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June 1921, in the British town of Epsom. It's Derby Day, one of the biggest fixtures on the World Horse Racing Calendar, and tens of thousands of people are packed into the course's stands. Among them, surrounded by hulking minders and goons, are the bookies, screaming odds into the crowd and taking millions in gambling cash. This is one of Britain's most lucrative industries, and it's bent under the nine bob note. Suddenly, there's a commotion.
Dozens of flat cap wearing gangsters are striding up and down the lanes of bookies, threatening a few of them from the northern city of Leeds, shaking them down for a few coins. These are the Brummagem Boys, from Britain's second city of Birmingham, feared for their street thuggery and prize fighting skills. The Leeds bookies have been threatening to break ties with the Brummagem Boys protection racket, which has risen to the top of the racing pile since the end of the First World War, and they're going to go instead with a rival gang in London.
Just as things threaten to boil over, a gaggle of cops steps in, arrests 14 of the Birmingham lads and carts them off to jail. It's almost like they knew what was going to happen ahead of time.
The leader of the Brummies, Billy Kimber reckoned to be Britain's biggest mobster is nowhere to be seen. Doesn't matter. The head's been chewed off his empire leaving room for the Londoners run by his arch nemesis Charles Darby Sabini to take over a racing industry worth over 30 billion dollars a year. But Kimber is not done. The next month rival Sabini's boys fight with rival Londoners at a race in Salisbury near Stonehenge weakening them both.
Then in August, Kimber returns with a vengeance, travelling to Bath to attack a group of Jewish bookmakers who'd been shirking their protection money payments. Among them is a First World War veteran called Alfie Solomon and his right-hand man Charles Bild. First the Brummies pounce on Bild, beating him almost to death with hammers, sticks, iron bars and sandbags. Next is Solomon's turn. One of Kimber's men hits him over the head with a hammer, knocking him flat out.
Next it's time for the race goers themselves and the Brummerton boys rampage through the crowd, snatch purses and wallets and make punters throw their cash into bags and buckets. The police are nowhere. The British press and public fumes. One newspaper calls it a quote, rival bookies vendetta. But it's far more than that. These are the Racecourse Wars.
Right in the middle of it all is a Birmingham gang that will be immortalized almost a century later in one of the most popular television shows of its time. These are the real Peaky Blinders. Welcome to the Underworld Podcast. Hey guys, welcome to the show that teaches you all about how to bludgeon your enemies to death using just a flat cap and a small razor blade.
I'm your host, Sean Williams, and I'm joined, as always, by Danny Gold. Danny, you ever seen The Peaky Blinders? I have, actually. It's a great show, so I'm excited to learn more about this, you know, and kind of get the real insight into what's going on. It kind of reminds me a lot of, you know, Gangs in New York was a great book that they turned into...
medium-tier movie, but it's got similar vibes, I would say. I mean, Daniel Day-Lewis in that film is amazing. He's just an incredible villain. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But it could have been, I mean, the subject material from that book, which is all about New York gangs in the, I think, late 1800s, early 1900s, it's just so rich. There's so much there. It easily could have been like The Peaky Blinders, like a 10-season movie.
series which would have been excellent anyway ah there's probably some netflix exec having exactly that conversation right now but um yeah i mean we've got loads of stuff going up as always guys uh there's the patreon done a bunch of interviews there i think patrick sims's interview should just be going up as we're doing this episode so that's really great stuff
We're going to do a Q&A for, I think, the 50th episode soon. That's right, Danny, isn't it? Yeah. Yeah, yeah. But yeah, patreon.com slash underworldpodcast. We also have the merch up at underworldpod.com slash merch, M-E-R-C-H, with the Don't Instagram Your Crimes t-shirts and mugs and stuff like that. Thanksgiving presents, Christmas. Yeah. Yeah, keep leaving us positive reviews and everything like that. We appreciate it. Anyway, let's get it moving.
Yeah.
Yeah, I know. You know, I thought the show was just loosely based on the existence of these guys. I didn't realize based on your opening how closely it resembles it, like plot lines and all. Yeah, right. There's the Epsom stuff. I think it's the culmination of, is it the first season? It's just like, it really, some of it really closely used to the real story and some of it just like goes completely out of left field. So yeah,
It's a really interesting one to research. And this is pretty good timing, actually, because the final and sixth series of the show is going to come out next year after like tons and tons of COVID delays. And then apparently there's going to be a feature film to close out the franchise, which I mean, if anything else, it's going to be pretty good fun seeing what the TV show is like. So when I was watching the show years and years ago, I really wanted to know how real is all this stuff. And I don't mean...
