Blackmail, intimidation and violence on streets of Brum
THE language is fruity, the violence writ large and the central characters the last kind of people you would want to cross on a Friday night.
But which of the real gangsters in
Carl Chinn’s new book Peaky Blinders: The Legacy would he really not
like to meet?
“All of them,” says Prof Chinn, as quick as a flash. “The violence they perpetrated was horrific and they were despicable, brutal men with few, if any, redeeming qualities.”
He is at pains to point out at every opportunity that he is not seeking to glamorise the actions of men like Billy Kimber (thought to have been the boss of the main Birmingham gang and who became the first leader on a national scale), Darby Sabini and Alfie Solomon.
As he writes in the book: “The 1920s gangsters were not audacious and exciting anti-heroes but dangerous, nasty, mob-handed racketeers who blackmailed, intimidated and maimed.”
Their stories follow on from the gangland genesis detailed in Peaky
Blinders: The Real Story, which was first published by John Blake Books in September 2019.
The book topped the Sunday Times’ top ten bestseller list of nonfiction paperbacks after Prof Chinn revealed how the origins of the gangs had shocked him into denouncing his own family’s antics.
While it no doubt helped that the fifth series of the TV drama – created by fellow Brummie Steven Knight –
was being screened on BBC1, the pandemic means there will be no new drama to accompany the latest book’s publication.
Launched in 2013 on BBC2, the earliest the sixth series could begin shooting is thought to be early 2021 for transmission in late 2021 or early 2022.
Prof Chinn said: “When I watch Peaky Blinders, I watch it with one eye on the exciting, engrossing drama and I keep the other eye on the facts I write about in my books. I first started researching and writing about the
Peaky Blinders in 1987 so I’ll often be thinking, it wasn’t really like that’.
“And the reason my paperback last year was so successful is that readers were telling me they enjoyed reading about what those characters were really like – they wanted realities, not the glamour and dramatic.
“That is what has motivated me to glean as much as I can from a variety of sources when it would be easy to fall into ‘Mafia don’ territory.
“In short, the racketeers and gangs were as noticeable and important a feature of the 1920s as the Bright
Young Things, the flappers and the jazzers.
“Peaky Blinders may not be on TV this autumn, but the tale is fascinating and this second book is all about central characters in the 1920s.
“Rather like 2020, it was an exciting time for a few and an unhappy time for many and we again need to replace old industries that have left areas devastated.
“I am always in awe of how working-class people put up with so much hardship, illness, injuries and poverty while having so much dignity and respect for each other.
“I’ve trawled official records kept by the National Archive and the West Midlands Police Museum.
“I had also talked to a lot of primary sources years ago, interviewing relatives of people who had been in the illegal bookmaking trade.”
■ Peaky Blinders: The Legacy by Prof Carl Chinn is a John Blake paperback published by Bonnier Books UK, priced £8.99.