As fans prepare for the release of Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man on 6 March, a new dive into the archives reveals that the smoky streets and razor-sharp rivalries of the Shelby saga were rooted in lives far more complex than fiction suggests.
Research by family history company Ancestry has uncovered the real men and women whose exploits filled Birmingham’s newspapers decades before they inspired one of television’s most stylish crime dramas.
Far from being a single, tightly run crime syndicate, the original “Peaky Blinders” were described in late 19th-century newspapers as loosely connected groups of violent youths. The name became a catch-all term for young men sporting the now-iconic flat caps, and for anyone associated with their brand of street bravado.
Among them was William “Billy” Kimber, later known as leader of the rival Birmingham Boys. Long before he was portrayed on screen by Charlie Creed-Miles, Kimber’s life was making headlines. In 1921, census records show him living in London with his partner, Cissie, presenting themselves as married years before they formally tied the knot. Weeks earlier, The Birmingham Gazette reported he had been injured in a violent clash with a rival gang a reminder that gang loyalties were more than television drama.
Female peaky blinders
But the archive also reveals stories often left out of popular retellings: the women.
In 1895, Emma Rowlands stood in a Birmingham courtroom accused of striking a man in the eye with a belt. Prosecutors claimed it was unprovoked; she insisted she acted in self-defence. Newspaper reports described the confidence with which she addressed police, recording her comment on arrest as, “it was a pity if you couldn’t knock a bloke’s eye out if he interfered with you”. She was sentenced to two months in prison, branded in print as a “Female Peaky Blinder”, probably because the Peaky Blinders were infamous for using heavy belts with enormous buckles as weapons. A photograph of her can be found in the West Midlands Criminal Records collection on Ancestry, thanks to their partnership with the West Midlands Police Museum.
A decade later, Laura Annie Collins was named in reports alongside her husband. In 1904, she was said to have attacked a police constable with a hat pin "in quite a scientific manner" during a confrontation in Staffordshire.
Other figures reveal lives that refused to stay in one chapter. Charles Henry Allbutt, stabbed during an internal gang dispute in 1905, survived not only that attack but the Battle of the Somme, where he lost an eye and earned medals for his service. By 1921, he was living quietly with his wife. James Brough, once arrested for drunkenly assaulting a police officer, later worked as a metal polisher and raised a family.
Even Alfred Solomon, the real-life inspiration for Tom Hardy’s character, balanced his underworld reputation with the respectable listing of “fruiterer” before a 1924 murder conviction led to prison.
Together, their stories paint a portrait of Birmingham’s past that is messier, more human and more surprising than fiction alone - proof that the real Peaky Blinders were not just gangsters, but people shaped by poverty, war, loyalty and change.