the soundtrack and the white stripes and brian's jones town massacre and all the crazy effort and jeff in that i'm like certain did not happen back in the 1920s i mean who actually in peaky blinders is real and who isn't and actually the truth of that is really really interesting and it speaks volumes to the creativity of show creator and writer every single episode steven knight
He's from Birmingham himself, and he got the inspiration from mobster conversations his dad told him about from his days in Small Heath in Birmingham, where the majority of the show is based right in the middle of the city. Knight has even said himself that the show is about, quote, family legend and historical facts. It is a fiction woven into a factual landscape, which is breathtakingly dramatic and cinematic.
but which for very English reasons has been consigned to historical textbooks. That's exactly how I describe the I Know World podcast to people. Ah, you've got his modesty, yeah.
So first things first, Cillian Murphy's Tommy Shelby, that's a complete work of fiction, as is his brother Arthur and all the other members of the Shelby family. The actual name is based on the Sheldons. That's a gang family from Knight's youth that he knew growing up. And second, the Peaky Blinders themselves, they were long, long gone by the time the show is set in the fallout of the Great War, First World War.
The Peaky Blinders definitely did exist. But to learn that history, we have to go back around 200 years to the early 1800s. And this is a time when Britain is the richest country on earth, about to go through its industrial revolution. Back at that time, local Tory and liberal politicians, they have a habit of hiring young toughs from the inner city to provide muscle at the ballot box. And not even an 1832 Reform Act stops the practice.
These brutish young men get the euphemistic nickname, lambs. You know, it's really interesting how universal that theme is of politicians hiring gangsters to handle stuff like that across the world. They're not even gangsters, just like young thugs. You know, I'm researching next week's episode, which is about what's going on in Haiti right now with the gangs. And they all came up. They all got powerful from being politically affiliated and, you know, having politicians and...
The elites basically hire them out as rented thugs to help get the vote out, help or stop the vote that they want to stop. And it's a big theme, too. And, you know, I'm looking at a Jamaica episode. That's how a lot of the gangs there rose up. And it's not even, you know, in New York, Tammany Hall, all that sort of stuff. You know, gangsters and politicians really go together almost as well as gangsters and real estate development. Yeah, I mean, I've done stuff like Nigeria and the Black Axe. They make a load of their money like crazy.
stuffing ballots or beating people up around the ballot box. And even in the Philippines, one of the first steps on the path to the drug war we've got today is actually the personal armed groups. I think they're called the PAGs. They were basically just hired thugs by politicians. So yeah, it's pretty common, this stuff. Yeah, I guess we shouldn't be surprised by it too. It's not exactly...
a paramilitary group, a lot of these things, they really are like street gangs, but it's got a similar sort of vibe. And they don't, you know, it's not like they have their own political ideology, most of these gangs, right? They're just, their ideology is getting paid by somebody or getting protection from someone. That's what it comes down to. Yeah, I think in Peaky Blinders, it comes down to a bunch of blokes just getting beer money for a lot of the stuff that they do. But,
Birmingham, at this time, is one of the world's biggest cities. It's second in the UK behind London, which itself is second only to New York City. It's known for a strong history of crafting, and philosopher Edmund Burke calls it the, quote, great toy shop of Europe. But that's where the playful allegories end. These British cities are rough as arseholes. The Tocqueville visits the place in 1835 and declares that, quote, they work as if they must get rich in the evening and die the next day.
I mean, during this time, the population of the city leaps from 74,000 to 630,000. And there's all your usual Dickensian stuff like overcrowding, poverty, crime, illness. It's interesting to think about that now, you know, happening in a city like that.
And then compare it to what's happening in a lot of developing countries, you know, where you have over the past 20, 30 years that are being industrialized in a way, you know, shanty towns rising up in the hills and that just going on and on. You know, you see it in a lot of places in Latin America or, and,
Africa too, these sort of capital cities that just get developed with like this ring of slums, just ringing them on the outside that keep growing and growing as people move in from rural areas. And it just creates these, you know, these conditions for, for crime, definitely poverty, illness and all that. Yeah. I mean the factories were the money back then, right? These factories that were popping up the mills and, and whatever. And that was what was drawing the people into the cities. And there just wasn't the infrastructure to deal for them.
I mean, so Birmingham was a pretty crazy place then, but it had a criminal past going back as far as the Napoleonic Wars. With a wealth of crafts and printing back then, it actually becomes a fountainhead of counterfeiting and forgery. And I found loads of really interesting stuff online about that past, people getting nicked with £5 notes, which I guess must be worth like a grand now.
