CHEEKY BLINDERS
Police poster from 1911 reveals how roguish Birmingham crime gang swindled Scots too
IT is a worldwide hit TV show that features the exploits of a Birmingham crime family in the aftermath of the First World War.
But it has now emerged the influence of the original ‘Peaky Blinders’ gangsters stretched as far as Scotland.
A new exhibition shows how roguish gangs from the city extended their money-making scams north of the Border.
An Edinburgh police poster of April 7, 1911, appeals for information on four members of the ‘Williams’ gang, comprising John Chalk Sr, John Chalk Jr, Ellen Jane Pugh, and Lily Hart.
At the time, the swindlers were behind bars in Birmingham on suspicion of ‘being concerned in the manufacture and circulation throughout the country of spurious coins’. The poster details hundreds of items bought with fake coins and recovered from their homes, including picture postcards from Edinburgh, St Andrews, Lanark and Arbroath.
John Chalk Sr, ‘70 years of age’ but ‘looks much younger’, was accused of ‘attempting to pass base coins’, while Pugh, 61, his ‘wife or paramour’, had convictions for fighting and brothelkeeping, among others.
Housebreaker John Chalk Jr, 27, ‘was in custody recently in Glasgow for assaulting his brother-inlaw by biting him on the nose’. Lily Hart, 29, was convicted in 1908 of brothel-keeping. The poster, found in a police station in Dufftown, Banffshire, will be displayed in Outcasts: Women, Crime and Society, an exhibition of original records from Aberdeen City and Aberdeenshire Archives to be staged at the city’s Lemon Tree and Music Hall venues.
Although the hit BBC drama Peaky Blinders is fictional, the Shelby crime family it centres around is based on a real gang active at the turn of the 20th century.
‘Circulation of spurious coins’