Late to the Peaky Blinders party and bemused
Somehow I hadn't seen any of the much-lauded BBC series, but it takes in some of my obsessions in a way that is distracting; a "me" thing, not an "it" thing
My late father was not, by his own admission, much of a reader of fiction outside fairly narrow confines. I remember one long, wine-afloat conversation after dinner in which I said I was reading something I wasn’t much enjoying, but that I’d plough on because at least I would have the satisfaction of having finished another book.
“You see,” he said reflectively, “that’s the difference between us. I don’t have that.”
It was a fair point, and true. I’m often pushed on to finish books because there is an underlying satisfaction in sheer completion, on top of which the merit of the book is an added bonus. But while my father didn’t gorge on fiction, he had a sharp eye for a good storyline and an experienced measure of accomplished acting, and he had a passion for well-crafted, muscular American television drama, especially when it came to crime and policing.
Dad’s adulthood—well, terrifying to think, his thirties—had been shaped by the revolution in American television by then crossing the Atlantic spearheaded by shows like Hill Street Blues, St Elsewhere and L.A. Law (it should be no surprise he revered Steven Bochco). This rolled on into NYPD Blue (which I always thought was treated as ground-breaking by people ignoring Bochco’s earlier work) and the outstanding, pounding ensemble piece which was Murder One. Once he’d retired, and the unquenchable thirst of cable TV for content laid out a menu of well-written, well-acted cop shows, he immersed himself in this genre, and, as retired people should, enjoyed himself hugely.
I mention this all because he used to recommend shows to me, and I would dutifully note them down, but I eventually had to realise that, as someone who worked full-time, I was never going to see them all. Not just that it would take a while for me to catch up, or that I’d skip some, but that I would simply never see them. That took some effort to accept, not only because I knew Dad’s recommendations were heartfelt and he enjoyed it when I liked things he had liked, but because it dragged me to a wider recognition of art and culture, that there would always be things I didn’t read/see/hear, that life wasn’t a game of catch-up, because new content, good and bad, is being produced all the time, and there will always be more things that appeal to you superficially than you can ever consume or absorb.
In recent years, therefore, I’ve regarded artefacts garlanded with critical claim in a measured way: to take a recent example, friends have recommended Stranger Things to me, and while it’s not really in my normal field anyway (despite featuring Winona Ryder and, well, the 1980s), there are already 34 episodes out there, each something like 80 minutes long, and if I’m realistic I know I’ll never see it. I’m sure it’s very good; and the saying in the German General Staff may have been that there are 24 hours in a day, and then there’s the night, but the world has physical limits. (I might also say I’ve never seen anything more than a few seconds of Game of Thrones but I’m much less sure that’s good; I can’t shake the feeling that Stewart Lee was right when he balefully dubbed it “Peter Stringfellow’s Lord of the Rings”.) And so, I had supposed, it would be with Peaky Blinders.
There is plenty to attract me to Peaky Blinders. The initial setting of the months after the First World War is a rich playground for dramatists; organised crime makes for good drama, as does a foundation of real life; and Cillian Murphy is a compelling screen presence, Sam Neill is always watchable and brings a creditable Northern Irish accent to the part (he was born in Omagh, of course) and the late Helen McCrory is a dark, brittle, glittering star as Polly Gray, the aunt of Murphy’s crime boss Tommy Shelby who has been running the family’s affairs while the men were away fighting in the War. But somehow it never quite hauled itself to the top of my list since hitting the screens in September 2013 (Jesus God, really? A decade ago?). Last night, at a loose end, I watched the first two episodes.
Here are some provisos. I was entertained by what I saw—it was more interesting than I had anticipated—but I don’t know if I’ll press on or if life, as it sometimes does, will get in the way. That’s no comment in either direction on the quality of the show, though, as I say, the lead performers are first-rate. I also fully understand that my criticisms (hesitations? questions? desires for clarification?) will strike a chord with only a very few, perhaps none. But they may give you an insight into the way my mind sometimes works and what happens if you spend an adult life—more than three decades now, anyhow—obsessed with organisations, hierarchies, institutions and organisms, which is, for better or worse, one of the main ways I view the world.
If you’ve seen Peaky Blinders you’ll know the set-up and if you haven’t it would take too long to do it justice, so let’s just sketch a very faint mise-en-scène by saying that Tommy Shelby (Cillian Murphy) is the head of a criminal gang based in Birmingham called the Peaky Blinders (who existed, though in reality they flourished before the First World War, from the 1880s). He has been decorated for bravery in the War but has now returned to Birmingham, and has acquired by theft a considerable number of guns from the local BSA factory in Small Heath. The authorities, fearful of Communist subversion and with an eye on the ongoing disorder in Ireland, are very keen to recover so many weapons, and Detective Chief Inspector Chester Campbell (Sam Neill), who has made his reputation fighting gangs and corruption in Belfast, is brought in to ‘clean up’ Birmingham, and find the stolen cache of arms. He is appointed by Winston Churchill, who appears played by actor, writer and magician Andy Nyman.
