The first chords of black bird, by Gene Simons and a young Jessie Eden opens a bottle of beer. She dances alone under the watchful eye of Thomas Shelby, leader of the Peaky Blinders, who spies on her behind the door of her house. Minutes later, beer in hand, they have a conversation, from union leader to boss. Or something else.
(This article contains spoilers)
Jessie Eden herself, a few days before, was retouching herself in the men’s bathroom of the Shelby company offices, responding “there are no women’s bathrooms on this floor because none of them reach that high” when they rebuke her for her presence. A strike at the Shelby companies, instigated by herself, intervenes between both scenes.
What’s real about Jessie Eden from Peaky Blinders? What part of the union leader who manages to put Tommy Shelby in check corresponds to reality? doWho was the real Jessie Eden? In this article we are going to discover what is true in the fictional representation of the British communist.
By order of the Peaky Blinders.
Last fall, the BBC premiered the fourth season of Peaky Blinders. The fiction, which is set in England in the 1920s, specifically in Birmingham, narrates the life after the war of a family of gypsy descent dedicated to horse racing and gangsterism. The series deals with issues that are so characteristic of the context in which it is based, such as the underworld, violence, class society, post-war trauma who ruined the mental health of an entire generation, drugs, IRA, street gangs or mafias.
In this context, and given the evolution of the Shelbys, who begin the series being practically part of the lumpen and come the fourth season they have become entrepreneurs -in unorthodox ways, however- the appearance of class conflicts was inevitable. Incarnated first in the figure of Freddie Thorne and in Ada Shelby herself, in the fourth season Jessie Eden appears to put the head of the gang in check. She had been mentioned already in the third season as the one responsible for a women’s strike in 1924, which leads all the Shelbys out on the street, headed by Polly, in order to listen to a trade union woman.
It is in the fourth season when he physically appears on screen. Played by Charlie Murphy, her first appearance shows her retouching in one of the Shelby factories bathrooms. Her presence at the Shelby’s business headquarters has a reason for being, which is none other than the negotiation with Tommy Shelby of an equal salary between the men and women who work in her factories. However, a Tommy Shelby threatened with vendetta by the Italian mafia, he proposes to raise women’s salaries at the cost of lowering men’s, equating to the drop, since Eden’s strike threat is convenient for him to overshadow other types of less legal conflicts.
Both hold several interviews throughout the season negotiating salaries, meetings that maintain a tonic: a condescending and paternalistic Thomas Shelby against a firm Jessie Eden who threatens a strike. A strike that, finally, is called in a kind of tug-of-war between the boss and the unions in which Eden fights, moreover, to prevail over the machismo with which she is treated. The plots of the series begin to merge, as Shelby tries to get information about different cadres of the communist party, where he knows of the presence of Italians and Soviets, in exchange for a salary increase.
Thomas goes to Eden’s house, a scene that supposes a schism in the existing relationship between both protagonists. In it, Eden ends up putting all the cards on the table: she knows about the gangster’s past as a communist, she knows the story of her first love and, above all, she knows how to play the exact key, which is none other than the change experienced by the protagonist after World War I. However, Thomas Shelby, a character characterized by exceptional intelligence, fights back. He also knows Jessie’s personal history, as well as the one who was Eden’s partner and who, unlike him, could not overcome the traumas of the war and ended his days by committing suicide. The existence of common places between two initially antagonistic characters radically changes the relationship between the characters.
Ignored these proposals by Jessie Eden, the leader of the Peaky Blinders goes to the only link between the gang and communism: his own sister. Ada Thorne, who confesses to having lost faith when asked why she left communism, she is tasked with mediating between her brother and Jessie Eden. They meet after a heated rally of the union leader, who unleashes the applause of the workers summoned there. They talk about Ada’s communist past to finally get to the point: Thomas Shelby will agree to Jessie Eden’s requests in exchange for a dinner together in which he explains everything she knows about Marxism.
After another interview with Shelby at the factory, and unconvinced to go so personal, she agrees. They have dinner together at the old Shelby junkyard, where the barriers between the two definitely collapse in a strategy of the businessman: he tries to suffocate the hectic social atmosphere of Birmingham by seducing Jessie Eden. Shelby had apparently underestimated the weight of Eden’s threats. However, the success of the strike called by Jessie Eden and the climate experienced in Birmingham, which points not only to a repeat of strikes but even to a revolution, prompt Shelby to start taking Eden’s threats seriously. So the leader of the gang sets out to put out the fires of revolution by seducing the leader of the gang. As Ada herself states, Tommy Shelby he is going to stop the revolution with his turnip.
