Recently American financier Tom Wagner bought 45.64% of the shares of the Birmingham City football team and 100% of the St. Andrews Stadium.
Curious is that the purchase took place through a company called Shelby Companies Limited, just like the one in the TV series Peaky Blinders is made by Tommy Shelby and his family.
Peaky Blinders is a British television series set in the 1920s. The series follows the Shelby family who were the leaders of a low-middle-class crime gang in Birmingham.
The social power of the gang was based on robbery, violence, racketeering, illegal bookmaking and gambling control. The gang had a high organizational level with its hierarchy systems.
The Blinders gained dominance by eliminating all of their rivals such as the Cheapside Sloggers with whom they contended the territory of Birmingham and the surrounding districts. They remained in control for almost 20 years until 1910 when a larger band, the Birmingham Boys led by Billy Kimber, lost control of the city to the Blinders.
The name Peaky Blinders comes from the practice of sewing razor blades into the visor (Peak in English) of hats that were used as weapons.
Interchangeable razors were introduced by Gillette in 1903, but were still a luxury item that would hardly be used as a weapon.
More credited is the theory that the adjective Blinder derives from the dialect of Birmingham, still common today, which indicates an aspect so elegant to blind (blind in English): the gang had in fact a distinct style of elegant clothing and unusual for criminals.
Comentarios