Later in the 19th century, Birmingham street gangs become a little more organised and they get known as the so-called sloggers, named after a game where men line up opposite each other and chuck rocks at the other team like this laughably grim version of dodgeball.
Some of these morph into somewhat hierarchical groups, and that's where the Peaky Blinders come in. They're based in Small Heath, which is known for its red brick terraces, crime. Actually, today it's like a really Pakistani British area, as is much of the city. And this is a bit where I talk about South Asian cricket pubs and the like, but I won't, of course, because nobody cares. There might be like five or six people who care, maybe like 0.0001% of our audience. And I'm sure they appreciate it, but, you know, I don't.
They do, though. I mean, of those, maybe one of them supports us on the Patreon. So thanks, buddy. Anyway, the Peaky Blinders, they're pretty nasty bastards by all accounts. And they get a rep for beating up random people on the street, brawling with the coppers. And they're led by a guy called Tommy. But it's Thomas Mucklow, not Shelby. Did he have a sweet haircut and wear an awesome three-piece suit all the time, too? You know what? He did, I think. Yeah.
He had like some cool three-piece suit for when I saw a picture of him. And like he had the flat cap, he had the look. So, I mean, they might not have had that ridiculous haircut that the Peaky Blinders have. But yeah, they were pretty suave fellas. In 1890, Mucklow and his boys attack a bloke called George Eastwood outside the Rainbow Pub in Birmingham and give him injury so bad that doctors have to cut a hole in Eastwood's head.
Mucklow's name pops up and despite good character testimony, he's given nine months hard labour. The quote murderous assault makes headlines all over the country and it's the first mention of the Peaky Blinders by name.
At this time, the gangs are so localized, they get named after pubs, roads, that kind of thing. In Birmingham, there's the Gunmakers, the White House Gang from Aston, the Garrison's Lane, Ten Archers, Bishop Riders. They sound like football firms, innit? Yeah. I mean, they probably ended up being football firms, but...
The actual Peaky Blinders, they pretty much die out at the turn of the century. And actually in 1902, a Sheffield paper runs a feature about organised crime saying that the Peaky Blinders are over. Oh, and the name and the razors in the flat caps you bury into people's faces.
Yeah, I mean, that's an urban myth, according to local historian Carl Chin. And he's written two books on the Peaky Blinders I read for this episode. It's really exhaustive stuff, and it's all on the reading list, guys. It's kind of a shame about the flat caps. You know, it reminds me of, again, Gangs of New York. They talk about all these gangs in the late 1800s and early 1900s that were just brawlers before the mafia, you know, and the Jewish mobsters and the Irish mafia really gets going.
And they talk about how, you know, there was a woman who was famous for filing her nails and her teeth into a point and just like really vicious, brutal stuff like that, like razors and a cap. Yeah, I mean, they're pretty much the same things going on in the UK, right? It's going to get a lot more organized as time goes on. But these sluggers and the Peaky Blinders, they're really like the prototypes of organized crime. But, you know, Billy Kimber. So he's the Cockney arch rival of the Peaky Blinders in the first series.
That guy is 100% real. But he wasn't a cockney, he was a brummy. Spoiler alert, the character of Tommy Shelby is actually Billy Kimber. Wow, they reversed it.
Boom. Yeah, mind blown. Anyway, set in the show in the aftermath of the Great War, that's also a great way for Stephen Knight to show how a whole generation of men was just completely brutalized and spat out. In the show, Tommy Shelby is a sapper, which has its own particular horrors, digging trenches and tunnels through minefields and no man's land. It's just like god awful stuff. I'm not sure if it's an allegory or actually happened, but it's a great way to show how a whole generation of men was just completely brutalized and spat out.
But Tommy has this recurring image of Germans busting through his tunnel in the first series. And there's always a big distance between the folks who fought, right? They're regularly referred to as men and the boys are the guys who haven't seen thousands of deaths. I think that's one of the things about the show that really appeals to me too. Like I got...
really into the idea or looking into the idea of what tunnelers did in world war one because of the show and how they portrayed how damaging it was to these men and their psych. And it's kind of, I mean, it's really brutal, you know,
World War I was fought across giant, giant trenches all over Europe. And these men, like it was their job to tunnel underground and pop up in the other trenches, like in the enemy's trenches and like fight for their lives. It seems like one of the- Like laughably horrible. Yeah. It sounds like one of the worst jobs you can have in war. Yeah. It comes from the French Saper, which I think they still have in the French Foreign Legion, but I don't think they actually dig tunnels anymore. Yeah.
