officers, and he pushed for dramatically harsher sentences. Punishments that had been a few years jumped to 15 or more. The crackdown worked slowly, grinding, painfully, but it worked. The last documented peaky blinder assault appears in a January 1907 report in the Birmingham Daily Gazette.

After that, silence. Professor Chin states it definitively. The Peaky Blinders disappear before the First World War. By 1910, the Birmingham gangs had gone. Let that sink in. In the show, Tommy Shelby is building his empire in 1919. In reality, the Peaky Blinders had been dead for nearly a decade.

The show’s entire timeline is built on a gang that no longer existed. If you found out your great-grandfather was a real Peaky [music] Blinder, would you want to know the truth or keep the myth? Let me know in the comments. By 1910, the Peaky Blinders were gone, absorbed, displaced, forgotten.

But the world they had built, the back alley networks, the bookmaker connections, [music] the willingness to use violence as a business tool, that world didn’t disappear. [music] It produced something far more dangerous. And the man who built it was the one person the show got most [music] wrong. In the show, Billy Kimber is a minor character, a dimwitted London gangster [music] who runs the racetracks and gets killed off in season 1 by Tommy Shelby.

He’s a stepping stone, an [music] obstacle, a footnote in the Shelby family’s rise to power. [music] In reality, Billy Kimber was the most important criminal figure in this entire story, and the show got almost everything about him backward. William Kimber was born on February 7th, 1882 in Summer Lane, Aster, Birmingham, not London, Birmingham.

He was a Brummy born and raised a brass caster by trade. And according to Carl Chin, Kimber was himself a former Peaky Blinder, a graduate of the very gang the show portrays as his [music] enemy. Chin describes him as a very intelligent man with a fighting ability, a magnetic personality and a shrewd awareness of the importance of an alliance with London.

Does that sound like the bumbling thug from season 1? That description sounds a lot more like Tommy Shelby. So by approximately 1910, the same year the real Peaky Blinders were fading into nothing, Kimber had built the Birmingham Boys into arguably the most powerful organized crime operation in Britain.

He’d found the perfect racket. The Gaming Act of 1845 had banned gambling everywhere in England except at racecourses. With a railway network enabling thousands of working men to attend race meetings, Kimber realized there was a fortune to be made. His gang charged bookmakers as much as 50% of their profits for protection.

He controlled [music] the best pitches at every meeting. He installed his own men. He expanded from the Midlands and the North into London itself, setting up a secondary base in Islington. This was the criminal empire the show attributes to Tommy Shelby. The racetracks, [music] the book makers, the expansion into London, the political connections, all of it.

Except it belonged to Billy Kimber, a former Peaky Blinder who outgrew the Peaky Blinders and built something they never could have imagined. And here’s the irony the show completely misses. The real Peiquey Blinders didn’t defeat Kimber. They didn’t outsmart him. They didn’t shoot him outside a racing ground. It was the other way around.

Kimber absorbed them. He recruited the toughest men from the old gangs. Gave them structure, gave them purpose, and gave [music] them money. Real money, not the pennies they’d been stealing from shopkeepers. The Birmingham boys were, in many ways, the Peaky Blinders grown up. The show reverses this relationship entirely, turning the apex predator into prey.

She Kimba’s expansion into London triggered what historians call the racecourse wars of 1920 to 1922, [music] a brutal conflict against Charles Derby Sabini’s gang from Clarkenwell. [music] And this is where Kimber’s story takes its most dramatic turn. On June 2nd, 1921, 60 of Kimber’s men launched an ambush near Epsom, armed with hatchets, hammers, and bricks.

Terrified onlookers thought it was a sin feain riot. But Kimber’s men had made a catastrophic mistake. They attacked the wrong vehicle. Instead of Sabini’s crew, they assaulted a group of leads book makers, men who were their own allies. 23 of 28 [music] gang members were convicted at Guilford Assises. The blunderhanded dominance of the London racetracks to the Sabini gang.

But here’s the part the show doesn’t tell you. Kimber lost the racecourse wars, but he never lost his freedom for long. He traveled to America in the late 1920s and allegedly reached Chicago [music] where he was hidden by Murray Humphre of Al Capone’s organization. He returned to England around 1929, settled in to Devon, and became president of the Devon and Cormal Bookmakers Association.

He died on June 27th, 1945 at age 63 of prolonged illness. [music] He was never shot, never killed by any Shelby. He outlived the real Peiquey Blinders by decades and died in his bed. The show kills Kimber off in season 1 as a minor antagonist. In reality, he was the most significant criminal figure in this story.

He was a peaky blinder who outgrew the peaky blinders. He built [music] everything the show credits to a man who never existed. And Kimber wasn’t the only thing the show got wrong. The deeper you dig, the wider the gap between fiction and reality becomes. Take Darby Sabini, the Italian accented mafia Dawn, who becomes one of Tommy Shelby’s most formidable enemies.

