Original subtitles

In 1890,

an incident occurs

in these back streets...

..that reveals a phenomenon that will rock Victorian society

and lead to the explosion of organised crime in Britain.

On March 22nd 1890, George Eastwood, an inoffensive chap,

goes into the Rainbow pub.

He's a teetotaller and is enjoying a ginger beer when three tough nuts

start to insult him.

George decides to go home.

When he gets outside, he hears the shout,

"Give it to him hot, lads!" They savagely attack him.

He's in hospital for three weeks and he has to be trepanned -

a piece of the bone from his skull removed.

So what's so important about this particular violent incident?

Well, it's the first time that the term "Peaky Blinders" is used,

and the legend is born.

The real Peaky Blinders go on to become the godfathers

of organised crime in the 1920S.

There was this organised gang system that was every bit

as bad and good as the one that operated in Chicago.

But their origins stretch back 50 years earlier, to the 1870s.

These young men aren't focused on moneymaking.

They're waging street war for status.

They're about fighting.

They attack policemen. They fight each other.

It's the first modern youth cult.

The gangs erupt from Birmingham's back streets, where they face

poverty and racism.

He denounces them as "cannibals".

This is the story of the rise and fall...

..of Britain's first modern mass gang movement...

..who'd change our cities forever.

My dad was the main source of stories about the Peaky Blinders,

and the story my dad told

that really made me want to tell this as a drama

is that he was probably eight years old and his dad

gave him a message and said, "Take these to the Peaky Blinders."

And he was terrified, and he walked in

and he said inside there were eight men, immaculately dressed,

a table covered in coins, in a place where no-one had any money.

And he said the men were all drinking beer and whisky

out of jam jars because they wouldn't spend any of that money

on something like a glass or a cup.

Every penny they had was spent on how they looked.

And it just made me think that in an environment

where you have no control, you have no authority,

everything's pretty grim,

the only thing you can do is make yourself the thing.

The Sheldons were his uncles

and they were the people who were sitting around the table.

And it wasn't until many years later when I started researching this

that I started seeing the name Sam Sheldon.

Steven Knight set his drama in Birmingham after World War I,

when the Sheldons, the inspiration for Knight's Shelbys,

are well-established.

But this film explores the early days of the Peaky Blinders.

I've done a lot of research into the Sheldons,

and three of the brothers, John, Samuel and Joseph,

were notorious criminals.

This is really important.

This is a photo of Samuel Sheldon.

He's only five foot one and a quarter,

but he's not a man that you want to mess with.

He was involved in riots, brutal beatings, shootings,

and the worst gang war in the city's history.

He would be my Tommy Shelby.

I wouldn't want to meet him in a dark alley.

That is for certain.

Because Samuel Sheldon gets done in the 1880s

for attacking the police in a gang.

He gets done for attacking other people and throwing stones.

The Sheldons have their own gang, but it's obvious

that it's from a period earlier than when the drama is set.

This mugshot of Sam Sheldon isn't the only one.

So this is the Birmingham City Police mugshot book.

Here he is. Samuel Sheldon.

Who many people might associate

with the fictional Tommy Shelby character from the Peaky Blinders,

who was part of the Sheldon family, criminal family in Birmingham.

This occasion, he was sentenced to five years' penal servitude

for being in possession of a base coin, which was a common offence

at the time, it was... it was forgery,

forging coins, fake currency.

It's probably the biggest police mugshot collection in the UK.

This contact with the law gives a rare insight into

working-class history, where so often, no records exist.

It's part of a remarkable collection that reveals how widespread

the early Peaky Blinders were.

You can see some of the Peaky Blinder mugshots.

You can see the date they were born, the offences,

the date of the offence and what punishment they received.

This is baby-faced Henry Fowler.

He and his brothers were convicted of numerous crimes around Birmingham

in the late 1800s.

Ernest Bales here, sentenced to two months' imprisonment

for stealing a bicycle.

Young Ernest there with his peaked cap and his typical frown.

Looks quite hardened.

Every single one of them has got a story to tell.

They're just a window into another lifetime, aren't they?

This is Edward Derrick, who I believe is an ancestor

of Carl Chinn, Professor Carl Chinn.

Looks quite surprised to be having his photograph taken.

The Peaky Blinders are very close to me and my family.

Unfortunately, my great-grandfather, Edward Derrick, was a Peaky Blinder.

His older brother was a leader of the Sparkbrook Slogging Gang,

and Edward, my great-grandfather, followed him for violence.

He got done for assault, for assaulting the police as well.

He was a petty criminal - so petty that on one occasion, he actually

stole a side of bacon from outside a pork butcher's shop.

But he was a nasty, vile man, and he used to beat up

my great-grandmother. So he's not a man to be admired.

By trawling the records of hundreds of Peaky Blinders, it's clear

that the early Peakies are a Birmingham-wide phenomenon.

