What are the real Peaky Blinders? The true story of Birmingham's razor-gang myth
Before Cillian Murphy put on the cap, the name belonged to actual people — and almost everything the TV show tells you about them is invented. There was no Shelby family, no post-war empire, and, most disappointingly of all, no razor blades.
Here's what Birmingham's records actually show.
Who they really were
The real Peaky Blinders were violent street gangs from Birmingham's poorest districts, active mainly in the 1890s — the name first appeared in print in the Birmingham Mail on 24 March 1890. They were young working-class men fighting territorial battles, robbing, and terrorising their own neighbourhoods. Crucially, they were gone by the early 20th century — decades before the 1919 setting of the series.
The man who knows them best is social historian Carl Chinn, whose own great-grandfather was a Peaky Blinder and whose 2014 book The Real Peaky Blinders dug through hundreds of court cases and police records.
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The razor blades never existed
The show's signature image — safety razor blades stitched into cap peaks, whipped off to blind an enemy — is a myth. Chinn told the Birmingham Mail in 2014 that razor blades were then "a luxury item, much too expensive for the Peaky Blinders to have used"; working men went to the barber for a shave. He traces the legend to John Douglas's novel A Walk Down Summer Lane, not to any historical record.
The real gangs used whatever was cheap and to hand:
- Belts with heavy buckles — the favourite, wrapped around the fist with eight inches loose to slash with.
- Steel toe-cap boots — for kicking a man once he was down.
- Coshes and knives — plus brick ends and stones wrapped in handkerchiefs.
"Although the razorblades are a myth, the viciousness of the gangs is not," Chinn told the Shropshire Star in 2019.
The name most likely just came from the fashion: peaked flat caps, worn with a swagger — the real Blinders were known for dressing sharply, silk scarves and all.
So was anything true?
One name, mostly. Billy Kimber — the series-one villain — was real, a Birmingham native who Chinn says was once a Peaky Blinder himself. After the First World War he led the Birmingham Gang, which ran protection rackets on Britain's booming racecourses and fought a genuinely bloody war with London rivals Darby Sabini and Alfie Solomon.
If you're looking for the closest real-life Tommy Shelby, it's Kimber — and the show made him the enemy.
For the record: the gangs the Blinders actually fought weren't Londoners at all. They were rival Birmingham "sloggers" from the next street over. Less cinematic, far more true.