Stories from the writer's family
Peaky Blinders was created by Steven Knight, a writer from Birmingham whose parents grew up in SMALL HEATH, a working-class district of the city, and told him stories about the street gangs of their youth; Knight has said his father's uncles were members. It ran on British television from 2013 to 2022, six series in all, moving to the main national channel from the fifth, and a follow-up film was later made for Netflix. It is a violent crime drama made for adults, so this grid keeps to names, places and period words.
Home from the war
The show begins in BIRMINGHAM in 1919, just after the First World War. TOMMY SHELBY, played by Cillian Murphy, and his brothers ARTHUR and JOHN have come home from France, where Tommy dug tunnels under the enemy lines, and none of them is the same man who left. Our World War One page covers the war that shaped them.
Their aunt POLLY, played by Helen McCrory, ran the family business while the men were away. Their sister ADA and youngest brother FINN complete the household, and Polly's son MICHAEL, their cousin, joins them later. The family pub, the GARRISON, is their headquarters. Birmingham had grown during the Industrial Revolution into a city of thousands of small workshops making guns, buttons, pens and jewellery, which our industrial revolution page covers.
The razor in the cap
The real Peaky Blinders were street gangs in Birmingham in the 1890s and early 1900s, about twenty years before the show is set, known for their smart clothes: bell-bottom trousers, silk scarves and a peaked CAP. The show made famous a story that they sewed a RAZOR blade into the peak to use as a weapon, but the Birmingham historian Carl Chinn says this is a myth, because safety-razor blades were an expensive luxury at the time. The name more likely came from the caps themselves and from BLINDER, an old slang word for someone who looked dashing.
Bets on the horses
The Shelbys make their money as a BOOKMAKER, taking bets on HORSE races. In Britain at the time, betting in cash away from the racecourse was against the law, and it stayed that way until 1961, when betting shops were finally allowed, so street bookies worked on corners and in back rooms with lookouts watching for the police. Tommy wants his business to become respectable, and he breeds racehorses of his own.
Inspector CAMPBELL is sent from Belfast to stop him, GRACE is a barmaid with a secret, and ALFIE SOLOMONS, a London GANGSTER played by Tom Hardy, is loosely based on a real Jewish gang leader of the 1920s.
Filmed a long way from Birmingham
Very little of the show was filmed in Birmingham itself, where most of the old streets had been rebuilt. Scenes were shot in Liverpool, Manchester and other northern towns, and at the Black Country Living Museum in Dudley, which has rebuilt streets, shops and a canal from around a century ago. The theme tune, Red Right Hand by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, came out in 1994, almost twenty years before the show. Cillian Murphy later won an Oscar for the film Oppenheimer, and the Shelbys' flat caps and short back-and-sides haircuts came back into fashion.