The real Peaky Blinders are not just a 1920s gang, one gang,

the real Peaky Blinders are the men and youths

who belong to numerous backstreet gangs in Birmingham

in the 1890s and turn of the 20th century,

but their roots go back much further.

They're just known then as street ruffians, but from 1872,

they have a name - slogging gangs, and that name is from the word

slogger, which means to hit somebody with a fierce blow.

It's the start of an urban movement

that will ultimately transform attitudes to the working classes

and life in the inner cities. The rise of these slogging gangs

is mirrored in other industrial centres across Britain.

By the late 19th century, we're hearing lots of reports

of territorial youth gangs in England's major cities,

and without exception, the gangs are located in the working-class

residential districts, so these will be the factory

or workshop districts of cities like Birmingham and Manchester.

The rampant ruffianism of the back streets.

That's the problem of the big cities -

Birmingham, Manchester, Salford, London and Liverpool.

These are the shock cities of the new industrial age.

There's nowhere else like this on Earth,

and there's an intensity to life.

From the 1870s, Birmingham is the industrial heart

of the greatest manufacturing nation on the planet.

But the price is high.

Charles Dickens describes the city as a vision of hell.

Life expectancy is below 45 years.

Around one in five children die before the age of five.

People are working long, long hours.

They're working in hot, noisy, often dangerous conditions.

Into this world are born the members of this early gang movement,

the precursors to the Peaky Blinders.

Certain names crop up more often than others.

One of them, who's central to our story of the Peaky Blinders,

is called Thomas Joyce.

A mugshot of Joyce hasn't survived, but we know about him

because he makes the papers.

The first mention I find of Thomas Joyce in the local press

is in September 1874, he and a pal from the Park Street gang

are on Deritend Bridge just over there, and they attack

William Smallwood, a top fighter from the nearby Milk Street gang.

They use very filthy language.

They draw their knives, Smallwood strikes out with his buckle belt,

Joyce and his pal end up in court with their heads bandaged,

and the magistrates look at him and go,

"You've had a good thrashing - taste of your own medicine."

A ticking-off from the law won't deter Joyce.

He's already a hardened gang leader with a taste for violence.

Making money doesn't motivate him.

Fighting does.

Thomas Joyce would have become captain of the Park Street gang

because he was the toughest, the nastiest,

the most brutal in a fight. What we need to understand is

why was fighting so important to so many poor and working-class youths?

They owned nothing, but the one thing they did own was the street.

That belonged to them.

So territory and masculinity come together.

If you can defend your street and beat another street,

you enhance your own status.

There's a ritualistic component to confrontations between gangs.

I think there's lots of shouting at the outset,

lots of threats being issued.

These are not criminal gangs in a conventional sense,

so they're not organised for the purposes of

street robbery or theft.

They're much more fighting gangs.

So really, what they're interested in is defending their territory.

There was much more acceptance of violence.

I think people were much more violent then.

There was sort of an acceptance of...not casual violence,

but just that there would be a fight

and men would fight each other and people would get hurt.

To understand why Thomas Joyce becomes a Peaky Blinder,

Carl has been tracing his story.

He's here in the 1871 census.

You can see him, there he is with his mum and dad

and his younger brother. He's 18.

His parents are both from Ireland, and they settled here in Park Lane,

near to Park Street.

It was a very poor neighbourhood.

There's a quarter of a million people in Birmingham

living in 43,000 back-to-backs.

Birmingham's back-to-backs are actually houses

split down the middle,

with one half facing the street and the other a central courtyard.

The living conditions of the poor are atrocious.

There's only one room downstairs.

The people are packed together.

It's insanitary living - toilets are dry pan privies

shared between two or three families.

There's one tap in a yard, perhaps for 100 people to get cold water.

There's smoke everywhere. It's dirty.

Life is hard, and poverty kills.

There are courts in the very centre of Birmingham

where filth accumulates on filth.

Where courtyards are so many acres of stink.

And where doorless privies face house doors

and make decency impossible.

And where it is a danger for a policeman to enter after dark.

Thomas Joyce lives in the squalor of these courtyards and lanes.

But the census reveals a detail that's surprising.

He's a youngster - in the 1871 census,

we can see that he's a labourer.

Like most of the early Peakies, he isn't unemployed.

He's working.

At the time, employment rates reach a record high.

It's said that any 12-year-old can get a job.

The overwhelming majority of gang members are young men and adult men

who are unskilled. Lots of them are factory workers.

They're hardworking chaps. Others are street traders.

There might have been quite a lot of work around, but it's badly paid

and so they haven't got a lot of spare cash.

So what they're doing is that they're looking to enjoy themselves

in the cheapest way possible.

From 1851 to 1881, the average age was just under 25.

The middle class birth-rate declines,

but it doesn't drop in poorer areas.

