Peaky Blinders on Netflix: This insane anecdote about the gangsters who inspired the series

The Peaky Blinders, literally “Peak Blinders”, were followed by a storm of the TV world in 2013 and fascinated, intrigued and shocked an audience that had been fascinated by their crime-filled adventures for six rich and powerful seasons. If the adventures and characters are fictional, the BBC flagship series is still inspired by the real Peaky Blinders, this criminal organization that ran the streets of Birmingham in the 1880s and 1910s.

The real gang, drawn from the British working class, used power from theft, violence, racketeering and illegal betting. And their peculiarity? Their tight attire and pointed hats, which, according to legend, hid the shavers to blind enemies.

If all this information were to be found in history books, the series’ creator and lead screenwriter, Stephen Knight, would not have had to look far. To write his perfect show, he had to rely only on his childhood memories and his parents’ family stories. His own memories are primarily of his childhood in a small village in Wiltshire. His father, George Knight, was a blacksmith and horse blacksmith. However, three months after his birth, the Dark Family Business and the Knights family – of which Stephen is the seventh child – are returning to their roots in Small Heath, south-east Birmingham. For some time George worked with his brothers in local car factories.

But thanks to the mobile forge, he resumed playing horse shoes in the city stables and scrap yard. “I used to go there as a child and there you could see the world of peak blinders”Explains Knight. “It was full of Birmingham’s previous debris: stolen items, scrap metal, all sorts of things. It looked like Aladdin Cave. When my father was riding horses, I heard them talking. There was Charlie Strong I would use in the show and Curley who was my great uncle. Very, very funny people. That’s the flavor of late old Birmingham that I tried to bring to Peaky. “. (Royal Television Society, August 2019).

Stephen Knight was also inspired by his parents ’family stories. Both of them really had a relationship with illegal bookmakers: if their mother transferred money from the age of 9, they were their father’s uncles … real peak blinders! Little by little, the latter looked at what it was, including finding it in a smoky room. The image his father describes – smoke, drink, money and impeccably dressed men holding guns in their pockets in a poor town – was an inspiration to young Stephen. “I saw it all through the eyes of children, which makes everything more mythological – everything is a little darker, brighter and better. I myself was a child when I heard these stories that are thus doubly mythologized. (BBC History Magazine, 2016).

It is this astonished perception that justifies the special aesthetics of his series: the ubiquitous ugly here becomes as brilliant as this soot-covered plant that has become shiny or mysterious in a whirlpool of smoke. The peak blinders themselves benefit from this sublimation: in Stephen’s naive vision – transcribed in the show – they are firmly cool, but also human and broken.

Broken yes, of course, because under the pen of Stephen Knight, vice is moved farther. If true peak blinders existed in the 1890s – and even later, as Stephen Knight argues (Esquire, 2022) – the television drama begins in 1919: a wise choice by a showmaker who wants to develop his anti-hero in an industrial, cold. And shocked England between the two wars.

Thus, after World War I, we discovered that the fictitious Shelby criminal family reigned in the streets of Small Heath, Birmingham. When the show begins, three of Shelby’s four brothers – Arthur, Thomas, Johnny, the show’s characters – have just returned from a war that has traumatized them. And the women left in the country – Adam, the rebellious sister and Paul, the aunt matriarch – have learned to manage everything and now have to step aside again … but if you know two women …: Go aside in favor of men? This, never again! They all form a united family for better and for worse, but above all they are determined to raise their social rank.

Elegant and brutal, Peak Blinders Written with emotion and eloquence and with produced means and sophistication. From now on, the look of Shelby and the landscape around them are the primary aspects of fiction, the scenography that defines the life of the clan, and the luxurious attire that protects them and conceals their traumas – the same costumes. That Stephen’s father had the privilege of seeing in person. “For a period of time, wealth is not the number on the bank account, but what you wear to be seen by people,” says the designer. Thus, fiction arranges for this attractive group of anti-heroes, these violent thugs who have an insane class. Even these bandits are moving, without undeniable shadow, to win the favor of the submissive community, who, although the series has recently collapsed, have not ended their support – blindly.