In reality, Sabini grew up in Clerkenwell, London. According to Chin, who interviewed descendants of Sabini’s associates, the man never spoke a word of Italian. He was as English as fish and chips. The show also turns Alfie Solomon’s into Sabini’s [music] bitter rival. The real Alfie Solomon, no S, was actually Sabini’s ally, not his enemy. The whole rivalry was invented.

Then there are the political connections. The show has Tommy meeting Winston Churchill, depicted as home secretary in 1919, and later tangling with Oswald Mosley in 1929. Both scenes are historically impossible. Churchill was home secretary from 1910 to 1911, not 1919. And Mosley’s British Union of Fascists wasn’t founded until 1932, not 1929.

The show compresses decades of history into a single timeline and hopes you won’t notice. But perhaps the biggest fiction is the most subtle one. The show presents the Shelbies as noble outlaws and rough men, yes, but men who protect their community, who fight for their people who live by a code. Carl Chin is blunt about this.

They weren’t Robin Hoods. They weren’t noble outsiders. They prayed on their own communities. They are not men of honor. The real Peaky Blinders didn’t protect the poor. They robbed them. They didn’t fight the establishment. They beat up shopkeepers for pennies. The Romani heritage that gives the Shelby family their mystique. Entirely fictional.

Chin finds no evidence linking the real gangs to Romany families in Birmingham. Chin has said something else that cuts right to the heart of it. The danger is that by mythologizing gangsters who help their own communities, we have had to adopt that myth. The show turned thugs into heroes and 500 million people believed it.

[music] So if Tommy Shelby didn’t exist and the empire was Kimbers and the razor blades were a myth and the timeline was wrong by 30 years, how did the real Peaky Blinders actually end? Not with a bang. Not with a dramatic final confrontation. With something much quieter. Chief Constable Rafter’s crackdown played the biggest role.

After the murders of Constable Snipe and Constable Gunter, public tolerance for gang violence evaporated. Rafters expanded, better trained force made the streets harder to control. Sentences got longer. The magistrates stopped showing mercy. For a group that relied on intimidating shopkeepers and mugging pedestrians, the math simply stopped working.

The risk outweighed the reward. But historian Philip Gooderson found an unexpected factor in the gang’s decline, and it had nothing to do with law enforcement. It was football. As clubs like Aston Villa and Birmingham City, originally called Small Heath Alliance, the very neighborhood where the Peaky Blinders were born, grew in popularity through the 1890s and 1900s.

They gave workingclass young men something the streets never could. Excitement without consequence, identity without violence, belonging without a criminal record. New youth clubs emerged across the city. Saturday afternoons that might have been spent on street corners were spent in stadiums instead.

Some former gang members simply aged out. They found work, got married, settled into the grinding anonymity of workingclass life. Court records from the era even show police officers vouching for reforming criminals, urging judges toward leniency when they saw genuine change. Not every peaky blinder died in the gutter. Some of them just grew up.

And some of them watched their own sons go off to play football on Saturday afternoons instead of robbing drunks outside pubs. And they let them go. The cycle didn’t always repeat. Not every story ends in blood. And the final blow, they were out competed. So Billy Kimber, a former Pey Blinder himself, built the Birmingham boys into something the old gang could never have been.

Sophisticated, profitable, national. The Peaky Blinders were street corner bullies. Kimber was a businessman who happened to use violence. By 1910, the name Peiquey Blinder had become generic Birmingham slang for any street criminal, not a functioning organization. And by 1940, as Carl Chin writes, [music] they were even forgotten or long dead.

There’s one man who knows this story better than anyone alive. And his connection to the Peaky Blinders isn’t academic. It’s personal. Professor Carl Chin, MBE, is the world’s foremost authority on Birmingham’s gang history. He’s professor emeritus of community history at the University of Birmingham.

or he’s published four books on the Piquey Blinders, including Peiquey Blinders, The Real Story, which hit number one on the Sunday Times bestseller list, and has been translated into 15 languages. He served as consultant historian on the BBC 2 documentary, The Real Peaky Blinders, in 2022. But here’s why Chin’s work carries a weight that no other historians can.

His great-grandfather, Edward Derek, was a peaky blinder. And Chin doesn’t romanticize him. Not for a second. He describes Derek as a violent, abusive, wifebeating thug, a petty thief. His grandfather was an illegal bookmaker in Sparkbrook. Chin himself was an off-c course bookmaker until 1984. He first wrote about the real Peiquey Blinders in his 1986 doctoral thesis and has spent 40 years chasing the truth through court records, census data, and newspaper archives.

His verdict on the show is measured but clear. He praises Steven Knight for capturing the spirit of workingclass Birmingham and notes the show has drawn young audiences towards history. But he never lets the myth stand unchallenged. The real Peaky Blinders were backstreet thugs. Chin says they baited the police.