So in poorer neighbourhoods, there's lots of youngsters,

lots of children, and they're out on the street.

They've got no gardens, they've got no front rooms,

so the street's their playground.

If we think about these boys being quite marginalised,

often in work that has limits to its satisfaction,

there's a limit to how much they can progress in life.

So perhaps the gangs give them something different.

It's a testing ground for their masculinity.

It's somewhere where they can prove themselves.

There's a great deal of loyalty and identification with the gangs,

and gangs have, you know, a particular association

with specific areas, streets or clusters of streets.

And so we have boys who were associated

with named gangs in this period.

There may have been one other explosive ingredient

that sucks Thomas Joyce,

the son of Irish parents, into the gangs.

Racism.

Irish immigration to Birmingham

happens in a big rush in the 1800s,

and a large amount of that happens in the 1840s and the early 1850s.

So you have the population, if you look at the census,

of Irish-born people in Birmingham

basically doubling between 1841 and 1851.

And that great rush of migration into Birmingham

is happening because of the disaster of the Great Famine in Ireland.

The famine of 1845 to 1851 leads to death by starvation and disease

of more than a million Irish men, women and children.

Up to two million are forced to emigrate.

The Irish who moved to Birmingham are often living

in the very poor, very central areas of Birmingham -

streets such as Park Street.

Now, those areas are very badly served by

things such as water and drainage and sanitation.

These new immigrants, like the Joyce family in Park Street,

are confronted by age-old anti-Catholic hatred.

And in 1867, that hatred is brought to the boil

by a Protestant rabble-rouser, William Murphy.

William Murphy works as a preacher,

so he moves around from town to town,

giving fairly bloodcurdling speeches

about how English men and women should not trust

the new Irish arrivals who are living in their midst.

He denounces them. He denounces them as cannibals,

and he denounces their priests as pickpockets and liars.

In June 1867, a mob marches on Park Street,

one of the poorest neighbourhoods in Birmingham.

A huge number of people who view themselves as English patriots

turn up in the Irish area of Birmingham

and decide to smash up the homes of the people who live there.

And at one stage, the mayor of Birmingham estimates

that there are about 50-100,000 people in the streets

during those very riotous events.

The Murphy riots are focused on Park Street,

which has an almost entirely Irish-born

or second-generation Irish population.

And the people who live on Park Street

put up quite a fight,

and the police very much take the sides of the people

who are attacking those Irish residences -

and when the police do that, really the fight is over.

And there are some very sad descriptions then

of those Irish homes being ransacked,

having their furniture brought out

into the street and smashed.

It's the Irish victims of the mob who are charged with rioting

and have their claims for compensation turned down.

Many of them live in the same street as the Joyce family.

And soon after this injustice,

Thomas Joyce rises through the ranks of the Park Street gang.

The roots of the slogging gangs are in the tail end of the 1860s,

when a number of people in Birmingham

who are children at the time, or teenagers at the time,

see the Murphy riots.

They see their homes being smashed.

What then happens in the 1870s is that this group,

who've lived through that period,

have seen the way that being skilled at things

like stone-throwing or being part of a big group

might be a really sensible measure.

It might help you to protect your own and your community.

So I think that is the legacy that we then see

in some of the activities of the 1870s.

We find names such as the Joyce family of Park Street

being involved in leadership positions

of the slogging gangs in the record from the 1870s.

Thomas Joyce thrives on this ethnic tension,

but the gang wars between Irish and English Peakies

lead to family casualties.

By 1874, Thomas Joyce is regarded as the captain

of the Park Street gang.

One of his men is his younger brother, Jacky.

He's only 13.

And in February of that year, Jacky,

along with other members of the Park Street gang,

are involved in a disturbance with the Milk Street gang -

their great enemies.

In that disturbance, Jacky creeps up

behind 15-year-old Thomas Kirkham.

There were about 20 boys standing together at the top of a gullet.

One of the boys called out, "Here, Kirkham!"

A witness noticed the prisoner steal around behind Kirkham

and, throwing an arm around him, stuck him in the neck.

He called out, "Murder! I'm stabbed!"

Another witness saw a boy staggering about in the middle of the road

with a knife in his neck.

The witness pulled the knife out and assisted the boy to hospital.

Sadly, Thomas Kirkham dies soon after.

Jacky goes to court and there's a bit of a dispute

over how old he is.

At the start, he says he's 14.

Then he says he's 13.

Well, one of the obvious reasons why you might give a younger age,

particularly the age of 13 or under,

is because if he's tried at age 14 or over,

he's tried as an adult and he could be facing the death penalty.

The judge directs the jury to convict Jacky of murder

only if they can establish intent.

They can't.

Jacky Joyce is found guilty of manslaughter

and sentenced to a month in prison and five years in a reformatory.

