Wordless Wednesday: The Real Peaky Blinders

RIP Derek 'Red Robbo' Robinson

A belated obituary for British Leyland trade union leader Derek Robinson who passed away on the 31st of October at the age of 90. 

A titan of the trade union movement and a familiar figure in the 1970's, the Morning Star today featured a very good obituary piece from Graham Stevenson, Andy Chaffer and George Hickman, which you can read by clicking here.

RIP.

Fact Meets Fiction: Jessie Eden and Peaky Blinders, Part 2

In episode four of season three of Peaky Blinders, there was a mention of Jessie Eden, the real-life Birmingham trade unionist and communist who made her name during the 1926 General Strike. I had previously blogged about this fact meeting fiction moment here, and saw that post gaining much traction in the last fortnight. Well, now I know why: Jessie Eden has become a regular character in the show, making her debut in the season four opening episode which was broadcast on Wednesday. 

Jessie Eden is played by Irish actress Charlie Murphy and her appearance has sparked a lot of interest in the real Jessie, as evinced by articles at Den of Geek and The Guardian, the latter of which features an interview with her daughter-in-law Andrea McCulloch, who had previously posted a message on my earlier blog post.

I was already looking forward to this new season but now, having watched the nail biting first episode and seen Murphy's performance as Eden, I'm looking forward to seeing how it all plays out even more! It's worth pointing out though that, as with the mention of Eden in the last series, writer/creator Steven Knight is playing fast and loose with history once more: Season four commences on Christmas, 1925 and at this point in her life, Jessie Shrimpton (as she was then known, Shrimpton being her maiden name) was only a shop steward of a small number of unionised members rather than the union leader they are depicting her as - that came much later, in 1931, when she led thousands of women out on a week long strike.

Still, it's good to see both an aspect of social and cultural history and a significant figure in trade union history be given the spotlight they have been unfairly kept away from for so long.

Theme Time : Matumbi - Empire Road

The BBC has done much across its channels to mark Black History Month this November with a wealth of programming, but it's a real shame that it didn't find space in its schedules to raid the BBC archive for long unseen programmes made specifically by or for black audiences. I'm thinking specifically of course of Empire Road which ran for two series on BBC2 from 1978 to 1979.

Created by Michael Abbensetts, the show depicted the life of Afro-Caribbean, East Indian and South Asian residents of a street in Birmingham. Ostensibly a drama in the soap opera tradition, Empire Road was written, acted and directed predominantly by artists who identified with being part of the ethnic minority within the UK. As such, this enabled the series to tell things totally and accurately from the perspective of the multicultural communities of the country. 

It starred future Desmond's star Norman Beaton as Everton Bennett, a West Indian who had arrived in the UK and built a business as a residential property landlord and the owner of a minimart. Bennett was seen as the neighbourhood's 'Godfather' figure, and if you had a problem, Everton Bennett was the man to go to, using his wisdom, experience and common sense to resolve matters. This is perhaps best exemplified in a storyline featuring Rudolph Walker (Love Thy Neighbour, EastEnders) as a Rachman-style slum landlord, Sebastian Moses, with his eye on buying property in Empire Road. Seeing both his patch and his neighbours potentially threatened, Bennett sets about a series of stings that publicly humiliate Moses, and a feud between the two men develops.

Made by the BBC's legendary Pebble Mill studios and with location work in the Handsworth district of Birmingham, Empire Road starred a host of talented actors including the aforementioned Beaton and Walker, along with Corinne Skinner-Carter, Joseph Marcell, Wayne Laryea and a young Julie Walters. The series theme tune was by reggae group Matumbi who were well known in the Rock Against Racism movement. It was released as a single in 1978 and went on to become the title of a best of collection for the band in 2001.

EDITED TO ADD: Sadly news reaches me today that Empire Road's creator, Michael Abbensetts passed away on 24th November, just two days before I made this post. Read his Guardian obituary here RIP

Fact Meets Fiction : Jessie Eden and Peaky Blinders

Fact met fiction in Peaky Blinders once again this week, as the Shelby women decided to show solidarity by walking out on the Good Friday strike of 1924 with the rest of Birmingham's working women. "Let's go to the Bull Ring"  Helen McCrory's Aunt Polly declared, striding out of the Shelby's illegal gambling den in Small Heath to see Jessie Eden, shop steward at Lucas' Motor Components factory, demand equal sanitation rights for her female members.