This is interesting from Knight about how he wanted to set the show in the aftermath of that war. Quote, Before the First World War happened, there was a feeling within Europe and America that science was going to solve everything. Everything was getting better. Diseases were one by one being eradicated. Life was getting easier and houses were getting warmer. All of the terrible problems of the 19th century and before, science seemed to be mopping them up. Technology seemed to be getting rid of them.
And he goes on, then the First World War came along and the same technology was suddenly blowing people to pieces. It was mass murder, gas that kills people, machines that run you over and squash you into mud. You know, talking about another show, I think that that featured veterans of World War I, an organized crime boardwalk empire.
There's this part that reminds me of this, right? And it's fiction, obviously, but there's a lot of truth to it. I forget his name. He's one of the main characters. He's back in Atlantic City after the war, become a gangster. And he says something about the effect of how they went over to World War I. They played by society's rules and the rules of the authorities and the people in charge and fought in this brutal war.
and it screwed them up so much, and they saw so much viciousness and brutality that when they got back, they were just like, we're only gonna listen, we're gonna make our own rules now. We're not gonna listen to society's rules, to laws, or anything like that. We're living by our own rules. And you kind of see the same thing
after World War II, right? With the emergence of sort of the outlaw motorcycle gangs that come back. A lot of them are World War II vets. And I think it's kind of a similar mentality that they go to this horrific event. They're doing what they're supposed to be doing. They're following the rules and the laws.
And they just experience such a devastating brutality that when they get back to normal society, they're like, we're only going to live by our rules now. We're not going to listen to anyone else's rules. It messes them up. Yeah, I mean, there's so many Mexican standoff style bits in Peaky Blinders where Tommy just doesn't really care if he dies. I think there's one bit where...
some guy that took a bullet for him in the war says like you're a piece of shit now i wish i'd never taken that bullet for you and tommy's like no you shouldn't have done and it's like a kind of death wish running through the whole thing and i think that's what a lot of young men felt after they like i mean imagine digging a tunnel into someone's trench it's just awful
Billy Kimber himself, he doesn't actually see action on the Western Front. He's born in 1882 and he does actually grow up a Peaky Blinder in Birmingham just as the gang is petering out. But he gets way bigger and he's going to end up being the most powerful gangster in the UK.
This is from Carl Chin's book, quote, And he goes on,
In the brief broom that followed the end of the First World War, Kimber's Birmingham gang controlled the protection rackets on the racecourses of England and made huge sums of money.
Billy's mother, Catherine, is Irish, which a lot of Brummies are at the end of the 19th century. But there's still tons of trouble. I mean, the IRA foundation is just around the corner. There's lots of racism. Of course, in the TV show, the Shelbys are actually Romani or Gypsies, so they're outsiders of sorts. But apparently the show didn't hire a Romani linguist, so the language is all out, which is a bit of a weird omission. According to historian Barbara Weinberger, the
The Bromwichan gang first emerged because anti-Irish sentiments, quote, offered a focus and a target for the frustrations of inner city youths, which became institutionalized in gang warfare. Again, this is a very typical story with the emergence of gangs, right? We see the same thing we talked about in the MS-13 episode, where you had Salvadoran immigrants that were
in really bad neighborhoods in Los Angeles, and they were getting targeted by other gangs, by other people who were taking their frustrations out on them. So they formed their own cliques to sort of fight back. And then you have this emergence of this giant gang, and it seems like it's a similar situation here. Yeah, and we're going to find out a bit further down the show that a lot of these gangs were ethnic-based. They kind of stuck to their own. It became a kind of, yeah, with us or without us kind of thing back then.
By all accounts, Billy, however, he seems to be dishing out a lot more shit than he's taking. In 1901, age just 19, he gets a prison term for, quote, wounding. And as soon as he gets out of that, he assaults two policemen and gets another two months hard labor. According to Kimber's daughter, quote, you owed our dad money. You paid with your life.
Billy divorces his wife around 1910 and lives with another woman. According to Carl Chin, Billy Kimber at this point is the biggest gangster in Britain, which is, I mean, it's a hell of a shout for a guy from Birmingham. By 1911, the British census has him 28, single and living in Salford near Manchester as a, quote, turf accountant, which is a euphemism for bookmaker. Actually, he's going up and down the country shaking down bookies with the Brummagem boys.
Now the Bromwichan boys usually hunt in packs of six to eight. They trip people up to rob them, snatch wallets and purses, and they work the three card trick on unsuspecting hunters. The three card trick is about 600 years old, by the way, like it's one of the most classic cons in the book.
It's just cups, basically, but with cards. And the scammer gets a mark to guess which one of three cards is the target before using sleight of hand to get them to pick the wrong one every time. Yeah, they call it three-card Monty here. I don't know if that's a thing in England. And it's kind of infamous in New York City. It has mostly disappeared. But I saw someone doing it in Herald Square like a few weeks back and was just kind of shocked that there were still people who fall for it, which...