They battled each other, but they bullied the hard-working, respectable poor, the majority amongst whom they lived. That’s not a line from a television drama. That’s a grandson reckoning with his own family’s past. And then there’s the man who built the myth. Steven Knight was born in 1959 in Small Heath in Birmingham, the same neighborhood where the Peaky Blinders were founded.

His father was a blacksmith who shued horses. His mother had been a bookmakers runner at age nine. His father’s uncles were members of a real Birmingham family called the Sheldons, renamed Shelby on legal advice. Knight has never claimed historical accuracy. His creative mission was mythology and he’s been open about it.

I wanted to do to my own history what the Americans did to theirs. He told radio times in 2022. Gee, 19th century agricultural laborers working with cows. Doesn’t sound very interesting. The Americans took them and made them cowboys. He’s described the show as almost the recollections of someone who experienced something as a child.

Everything’s bigger and better, and the suits are smarter, and the pub is a cathedral. Real people from Knight’s Family World appear in the show. Charlie Strong is named after a real person from the blacksmith’s yard. Curly was Knight’s [music] great great uncle. Aunt Polly was based on his father’s aunt.

And the core image that sparked the whole series, [music] Tommy witnessing a table covered in money and guns surrounded by bloeds, drinking beer from jam jars, comes directly from Knight’s father’s childhood memory. Knight acknowledges the liberties freely. He knows the timeline is wrong.

He knows there was no Tommy Shelby. He knows the razor blades are a myth. But he also knows something else. something that even Carl Chin conceds. The show, for all its inventions, [music] captured something true about workingclass Birmingham. The hunger, the defiance, the refusal to accept that where you’re born is where you die.

That’s not history. But it’s not nothing either. And perhaps that’s the real lesson here. Knight didn’t set out to make a documentary. He set out to make a myth. And myths don’t need to be true to be powerful. The cowboys of the American West were mostly illiterate drifters who died young and poor.

Hollywood turned them into legends. Knight did the same thing with the Backstreet Thugs of Birmingham. The question isn’t whether the myth is accurate. The question is what gets lost when the myth replaces the truth entirely. The Peiquey Blinders universe keeps expanding. Peiquey Blinders, the Immortal Man, the long- awaited feature film, [music] hits select cinemas on March 6th, 2026.

And Netflix Worldwide on March 20th. Killian Murphy returns as [music] Tommy Shelby. Barry Kogan plays his son, Duke. Rebecca Ferguson and Tim Roth join the cast. The film is set in Birmingham in 1940 during the Second World War and was shot at Steven Knight’s own Dig Beth Lock Studios in the city.

A new documentary Peaky Blinders, the real story directed by Robin Beexter, was released on digital platforms on February 23rd, 2026. It features Carl Chin, Steven Knight, and the show’s production designer, Grant Montgomery, [music] examining the historical records behind the series. See, among its revelations, the gang was originally nicknamed the Bellbottom Crew for their wide flared trousers, and the cropped haircut was a badge of honor, a way to display scars from street fights.

The Black Country Living Museum in Dudley, the filming location for all six seasons, won large visitor attraction of the year in 2025, and continues hosting immersive Piquey Blinders nights. Birmingham is studying the feasibility of a permanent Peiquey Blinders attraction in Digbath. And at the West Midlands Police Museum, in a Victorian lockup that once held the very men this story is about, the original mug shots still hang on the wall.

A show about fictional gangsters has become Birmingham’s biggest cultural export. Half a billion people around the world know the name Peiquey Blinders, but the men behind the name and the real ones, the ones whose faces stare out from those museum mug shots. Their story is something else entirely. Thomas Mucklo, the probable founder of the Peaky Blinders, appears in the 1921 census as a 57-year-old Carter, still living in Bordesley with his wife Charlotte, hauling cargo for a living.

Harry Fowls, the only documented peaky blinder, who was also a war veteran, spent his later years selling postcards of himself dressed in a nurse’s costume. Thomas Gilbert, the closest thing to a real Tommy Shelby, was a fishmonger who kept changing his name to stay out of prison.

Their mug shots still hang in the West Midlands Police Museum. No one visits them. The real Peaky Blinders didn’t build an empire. They didn’t marry into aristocracy. They didn’t enter parliament. They didn’t sit in grand offices making deals that shape nations. They were poor young men from backto-back slums who beat people with belt buckles and stole bicycles.

And yet 500 million people around the world know their name. Or at least the name Steven Knight gave them. Billy Kimber, the peaky blinder who became something bigger, who built the real empire, who fought the real wars, and who died in his bed in Devon at 63, has never had his full story told. Not by the BBC, not by Netflix, not by anyone.

He’s still waiting. Somewhere between the myth and the mugsh shot, the real story of Birmingham’s underworld is [music] still being written.