The boys are back in town.
Crime boss Thomas Shelby and his team are back at work as “Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man,” the highly anticipated sequel to the 2013 hit crime series, will debut on Netflix on March 20.
The nearly 2-hour film, which was in select theaters before it began airing, retells the story of wolf-eyed war veteran-turned-Birmingham crime boss Shelby, played by Oscar-winner Cillian Murphy.
The original series, which began in England after World War I, ran for six seasons and followed Shelby and her family through tragedy and triumph, ending with a cliffhanger in 2022 when Shelby survived a botched assassination.
“It’s the Second World War, so [Tommy Shelby] it’s against the Nazis, the enemy of the time in the 1940s,” said illustrator Steven Knight to The Post about the new film’s plot.
Although both the show and the movie are fictional, Knight drew inspiration for the Shelby family from the second-hand stories of the Peaky Blinders, a well-dressed but ill-behaved group of British criminals.
The seeds of Knight’s story were sewn from his father’s childhood memory of delivering a message to a group of well-groomed gangsters, each with a cap and a gun in his pocket, sitting around a table full of cash.
“That image — the smoke, the booze, and these scantily clad men in these slums in Birmingham — that’s the legend, that’s the story, and it’s the first image I started working on,” Knight recalled to History Extra.
The OG Peaky Blinders was set in Birmingham in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, a time of rapid urbanization accompanied by rampant unemployment and widespread poverty.
As the saying goes, people get hungry, and they get mean, and the circumstances give rise to a violent criminal.
Comprised of young working-class men in their early 20s, the Peaky Blinders were equal parts dapper and dangerous.
The hit series perpetuates the most persistent myth about the gang: that their name comes from sewing razors on their caps and using them to cut or blind their enemies.
However, experts maintain that sartorial sadism may have been invented.
“Razors were coming in from the 1890s and they were a luxury, too expensive for the Peaky Blinders to use,” Birmingham historian Carl Chinn told the Birmingham Mail.. “It can be very difficult to get direction and strength with a razor that is sewn into the soft part of the cap.”
Possibly, the moniker arose from the way peaked caps, known colloquially as peakys, were worn by petty criminals; slanted over one eye, perhaps to hide their face and avoid being identified by their victims.
At the time, the word ‘blind’ was a popular description of a person with brilliant eyesight.
Graceful and figuratively constructed for blindness, the original Peaky Blinders decked themselves out in cravats, bell-bottoms, bell-toed boots, knit jackets, and silk scarves, suggesting something of the decadent elegance replicated in the show.
Scholars maintain that this fancy uniform served a triple threat agenda: it differentiated the Peaky Blinders from other gangs, it reflected wealth and status, and it served as a middle finger to the police, who could easily spot gang members but were powerless to stop them.
Using intimidation and bribery, this group wielded considerable economic, political, and social control over the city.
The show portrays the group as working-class anti-heroes committed to improving the lives of downtrodden people, a point of moral distortion according to Chinn.
“Actually, they’re doing their own thing,” he wrote in “Peaky Blinders: The Real Story.”
Historian David Cross told BBC News that the Peaky Blinders were indiscriminate in their attacks, targeting “anyone who looked vulnerable” with an indiscriminate attitude.
“Anything that could be taken, they would take,” he said.
Following an attack on a man named George Eastwood (allegedly provoked by Eastwood ordering ginger beer in a pub) in 1890, a local newspaper coined the term Peaky Blinders – the first time the name had been published.
Over time, gang crimes expanded from gambling, extortion, extortion, and assault to high-profile and high-income activities such as smuggling, fraud, and kidnapping.
The real Peakys peaked, so to speak, before the start of World War I, a timeline that was altered in the show, which follows the crime family from 1919 onwards.
In the end, it wouldn’t be the authorities but a rival gang that ended the dirty and stylish reign of the Peaky Blinders. And while the Blinders eventually lost their hold in Birmingham, they remained a constant source of fashion, fascination and awe.
Indeed, “The Immortal Man” will not be the end of the “Peaky Blinders” saga.
“There’s a strong desire for a Peaky world,” Knight previously told The Post. “We will continue to tell that story, as long as there is a story to tell.”