There's a lot of kudos, a lot of status

hinges on reputations for toughness and for fighting prowess.

We could almost say that some of the leading sloggers

or Peaky Blinders were the celebrities of their age.

And we discover evidence for this rising infamy

in a familiar place - the media.

In 1855, tax on newspapers is lowered,

so they're cheaper to buy.

It becomes way more accessible to a lot more people,

including the working classes.

Birmingham Provincial Press is really telling us

many more stories about crime locally than ever before.

Almost if you think about how popular reality TV is today,

it's the kind of Victorian version of that,

of finding out what's going on in your local area,

the crimes that have been committed,

the bad guys, the scandal.

So it becomes much more exciting to read.

It is the birth of the modern tabloid press.

Crime is the most commercial form of entertainment news

in Victorian Britain,

because they're doing something that people

can only really aspire to in their lives.

They're actually breaking all the rules.

It could be seen as a form of social mobility.

By the 1870s, literacy rates are increasing.

75% of women and 80% of men can read.

And the education acts are really improving people's literacy rates.

You're still leaving school at around 13 or 14

if you're a working-class kid, for work,

but you should have a basic level of literacy.

There's evidence that the sloggers desire the exposure

that the press offers.

You might well actually want to be featured in the press

if you're a member of a gang in this period

because it gets your name out there and you become notorious.

So you might initially serve some short-term prison sentences,

but then, on your release, you've got this history -

you've been in prison, you've survived it,

you're known as a leader of a gang.

And it isn't just the male gang members

who are gaining notoriety in the 1870s.

Women also play a role in the real Peaky gangs' activities.

Here we've got the female prisoner ledger.

This spans a number of decades, up to the early 1930s.

There's probably some of the Peaky Blinders' molls in here.

The girlfriends, the wives

of some of those young Birmingham criminals.

Just rich with details.

The majority of offences on any given page are theft offences.

There's the odd assault.

There's prostitution, running brothels.

And of course, the same as with the men,

a lot of them will have stories of personal tragedy and poverty

and alcoholic parents,

no money, really just struggling to survive.

So a lot of the theft offences could just be to survive,

to get food, to get money for food.

There is an awful lot of misery amongst these pages.

There are some very young prisoners in these books.

This lady here, Leah Jinks - she was...

Her occupation was a polisher.

She was arrested for assault.

So she looks like the kind of character

who could have been associating with Peaky Blinder gangs.

She looks tough as nails.

And she's only 18 years of age.

Here we have Alice Jackson,

who was arrested for attempted murder in 1911.

And she was sentenced to two years' imprisonment,

so there must have been some kind of extenuating circumstances.

Some very typical hairstyles of the time.

Lots of wonderful hats.

Look at those shoulder pads!

And the fur collar!

I mean, they're out in their Sunday best.

But it's really telling, all of the ladies on that page

have all been arrested for stealing.

So they're dressed up, they're in their best attire,

they're trying to blend in with

maybe a more affluent class of people.

And then they've been apprehended for stealing -

stealing watches, stealing boots, stealing shirts, clothing.

Historian Kate Lister has been uncovering

how some of the women Peakies were just as involved as the men.

In the summer of 1874, a riot broke out in Digbeth, Birmingham.

Witnesses said there were about 500, maybe 600 rioters

attacking police, smashing windows and generally destroying property.

And it wasn't just men who were doing the rioting.

15-year-old Julia Giblin was among the arrested rioters.

She'd been seen by witnesses carrying stones in her apron

to throw at the police.

Julia was not an isolated incident.

We have reports in some of the larger-scale gang confrontations

of girls fighting side by side with the boys,

and they're involved in assaults on the police

or in assaults or attempts to intimidate witnesses.

And it seems that that's where often the girls and young women

are most actively taking part in the violence.

Women like Julia Giblin upset Victorian sensibilities no end.

They were not the angel in the house,

they were not demure, submissive or quiet.

They were loud, aggressive and violent.

But in Victorian Birmingham, in the streets,

you had to be loud if you were going to be heard at all.

Girls and young women associated with the gangs,

they're adopting their hairstyles and their clothing

to show their sense of affiliation to the gang.

So the young women are also sporting very long fringes.

They're wearing coloured neckerchiefs.

They're wearing coloured or striped skirts.

There are reports of a Peakies moll in Birmingham

wearing a tremendously elaborate hat adorned with feathers and poppies.

So she's really cutting quite a striking figure on the streets.

In a world where you don't have much,

being a big player on the street corner

can feel like quite a lot.

And the way you dress and look are keys to that identity -

for the men as much as the women.

# New generation

# Diamonds in the rough

# The future makers were in it for the rush

# Legends in the making

# Unstoppable at heart

# Won't see us coming

# When we leave a mark

# Better get ready... #

Kate Lister is meeting barber Dale Sampey,

who often gets requests for Peakies-style haircuts.