From this moment on, the plot thickens for the Shelbys. To quell certain problems with the institutions, Shelby pulls the only possible rope: Jessie Eden. She manages to make her believe that she has returned to believe in socialism, with the sole purpose of getting information about the east winds who blow into the city and pass said information to the government in exchange for being hired to make war vehicles.
However, as usual, Thomas Shelby goes one step further. With Eden’s support – and with the votes of the Shelby women, who had been able to exercise that right since 1918 if they were over 30 years old – he becomes Member of Parliament for the Labor Party. One wonders how the figure of a businessman fits (without questioning other less legal activities of the Peaky Blinders) within the Labor Party and the English labor movement and what level of stability is that of Eden’s relationship with Shelby, who receives the news of the beginning of his political life arm in arm with Lizzie Stark, former prostitute, secretary and recent mother of the second son of Thomas Shelby.
After the election of Thomas Shelby as a Labor parliamentary member, the political landscape shown in fiction completely changes. Eden, a young, working-class woman, is perhaps one of the few characters capable of putting the gang leader in check on an intellectual level. The scenes that both star are, sticking to the dialogues, the most agile of the season. The sharpness of both characters and the tension that is breathed between them serve to characterize and build the character of Jessie Eden, but also the protagonist. The sentimental and political past of Thomas Shelby, the Tommy before the war, is built throughout the series with slight brushstrokes that, when Jessie Eden arrives, become brushstrokes that give birth to the protagonist.
However, despite being an essential character to build the image of the protagonist, Jessie herself is slightly blurred when her relationship with the clan leader becomes more personal, especially when compared to the real person who inspired the character. character. A Jessie who begins unmoved by the paternalism of Shelby, who sarcastically calls the union leader charm in their first meeting and that, little by little, falls into Tommy’s nets, becoming another one of the innumerable conquests of the protagonist.
What about the real Jessie Eden in the fictional Jessie Eden?
Contextualizing Jessie Eden chronologically is very important to understand the differences between fiction and reality, since the Peaky Blinders of fiction themselves are an anachronism in themselves. The criminal gang known as the Peaky Blinders actually acted during the last decade of the 19th century and the first decade of the 20th. These are criminal groups that dominated the streets of England on the dates mentioned and whose name is subject to historical debate. The name of the gang has become for some historians a generic denominator that defines a violent youth subculture (“Peaky Blinders (criminal gang)”, 2018) but for others it refers to a specific gang. Probably it was born to denominate a specific group and it was spreading.
The origin of the name is also debated: everything indicates that peaky refers to the berets they used to wear -which both in the series and in reality are the aesthetic hallmark of the members- and blinders the use of said beret as a weapon, in which they supposedly hid razor blades with which they blinded their opponents, or the fact that these served to hide an eye. After the Peaky Blinders, whose radius of action focused on Bordesley and Small Heath, poor neighborhoods in the city -just as it happens in fiction-, the streets of Birmingham were occupied by other gangs, such as the Birmingham Boys, who did fit into the chronological context of the series (Mariño, 2017).
It is the historian Carl Chinn, who, due to family ties, has investigated certain issues around these gangs. In fact, he even claims that the character of Thomas Shelby is inspired by Billy Kimber, one of the most powerful gangsters in England, leader of the Birmingham Boys and who appears in the series as Shelby’s rival. There are differences between the two: the historian affirms that Kimber deserted while Shelby’s character is drawn as a war hero who returns from the trenches traumatized, like an entire generation (Mariño, 2017).
It is difficult, therefore, that the real Jessie Eden had to face a Peaky Blinder turned businessman. First of all, by pure chronology. In addition, the gang members who occupied the streets of Birmingham in the 19th century, like those in fiction at the beginning of the series, are practically part of the lumpenproletariat, which, in a way, and despite how unlikely it would have been in 1890 for a gang member to take over the property of several factories, fits in with the character’s ideology. However, Shelby despite having abandoned his socialist beliefs is not a “traitor to his class”: his class is the lumpen and it acts as such, trying -and managing- to grow in the system instead of changing it, as in the case of Eden.
The band, as such, is decontextualized, and the dynamics of…