Who from Peaky Blinders is real? The real gang's heyday came decades before Tommy's era

Across six series and this year's Netflix film The Immortal Man, Peaky Blinders has always presented itself as rooted in Birmingham fact. Some of it is. The gang existed, and several of Tommy's rivals were flesh and blood — but the timeline was shifted by roughly thirty years, and no Shelby family ever ran Small Heath.

The real gang came decades earlier

The term "peaky blinder" emerged in Birmingham in the 1890s as a label for young street toughs — much as "hooligan" entered the language around 1898 — and the phenomenon had largely burned out by the First World War. Steven Knight's series opens in 1919, precisely when the originals were finished. Historian Carl Chinn, author of The Real Peaky Blinders, has worked through hundreds of court cases and police records: there was no central organisation, no boardroom, no empire — just loosely connected gangs known for robbery, illegal bookmaking, and street violence. A handful of names survive in the records, including Thomas Gilbert, often described as the most prominent, and young offenders like Harry Fowles and Stephen McHickie, whose police mugshots still exist.

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The razor blades are a myth

The show's signature weapon — blades stitched into cap peaks — doesn't hold up. Razors were expensive luxury items at the time, and Chinn, who grew up hearing the legend himself, is blunt about it:

"Number one, it's not feasible. Number two, it never happened," he told Shortlist in 2026.

The likelier origin of the name: "peaky" for the fashionable flat caps, and "blinder" as Brummie slang for someone strikingly dressed.

The rivals were real people

• Billy Kimber — genuine leader of the Birmingham Boys, the gang that actually dominated the city in the 1920s. Tommy shoots him dead in series 1; the real Kimber was shot and wounded in 1921 — a Birmingham Gazette court report named Alfred Solomon — survived, and died in Torquay in 1945.
• Darby Sabini — Charles "Darby" Sabini, the London-Italian boss who controlled southern England's racecourse rackets and fought Kimber in the racecourse war of spring and summer 1921.
• Alfie Solomons — based on Alfred Solomon, a north London Jewish bookmaker connected to Camden's "Yiddishers", with considerably less power than Tom Hardy's version and, presumably, a different voice.
• Jessie Eden — the real Birmingham trade unionist who led mass walkouts of women workers in the city in the late 1920s and early 1930s.
• Oswald Mosley — real, though the show has him building his movement in 1929; the British Union of Fascists wasn't founded until 1932. He was interned during the Second World War.

And the Shelbys?

Invented. Knight built the family from stories on his Birmingham doorstep — including his father's childhood memory of calling on immaculately dressed men with money and guns on the table. Chinn's assessment of the real 1920s racketeers is rather less romantic: he's described them as dangerous, mob-handed men who "blackmailed, intimidated and maimed".

For the record: Kimber ended his days in middle-class comfort in Torquay, his daughters educated at a Swiss finishing school — while the Birmingham wife he'd abandoned was buried in a pauper's grave. History rarely tidies up as neatly as television.

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