There’s a lot going on here which I’m still picking apart. We’ll set aside some minor things: Campbell, as a senior policeman in Belfast, is presumably an officer of the Royal Irish Constabulary; the RIC didn’t have uniformed chief inspectors but I’ll be generous and assume the writers were familiar with the Constabulary and Police (Ireland) Act 1918 and had read the provisions in Schedule 2 for paying “chief inspectors” in the Detective Division.
Was Campbell head of the police in Belfast overall? There were precious few plain-clothes detectives in the city—the RIC’s headquarters was in Dublin, remember—and their main duty, from about 1886, was to scan the horizon and sniff the air for political dissent and likely public disorder. One district inspector said at the time “There is not much crime in Belfast in the ordinary acceptance of the term”, and the crime rate was indeed staggeringly low: between 1864 and 1894, a little over 5,000 indictable criminal offences were recorded, while in the same period the Dublin Metropolitan Police dealt with nearly 120,000. By 1914, while there were 1,261 policemen in Belfast, they were led by only seven district inspectors and the Belfast Town Commissioner, who ranked as a county inspector. Where was Campbell in this hierarchy?
We do know Campbell is a Protestant: he has little regard for the sanctity of his surroundings when he confronts Polly in the Catholic church. That’s in line with the RIC, which was disproportionately officered by Protestants though was more representative of the whole of Ireland in the rank and file, one reason the “Popish Peelers” were so unpopular in Belfast. There are also snide remarks at Campbell’s lack of war service; but he is supposed to be about 60 at the time of the first episode, with 35 years in the police. For one thing, the RIC had a retirement age of 60, introduced in 1882, and anyway officers could receive their full pensions after 25 years’ service. In any case, there would have been no coercion; the highest the age for conscription reached was 51, but Ireland was exempt due to the political situation there. So what might Campbell have done in the War?
It has been suggested that Campbell’s character is based on Sir Charles Rafter, chief constable of Birmingham City Police from 1899 to 1935. Rafter was Belfast-born, son of a linen merchant (what else?) and educated at the Royal Belfast Academical Institution, the “Inst”, one of Ulster’s most prestigious grammar schools which produced as much as a third of the city’s civic elite. He came top in the entrance examinations for the RIC, becoming a “gentleman cadet” in 1882, and served all round Ireland, from Galway to Tipperary, before applying, with 49 others, to be head of the Birmingham police. It is said he was the only candidate to attend the interview in uniform. Rafter was certainly a strict disciplinarian, and he cracked down hard on the real Peaky Blinders, though a major cause of their decline was their eclipse by the Birmingham Boys, a rival gang under the leadership of Billy Kimber (of whom a fictionalised version appears in Peaky Blinders). But there is no hint that Rafter prefigured any of Campbell’s ruthless brutality or sadism.
One might note, as an aside, that Rafter was one of the first British chief constables to recruit and deploy female police officers. In 1917 he created a separate Women’s Division, which dealt with indecent exposure, sexual assault, carnal knowledge, attempted suicide, obscene language and shoplifting, while women officers had been used for some years as matrons to look after female prisoners and juveniles. Is there an echo of this in Campbell’s use of Grace Burgess, the daughter of a colleague killed by the IRA, to infiltrate Shelby’s organisation? (Burgess is a Protestant from Galway, part of a true minority: the 1911 census showed that the county was 97.6 per cent Roman Catholic.)
But all of this brings me to my main stumbling block, my “I’m sorry, what?” moment, which is the appearance of Winston Churchill. I knew that Sir Oswald Mosley would come on to the scene later in the narrative arc, as Tommy Shelby becomes an improbable Member of Parliament; Mosley is played by Hunger Games veteran Sam Claflin, while versatile actress, musician and model Amber Anderson plays the terrifying, ice-cold Diana Mosley (née Mitford). But I hadn’t expected Our Greatest Prime Minister™ to be quite so prominent so early on, and I’m not sure what he’s doing there.
All right, that’s slightly disingenuous. Winston is the most box-office of all prime ministers, and who better to anchor the series in reality than him? In addition, you have the frisson of novelty of dealing with Churchill’s often-neglected “middle period”, which began with the Gallipoli disaster and ended as he emerged as the backbench scourge of appeasement; instead of the siren suit and chunky cigar, the costume department needs to find a frock coat and… a chunky cigar. (There are a lot of myths about Churchill’s smoking but his cigar intake, especially by today’s standards, was staggering, and he smoked most of the time.) So yes, fine, Churchill’s a handy icon.
But really, why is he here? He has appointed Campbell to whatever his position is in Birmingham, and is receiving detailed reports from him at all times of the day and night. At first, I wondered if, because of the theft of the weapons, we were capturing, slightly out of time, Churchill’s stint as minister of munitions (1917 to 1919). But he left that office in January 1919, the year in which the first episode is set, and anyway, the ministry had been established in 1915 to oversee the manufacture of weapons, not their subsequent supervision.
