Billy Kimber: The real-life gangster in ‘Peaky Blinders’ who became Charlie Chaplin’s bodyguard
Walking the halls of my first year university accommodation, I almost felt as though I had been transported to 1920s Birmingham. Such was the popularity of Peaky Blinders and Cillian Murphy’s lead character Tommy Shelby, that every lad with a gangster dream and a spare £20 in their pocket had gone to the local barbers and asked for the Shelby mop-top.
Despite the fact that the haircut was born out of a very deliberate need to prevent people from nits, in some bizarre twist of fate, it had become a symbol of mid-2010s style.
Overall, though, it was in keeping with the poor taste of the decade, one that sprayed skin-tight skinny jeans on the legs of every youngster and listening to music that ached between alternative and pop.
But despite the copycat nature of its fandom, Peaky Blinders was a guiding light of the otherwise confused era and thrived in the burgeoning era of TV writing. While Cillian Murphy had already established a pretty bulletproof film career at that point, it was in many ways his true breakout role, catapulting him to the levels of fame and cultural reverence that ultimately resulted in his recent Oscar win.
His troubled portrayal of Shelby made him the show’s perfect anti-hero, warding off troubles from a number of different evil forces, from Adrien Brody’s Luca Changretta, Tom Hardy’s Alfie Solomon and Sam Neill’s Chester Campbell. While all of them were fictionalised replicas of historic characters, none of them was as directly influenced by the season one antagonist, Billy Kimber, who was inspired by a real person of the very same name.
Peaky Blinders creator Steven Knight explained that “he was actually a person who was called Billy Kimber, who was a Birmingham gangster, who didn’t get killed. He actually went off, believe it or not, and became Charlie Chaplin’s bodyguard in Los Angeles.”
Chaplin’s involvement in the entire plot then thickens. Not only was he loosely associated with Kimber, who in real life and on the show was a hardened gangster who did whatever he possibly could to advance in the world, but he was something of a kindred spirit to the man he bodyguard, because before Chaplin became the Hollywood star that history remembered him for, he was another Brummie, caught up in the social web Knight sought to untangle.
He continued, “Charlie Chaplin was born in Birmingham on a gypsy side, which is not commonly known, but he was. And he knew Billy Kimber, and he knew the Sheldons, who were the original Shelbys. He appears in one of his films, Billy Kimber walks through a shot.”
It all begins to make sense when you watch season two, episode five of Peaky Blinders, where Chaplin himself is portrayed – in the actual episode, Shelby explains to his partner, Grace Burgess, that Chaplin was born in Black Patch, a Gypsy camp in Birmingham, where he grew up as a Romany Gypsy, but hides it from the public in a bid to secure his glittering career.