It's kind of been in every movie, every TV show about the bad old days in New York and you still have people out there who think they can beat the system. They can't. You deserve to get scammed there, guys. Here is more from Colchin.
This is not a firmly organised gang like that of a mafia family with a don, captains and soldiers. Rather, it's a loose grouping of various small bunches of thieves and fighting men that could occasionally be brought together into a formidable force.
One police report has them as, quote, expert traveling pickpockets and hotel thieves. And actually, this area has recently been redefined as disorganized crime because it was so diffuse, which gives you an idea like how chaotic that time was in the UK.
By 1913, Billy pals up with a Londoner named George Sage, which reports suggest he'd met in prison over a decade before. Sage is from Hackney, East London, which is now one of London's most vibrant, exciting districts, but back then, absolutely terrible. Sage introduces Billy to London's race courses, so much so that Sage gets the nickname Brummie, and Billy moves down to the capital to live in Islington, which is just one hop and a skip up from Hackney.
This is also when Billy hooks up with Wag McDonald. He's a major gangster and leader of the Elephant Boys of Elephant and Castle alongside his brother, Wow. So that's Wag and Wow.
They're also involved in racing chithousery, but they're also a big player in the emerging nightclub protection scene. Wag has a pretty incredible tale himself, and I'll get into that a bit later on. But for now, Billy gets into trouble when he beats up an officer who's trying to arrest his drunk wife, Anna. And she says the best thing to this officer, quote, I will blow your brains out when I get out. I shall know you again. Hackney hasta la vista, baby. Love it. These guys get away with a lot, huh?
Yeah, I mean, you basically just get like a week's hard labour for killing about 10 people back then, it seems. Actually, Wag and Wow, their pals were the leader of the 40 Elephants crew, Alice Diamond, and we're totally doing a show on them. It's this all-woman gang of pickpockets and thieves who dodged the cops in London for years. But race caused crime at this point. That's the big one. And it's getting fully out of hand.
In 1910, a gang of 40 thieves boards a train heading back from Windsor Racecourse, threatens to throw the captains onto the tracks, robs everybody and successfully runs away from the cops. Actually, we should do a show on the Great Train Robbery of 1963 because I think my granddad was involved with those guys somehow. But this one, this robbery causes uproar. Just broad daylight, violent crime and the tracks themselves actually turn to Billy Kimber and
and his mates in London, the McDonald's and the Camden Town Boys, to keep some kind of underworld peace, so he's managed to sort of turn into a thief in law at this point. But then, of course, in 1914, the First World War strikes, and all horse racing is suspended except for one meet at Newmarket, apparently. Billy spends time in Ireland during the war, and according to one legend, he fights off a whole group of men on the banks of the River Liffey.
Anyway, four years later, the war ends and the race course is set up shop again. And you think someone might have thought about changing security, but nope. People want to put on a post-war bet and the British government bans all other forms of betting outside horse racing, which just turns it crazy.
Crime is as high as ever. So-called race course ruffianism becomes a common phrase, which could be the name of a slow tie album. Is there any reasoning behind banning all gambling besides horse racing? Like, is it seen as more gentlemanly or something like that? Yeah, I think so. I think there's probably just a massive lobby, right? Because it was making so much money. And I guess you had all these courses and places staying empty. So it just made sense. And if you've got horse racing, you've got to have the betting.
A quick aside at this point, Jimmy Jesus, that's the guy played by poet and legend Benjamin Zephaniah on the show, he's based on a real-life guy from Jamaica who served in World War I before heading back to the Caribbean, but then he gets homesick for his Birmingham buddies and comes back to Britain soon after the war. Says Zephaniah himself, quote,
The real character was known to everybody as Jimmy Jesus. He was a slightly off his head character who went around the streets of Birmingham preaching hell and damn fire. And everyone, you should read Benjamin Zephaniah. He's a one-time gang leader himself. Now he's a poet, author, activist, like absolute underrated British hero.
Another character based on true life actually is the Chinese gangster Brilliant Chang who pops up in series 5, the last one shown. The real Brilliant Chang was born in Canton, modern Guangzhou, in 1886 and he travelled to the UK in 1913 as a student. While in Birmingham, Chang opened up a Chinese restaurant but he's also dealing a ton of drugs including cocaine, heroin and opium.
And he allegedly supplies the dope that kills a young English woman called Freda Campton in 1922. The result in outcry is basically like a big yellow peril and it's riven through with sordid descriptions of Chinese men stealing white women. Cops don't actually bring any charges against Chang, but he has to move south and he sets up in London before he's deported in 1925.
