Peaky Blinders: The Real Story - Carl Chinn
About the book
Who were the real Peaky Blinders?
In this gripping social history, Chinn shines a light on the rarely reported struggles of the working class in one of the great cities of the British Empire before the First World War. The story continues after 1918 as some Peaky Blinders transformed into the infamous Birmingham Gang. Led by the real Billy Kimber, they fought a bloody war with the London gangsters Darby Sabini and Alfie Solomon over valuable protection rackets extorting money from bookmakers across the booming postwar racecourses of Britain.
Drawing together a remarkably wide-range of original sources, including rarely seen images of real Peaky Blinders and interviews with relatives of the 1920s gangsters, Peaky Blinders: The Real Story adds a new dimension to the true history of Birmingham's underworld and fact behind its fiction.
About the author
Professor Carl Chinn MBE Ph.D. is a social historian with a national profile, writer, public speaker, and teacher. An off-course bookmaker himself until 1984, he is the son and grandson of illegal bookmakers in Sparkbrook, and the great-grandson of a peaky blinder, whilst his mother's family were factory workers in Aston. His writings are deeply affected by his family's working-class background and life in the back-to-backs of Birmingham and he believes passionately that history must be democratised because each and every person has made their mark upon history and has a story to tell.
Discover more about the book and author
Watch the author talking about the background to the book.
Read this Review of the book.
Listen to the author Carl Chinn talking about his ‘criminal ancestors’.
Read this Review of the book.
Our Librarian’s Review
This is a fascinating book exploring in detail the development of the gangs in Birmingham at the turn of the 19th Century. Using a range of sources including newspaper articles, court records and interviews with relatives of those involved at the time, Carl Chinn brings the past to life. As a major industrial city, Birmingham had areas of desperate poverty, slums, and overcrowding. In these areas, slogging gangs grew up; these were groups of young men, and sometimes young women who would fight regularly. Weapons ranged from stones, bricks to pieces of metal, and belts with large metal buckles. Peaky Blinders grew out of these slogging gangs; the term was generic and applied to those who sported very distinctive clothes, hats and hairstyles.
I enjoyed this book, but it was quite difficult to begin with as there were lots of references and repetition. However, it was worth persevering, as Carl Chinn is very good at painting a vivid picture of life at the turn of the century. I would recommend this book to anyone who enjoyed the TV series Peaky Blinders and wanted to delve into the world these characters inhibited.