Jessie Eden

1902~1986

Unfortunately, the episode didn't actually show us Jessie Eden, or her rally at the Bull Ring, though it is revealed that a drunken Aunt Polly, burdened with guilt at the Shelby's increasing murderous exploits, got very pally with the twenty-two year old firebrand though found her too diplomatic for her tastes!

Peaky Blinders, Series 3 Episode 4;

The Shelby Women discuss Jessie Eden's strike

It appears that Peaky's writer Steven Knight has taken both the 1926 General Strike and a subsequent week-long strike for female workers in January 1931 as his main inspiration here. In reality, the first recorded act of militant unionism that Jessie Shrimpton (her maiden name, and as she was then known) undertook was in the General Strike, which means Knight has used some licence to depict her as politically active some two years prior to what we actually know. It's not the first bending of fact Knight has undertook - many will remember how, in series two, he wrote of Tommy Shelby and Churchill as being active in the British forces at Verdun; a First World War battle that occurred between the French and German armies only.

The General Strike lasted 9 days from 4th May to 13th May, an attempt to force the government to halt wage reduction and worsening conditions for the 1.2 million locked out coal miners. Despite over a million people standing in solidarity and transport and heavy industry being particularly effected, the action proved unsuccessful thanks to a prepared government reaction and the enlisting of middle class volunteers to run services struck by the industrial action. 

For the fiftieth anniversary of the strike, The Birmingham Post interviewed a then 74-year-old Eden - then using her final married name of McCulloch - for her memories of the day she downed tools at Lucas' and led all the women in her section out to join the traditional May Day march onto the streets of Birmingham alongside some 25,000 fellow marchers from across the city.

"When policemen laid hands on trade union tomboy Jessie McCulloch at a workers' meeting in the old Bull Ring during the 1926 General Strike they pretty soon realised they had made a mistake; 'One policeman put his hands on my arm. They were telling me to go home but the crowd howled 'Hey leave her alone' and some men came and pushed the policemen away. They didn't do anything after that. I think they could see that there would have been a riot. I was never frightened of the police or the troops because I had the people with me you see; I don't know what I'd have felt like on my own'"

On strike, the Shelby womenfolk march to the Bull Ring to hear Jessie Evans speak; Peaky Blinders, Series 3, Episode 4.

She soon got a taste of it. In 1931 Jessie went down in history when she led 10,000 Birmingham women out on a week long strike - virtually unheard of at such time. It all started when Lucas' management instigated a time and motion study from America called the Bedaux System, after its creator Charles Eugene Bedaux, which had so impressed factory owner Charles Lucas on a visit to the US. It was universally accepted among the management at Lucas' that Jessie's work filing shock absorbers at the plant was both the quickest and most efficient and the plan was to set the time by her and expect her colleagues to keep up with her. The two Americans brought to Birmingham had even begun to time the women's visits to the toilet and this offensive act spurred Jessie and 140 of the girls into action; refusing to participate in the project, the Americans were chased from the screw machine shop, with one of them taking to the roof! 

Jessie initially went to the AEU (Amalgamated Engineering and Electrical Union) to ask them to represent her fellow women in this dispute but, whilst the AEU were the most populated and largely Communist union at Lucas' at the time, they did not accept women as members. So instead she turned to the TGWU (Transport and General Workers Union) who promptly signed up the female workforce at her behest. A rank and file committee was duly formed, holding lunchtime meetings at the gates. Numbers increased rapidly and eventually, Jessie led thousands of women out of the gates in an all-out strike. 

With support from other factories and the Birmingham branch of the Communist Party (which Jessie had now joined) Lucas' seemed set for a complete stoppage and an anxious management dropped the Bedaux system as a result.Tasting victory, the jubilant workforce hoisted Jessie up onto their shoulders in celebration. But triumph proved to be short-lived; a 5,000 strong victory march the following day was broken up by Birmingham's Chief Constable who was booed by the procession and arrests of known communists were made in attempts to stage a May Day rally. After a while, cutbacks at the Lucas plant and a vengeful management saw Jessie lose her job. She subsequently received victimisation pay from the union and a gold medal from Ernest Bevin and had so impressed the party that they would sent her to Soviet Russia to help rally the female workers at the Moscow Metro.