It's always inspired by the TV show,

where it's really short on the sides, long over the top.

It looks a little bit like a mop when it's finished.

The original haircut was actually...

It was even more severe than it is in the TV show.

This is George Williams.

Wow! KATE LAUGHS

As you can... He looks a character, doesn't he?

George is ultimately convicted of manslaughter

and serves life imprisonment.

But even as he's arrested for murder,

he still defiantly sports his Peaky hairdo.

This is super fashionable.

It's basically all shaven and cut very close to the head,

apart from a fringe, which they keep very long.

That's awesome, that is, isn't it? It really is.

So this is quite a severe and extreme version of the haircut,

but they were all sporting variations on this.

But when they first came into existence,

they were wearing hats much more like this

that were known as billycock hats,

and they would fashion the front so they were peaked

and they would have the hat pulled down over one eye,

hence Peaky Blinder,

and their very long fringe or quiff

styled across their forehead to the other side.

So eventually, the billycock hat is replaced by the flat cap,

which is more recognisable from the Peaky Blinders today,

although they didn't keep razor blades in it. That's a myth.

They didn't have the safety razors at the time,

they couldn't have done it.

They often have what was known as a daff,

which is a really brightly coloured scarf tied round their neck.

Really bright buttons, pearl buttons,

and they would have bell-bottom trousers on as well,

so you can imagine the figures that these guys cut.

They do look like they're in a gang.

You would know that these people were together,

and that was the idea, this was their uniform.

They have been described as the first modern youth cult,

and I think that really makes sense.

Their clothing, their sense of style, even their own language,

they really do look like the forerunners of

the later 20th-century youth cults like punk and so on.

There are even reports of gang members having clothes

specially made for them.

We have a report from Manchester of a young man in a Scotland gang

whose sweetheart has apparently

knitted him a distinctive pair of socks.

And then in Salford, the so-called King of the Scuttlers

John-Joseph Hillier, somebody knits him a sweater with that legend -

King of the Scuttlers - sewn onto the front,

and he takes to parading the streets of Salford showing off that jumper.

So that moniker, which was really intended to shame him,

has absolutely the reverse effect.

The Peaky Blinder, this product of poverty, squalor

and slum environment, was a terror to respectable people

40-odd years ago.

He was also a terror to the police.

He went in pairs along Summer Lane every Saturday night,

but he never molested any member of my family.

Perhaps as we lived on his doorstep,

we were treated as members of the gang.

By courtesy or adoption, the local bullies would always

give me curt nods of comradeship.

The street gangs are all about territorial conflict.

But there is one other element that defines them.

Gambling.

And the next time that we come across

Thomas Joyce's Park Street gang,

they're engaging in one of the favourite pastimes of all the gangs.

Pitch-and-toss is a simple game.

A group of young men or lads will gather,

and they'll have a target,

and they will pitch their pennies towards the target.

The one that pitches 'em closest to the target

then is allowed to pick them all up.

So they get them,

and now it's the tossing.

They're tossed up into the air...

..and the coins that come up heads, he keeps.

Thomas Joyce's gang are playing for pennies,

but street gambling games are part of a much larger tradition.

So gambling was pretty much ingrained

in English life, everyday life.

If you were the industrial working class or the rural poor,

you liked the idea of a bit of a flutter.

My mum would say my grandad was the big gambler, and he would...

He had one suit and she would take his suit to the pawnbrokers

on a Monday to get cash so that he could bet,

and then when he got paid on the Thursday,

he would retrieve his suit, wear the suit over the weekend,

and then back into the pawnbrokers on the Monday.

So that was the routine.

I think gambling - and beer - were solace for people

who didn't really have much source of solace.

I think it's about escapism,

and it's about trying to find some fun in what is

an otherwise relatively bleak existence compared to today.

So they wanted to kind of make the most of what little bit

of leisure time they got.

I think people gambled because they didn't have much else

in terms of hope for change.

So they weren't going to get out of this situation by working,

because they worked as hard as they could anyway.

And the only possible way of getting sort of even a few moments

of something different was to win.

Until 1826, there'd even been a national lottery in Britain.

But infected with prudish Victorian values,

the middle classes want the fun to stop.

As the 19th century wore on, the campaign against gambling,

the puritanical campaign against gambling,

the religious campaigns, the moral disdain

that many of the elite felt for poor people gambling,

gathered pace and conspired to make working-class gambling illegal.

In this powder keg of antagonism,

Thomas Joyce's gang come up against the law.

HE WHISTLES

When the police break up their pitch and toss games,

the gangs fight back.

It's a regular occurrence on the streets of Birmingham.

I'm not far from the spot where a full-blown riot breaks out

in 1871, when a few policemen tried to stop one of the gangs

from playing pitch and toss.