Of course Churchill was intimately involved in the Irish War of Independence (1919-21), which lurks in the background of the first episodes of Peaky Blinders. But that was in his role as secretary of state for war, as 20,000 British soldiers were deployed in Ireland during the conflict. He held that office from January 1919 to February 1921, the period in which the first series of Peaky Blinders is set. He is also referred to as “Secretary of State” on screen. But if he’s war minister, he would have no control over the civilian police, not even in conflict-riddled Belfast, let alone on the mainland. The civilian control of the police, and its non-military nature, were among the founding principles devised by Sir Robert Peel when he created the Metropolitan Police in the 1820s, deliberate policy decisions to avoid the impression of an armed gendarmerie of the sort so loathed on the Continent. In any event, such interference would have triggered an absolute broadside of indignation from the home secretary, a blameless Liberal North-Eastern barrister (who was Recorder of Sunderland for a time!), Edward Shortt. (Coincidentally, given Chester Campbell’s provenance, Shortt’s roots also lay in Ulster, but in Tyrone in the west of the province.)
Shortt had become home secretary in January 1919 after eight gruelling months as chief secretary for Ireland, in effect the head of the British administration at Dublin Castle but also a member of the cabinet in London. He had been moved from Dublin, however, because the lord lieutenant of Ireland, usually a figurehead, was Field Marshal Viscount French, who had commanded the British Expeditionary Force in France for the first two years of the First World War, and intended to exercise full executive authority at the head of the British government in Ireland. Shortt was replaced with a more pliant Scottish Liberal lawyer, Ian Macpherson.
While Shortt’s first months as home secretary was busy with various tasks, like the fate of foreign detainees and the settlement of a police strike, he would not have been enthusiastic about a cabinet colleague fighting a private war on United Kingdom soil; nor would his permanent secretary, 62-year-old Home Office veteran Sir Edward Troup.
Perhaps Churchill is meant to be home secretary himself? He had in fact held the office, though back in the summer of the Asquith Liberal government from 1910 to 1911; he had been a reform-minded manager of the prison system, and was broadly in favour of women’s suffrage, but he had also displayed a knee-jerk tendency towards authoritarianism when it came to public order. He had sent additional officers of the Metropolitan Police to help suppress the Tonypandy riots in 1910 (though he had not acceded to requests for military assistance), and in January 1911 he had caught the public eye by taking personal control of the Sidney Street siege. So the recruitment of someone like Chester Campbell for a “special op” is actually the sort of idea which would have been wholly in character for Churchill. Even so, this kind of micromanagement, and with such dubious propriety, would not easily have got past a prime minister like David Lloyd George. Then again (again?), Lloyd George spent much of 1919 in France at the Paris Peace Conference, an extraordinarily thorough and far-reaching attempt to remake the political order, and threw himself into the negotiations with impressive vigour and relish, so perhaps his attention at home might have been less focused than usual.
BUT IT’S ALL FICTION. I know, I know. I’m not even really taking a swing at Steven Knight, the creator of Peaky Blinders. I am making two observations. The first, which is purely personal, is my reaction, or part of it, to the two episodes I watched, to illuminate the kind of rabbit holes my mind looks for an unerringly finds. I understand that such a reaction is not universal; and thank God for that.
The second observation, and I make it mildly here, is that of course writers plunder history for context, background and ambience. They always have: when Homer picked up his phorminx, cleared his throat and started singing about the deadly rage of Achilles, son of Peleus, he was describing supposed events in the past and presenting them as real. (It would delight me to think that one, just one, eighth-century Ionian listener began to wonder about the chain of command in the Achaean army and how in practical terms Agamemnon had exercised leadership; but I doubt it.) No-one pretends that Peaky Blinders is a documentary and the writers are perfectly entitled to choose those historical elements that suit them, change what’s necessary and discard what doesn’t work. It falls into a different category, I would argue, from a biopic like Christopher Nolan’s recent Oppenheimer (which I reviewed for CulturAll earlier this month) or a broader epic like Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan.
Nevertheless, if you borrow historical authenticity, you trail a whiff of expectation with you. It’s only fair: the reason Knight introduces characters like Churchill and Mosley is not simply to give period flavour and name recognition but to add weight, to suggest the gravitas of reality in his fictional story. It is natural, therefore, for audiences to think “Well, if that’s a real person, did this bit really happen?” or “Did they really say that?”. Most viewers will come to Peaky Blinders with a modest knowledge of inter-War politics and cannot be expected to perform their own fact-checking, so they must, and this is the creator’s burden, assume everything to be true, or assume everything to be fictional, or conclude that the truth is less important than the “truthiness”, which is what Knight is reaching for all along.
Write history into your fiction, play with it, wrap it around your narrative; God knows, I do. But be aware of the consequences. Viewers and readers can be intrigued, gripped, impressed or dubious, or all of those at the same time. You may have to answer questions and you should be ready for that. And yes, I’m afraid that does sometimes include a weirdo like me at the back putting up his hand and uttering the dread words “I think you’ll find…”