Carl Chinn – Peaky Blinders: Historical Reality

This event is now sold out, however an additional talk is now available to book here 

The Peaky Blinders as we know them, thanks to the hit TV series, are infused with drama and dread. Fashionably dressed, the charismatic but deeply flawed Shelby family blind enemies by slashing them with the disposable safety razor blades stitched in to the peaks of their flat caps, as they fight bloody gangland wars and defy the authorities.  

But who were the real Peaky Blinders? Did they really exist? Professor Carl Chinn has spent decades searching them out, revealing the true story of the notorious Peaky Blinders, one of whom was his own great grandfather.  

Drawing together a remarkably wide-range of original sources, including rarely seen images of real Peaky Blinders and interviews with relatives of the 1920s gangsters, Peaky Blinders: The Real Story adds a new dimension to the true history of Birmingham’s underworld and fact behind its fiction.

Professor Carl Chinn MBE is a social historian with a national profile, a Sunday Times bestselling writer, teacher, tour guide, and public speaker. He is the author of over 30 books that include studies of working-class life, manufacturing, Birmingham and the Black Country. 

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