So it's like crazy random characters in the show are just completely based on real life people and others are made up. I guess that's the beauty of it. But back to the races. According to Chin again, quote, bookies were victimized. They had to arrive early in the morning to stake a claim for their pitch and be prepared to be blackmailed or prepared to fight the local gang.
You had to be prepared to bung or be prepared to fight. Yeah, thanks, Carl. I think they had to be prepared. But this chaos brings its own cottage industry with bookies paying minders and gangs to keep their position or handle angry punters when the bookies refuse to pay out.
By 1919, the Daily Mail reports that, quote, race course robberies with violence were said to be increasing. Then we get the big fights at Epsom, Salisbury in 1920, and a Yorkshire journalist says that that year that, quote, the only way to deal with the class of desperados who look on Salisbury racing as a bean feast is to deal with them before they enter the city.
which I think I need to find ways to get bean feast into popular use outside Poulm. But you can see that things are getting pretty bad if people want police checkpoints around racing cities on game day. Yeah, it just sounds like violent anarchy for the most part. Yeah, it's nuts. So now we get into the real heart of the wars. And most of them are being fought between the Bromwichems in Birmingham and their London allies and gangs run by an Anglo-Italian Londoner called Charles Darby Sabini.
who is actually also a main character in the show. The real Charles Sabini was based in Clerkenwell, central London, which was a little Italy at the time. He leaves school in 1902, age 13, and he begins working in boxing promotion, which I'm guessing 1902 London isn't exactly white collar. Yeah. Even now it's, you know, a lot of gangsters involved. We've talked about the Kennehan cartel and organized crime and all that. Yeah. And the Paul brothers, you know, so it just, it's just all downhill. Yeah.
His gang, so this is Charles Sabini's gang, that takes his name and it's London's richest race course gang. It has around 100 members and it is about to go to war with Billy.
In 1920, Billy scores a big victory in Brighton when he throws the King Cross Boys and Bethnal Green Gang out of the course. Those are two separate London gangs affiliated with Sabini. Then that summer, Sabini's guys get into the same course and start shaking down bookies, making them throw coins into a bucket for their so-called services. One reluctant guy is attacked with a razor.
Billy has a quote token false at Brighton and they're quickly overwhelmed by Sabini's gang. But when Sabini returns, it's a different ball game. McDonald's there, that's wagging well on behalf of Kimber and his mob, they frisk and confiscate the Sabini's cash. Then according to Chin's book, they were given a kicking as a disincentive to be cheeky in future. I mean, these quotes are absolute fire. It's very English. It's so English.
Billy corners the market from this point, and he really pioneers the bribing of police officers and detectives to create a monopoly around the races. I mean, some days these guys are sticking 500 quid on fixed races, which is about 25 grand today. So these flat cap wearing gangsters are the chinchilla coat pimps of their day.
There's even a chief of police at this time called Frederick Nutty Sharp, who moves from CID, which is like plainclothes detective branch of the UK police, over to become a bookie. So he's completely bent. I was always taught actually as a kid that it stood for coppers in disguise, but apparently CID is something else. Here's where Solomon comes in. That's Alfie Solomon.
He's basically running a bookmaking operation that's cutting into Billy's profits. So Billy has Alfie beaten up and his brother, Simi, changes his name and operates as Sidney Lewis over fears of his Jewishness. He says, if I put up a Simi Solomon, I wouldn't have taken a penny.
In the show, Solomon is played to psychopathic, sweary perfection by Tom Hardy. Yeah, he's incredible in it. Yeah, it's just amazing. It's been described as the, quote, scene-stealingest character of all time. The real Solomon is born in East London in 1892, and he joins the First World War effort as a Royal Field Artillery driver, serving three years in France. Solomon was actually a secular Jew, unlike his orthodox on-screen alter ego.
And Solomon was never a booze smuggler like his fictionalized self. But connections to American gangsters like the guy played by Adrian Brody trying to lock down Prohibition-era smuggling routes, that really did happen. So-called rum runners whet the whistles of Americans after the Prohibition Act came into force in 1920.
Here's a quote from the Mob Museum in Vegas, which I've never been to. Perhaps one of our sponsors wants to pay for me and Danny to go on a week-long research trip to Nevada sometime. Anyway.
Quote, shipments of whiskey from Great Britain traveled to Nassau in the Bahamas and everywhere in the Caribbean for illicit importation to America's east coast in New Orleans. Whiskey distilled in Canada was smuggled by ship or across land to the west coast from British Columbia, to the Midwest from Saskatchewan and Ontario, and to the east from Nova Scotia and the French island of St. Pierre, a liquor smugglers hotspot off Newfoundland.