Returning to England, Jessie raised her family, remarried and remained politically active, playing a prominent part in the 1939 mass rent strike across the city and would spend much of the war involved in pro-Soviet activity building bridges with the USSR's ambassador and many visiting delegations in an attempt to improve our relationship with Russia. She unsuccessfully stood for council representing the Communist Party in the 1945 election for the Handsworth district, but drew a respectable 3.4% of the vote. She protested against the Vietnam war in the 1960s and remained an active and much respected member of the party until senility struck in the late '70s. She died in 1986 after spending her last years in hospital from heart failure and dementia. She was 84 years old.

For more on Jessie, the Midlands and the Communist Party, visit Graham Stevenson's website.

Prostitute (1980)

Tony Garnett, the veteran producer of many classic BBC plays and dramas, as well as the producer of several Ken Loach films, made his directorial debut in 1980 with Prostitute - an unsurprisingly hard hitting quasi documentary film which depicts the life of street girls in Birmingham and London and deals in feminism and sociopolitical questions.

Garnett approached his subject via extensive research, necessary to win the trust of the real life women who worked the streets of Birmingham. Once accepted he was host to a litany of stories that gave him an unprecedented account of their lives and lifestyle and some of them accepted roles in the final film - though Garnett, discreet and faithful, refused to state who were the professional actors and who were the pros.

Forget the likes of Secret Diary of a Call Girl and Pretty Woman, Prostitute offers an authentic, warts and all depiction of the world's oldest profession without recourse to the melodrama, eroticism and sentimentality that usually afflicts films and programmes on this subject matter. Garnett seems fascinated in the detachment these women have, how they could turn a trick for a visiting businessman or salesman in town and still be at the gates in time for their children at the close of school. The message of Prostitute is that these women sell their bodies for better hours and better money than what they could receive from the factory or supermarkets of the day and that they should have the right to do so, without hindrance from the justice system and its enforcement by the police. 

It is police harassment, and not drug/alcohol abuse or violent and abusive pimps, that is shown to be the main hindrance in Prostitute; the tale beginning with one working girl - walking home and not actually soliciting - hauled off the street and forced into an unmarked car to be arrested and brought before the courts for a prison sentence, simply because she is known and is thus an easy target to help boost an officer's slack arrest rates. This action spurs on one of the film's main characters, an idealistic social worker, to start a campaign to get a reform on the laws regarding prostitution. The activist's flatmate Sandra, a prostitute herself, leaves Birmingham and heads to London to try and work as a more upmarket call girl with an agency and this is the film's other central storyline. However, when Sandra falls out with the agency boss she's forced to work privately from her flat and the film goes full circle when she is raided by two shady Met officers, forced into a sex act and robbed of her week's takings. She returns to Birmingham, broken whilst her prostitute friend is released from prison.  

Despite the circular narrative, Prostitute is a largely episodic and low-key film, near improvised by the cast  to give it a documentarian naturalistic air. There's no moral judgements, no wagging of fingers or impassioned pleas to consider the plight of the women - this is a rare look into a world that we all know exists but we tend to ignore or pretend that it does not. It's eye opening and extremely explicit in places (one scene shows a punter being given 'relief' in a dingy massage parlour) but wisely shorn of any erotic stimulus, giving it a strangely feminist approach. Garnett reports as he finds and as he could find no issues with the lives of the girls (such as the substance abuse you would perhaps normally expect) he does not include it - though he is on record as saying that may have been more to do with the time the film was made - focusing instead on girls who accepted this as their occupation and found within it just as much to complain and laugh about as those in more legal professions; as evinced in a very strong and amusing scene which sees two Northern girls crying with laughter as they gossip over the different types of clients they have and their stereotypes (Japanese are small and quick, Americans are generous, Arabs are big and not quick to tire) Crucially it ends with them expressing a complete ambivalence towards sexual intercourse and that, if it stopped for them tomorrow (outside of business one is led to presume) they would not miss it - putting paid to the silly old argument and male fantasy that nymphomaniacs work as prostitutes.

