The Real Peaky Blinders

The Peaky Blinders were a real Birmingham street gang whose heyday was the 1890s, not the 1920s as the TV series depicts. They emerged from the slums of Small Heath and Bordesley during the Industrial Revolution, when economic inequality and overcrowding bred organised crime across British cities. The gang’s name almost certainly comes from Birmingham slang “peaky” for a peaked flat cap, “blinder” meaning something dapper or striking. By the early 1900s, police crackdowns had eroded their power and rival criminal networks had moved in.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peaky_Blinders

Operation Bernhard

Operation Bernhard was a Nazi scheme to destabilise the British economy by flooding it with forged banknotes. The original plan, to airdrop counterfeit currency over Britain, was abandoned as unworkable, and by 1942 the operation had pivoted to using the forged notes to finance German intelligence operations. Around 140 Jewish prisoners at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, selected for their backgrounds in printing, engraving, and finance, were forced to study and replicate British banknotes. The operation was named after its SS overseer, Major Bernhard Krüger. At peak production, the prisoners were manufacturing approximately one million notes per month across denominations from £5 to £50. The Bank of England responded by withdrawing all notes above £5 from circulation in 1943; the £10 note was not reintroduced until 1964. Total forgeries are estimated at somewhere between £132 million and £300 million. The counterfeiters narrowly survived the war when an execution order came down in the final weeks, but bureaucratic delays in assembling all the prisoners narrowly saved them. Remaining forged notes, with a face value of £9 million, were found at the bottom of an Austrian lake after the war.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Bernhard

John Beckett

John Beckett was a real person: a former Labour MP who represented Gateshead and then Peckham in the 1920s before moving sharply to the right. He joined Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists in 1934, rising to Director of Publications before his falling-out with Mosley led to his dismissal in 1937. That same year, he co-founded the National Socialist League with William Joyce, later known as Lord Haw-Haw, before leaving to establish the British People’s Party in 1939. His son, journalist Francis Beckett, has written critically of the film’s portrayal of his father as a one-dimensional villain, arguing that lazy historical mythmaking does a disservice to understanding how fascism actually operates. Beckett was imprisoned under Defence Regulation 18B in May 1940 after MI5 uncovered detailed plans he had drawn up for a collaborationist government in the event of German invasion.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Beckett_(politician)

The Birmingham Blitz

Birmingham was the third most heavily bombed British city of the war, after London and Liverpool. As a major centre of armaments production, building Spitfires, tanks, and munitions, it was a strategic target. The Luftwaffe carried out 77 air raids on the city between 1940 and 1943, killing 2,241 people, seriously injuring over 3,000 more, and leaving tens of thousands homeless. The BSA factory in Small Heath, which Steven Knight’s mother worked at, was directly hit on the night of 19 November 1940. Fifty-three workers were killed when two bombs collapsed the building on top of them. The opening cards of the film acknowledge the attack and dedicate it to their memory.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birmingham_Blitz

Roma People in Britain During World War II

An estimated 45,000 Roma were living in Britain at the start of World War II. Though they faced less systematic persecution than Roma in occupied Europe, they were a marginalised community with limited access to literacy and institutional support. Despite this, Roma men and women contributed to the British war effort, serving in the military, auxiliary services, and war production industries, including factories, forestry, and agriculture. Maartje highlights the case of Eric Stanley Lock, a decorated RAF fighter pilot (DFC, Bar to DFC, and DSO) who was the highest-scoring British ace of the Battle of Britain. He went missing over Pas-de-Calais on 3 August 1941 and was never found. A claim that Lock was of Romani heritage comes from the Encyclopaedia of the Nazi Genocide of the Sinti and Roma in Europe, but this cannot currently be verified from mainstream biographical records.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Lock