The truth about the ‘real’ Peaky Blinders — 7 facts, myths and stories from the historian who knows best

Birmingham in the late 19th century was a city running hot. It was the so-called “city of a thousand trades”, a place that helped power the Industrial Revolution, stamping out buttons, guns, chains and metalwork for an empire that liked to tell itself it ruled the world. But beneath the civic pride and manufacturing muscle was something harder: overcrowded back-to-backs, grinding poverty and street violence that could flare up at the corner of any road.

Out of that world came a name that now carries global cultural weight: the Peaky Blinders.

In 2026, that name belongs as much to television as to history. Peaky Blinders, created by Steven Knight and fronted by Cillian Murphy, turned a regional footnote into a worldwide obsession. Razor blades stitched into caps. Slow-motion walks. Industrial angst set to Nick Cave. A Shelby dynasty clawing its way from Small Heath to Westminster.

But how much of it is actually true?

Carl Chinn has been researching Birmingham’s gangs for four decades. He first wrote about the real Peaky Blinders in his doctoral thesis in 1986. He grew up hearing the stories in Sparkbrook. His own great-grandfather, Edward Derrick, was a Peaky Blinder, “a violent, abusive wife-beating thug, a petty thief,” as Chinn puts it, without flinching.

“I’ve been researching the real Peaky Blinders and the real organised crime gangsters of the 20s for 40 years,” he tells us. “My research goes back a long, long way. I have personal connections.”

So what happens when the world falls in love with a myth you’ve spent your life untangling?

Thankfully, Knight's adaptation isn't too far removed from the truth of the matter. Here’s what Chinn says that onscreen mega-hit got right, and the rare things it got wrong.

1. There was no single Peaky Blinders gang

The most basic misunderstanding is also the biggest.

“There were no Peaky Blinders, not one gang called the Peaky Blinders,” Chinn says. “It’s a generic term.”

Late 19th-century Birmingham was carved into hyper-local territories. Park Street. Milk Street. Whitehouse Street. Summer Lane. The Ten Arches. Aston. Sparkbrook. Each has its own cluster of young men willing to scrap for reputation.

“They’re vying to say, ‘We’re the hardest,’” Chinn explains.

Sometimes that meant teenage lads hurling stones across waste ground. Other times it meant older youths and men getting “up close” with belts, boots and fists.

There was no central committee. No Shelby family pulling strings from behind the scenes. The term “Peaky Blinder” emerged in the 1890s as a label for Birmingham hooligans, much like “hooligan” itself entered common use around 1898.

It described a type, a fashion, a reputation. Not a corporate structure.

2. The razor blade myth? “It never happened”

If there’s one image the world associates with the Peaky Blinders, it’s the blade in the cap.

Chinn grew up hearing the story himself. “The story I’d heard was that they slashed the foreheads, blood poured into the eyes.”

It’s cinematic. It’s brutal. It’s memorable.

But historically? “Number one, it’s not feasible. Number two, it never happened.”

He’s combed through “hundreds and hundreds of court cases, police records”, and interviewed elderly men in the early 1980s who were around when the gangs were active. There is no documented pattern of razor-blade assaults.

There are also three inconvenient facts.

First, the mechanics. Try removing a soft flat cap mid-fight, folding it and slashing someone while they stand still. “You’re very open,” Chinn says. You’d be flattened before you’d done the damage.

Second, the economics. Disposable safety razor blades were not widely sold in England until just before the First World War, by which point, Birmingham newspapers were already noting that the Peaky Blinders had faded away. And they were expensive.

“A poor man in Birmingham would be lucky to earn 75 or 80 pence a week,” Chinn says. Razor blades could cost significantly more. “Are you going to spend twice as much as your weekly income on a weapon that doesn’t work? Of course not.”

Third: the hat itself. The earliest Peaky Blinders didn’t wear flat caps.

“They wore a hat called a billycock,” Chinn explains, a working man’s bowler. They would wet the brim, heat it over a fire and funnel it, pulling it down over one eye.

“Hence the peaky blinder, blinding the eye.”

3. They had style — but they were still poor men

The TV show has turned the Peaky Blinders aesthetic into a global costume fit for fancy dress, stag dos and even standard attire. But the original uniform was born of pride, not luxury.

By January 1890, newspaper descriptions refer to bell-bottom trousers, tight at the knee, flaring to as much as 22 inches at the hem. In Birmingham, some had buttons up the crease, a local flourish in a city famous for button-making.

Around the neck, a silk-like scarf known as a “daff”, sometimes tied tight as a “choker”. On the feet, boots, unlike the clogs worn by Manchester’s “scuttlers”.

Chinn is clear about the social reality.

“These are poor men,” he says. “They were not elegantly dressed.”

