The savage reign of Bloody King Billy
As Peaky Blinders returns to our TV screens tomorrow, how a notorious Glasgow razor gang boss inspired the new series
FROM his smart three-piece suit and closely knotted tie to his cruel-eyed stare, the man in the black and white photograph could easily rival any of the feared Shelby clan from TV’s Peaky Blinders.
This, though, is no fictional villain but Billy Fullerton, a man whose reputation for brutality on the streets of Depression-era Glasgow left his native city gripped by fear.
The savagery meted out by the 800-strong mob that he governed with an iron fist between the wars would routinely match anything dreamed up by the makers of the ultra-violent BBC drama, which returns to our screens tomorrow.
Even the show’s creator, Stephen Knight, confessed he was in awe of the terrifying levels of bloody mayhem regularly unleashed by Fullerton’s Billy Boys, uncovered while he was researching a Glasgow gangster to feature in the latest series of his hit show.
While Fullerton and his violent tendencies never ventured beyond his native city in real life, the temptation to pitch such a man against his own ruthless creations was too much for Knight. Viewers will witness the ensuing chaos when a Glasgow gang inspired by Fullerton and the Billy Boys heads south to Birmingham to lock horns with Tommy Shelby and his bloodthirsty entourage.
Tantalisingly, the identity of the character and the actor playing him remains a closely guarded secret for now.
But as Knight himself recently pointed out: ‘The truth is that in the late Twenties and Thirties, really the hardest gangs were in Glasgow. It’s a rich vein to be mining.’
Fullerton’s notoriety was born out of the chaos of Glasgow’s overcrowded East End, a hotbed of tension between Protestants and Catholics, a scary place where mass brawls, slashings and extortion were a way of life.
It was a time of myth-making, immortalised in the novel No Mean City. Yet, as probably the only person who can lay claim to inspiring both a bigoted football chant and a poem by the late Edwin Morgan, Billy Fullerton’s life was as complex as it was contradictory.
In a city defined by sectarianism, he was the most ardent of Protestants, yet he was married to a Catholic. Working-class at a time when the term was almost synonymous with joblessness, he was merciless in exploiting the massed ranks at his disposal for his own financial and political ends.
The Billy Boys were used to break up strikes and Communist Party meetings and even, surprisingly, to act as bodyguards for a Tory party election candidate – in return for payments to Fullerton.
He would form his own band of Blackshirts to act as a Scottish bodyguard for the British fascist leader, Sir Oswald Mosley, yet he would go on to serve his country against Hitler with distinction.
Fullerton retained his unfailing ability to catch the public eye into his twilight, when he sensationally appeared as a hostile witness for the Crown at the trial of Peter Manuel, amid claims that he sourced a gun that was used by the infamous serial killer to shoot some of his victims.
Yet his desire to depict his gang in a chivalrous light, insisting they looked after the wives and children of jailed members, is arguably the most contentious part of his story.
BORN in 1904 in the staunchly Protestant enclave of Bridgeton, deep in the heart of Catholic country and almost in the shadow of Celtic Park, his upbringing was coloured by the deep divisions which arrived with the rise in Irish immigration to Glasgow amid the potato famine of the 1840s and 1850s.
Huge groups of men from the ranks of the unemployed, with nothing better to do than fight or steal, would gather under Protestant or Catholic banners and launch into mass brawls.
Wars raged for two decades with Catholic gangs such as the Kent Star, the San Toy and the Calton Entry.
They fought with a terrifying arsenal: hatchets, swords, machetes, knives, bottles, sharpened combs, bicycle chains and even lengths of rope with heavy bolts attached, not unlike the South American bolas.
But the weapon of choice was the open razor. Light, easily concealed and lethal, it earned these roaming gangs of thugs their terrifying soubriquet – the ‘razor gangs’.
Fullerton became leader of the Brigton Billy Boys. Under his command, it became the largest and most powerful of the city’s gangs by the 1930s.
Historian Dr Andrew Davies, who spent 15 years researching a book about Glasgow’s gang culture, believes Fullerton was ‘clearly a very powerful personality’, adding: ‘He was, without a doubt, charismatic, and was skilled as an organiser. He worked his way up through the Billy Boys by organising their “brakes” – their Saturday trips in motorised charabancs to watch Rangers – and he seems to have built the Boys into quite a powerful force.’
Drilled with near-military efficiency, after meetings they would stand in all weathers at Bridgeton Cross and play God Save The King.
Their signature tune was The Billy Boys, an infamous sectarian tribute to both William of Orange and ‘King Billy’ Fullerton. It became an anthem for Rangers fans before it was banned.
On Catholic holy days, they would form a flute and drum band and march down nearby Norman Street – home to the Catholic Norman Conks gang – playing what today would be called sectarian songs to enrage their bitterest rivals, who pelted the parade with stones, broken glass and human waste from every tenement window.
At a Billy Boys wedding in 1926, the groom stood before the minister with a sword concealed in his morning suit, while the best man had a gun in his pocket and Fullerton, sporting a previous injury, wore a bloodstained
bandage on his head. When the wedding party emerged, the Calton Entry boys threw bottles and bricks rather than confetti.
Despite the horrifying toll of casualties from such urban warfare, there was no shortage of manpower.
Gang membership bestowed a sense of belonging and self-respect on the unemployed and organised violence provided an antidote to boredom.
