Peaky Blinders - The Peaky Blinders Compendium: The Official A-Z Guide to the World of Peaky Blinders

The Peaky Blinders Compendium

www.hodder.co.uk

First published in Great Britain in 2021 by Hodder & Stoughton

An Hachette UK company

WITH THANKS TO MATT WHYMAN

Peaky Blinders 20132021 Caryn

Mandabach Productions Ltd.

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Caryn Mandabach Productions Ltd.

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Hardback ISBN 9781529347579

eBook ISBN 9781529347739

Paperback ISBN 9781529347722

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CONTENTS

Key:

Big Ideas

Style

Faces

Life

Places

Food & Drink

A

ANARCHY IN THE UK

The good old cause!

The call to reject all forms of authority and state control took shape in the ancient world. Deriving from the Greek word anarchos , which means without authority, anarchy as a philosophical idea spread in popularity across Europe and America throughout the nineteenth century. As a political force, it began to gather ground at the turn of the twentieth century.

At a time when the Peaky Blinders made capital with their business ambitions, anarchism emerged in Britain. It took the form of a hard-left movement committed to tearing up the establishment by any means and constructing a society based on cooperation, mutual aid and the belief that everyone is equal. Anarchists drew support from the working classes to radical thinkers and anti-establishment idealists.

In Peaky Blinders , it is Ada Shelbys lodger, James, who playfully expresses an enthusiasm for the anarchist movement. The young man strikes Tommy as a dreamer rather than an agitator, and yet he knows that the wider world considers anarchists to be a threat to society. Tommy duly plays this fear to his advantage by persuading James to accompany him to Alfie Solomons bakery, where he asks him to wait outside. In order to secure his safe exit following the meeting, Tommy informs Alfie that his associate has been instructed to trigger a grenade he planted in the bakery on the way in. He describes James as a professional anarchist, and likens him to a group behind the infamous and deadly Wall Street bombing of 1920. Ultimately, its enough to convince Alfie that Tommys accomplice will do whatever it takes to cause chaos as a catalyst for change.

It could be said that anarchy in the UK reached its height as the Peaky Blinders expanded their business interests from Small Heath to racecourse ownership and black-market export. In some ways, the movement was largely absorbed throughout the first half of the twentieth century by left-leaning political movements as well as by wider world events, such as the 191723 Russian Revolution and the Spanish Civil War, 19369. As a symbol of establishment resistance, however, anarchist ideals remain a powerful means of seizing attention. The spirit of the early twentieth-century anarchists can be seen in everything from the punk rock movement of the late 1970s to Reclaim the Streets in the 1990s and the radical environmentalism of todays Extinction Rebellion protests.

ARROW HOUSE

Every night since the funeral, he comes back in the morning to see Charles and feed the horses. When it gets dark he goes off again.

When Tommy Shelby takes up residence in his grand countryside estate, its a far cry from his humble beginnings in a terrace on Watery Lane. The red-stone mansion with its stained-glass windows offers him respite from the pressures in his life, and a place for him and his new wife, Grace, to start a family

. Later, as a widower with his son, Charlie, Tommys prized property serves to remind him of what hes lost. As his sister, Ada, observes, the house becomes a painful place for him to be. With servants quarters, grand staircase, ornate ceilings, imposing fireplaces and long dining table, it just seems cold and hauntingly empty. Arrow House is not a place without drama, however. Throughout the story of Peaky Blinders , its the scene of pivotal events from a mass arrest of the Shelby family to a staging of Swan Lake thats attended by British fascist leader Sir Oswald Mosley and interrupted by a shooting.

Many of the Arrow House scenes in Peaky Blinders are filmed at Arley Hall and Gardens, which is one of the most prominent family-owned stately homes in the north-east of England. Built between 1832 and 1845 by the landowner, Rowland Egerton-Warburton, the mock Elizabethan hall stands on the site of the original building, which dated back to 1469.

Arley Hall is located over fifty miles north of Birmingham, just outside Northwich in Cheshire, and is open to the public. With its grand approach and handsome front, the house and gardens are no stranger to our screens, having also featured on the Antiques Roadshow , Coronation Street and numerous other productions.

ASYLUM FOR THE INSANE

If hes caught they wont hang him on the grounds of insanity. He will go back to the same place I found him. Hell just have had a very eventful holiday, which he will probably believe never really happened.

In his attempt to take down Oswald Mosley, Tommy recruits the help of an old war comrade, Barney Thompson. In the years since his return from the frontline, the former sniper has struggled with shell-shock and manic episodes. Tommy finds him incarcerated in a dimly lit and windowless asylum cell. Conditions are bleak for him; effectively a reflection of societys attitude to mental health at the turn of the twentieth century.

The concept of a lunatic asylum is difficult to comprehend today, as is the terminology used to describe those considered to be mad or insane, who until the later years of the twentieth century were often locked up in institutions for a lifetime on the grounds that families and communities needed protecting from them. This was frequently open to abuse, with difficult women sometimes finding themselves committed against their will, along with those suffering from what we now understand as dementia.

By the 1920s, shortly before Tommy helps Barney to break out, Britains asylums housed almost one hundred thousand inmates. Each institution was legally bound by the Lunacy Act of 1845 to employ a qualified physician to care for the patients. Treatment was often minimal, however, with the emphasis on keeping large numbers of inmates calm, occupied or under control. By the 1930s, at a time when asylums had become increasingly underfunded and overcrowded, leading psychiatrists also developed and promoted more extreme, invasive treatments in the form of electroconvulsive therapy and lobotomies. It was only with the development of effective drug treatment in the 1950s, combined with a more humanitarian and socially inclusive approach to mental health issues, that such institutions finally began to close their doors for good.