By The fifth season of Peaky Blinders has seen the arrival of a new malevolent force on the horizon to threaten the Shelby operation: the Billy Boys. But who were they in real life?
The Billy Boys - also known as the Brigton Boys, or the Billy Boys of Brigton Cross - were another razor gang like the Peaky Blinders. They were Protestants and operated mostly around Bridgeton (or in Scots, Brigton) in Glasgow, and at their height were 800 members strong.
The name comes from the sectarian song which the gang used to sing while stomping around Glasgow. 'The Billy Boys' goes to the tune of the American Civil War song 'Marching Through Georgia' - you'll probably know it as the one that goes "Hello! Hello! We are the [insert city or region here] boys" - and contained cheery lyrics about standing knee-deep in "Fenian blood" and telling Catholics to "surrender or you die".
The Billy Boys fought street battles with Catholic gangs like the Norman Conks and Kent Star in Glasgow, often provoked by the Billy Boys marching through Catholic areas of the city on Catholic holy days. It was as brutal as you'd expect. Historian Andrew Davies, whose book City of Gangs explores the Glaswegian gangs in detail, described the gang wars as "tit-for-tat stabbings and occasional razor-slashings in seemingly endless cycles of reprisal".
Their leader in the late 1920s was Billy Fullerton, a member of the British Fascists who went on to found the Glasgow branch of the British Union of Fascists and lend Mosley the Billy Boys as his personal security. The Billy Boys broke up strikes and Communist party meetings, and Fullerton is said to have been involved in a short-lived Scottish offshoot of the KKK called the Knights of Kaledonia Klan. There wasn't much to like about the guy.
A popular mythos around the Billy Boys - encouraged by the gang itself - says that they chivalrously looked after their own and helped local people through a time of extreme hardship in inner city Glasgow. But Davies told the Scottish Daily Mail that that's wide of the mark.
"The present-day perception of the gangs as semi-Robin Hood figures, only ever fighting among themselves and not posing a threat to the community, is quite misguided," he said. "An allegation that surfaces in the early 1930s was that threats were made against publicans' families - if the publicans didn't pay up then other members of their household would be assaulted as a form of reprisal."
So, in all, not a good bunch. If the Peaky Blinders version of the Billy Boys cleaves to the grim truth, it sounds like Tommy Shelby might have met his match.
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