The trousers could be bought cheaply from specific local tailors. The rest was often second- or third-hand. The look was about intimidation and identity, marking out your crew, your street, your presence.

It wasn’t Savile Row. It was self-invention under pressure, but with young guys who still had an eye on how they looked.

4. By the 1920s, the original gangs were already gone

One of the biggest divergences between history and drama is timing.

“The Peaky Blinders disappear before the First World War,” Chinn says. “By 1910, the Birmingham gangs had gone.”

A combination of factors squeezed them out. Stronger policing under Chief Constable Charles Haughton Rafter. Heavy recruitment drives for taller, fitter young officers. “Can you read? Can you write? Can you fight?” was the unofficial test, Chinn says.

Police “took the fight to the streets”. At the same time, youth provision expanded. Clergy set up lads’ clubs, girls’ clubs, football teams and boxing gyms.

“You have new sports coming in,” Chinn explains. “Instead of gathering on a Sunday on waste ground, gambling and swearing, they’re playing football, or they’re going boxing.”

By 1915, one Birmingham paper was asking what had happened to the Peaky Blinders.

“Some of them are fighting at the front,” Chinn says. Others were earning steady wages in munitions factories. Many were ageing out.

“There were men who had been Peaky Blinders,” he says of the 1920s. “But there were no Peaky Blinder gangs.” The Shelby story is compelling drama. Historically, it’s out of sync.

5. The real Billy Kimber was a racecourse operator, not a crime emperor

One of the few names lifted directly from history is Billy Kimber.

Again, the details matter. “He was not a Cockney,” Chinn says. “He was a Brummie from Summer Lane. Not small, but big and burly.”

Kimber had likely been involved in Birmingham’s earlier street gangs. After the First World War, he helped bring together small crews into a more organised racecourse outfit, often referred to as the Birmingham gang or the Bromwich Boys.

Why racecourses? “What do people carry at a race meeting? Loads of money,” Chinn says. “There’s hardly any police… and they’re intimidated.”

Bookmakers paid for the right to stand on a pitch. Payments mounted up: for the stool, the chalk, the sponge, the water, and then protection on top. Refuse to play along, and you risked a beating.

This wasn’t a Midlands mafia running industry and politics. It was opportunistic racketeering attached to a specific setting.

Kimber’s endgame wasn’t a blaze of gangster glory. He eventually moved to Torquay and slipped into middle-class respectability. His daughters attended finishing school in Switzerland. His abandoned Birmingham wife was buried in a pauper’s grave. Proving that history is rarely neat.

6. Alfie Solomons and Darby Sabini were real but far less mythic

Two of the show’s most magnetic figures are rooted in real people, though heavily dramatised.

Alfie Solomons draws inspiration from Alfred Solomon, a North London bookmaker whose story Chinn traced through interviews and archival research.

“They were secular Jews from North London,” Chinn says of the family. “The dad had a small business. They grew up well off.”

Solomon’s turn towards organised violence followed a brutal assault on a racecourse by a Birmingham enforcer, an attack so savage that, according to Chinn’s research, it reshaped his life.

“That made him a gangster,” Chinn says.

Darby Sabini, meanwhile, was not a Sicilian-style don. He was “an Anglo-Italian from Clerkenwell”, English-born to an English mother.

“He didn’t speak Italian,” Chinn says. “He spoke English.” Sabini and others would go on to exert influence in London’s racecourse and club rackets, laying foundations for later organised crime structures. But the alliances were pragmatic, the identities fluid, the reality far less operatic than the show suggests.

7. They were not anti-heroes

For Chinn, the most important correction is moral.

“The real Peaky Blinders were backstreet thugs,” he says.

“They baited the police. They battled each other. But they bullied the hard-working, respectable poor, the majority amongst whom they lived.”

They weren’t Robin Hoods. They weren’t noble outsiders. They preyed on their own communities. “They are not men of honour,” he says.

Chinn is careful not to dismiss the series outright. It has drawn young audiences towards history. It has brought major production investment into Birmingham. It has shown that violence carries consequences.

However, the wider cultural phenomenon, the glamorised gangster aesthetic stripped of context, troubles him.

“There’s a danger,” he says, “when they don’t see the reality.”

The reality is this: street scraps, opportunistic rackets, men shaped by poverty and pride, some of whom reformed, some of whom didn’t, none of whom were mythic masterminds.

The television series Peaky Blinders is modern folklore. The real ones were flesh and blood, smaller, rougher and far less heroic than the legend would have you believe.

Crime historian Carl Chinn guides viewers through Birmingham’s streets and gangs in Peaky Blinders: The Real Story, showing what’s real, what’s myth, and why the legend still captivates today. Out now, watch the trailer below:

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