When the police tried to stop the gambling, they're attacked

by the enraged youths.

They're called roughs, disparagingly.

It's a really dangerous situation, and one of the policemen involved

said that the numbers rival those in the Murphy Riots,

the worst riots in the entire history of Birmingham.

By the mid 1870s, the territorial gang problem is getting worse.

Thomas Joyce's Park Street Peaky gang is one of more than 50

throughout Birmingham.

Like his, the vast majority are named after streets.

The phenomenon is repeated in cities

like Liverpool, Glasgow and Manchester,

where the gangs, known as scuttlers, often have names

inspired by real events, like the Franco-Prussian War.

There's even a Buffalo Bill gang

after the famous frontiersman tours his Wild West show.

There's a great moral panic in the 1870s

around the activities of these young men involved in slogging gangs.

The neighbourhood is so infested by roughs of both sexes

that it is feared dangerous

for a policeman to work the beat alone,

the mob actually hunting and stoning him off the streets.

For five years, Thomas Joyce's slogging gang

is one of the most feared in Birmingham.

But then in 1875, another gang crosses a line

when it graduates from fighting rivals

to take on the establishment.

7th March, 1875, a riot erupts in this street - Navigation Street -

when a mob tries to free a prisoner from two policemen.

They're pelted with stones and mud.

PC Lines comes to help them.

He tries to beat back the crowd with his staff

and the sergeant manages to drag himself away.

But then, as one witness put it, they attacked him like rats,

and somebody stabs him in the neck.

He falls, they start kicking him on the ground.

Then more police come. They take PC Lines to hospital.

It's really difficult for the police to find out who's actually involved

in the Navigation Street riot.

This is a collection relating to the murder of PC William Lines,

who was stabbed in Navigation Street in 1875.

This is believed to be the whistle of PC William Lines.

You can see the crucifix attached to the whistle chain there.

This is the picture from his funeral.

You can see it was very well attended by his fellow officers

and members of the public.

He was the first police officer to be stabbed to death on duty

in Birmingham, and he attended the scene of the riot to help out

a fellow officer, and he and a sergeant were both assaulted.

He was stabbed behind his ear

and he died in hospital two weeks later.

This is the offender who was deemed

to be ultimately responsible for stabbing him, Jeremiah Corkery.

And we have a couple of what I presume are commemorative postcards,

posters produced at the time,

both kind of highlighting the plight of Corkery.

After a trial in which 20-year-old Corkery first pleads his innocence

and then confesses his guilt,

he's sentenced to hang at Warwick on 27th July 1875.

He rose about 4.30,

and from that time until the moment of his execution,

his terror and consequent helplessness

appeared to rapidly increase.

Shortly before seven o'clock, he was visited by Father Kelly,

and he then engaged in religious exercises,

the last rites of the Roman Catholic faith.

The very beauty of the morning, however, appeared by contrast

to intensify the deathly and shocking look of the condemned man.

His face was deadly pale, his eyes half opened.

He trembled violently

and his knees occasionally seemed almost to give way.

On being placed in an upright position,

he staggered and would have fallen,

had not the warders again been vigilant.

And in a moment, the drop fell with a dull, heavy sound

and the unhappy murderer's body descended with a swift rush,

being brought up at the end of the rope with a terrible jerk.

The report on the execution of Thomas Corkery

is intended to be moralising.

Like, "This will be your inevitable doom.

"If you commit a crime, a terrible fate awaits you."

On the other hand, it's quite voyeuristic and salacious as well,

and that is what the Victorian press plays upon.

They know this is commercial,

they know that people will actually treat this as entertainment.

I'd say a little too much sympathy towards Corkery

rather than PC William Lines,

who ultimately lost his life,

left a young daughter without a father, a wife with no husband.

But there's lots of information and sympathies towards Corkery.

Corkery becomes Birmingham slang for striking fear into policemen.

The city is gaining a reputation for lawlessness.

Over the next few years, two more police officers are killed,

hundreds injured, and what was skirmishes in the streets

now look more like full-scale battles.

The range of numbers involved in the fights is quite extreme.

You could have, as in 1886,

supposedly 2,000 Peaky Blinders slugging it out.

This was not just street warfare, it was neighbourhood warfare.

They were chucking stones at each other,

they were fighting with buckled belts.

It went on all afternoon and police reinforcements had to be called in

from all over Birmingham to put it down.

Gang violence is now out of control.

They're terrorising the vast majority of law-abiding citizens.

It would take a new sheriff to clean up the town.

So, here we have the tunic of Sir Charles Haughton Rafter,

our chief constable from 1899 all the way up to 1935,

when he sadly died in office.

1899, when he joined Birmingham City Police,

several officers had been killed in the line of duty,

police officers were being stabbed or assaulted every other week.

It was a really dangerous place to work as a police officer.