If Prostitute has any flaws it is in its somewhat hands off approach to the private lives of the girls it chooses to represent. Sandra may be the film's main character, but precious little is ever really explained about her domestic set up. She lives with the social worker, her boyfriend Winston and her son Michael, but her relationship with Winston isn't particularly loving or close - his reaction to her departure to London is never highlighted and we are shown that he simply accepts that it is his duty to look after her son. It's never actually stated whether Michael is his son or not, so vague is this aspect of the story, pushed to the sidelines as Garnett focuses on 'the job'. Also somewhat disappointing is the inability to answer the question of what is the ultimate effect on selling one's body. It's clear that money is the deciding factor for the girls (though it is in itself abstract as their rewards are never dwelt upon, nor is there any depiction of them being afforded a better lifestyle than their contemporaries down the factory or supermarket beyond Sandra briefly claiming that she's 'kept' Winston for years and effectively bought him a Jag before now) but the actual cost this life has upon the women is routinely ignored as Garnett concentrates solely in the here and now.

Gangsters (1975)

Get Carter and the frozen North of Newcastle in 1971.

The Long Good Friday and the developing capital city of London in 1980.

And slap bang in the middle both genealogically and geographically lies Gangsters and the melting pot of the Midlands in 1975.

The only difference being that Gangsters was not at that time a commercially made for the cinema film. It was a Play For Today (and one which, like Rumpole of the Bailey and Headmaster, was deemed so successful that it spawned a spin off series) You wouldn't know it though, as director Philip Saville shot it totally on location on 35mm capturing the seedy underbelly of Birmingham life with a unique and distinctive cinematic sensibility. It has in recent years been shown on the big screen at many festivals and events in places such as the BFI and is received purely as a film - a film that deserves to stand alongside those aforementioned Brit crime classics Get Carter and The Long Good Friday.

In the DVD commentary, Saville, scriptwriter and series creator Philip Martin and producer Barry Hanson (who went on to produce The Long Good Friday) make a point of discussing how different Gangsters was from its Play For Today stablemates. Whilst its true you don't get many car chases in your average Play For Today (and certainly not ones that took place around on and under the Spaghetti Junction!) I do think they're being a little unfair on both the other PfT's and their own project. Martin's extensive three month research into Birmingham's clubland, its police force, drugs problem and ethnically diverse community makes Gangsters just as authentic and politically minded a voice as anything Ken Loach and Tony Garnett et al produced for the umbrella series. It's just that the trio approach the telling of their story in such a strikingly different way. It is said that BBC head of Regions David Rose had seen The French Connection at the cinema and lamented that the BBC seemed incapable of producing that kind of drama. Well, Saville, Martin and Hanson set out to prove him wrong and Gangsters carries elements of the very best hard boiled American thrillers, the Warner Brothers gangster flicks of old, noir, the blaxploitation genre, a touch of Bollywood, the spaghetti western and even a sprinkling of James Bond all topped off by a soundtrack from Greenslade!

The diverse cast is a real credit to Gangsters, and vitally necessary too. Without them, the desire to represent the culturally diverse city would have significantly failed. Tremendous actors like Saeed Jaffrey and Ahmed Khalil from the Asian community and Paul Barber and Tania Rogers from the Black British community, all then relatively unknown to British TV audiences of the time, shine with the opportunity afforded them in Philip Martin's gritty and excellent script.  This desire for unknown quantities continued with Martin himself appearing as the Birmingham kingpin and chief villain Rawlinson whilst Maurice Colbourne hits the ground running with the show's anti-hero John Kline.

I fucking loved John Kline. As Martin says, he wanted a kind of dull and heavy anonymous name like James Bond and, like that character, he wanted to use him as a blank canvas to place numerous intrigues and action upon. Colbourne, with his lean and muscular frame not a million miles away from Clint Eastwood, also plays to the film's pervading urban western idea too and, as the character remarks at one point, "My name's John Kline, not John Wayne". You can also totally believe Colbourne is a tough guy former convict and SAS man. This isn't an actor stepping back to allow his stunt man to perform the physicality the script requires, even though it occasionally looks rather hairy! And real men wear pink. Just like John Kline and his habitual pink shirt.

