What was Tommy's job in the war in Peaky Blinders?

Sergeant Major Thomas Shelby went to France with the Small Heath Rifles — a fictional Birmingham unit modelled on the real Birmingham Pals battalions — but the job that defines him in Peaky Blinders happened underground. Tommy was a tunneller with the 179th Tunnelling Company of the Royal Engineers: a "clay kicker", digging beneath no-man's-land to plant mines under German trenches.

What a clay kicker actually did

Clay-kicking was a real technique borrowed from Victorian sewer construction: a man lay back on a wooden frame and drove a spade into the clay face with his feet, inching the tunnel forwards in near silence. Quiet mattered, because the Germans were digging too — both sides listened through the earth for the other, and when tunnels met, men fought hand to hand in the dark. The engineer John Norton-Griffiths famously recruited Britain's first military "moles" from sewer works, precisely because they already knew the method.

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Cillian Murphy has described the job in an interview with the BBC in exactly the terms the show dramatises:

"The most claustrophobic, horrific, dark job you could possibly have," Murphy called it — tunnelling under enemy lines to set explosives.

The real 179th

Steven Knight didn't invent Tommy's unit. The 179th Tunnelling Company existed, and its signature achievement is one of the most famous moments of the entire war: it dug and fired the Lochnagar mine at La Boisselle on 1 July 1916, the first day of the Battle of the Somme. British tunnellers detonated around 17 mines under the German lines that morning — reportedly the loudest man-made sound created up to that point — and the Lochnagar crater, some 330 feet across, is still there in the French countryside, open to visitors.

So when the series calls Tommy a decorated Somme veteran, the fictional man is standing on very specific real ground.

How the tunnels follow him home

• The nightmare — Tommy's recurring dream replays a breakthrough: German diggers smashing through the clay wall, a comrade shot, a close-quarters kill by candlelight.
• The ritual — the Shelby men recite "In the Bleak Midwinter" when facing death, a habit carried back from France.
• The contrast — brother Arthur served with the Warwickshire Yeomanry, a cavalry unit turned machine-gun corps that fought at Gallipoli and in France, which is why his war damage looks so different from Tommy's.
• The shovel — across six series and the 2026 film The Immortal Man, whenever Tommy picks one up, the show is pointing backwards.

Why Knight built him this way

Speaking at the Canneseries festival in 2019, Steven Knight described Tommy as a man broken by the First World War whose entire long arc — planned to run to 1939 — was the journey back from that damage. The tunnels weren't background colour; they were the origin story.

In the show's own logic, everything above ground — the calm under fire, the gambling with death, the opium — is a symptom of what happened below it.

For the record: the "whizz-bang" in Danny Whizz-Bang's nickname is a real bit of trench slang, for the German shells that arrived faster than the sound of the gun that fired them. The war is in this show's vocabulary, right down to the names.

Earlier we wrote: Zack Snyder still won't deny the Dark Knight Returns rumours: he'll do it 'when they let us'