So he came in, he came across from Ireland, and he had to improve

the quality of policing, to improve the standard of education

of his recruits, to improve discipline, but also to try

and stamp out a lot of these really big crime problems in the area.

Many of those recruits come from the Irish community,

who only a generation before had been the victims of racist mobs

as the police stood by.

Only 1% of Birmingham's population are, by this time, Irish-born,

but they make up 7% of the police force.

He embarks on a rapid recruitment campaign.

The Birmingham City Police is on demand, so what he does,

he brings in lots of young fit men.

They've got to be five foot ten, they've got to be tough.

And the story went in the Birmingham Police

that Rafter asked three things of his men -

can you read, can you write, and can you fight?

He sends out his men in pairs in the toughest districts,

and they take the fight to the Peaky Blinders.

It's a tough time, and tough tactics are needed.

Rafter's strong policy is supported by more severe sentences

against criminals, rogues who attack policemen.

And what starts to happen is that poorer working-class people

gain confidence in the police.

They start to report Peaky Blinders to the police,

and the tide is slowly turned.

When Charles Haughton Rafter sadly died in office, Birmingham

was one of the best-policed cities in the country,

the Birmingham Police were known throughout the world

for their professionalism,

and he left the city in a really, really good state.

The gang violence had all but disappeared.

Effective policing may have curbed the problem

and changed the city for good,

but it takes a war in South Africa to expose the poverty

that gave birth to the gangs.

Attitudes towards the so-called slums

and slum populations of England's cities

are really changed as a result of the South African war

from 1898 onwards.

So, young men in their thousands seek to enlist

to take part in the war effort,

but most of them are knocked back on account of them not meeting

the Army's requirements for their physiques.

So in Manchester and Salford, you get around 12,000 young men

seeking to enlist, 8,000 of them are rejected

as not meeting the Army's fitness requirements.

Only one in ten who heed the call of the recruiting sergeant

are deemed fit for full military service.

It leads to social reforms from 1904

that include free school meals and medical examinations.

This desire to improve conditions

isn't just taken up by the government.

A group of enlightened philanthropists also get involved.

A few good-hearted individuals are trying to provide alternatives

to the gangs for youngsters,

and it's their belief in physical fitness

that has a major impact on the decline of the gangs.

Now, one of the most important figures in Birmingham

is Father Pinchard.

He's the High Church of England vicar in St Jude's.

That's one of the poorest parishes in the city.

In 1896, he starts a club for young lads between 18 and 20.

The most important attraction - boxing.

They've got no ring, no ropes, they box in their clothes.

But it's really popular.

The boxing clubs don't just attract Birmingham's Peaky Blinders.

Lads' clubs prove popular up and down the country.

And what's really interesting is that, by and large, they work.

By the late 1890s, reports in Manchester and Salford

are suggesting that scuttling is absolutely on the wane.

What the lads' clubs really do spectacularly well is to bring in

the 12-, 13-, 14-year-olds.

So the gangs almost wither out as the lads' clubs take root.

The lads' clubs also heavily promote football, and football grows

very rapidly in the late 19th century,

both as a participant sport with teams forged at street level,

playing on the patches of open ground.

Football also grows very rapidly as a spectator sport.

Famous teams like Aston Villa, Birmingham City

and Manchester City all emerge from this movement.

And the two professional teams in Manchester - Manchester United

and Manchester City as they later become -

are hugely popular with people,

they're now coming together in their tens of thousands

to watch professional football.

And this transcends the kind of neighbourhood loyalties

that had underpinned the scuttling conflicts.

But the final nail in the mass gangs' coffin

comes completely out of the blue -

from the rise of cinema.

In the first decade of the 20th century,

there are more than 100 cinemas opened in Manchester alone,

and young people flocked to cinemas in droves.

Even in the years before the First World War,

there are social commentators reporting

that some young working-class people

are going to cinema as often as three or four times a week.

Police officers absolutely welcome the cinema.

To them, it's a great boon

if young people are increasingly spending their evenings indoors.

And, of course, the other thing that people are doing

is they're spending money going to watch films

that they might otherwise have spent in beer houses,

so the violence that had typically been associated with drunkenness

begins to diminish as well.

But just as the mass Peaky problem is waning...

..a familiar face re-emerges from Birmingham's slums.

Sam Sheldon and his family,

the inspiration for the Shelbys in the drama series,

have been working away in the shadows.

They're now a powerful crime gang.

We come across the Sheldons again in the early 20th century,

and that's when they gain infamy.

Let's have a look at one of the newspaper reports from the period.

Look at it. "The Birmingham Vendetta.

"Injured man's dramatic story, accused remanded."

And they fought for four years - brutal beatings, shootings, riots.

They fought with Billy Beach.

Beach, a hardened street fighter, lives close to the Sheldons.

They originally fall out over a gambling debt.