Loads of rum from the Caribbean, employed champagne, and other alcohol also made it ashore. Yeah, that's how a lot of US organized crime kind of got their start or their big money. And according to legend, the Kennedy family, which is when Nazi-sympathizing patriarch Joe Kennedy got involved. What? I did not know that. Yeah. That's nuts. Yeah.
And this quote goes on, right? Soon, captains of boats loaded with liquor bottles in false bottoms beneath fish bins, anchored offshore at designated areas and waited for contact boats, high speed crafts with buyers who tossed aboard a bundle of large denomination bills bound by elastic bands, loaded their liquor orders onto their boats and sped to shore to load it onto trucks heading for New York, Boston and other cities.
One such stretch of ocean for liquor selling boats, famously called Rum Row, ran from New York to Atlantic City, 12 miles out in international waters to avoid the US Coast Guard. It's pretty nuts, that whole era. William Bill McCoy is one of the best known of these rum runners, and he ran the route from the UK to Nassau and into the States. And of course, the Italian mob is like...
deep into alcohol smuggling at this time but adrian brody's luca changretta the main bad guy in series four of peaky blinders he's fighting a war with al capone in the show birmingham gangsters do have close connections to chicago mafiosi at the time but changretta is totally fictional so back to the race course wars once again
There's actually a lot of historical and cultural importance to these fights. And I read a really interesting academic paper from Leeds about how they were kind of the first moral panics of the post-war era, a time when Britain is desperately trying to reshape its image of nativism, but also peace, which is kind of an oxymoron. And like Peaky Blinders' fifth series, Crescendos with Oswald Mosley's Fascists,
The press basically ignited a moral panic during the 1920s, trying to other the gangs as anti-English, anti-British and so on.
says the paper, quote, During the 1920s, simple if effective descriptions of ruffianism and rowdyism were often shadowed by a more sinister language which drew upon the warian idea of the enemy within. Military metaphors were frequently employed and references to terrorism, insurrection, vendettas and espionage can be found throughout the period. So I guess nothing's changed.
The paper goes on to mention the so-called folk devil trope often employed against Jewish bookies or Italian family mobs or Irish or just anyone who didn't fit the bill for a white British gentleman, which is really interesting, right? And just goes to show how deep Stephen Knight's research for this show must have been.
The press basically back then weaponizes the idea of the Tommy, which is a generic name of an English soldier going back to the 1700s against Italians, Jews, Chinese, anyone in inverted commas foreign. And this drives a lot of political action against gangs in the 1920s.
So at this point, you've got the Brumagems and the Sabinis kicking off with each other. And Alfie Solomon, the Jewish bookie, he and his brother Simi, who's now going by the name Sidney Lewis, they're making tons off racing still and sort of trying to eke out a little betting fiefdom by playing both sides, right? And that goes down like a sack of shit, as you can imagine. So on March 12th, 1921, Simi, or Sidney, is set upon by London gangsters at a boxing match. That's presumably Billy's men in the capital.
The referee tells a reporter in the 50s that, quote, the mobster swung his race glasses, heavy and solid, into the bookmaker's face. Down went Lewis, and the assailant promptly stepped on his unprotected face as he lay on the ground, immediately afterwards slipping away into the crowd. Lewis was picked up, his face a bloody mess and with several teeth missing. From that moment, the gang wars between the North and South opened up in earnest.
And if you don't know, a field glass is basically a telescope. So it's a nasty little weapon. So as that quote mentions, there's a bunch of flare ups at this time. And at the end of March, Billy Kimber's shot by Alfie Solomon. Billy refuses to tell cops anything and the case dies. But the next month, George Sage acted on Billy's behalf. He starts a riot. Alexandra Park races in North London and just beats the shit out of tons of Italian British mobsters.
And then you get to Epsom and the subsequent foundation of something called the Bookmakers and Backers Racecourse Protection Association. And that's something that was founded in the backdrop of all of these wars which were causing the moral outrage. But it actually helps Sabini because it basically turns all of his lucrative London protection rackets legit by turning them into protectors for the bookmakers at the courses.
And it seems that most bookies openly back Sabini over Billy and his Midlanders. The media starts reporting a truce, but that is not true. In 1922, it's reported that Sabini is paying 5K a year for immunity from the police. That's about 300 grand today, which is like half a million dollars, I guess. It's serious stuff, and it just goes to show just how deep Sabini's pockets have become at this point.