With its violence, nudity, bad language and overall contentious issues, it was only natural that Gangsters caused quite a stir. Critics called it amoral, too graphic and a dishonest representation of the fine city of Birmingham, words that had to be eaten when only a day after transmission the papers reported both the influx of illegal immigrants and a cache of drugs into the city. The audiences loved it though, and its easy to see why Philip Martin was snapped up to write not one but two seasons of Gangsters, each episode becoming more and more bloody and labyrinthine (mixing West Indian and Asian gangs with Chinese Triads) as well as deeply self referential, post-modern and downright strange. Small wonder, the Open University did courses in it!

Gangsters is available to buy as a DVD box set including this film, series one and series two. But to get the BBC to consider repeating some of the classic Play For Today's still languishing in the bowels of the corporation please sign the petition I started here

Out On Blue Six : UB40

End Transmission

Felicia's Journey (1999)

Atom Egoyan's adaptation of William Trevor's novel of the same name is a mordantly dark, at times blackly comic, and almost Hitchcockian production concerning two lost souls, each damaged by their past and their parents, thrown together in a quietly desperate, stifled post industrial Birmingham shot in suitably dank greens and browns.

Elaine Cassidy plays titular Felicia, a dreamy, innocent and bewildered young Irish girl whom we meet on the crossing over to England. She's looking for her boyfriend Johnny (Peter Macdonald) who has got her pregnant and, somewhat unhelpfully and uncaring, has severed all contact with her since he moved to England for work; the nature of which he kept suitably vague for Felicia. Back in Ireland her father, played by Gerard McSorley, mutters darkly about the rumours Johnny joined the British army and horribly claims that his daughter now has 'the enemy within her'. It's no wonder she's running away, so hopeless and at a loss to rectify things.

Into Felicia's path comes Hoskins as the grey and meek catering manager Hilditch, a seemingly regular rotund little 'Semi Detached Suburban Mr James', a man who lives in a 1950s timewarp watching old b+w cookery programmes hosted by a buxom Italian matriarch on a small portable, following her instructions to create lavish and large meals that only he alone eats. He wants to help Felicia, help her find Johnny and generally, do right by her. Or so it seems.

The issue really is that Egoyan plays his hand a little too quickly. It's obvious pretty much from the off that Hoskins character is damaged and sinister so that  the eventual reveal that he's a manipulative liar and serial killer in the John Christie mould - hinted at all too early through well crafted video camera style footage of him picking up numerous young 'troubled' girls just like Felicia - has little shock or mystery, alas.

It's clear that both Felicia and Hilditch are characters trapped in their pasts and how they were treated by others. For the former, she is a character unfairly spurned both by a boyfriend who seems to care little (though it seems he too has suffered at the hands of his parent, a mother who refuses to accept and obstructs his relationship with Felicia) and a father who cannot accommodate who she has loved. For the latter, it's the opposite; Hilditch was smothered by love and affection from his mother and it has turned him into a sad twisted overgrown and perpetually overweight schoolboy. What is interesting is how the film, or perhaps Trevor's original source material, seems to concern itself very little with right or with wrong; in its psychological exploration and it's understanding of the inherent similarities between both victim and perpetrator it seems to ask us to understand and to forgive or even to empathise with Hilditch in comparison with and relation to Felicia. Indeed both are portrayed as victims, it's just that one is ultimately more innocent than the other.

The film ends in a manner that some may, and have, argued as too pat. I'm not so sure, I view the timely intrusion of a previously small supporting character - the local Jehovah's Witness - in Hilditch's garden and the subsequent unravelling of his murderous plans quite akin to the curious dog determinedly sniffing around the small back yard of the aforementioned Christie's home, 10 Rillington Place - that other great repressed serial killer drama

With its dark and thought provoking tone, it's certainly an accomplished film that I feel with stay with me and linger in the mind for some time to come.

Out On Blue Six Xmas : Slade / Wizzard

So here it is, Merry Xmas...don't you wish it could be everyday?

What else could I pick to celebrate the day itself but the two biggies from Brum; Slade and Wizzard's 1973 hits that each battled for the number one spot that December. Slade inevitably bagged the prize, but they each found a place in our hearts and collective consciousness 

Merry Christmas to all my readers!

End Transmission

Peaky Blinders

I had such high hopes for this series, which started tonight on BBC2

It did not disappoint.

One word review : Blindin'

Peaky Blinders BBC2 Thursdays 9pm (and even more stunning on BBC2 HD) Watch it!