The television series Peaky Blinders, first broadcast in 2013, turned the name into a brand. The real gangs behind it were something much smaller and rougher: groups of working-class youths in the back streets of Birmingham, active a generation before the show is set.
The Horror
Birmingham’s street gangs were known as “sloggers”, or slogging gangs, whose roots are traced to the 1850s. The most violent of them took the name Peaky Blinders and are said to have been founded in Small Heath by a man named Thomas Mucklow.
The earliest print evidence is the Birmingham Mail of 24 March 1890. It describes an assault on a man named George Eastwood by men “known as the ‘Peaky Blinders’ gang”. That is the founding document. The further detail often repeated, that Eastwood was beaten with belt buckles after ordering a ginger beer in a pub in Adderley Street, is unconfirmed here.
The name is explained, by the historian Carl Chinn, by dress. “Peaky” meant a flat cap with a peak, and “blinder” was Birmingham slang for something dapper. Members wore good caps and scarves. The story that they sewed razor blades into their cap peaks is treated as apocryphal. The relevant razor technology is said to have appeared after the gang’s time.
There was no single organisation and no family empire. The Peaky Blinders were a set of local gangs sharing a name. Education, stronger policing and harsher sentences wore them down, and they had disappeared by the 1920s. In that decade the Birmingham Boys, under Billy Kimber, a former Peaky Blinder, controlled racecourse betting. The series draws on that later gang for its plots.
The Legend
The Shelby family, the First World War veteran at the head of a criminal empire, and the character of Tommy Shelby are inventions of the series. The reported individual crimes and mugshots of named gang members circulating online, among them a Harry Fowler photographed in 1904, are not confirmed by the sources consulted here, and are left out.
The Modern Relic
The Steelhouse Lane Lock-up, a Victorian cell block in the centre of Birmingham, was in use from 1891 until 2016. In April 2022, after a lottery-funded refurbishment, it reopened as the West Midlands Police Museum. Its collections include Victorian mugshots and personnel records, and a portrait of Sir Charles Haughton Rafter, Birmingham’s longest-serving chief constable. It is a Grade II listed building.