And it was a gang war that was fought by men who were living

really close to each other in and around

the Garrison Lane neighbourhood.

When I was growing up, the vendetta in Garrison Lane,

for me, it was like, as a kid,

I imagined it as like a Wild West, OK Corral shooter,

which it sort of was a bit.

But it was two families

who really didn't like each other in Garrison Lane,

and Garrison Lane at the time was obviously teeming with people

and was quite a lawless place.

It was finally put down in 1912.

There's various stories about what happened to Billy Beach.

Eventually, though, he was getting a bit too old

for all this aggravation, and the police, it's said,

had a collection to send him to Canada.

That phrase - vendetta in Garrison Lane -

is just something that always evokes a particular image,

and it was things like that

that I really wanted to get into the Peaky Blinders.

The Garrison Lane vendetta is one of the final acts

of the Peaky street gangs.

Fighting for fighting's sake is fast disappearing.

Now if there's any fighting to be done, it's all about money.

And Sam Sheldon is one of those who recognises that change.

By the early 20th century, the police are making things

really hard for the Peaky Blinders in Birmingham.

So the petty criminals amongst them, the violent petty criminals

amongst them, start to travel around thieving and pickpocketing.

One of them is Samuel Sheldon, and under the alias of Samuel Small,

in January 1902, he's sent down for three months in Manchester

as a suspected person.

That's a common charge for pickpockets.

Sheldon is most likely in Manchester

because he's using the railway network

to move anonymously around the country.

But the city isn't his final destination.

He's heading for the entertainment meccas

opened up by the railways.

They're a magnet for punters,

and for every budding Edwardian criminal.

Horse racing since the late 19th century

has boomed as a popular sport,

more and more racecourses are opening.

And it's illegal to bet for cash anywhere else,

so there's an expanding population of better-off middle-class people.

They've got a disposable income,

they're going to racecourses to have a bet.

Here's the best prices in the ring...

And where there's cash, that brings in the thieves

and the rogues like bees to a honeypot.

Racecourses are happy hunting grounds.

They're lightly policed, they haven't got a lot of security,

they're very popular with crowds, so there's people with lots of cash,

so that draws in ruffians.

And what they start to do, these ruffians from Birmingham,

they pick-pocket, but they also blackmail bookies for protection.

Into this world of travelling pickpockets and rogues

comes another familiar character from the TV series.

Billy Kimber.

In the drama series, Billy Kimber is portrayed as a Londoner.

In real life, he's from Birmingham.

Big man, apparently,

very, very good street fighter,

cobbles fighter - a very dangerous man to cross.

I think he had a theory that you picked out

the biggest of the opposition, dealt him a blow,

and everybody else would fall into line.

A character like Billy Kimber,

what I find interesting is the only way

that someone born in Summer Lane in Birmingham,

which then was a very rough part of Birmingham,

the only way that person would ever rub shoulders

with a lord or a lady or an MP was by doing what he did.

He would never have got there by working hard in a factory.

And so, in a sense, this idea that there's only one way out,

or two ways - boxing and that - is sort of true.

And that's what I've tried to reflect in Peaky Blinders.

Kimber's the clever one.

He realises that the world is changing

and that there's big money to be made out of gangsterism.

The youth gangs of the late 19th century, these are

much more territorial, youthful fighting gangs.

Those gangs look very different from gangs

like the racecourse gangs of the 1920s.

The members of those gangs are older men,

and, of course, they are much more driven by money-making.

By the 20th century, society is becoming much more organised,

and with organised society comes organised crime.

And the criminals who inspired Steven Knight.

All of the characters - Darby Sabini, Alfie Solomons,

Billy Kimber - came as a consequence of reading research

about who was around

and just discovering the truth about them,

the illegal gambling and the gangsters and all of that.

It's so wildly more than you would expect it to be,

because, in the way that

the Americans have mythologised their gangsters,

the British have never, ever even gone there.

These people were not mythologised at all,

and yet they were the same people.

And what of the original Peaky Blinders?

Characters like Thomas Joyce and Jeremiah Corkery were violent.

Many were victims of the grinding poverty of the slums.

But there is no doubt they had a profound effect

on the evolution and reputations of Britain's industrial cities.

They highlighted the appalling conditions so many endured

and forced society to act.

Perhaps their stories are as relevant today

as they were more than 100 years ago.

Next time, British gangsterism explodes

in the racecourse wars of 1921.

It's England's first major gangland war

between two gangs from different cities.

They give rise to Britain's Al Capone,

and spawn the mother and father of all British crime gangs.

The Sabinis are the spiritual godfathers

of the Krays and the Richardsons.

There they are.

The real Billy Kimber, the real Darby Sabini

and the real Alfie Solomon set to go to war.

MUSIC: Danger on the Dance Floor by Dave Cavalier