Author: Carl Chinn
ISBN No: 9781789461725
Review date: 23/04/2024
No of pages: 288
Publisher: John Blake
Publisher URL:
http://johnblakebooks.com/
Year of publication: 20/11/2019
Brief:
price
£8.99
An historian tells us a real story, in Peaky Blinders – The Real Story of Birmingham’s most notorious gangs, writes Mark Rowe.
At the very start of the BBC TV drama Peaky Blinders, we follow the camera into a teeming, noisy room where off-course racing bets are being laid, illegally. As Carl Chinn points out, bookmakers in Birmingham were not like that in the 1920s; the work was on the street (harder for police to stop). Still, television drama has never let the facts get in the way of a story.
While organised crime of the 1920s, and around racetracks in particular, has only become fashionable thanks to the series, Carl Chinn has been a proper academic historian (with a broad Brummie accent) for decades; the author for instance of Poverty Amidst Prosperity: The Urban Poor in England, covering the era that gave birth to the Peaky Blinders.
He quotes a letter reply from 1988 from the writer Graham Greene, about the novel Brighton Rock, which covered much of the same ground. Chinn is too sound a man and too rooted in Birmingham to fall for the glamour and fashion of the dramatised Peaky Blinders, even if he could not trace family connections to the subject (and he can). At the end he reminds us that the gangsters were ‘despicable men’. Far from being like Robin Hood and Ned Kelly, or the fictional Tony Soprano, springing from a working-class community and supposedly looking after their own, and only harming the authorities and the rich, as Chinn points out, the gangsters dished out violence to get their way.
If you enjoy this book, you could move on to Carl’s Better Betting With a Decent Feller: A Social History of Bookmaking. Carl came from a family of bookmakers, on his father’s side, and indeed was a victim of an armed robbery in the family shop. As implied in the title, his argument is that local bookmakers looked after their clientele, people that they knew, and their community, similar to a publican, in contrast to the faceless chain betting shops, let alone the online gaming and casino websites.
You can quibble with that, because what of the wives and mothers of gamblers who could have done with the money lost, who presumably did not have a good word to say for the bookmakers. But to return to The Real Peaky Blinders, Carl Chinn does a proper and welcome job of showing that organised crime was and is not glamorous. But then protection rackets, pick-pocketing and the like never is.
It’s the subject for another book why the entertainment media remain so fascinated (as does the public, for why else would documentaries and dramas keep being made) by organised crime and true crime in general; and how Peaky Blinders compares with the later 1970s televised story of Tyneside between the world wars, When the Boat Comes In; and what if anything the popularity of the two say about the periods they were screened in.