They would fight with equal relish against the ranks of policemen led by their Chief Constable, Sir Percy Sillitoe, the legendary ‘Hammer of the Gangs’ who used force to meet force in his quest to stamp them out.
Dr Davies said Fullerton tried to portray his gang in a chivalrous light, collecting a weekly levy to pay fines and look after the wives and children of jailed members.
But his research uncovered a very different picture, one of the Billy Boys as organised criminals who preyed on the communities they claimed to protect, extorting up to £5 a week – more than a week’s wage for a manual worker – from shopkeepers, publicans and back-street bookmakers, and amassing a fortune as a result.
Dr Davies said: ‘The present-day perception of the gangs as semi-Robin Hood figures, only ever fighting among themselves and not posing a threat to the community, is quite misguided.
‘An allegation that surfaces in the early 1930s was that threats were made against publicans’ families – if the publicans didn’t pay up then other members of their household would be assaulted as a form of reprisal.’
Jewish traders around Bridgeton Cross in the 1930s complained they were singled out for particularly harsh treatment on the basis of their faith.
PARENTS, too, feared their children could be attacked if they were perceived as belonging to the wrong ‘side’. Police at the time would tell magistrates there was no point fining a gang member as a local shopkeeper would simply end up footing the bill.
Cinemas and dance halls were also targeted, with gang members taking ‘subscription lists’ to dances, raising up to £20 in one night.
Dr Davies said: ‘There may have been people who paid voluntarily because the gang was seen as protecting that religious community, but I imagine it would have been difficult to refuse.’
Fullerton boasted his gang had up to £300 at any one time held in a bank account in Bridgeton, although he would also exchange coins for notes
and hide them behind the wallpaper at his flat.
The strangest aspect of Fullerton’s grasp for power was not financial, but his ties with the Tory Party. The gang was known to have acted as strikebreakers and would disrupt Communist Party meetings on their patch, but they also acted as security guards for Unionist candidate Catherine Gavin in the 1931 general election campaign.
Miss Gavin, who went on to be an acclaimed war journalist, novelist and historian, had been abused by East End women during previous hustings, but was able to campaign in safety thanks to the gangsters.
The connection hinged on the unlikely relationship between Fullerton and a Major Malcolm Spier, a war hero and pioneer of the Boy Scout movement who was involved in Unionist circles.
He was also a regular visitor to Barlinnie prison, where he would dish out corporal punishment to gang members, apparently with the full backing of the police.
Spier later recalled having given Fullerton a ‘sound thrashing’ with a hairbrush after a melee outside a cinema in which he ‘had taken on three policemen single-handed’.
Suitably impressed with how he could handle himself, Spier signed Fullerton up to guard Miss Gavin.
DR Davies said: ‘Billy Fullerton was quite open about saying they got a donation to gang funds in return for this, although that was never confirmed.
‘This shows the gangs were not outside the mainstream civic life – they were absolutely enmeshed in it. The great irony is that most of the Billy Boys were unemployed and yet were supporting the party most opposed to their interests.’
Fullerton could indeed be a contradictory character. Despite being the leader of the most Protestant gang, he was banned from the Orange Order because his mother and wife were Catholics, although he could lead Orange walks. When
he and his wife Nan moved to Shettleston two years after their wedding in 1924, local Protestant hardliners did not let him forget his Papal links. One night a gang painted his front door green.
By the late 1930s, Fullerton’s politics became even more extreme as he created a 200-strong band of Mosley’s Blackshirts, which were active until the British Union of Fascists leader was interned. He also dabbled in the racist politics of the KKK, founding the shortlived Knights of Kaledonia Klan.
But the threat of war weakened the gangs’ sway over Glasgow far more than Sillitoe’s strong-arm policing tactics.
When hostilities broke out across Europe in 1939, Fullerton signed up for the Navy as a boiler scaler. It was filthy and often dangerous work and Fullerton survived being badly burned when a boiler blew up. After leaving the Navy, he worked at John Brown’s Clydeside shipyard and as a doorman for a boxing club, but suspicions about his links to the underworld were about to take a remarkable twist.
At the 1958 trial of serial killer Peter Manuel, Fullerton gave evidence that he had obtained a Beretta pistol for a gangland contact which was similar to the one used by Manuel to murder three members of the Smart family.
For those present at the High Court in Glasgow, it was a spellbinding cameo by an infamous hardman which lent added spice to an already sensational case.
By then, Fullerton was already a sick man. In 1960, terminal lung cancer was diagnosed and he succumbed to the disease two years later, at the age of 58. More than 2,000 people paid their respects outside his single-roomed flat in Brook Street and it is said grown men wept as his coffin was carried through the streets of Bridgeton Cross and the Gorbals.
For some, these may have been tears of relief as his terrifying grip had finally been thrown off.
His remains are thought to lie in an unmarked grave in Riddrie Park Cemetery in Glasgow.
After his funeral, Edwin Morgan wrote the poem King Billy, which has the lines: ‘King Billy, dead, from Bridgeton Cross: a memory of violence, brooding days of empty bellies.’ Morgan saw that, like the fictional Shelbys of Peaky Blinders, Billy Fullerton fed off the endemic poverty of his fellow men.
For as long as the gap between rich and poor persists, gangsters will be part of every city’s story.