The Peaky Blinders: Industrial Chic at its Hollywood Best

The past is the past, if it ever really was the past.

I woke up this cool morning to the sound of the coal train whistling across the river through my open window. It struck me that the women of Whitsett have been being woken by that sound since (let me look)…1857. That was before Henry Clay Frick opened Banning #2 coal mine and turned it into a fifty year blitz of raw material extraction that changed the world.

The Baltimore and Ohio railway, my train across the river, was laid in those early decades, with the knowledge that it was coal that would be its major passenger. Although it was also the first common carrier U.S. railway, which meant that it was open to carrying coal and people at the same time.

I call it an atmospheric train.

Just far enough away to not vibrate the house, it’s now called the Keystone branch of CSX. A sad name for a train, I think. The C in CSX came from Chesapeake. During its heyday, it became fondly known as The Chessie System and some smart marketer came up with the phrase, Sleep like a Kitten, to hint at a restful riding experience. The cat logo stuck and became a beloved railroad icon. My mother loves to tell us about our great-grandfather T.G. Wesley who worked as an engineer for a Chessie train.

The train that wakes me up across the river still carries coal.

Brilliant emotional marketing

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But let me get to the Peaky Blinders. It’s a 2013 series set in Birmingham, England during the height of the industrial revolution, 1880 to the 1910’s, and centered around a fashionable crime family.

I say fashionable because, if you can stomach the violence, the clothes are a great reason to watch the show. The Shelby men are decked out in three piece suits as they swagger through the muddy streets, past the ringing tones of the blacksmith’s hammers, on their way to do bad things. Tweed and wool and very white shirts buttoned up to the neck, these boys are swanky. I looked up the real Peaky Blinders and it seems their style was their most memorable trait, and clearly a key inspiration for the show.

Black, lace up boots paired with the flat, newsboy cap, long, heavy wool overcoats and lots and lots of whiskey. The vibe created by the cinematography is sublime for someone like me, interested in recreating what it was like working amidst industry during those decades. Hollywood, as it does, takes liberties so the characters are most likely more polished and clean and put together than the people they are meant to represent.

But I am sucked in completely.

Thomas Shelby, played by Cillian Murphy and his blue eyes, is one of the most strategic characters in film I have ever watched. He’s right up there with Walter White and Tony Soprano. A World War I veteran, Thomas is tortured with PTSD, along with most of the men in the show. The character arc of coal miner to trench soldier back to coal miner is a theme I have been working to explain to visitors of The Ruins for years. As we walk through the crumbling rooms and look at the art, I explain how many of the men who dug this coal were both soldier and miner within a single decade. The two most damaging jobs a man could have.

Helga Maribel Sanchez’s Boots sculpture is an attempt to communicate the lifestyle of sacrifice the men of this age shouldered.

The Peaky men were criminals though, not coal miners. But that brings me to the visual settings.

Coal is on every street corner. In barges, train beds, and fireplaces.

The characters, as they saunter down alleyways, are surrounded by furnaces and fire. The whoosh of the coal furnace and the ring of hammers, accompanied by Nick Cave’s Red Right Hand music, make for a haunting vibe that I could still feel when I was woken by my train across the river this morning.

Dirty, bare chests shoveling coal into burning maws. Gorgeous brick architecture and a moody, but not overly stylized, camera filter sets a tone that convinces me. When Hollywood gets its right, we are hypnotized into believing that the past they show us was the real past.

But the past is always an illusion.

As Thomas Shelby himself says several times, the past is the past. Re-living, or re-creating it is impossible. We can try, but we are trapped in the truth of right now.

As I invite a new season of The Ruins tours into my schedule, I grapple with the storytelling. Talking about the past is a chimera, an illusion of imagination that we layer with the few facts we have. It is too easy to place black and white labels on our characters. Criminal. Anti-hero. Villain. The coal miner shoveled coal. He could also have beat his wife and fought for his country. He could have drank like a fish and the next morning saved his buddy from a roof cave in.

The past is just as messy as today.

It’s simply easier to compartmentalize. A short fifty years from now, storytellers will be fabricating our details and turning them into the truth

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Peaky Blinders is set across the ocean from our Ruins story. Although I believe the characters will be making the journey to America in future seasons.

I will leave you with a mosaic of England by Lynda Knott. Made with English brick and English coal, it represents the canal system of the Industrial Revolution, during the time the Peaky gang was at large.

I recommend watching a few episodes of Peaky Blinders before your next Ruins visit. If the violence is too much, remind yourself that you are there for the the tweed and the character arcs.

A mosaic map of England for The Ruins by Lynda Knott

Thank you for being here with me as I keep digging for the truth.

Some days with a hammer, some days with a shovel. And some days with a pen.