The Rough Fleet Gang of Hanley, led by Mad Jack Wilson, was notorious decades earlier. Many members of the Rough Fleet Gang may even have been former soldiers, demobbed after the Napoleonic wars.
Next, consider Birmingham’s Park St Irish quarter that was largely demolished during the rabble-rouser Protestant William Murphy Riots in June 1867. The anti Irish-Catholic rioting may have predicted the gangland feuding that was to follow. Yet concern at youth violence in Birmingham’s industrial districts did NOT prompt Council action.
The lads did not belong to a single gang. In fact opposing gangs threatened each other on the city streets and in late-night confrontations outside music halls. Clashes between these rival youth gangs intensified in the early 1870s. Anti-Irish sentiment offered a target for the frustrations of inner city youths which became institutionalised in gang warfare.
The recession that followed the early 1870s boom threw thousands of unemployed and disenfranchised lads onto the streets, particularly in 1873–74. How ironic, then, that police clampdowns on drunkenness and street gambling were resented in working-class districts. I can only shake my head at the indifference shown by the city authorities to the welfare of a powerless section of the community.
Photo credit: StokeonTrentLive
So Birmingham’s sloggers became more territorial, sparking gang-conflict that attracted intense loyalties in adjacent districts. Most of the feuds reported in the press in the 1890s spread, extending from the central slums to areas outside the jurisdiction of the Birmingham police in 1890. Each gang jealously guarded its turf; the Peaky Blinders, for example, were embedded in areas like Small Heath and Bordesley.
By the 1890s, the gangs had adopted their distinctive uniform. It was a style shared by the sloggers’ counterparts in Manchester & Salford, and in London, but more fashion conscious. It was always a working-class pastime, reflecting the honour attached to displays of working-class toughness. Middle-class youths, with greater opportunities and better prospects, had no incentive to risk injury and gaol.
Bell-bottomed trousers secured by a buckle belt, hob-nailed boots, brass-lined button jackets, gaudy scarfs, cravats and billycock-bowler hats with long elongated brims. The bowler-style hats, made of hard felt, had a rakish, curved rim. They shaped the hat brims into a point, worn on one side of the head and tilted over one eye. The hair was prison-cropped all over the head.
Peaky Blinders’ girls would be of a similarly distinctive style, with lavish pearl buttons, long fringes down to the eyes and gaudy-coloured silk handkerchiefs covering their throats. The elaborate hats were large and decorated with feathers and poppies. The men wore these fancy fashions to potentially strike fear (?) when they roamed the streets. The women wore them in order to be noticed.
In the film, the gang was named after the weapon they were supposed to have used in fights: safety razors were sewn into the peaks of their flat caps! The razors were slashed across the opponents’ foreheads, causing blood to pour into their eyes and to blind them. But blades were too expensive for gang-members. Most gang events recorded by the police related instead to illegal betting, theft and Actual Bodily Harm, not razor slashing. Court reports back then called the gang foul mouthed young men who stalked streets in drunken groups, insulting and mugging passers-by. Very nasty and violent to be sure, but mostly not deadly.
Photo credit: Sparkhill’s West Midlands Police Museum
Why were so many young, working-class men drawn to the glamour and the brutality of the Peaky Blinders. I could have understood pickpocketing or robbery because of the potential gains. But I wouldn’t have understood insulting elderly pedestrians in the street. So it seemed to be more a statement of how these lads would not accept City or Police authority! The more the Birmingham press railed against the brutality and violence that confronted the city on a daily basis, the more the new working class generation reached manhood without acknowledging any authority whatever.
Manufacturer Arthur Matthison lived in Summer Lane in the early 1890s. Most Peakies belonged to a slogging gang, he said, as the product of poverty, squalour and slum environment. With slums all around, it was clear to Matthison that youth violence grew out of harsh social and economic conditions, and unemployment.
Alternatively letters to Birmingham Weekly Post insisted that the Peaky Blinder was just an ordinary working man. He could always be found at work during the day in some brass foundry at the lathe. His actions were mostly focused on rival gangs and the police, not on the general public.
By WW1, Birmingham’s Peaky Blinders faded from view. Philip Gooderson attributed the decline of slogging gangs and the concomitant disappearance of the Peakies to a number of factors, ranging from the growth of football as an alternative source of excitement for working-class youths to a belated clampdown by the police and courts. And in any case, by the time Birmingham’s ex-servicemen returned after 1918, the world had greatly changed.
The Peaky Blinders were backstreet criminals in Birmingham during the 1890s and turn of the C20th, known for two defining passions: natty streetwear and violence. The Peaky Gang was brought down before WW1 by a combination of strong policing, more severe sentencing and social changes. So the tv series was set in the wrong era and used the wrong weapons, but Birmingham citizens loved the film’s strong sense of place.
Perhaps read The Gangs of Birmingham: The True Story of the Peaky Blinders by Philip Gooderson (Milo Books, 2010). Or visit West Midlands Police Museum in Steelhouse Lane Birmingham
Perhaps read The Gangs of Birmingham: The True Story of the Peaky Blinders by Philip Gooderson (Milo Books, 2010). Or visit West Midlands Police Museum in Steelhouse Lane Birmingham
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8 comments:
There is a long history of football hooliganism in the UK. One of the surprising things about it, in the 1980s, was the fact that many of the participants were high-earning city boys. They were generally from a working-class background and had ridden the stock market boom of the time. So poverty was not a factor but wearing snazzy fashions and being in a gang were. One can see parallels with the Birmingham gangs.
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bazza
The gang mentality groups of football supporters were familiar in the late 19th century. I would have hoped by the 1970s and 80s, thugs would not be using violence to target opposition supporters and police, and to bond with their own supporters. I suppose that was a bit better than the Peaky Blinders tackling random people in the street and stealing, but violence was still very very nasty.
If grinding poverty was not a cause, and territoriality was nothing new, do you think gang warfare will ever end?
Hello Hels, I strongly dislike the romanticizing of criminals--in the U.S., this happens most often with the Old West, but also in many other places, such as the Chicago (Prohibition-era) outlaws, in politics such as with the Tweed Machine, etc. etc. I don't listen to rap, but understand that it often glorifies gang participation and violence. Your example today (in addition to certain references from Australia's past) shows how gangs and criminals everywhere are too often celebrated instead of scorned, which attitude of course only causes repetition of the cycle.
--Jim
I read through this glued to the screen, not paying attention to the tv show Vera. Very interesting. Young British men can be very violent, perhaps more so than young Australian men. See Glasgow Kiss and Cheshire Grin.
Lawless and restless, but this tv is seriously addictive. I love the drama and the colour.
Parnassus
it is a dilemma, I know. I never allowed my sons to watch tv series with violence or weapons, even when they did not glorify gang participation and violence. Unfortunately those programmes showed a way that men coped with real issues, with "skills" that I never approved of.
I wonder if my ban on violence influenced their behaviour and values as adults.
Andrew
every review of Peaky Blinders that I have read says the same thing - atmospheric, gripping, dramatic and a strong sense of place.
I love Vera because it is so Northumberlandish and sensible, with no affectation and no B.S. So missing Vera is making a big statement. I wonder if Australian males are less violent because our inner cities are not so full of poverty, unemployment and lack of sunshine.
Deb
Brilliantly produced, yes.
As very well done as the programme is, I wonder if our mothers would have allowed us to watch Peaky Blinders in the middle 60s. I think the generation that survived WW2 would have feared the violence.
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