So at this point, Billy Kimber, he's basically losing. He's been outmaneuvered in London. He's got a rep as a thug where Sabini has ingratiated himself with the authorities. Billy's star in the local underworld fails after that. He doesn't really play much of a role in the battles of 1925 and other things that follow. That year, Wag McDonald, that's Billy's ally in London, he flees to the States. And in 1927, his brother, Wow, and Billy himself follow him.
After they fire shots through the window of a London Sabini club called the Griffin. Wait, so what's going on in 1925? Even though Kimber's not involved, there's still other wars going on?
Yeah, there's basically just a running battle between the London crews at this point. So you've got Wagonwell McDonald, they're running the elephant gang. You've got guys in Camden town that are allied with them and one time with Billy and they're fighting Sabini, who's just become a huge, huge gangster, probably the biggest in the country at that point. But Billy, by this point has kind of slipped into the background.
And in America, Billy heads to Arizona, where he may or may not have killed a man over an unpaid debt. It's pretty unclear. Then he goes to Chicago and Los Angeles, where he's actually hidden from the law by an associate of Al Capone. Billy heads back to London in 1929, and he becomes a small-time bookie and a crook. Before dying in 1945, aged just 63, an incredibly kind obituary says that, quote,
His great interest in life, both personal and professional, was racing. And he was well known and respected on every race course in England. So did he go from being like the number one gangster in England to just kind of dying broke and powerless?
He was powerless, but he wasn't broke. I read somewhere that he left about 10 grand to his daughter, which is a huge sum of money back then. This is a guy that came from nothing. So to have that much money on you at your death is pretty big. And his family live a pretty good life. So he just sort of didn't have the power. He lost the war, but he ended up being a gangster until he died. And he did pretty well for himself.
And I think this is one of the most interesting things about the real Peaky Blinders compared to the show. And that's that Tommy Shelby, or rather Billy Kimber in real life, he actually gets his backside handed to him by Sabini. In the mid-20s, Sabini moves down to Brighton to start up a bunch of new protection rackets. In 1927, he defeats the elephant mob at the, quote, Battle of Waterloo in South London, and eight people are killed.
Are these just massive brawls like depicted in Gangs of New York style where it's just two groups meeting in the middle and just attacking each other? It's exactly what it is. Yeah. And I think the difference between the Birmingham lot and the London guys were as far as I could tell, the London guys didn't mind packing heat, whereas the Birmingham lot preferred a razor blade or a knife or something like that. They're pretty hands on. But yeah, it's like really Gangs of New York. Like this is all similar kind of stuff happening on both sides of the pond.
From that point on, this Battle of Waterloo, Sabini is the king of the racetrack. Authorities move against him. In 1929, the Jockey Club and Bookmakers Protection Association, they band together and the Metropolitan Police, that's the police in London, they also launch an operation to push him out of the sport.
During the war, Sabini is arrested and interned as a foreign alien, despite mixed heritage and being unable to speak Italian, I guess similar to what America did with Japanese citizens as well. Later, he's arrested for handling stolen goods, and he's sentenced to three years behind bars, and he dies in 1950, aged 62.
Alfie Solomon, the Jewish bookmaker, he gets into plenty of trouble after the race calls wars. He spends three years behind bars from 1924 to 1927 when he kills a guy named Barney Blitz during a card game. His life quietens down thereafter and he dies just after the Second World War in 1947.
And you can see that all of these deaths and the end of these wars, that pretty much wraps up that generation of gangsters, paving the way for the 60s era of the craze, completely different brand of British organised criminal. So yeah, that's the story of the real Peaky Blinders guys, the Brumageums, Billy Kimber, Sabini Solomon and a gangland that grew of age in the Victorian era.
That was great, man. I'm looking forward to the next season now. And it kind of, it's interesting to learn how much research and how much work actually went into making the series realistic. Yeah, tons. And so much of it's backdrop by like, you know, you got Winston Churchill in there, Oswald Mosley. It was like our Hitler, essentially. So yeah, it's all like super, super interesting historical stuff. And there's all this like slow-mos and banging guns and all that kind of stuff that we love as well. So yeah.
I'm really looking forward to next year. Awesome. Well, that about does it, man. Thanks for this. Next week, I think I'm going to be talking about the situation in Haiti right now with the kidnapping that's been going on and the gangs there that are pretty much in control of the country. But I just want to thank all our Patreon top tier subscribers. Again, Mike Ulrich, William Wintercross, Trey Nance, Matthew Cutler, Chris Cusimano, Ross Clark, Jeremy Rich, and Doug Prindival.
Again, patreon.com slash the underworld podcast for bonus episodes. And until next week.