Peaky Blinders History - Who were the Billy Boys?

now I'm not actually making this article out of free will I'm making it by order of the Peaky Blinders.

the Shelby clan are back but they've picked a fight with the Billy boys who appear out of nowhere and shoot Abrahma gold and then crucify and shoot his son leaving everyone wondering.

but the supplement Arthur's subsequent explanation I went away and did some research into the actual historical Billy boys and who they were so in this article I'll be asking the question who were the Billy Boys? who are terrorizing the Peaky Blinders so a good place to start looking for clues about the Billy boys is actually in the song that they sing as they approach a Barama Gould and his son and these are the lyrics to the song which has become known as the Billy Boys.

and I'd like to highlight two of the words in this song which are particularly telling now the first is the word Fenian describing the Fenian blood and actually Fenian has been used a fair amount in the show peaky blinders by Detective Inspector Campbell beforehand and it's actually a derogatory term for Irish Republicans or more specifically Irishmen especially Catholic Irishmen and it's actually for this reason that this song which was sometimes sung by fans of the Football Club Rangers in Scotland as a we'll get
on to why it has now been banned from being singing there because Fenian is today seen as a derogatory term for Irish and specifically Irish Catholics now the other word that I've highlighted here is Brigton and Brigton is actually the scots form of an english area called Bridgeton which is an area in the city of Glasgow in Scotland by 

font-weight: bold; text-align: start;">the 19th century Glasgow like much of Scotland was very strongly Protestant although during the middle of the 19th century especially after the 1840s when the Irish potato famine hit Ireland lots of immigrants from Ireland came to Glasgow to settle and to find work as well as in other industrial parts of Scotland although of course this then flooded the already very poor and working-class industrial areas in Glasgow with new workers from Ireland and so naturally there's bred resentment with the population that was already there as well as of course the religious 

divide being that the Irish were very strongly and largely Catholic whereas the population already in Glasgow at the time were Protestant and where the competition for jobs in a hard economic situation you can see this going badly.

the Protestants were worried they were gonna spread paper story and revolutionary ideas as well as steal their jobs and the Catholics felt increasingly marginalized and unable to get jobs due to discrimination and so formed a bunker mentality as well as forming several sectarian nearly divided razor gang these gangs often had violent encounters at football matches especially after 1888 in which the first Old Firm derby was played at between Celtic which was a team made up of largely  Catholic and Irish supporters and Rangers which was made up of the

Protestant and originally Scottish inhabitants of the city and to this day the rivalry between Celtic and Rangers in the city of Glasgow and beyond in the diaspora folk the Scots Protestants and also the Scots Irish Ian in Ireland

itself is one of the bloodiest and biggest rivalries in footballing history

now the name Billy boys could come from several different sources one of them is from King William the 3rd who was the king of England Scotland and

Ireland but where was he from again oh I remember just as with Williams Protestant

supporters in Ireland and today still in Northern Ireland Billy boys also form these marching bands that we see actually playing in the most recent episode marching off towards going and trying to find a bur I'm gold in the series but this is actually also based on historical truths that they went to Ireland and took part during the 12th orange Men marches and that they kind of took on a military form with these big bands and would march through Catholic areas screaming insults at the Catholics living there and then the Catholic gangs would come out and attack them and that's kind of how they would fight these pitched battles in the streets of Glasgow what's probably a more likely origin of the name the Billy boys are

their leader who was called Billy Fullerton Billy Fullerton is actually

quite an interesting character and he really got involved in the gang scene because of football again he was as a teenager playing a game against a Catholic team he was a Protestant and he happened to score the winning goal now normally that's quite a good thing you know it's a game of football you score the winning goal

you're happy but in Glasgow, that meant that he was attacked by a gang of

Catholic kids who then you know cut up his face and all of this kind of thing and then he vowed revenge against them and formed the Brickton boys as they were called and they would colloquially become known as the Billy boys and I think this is named after him he actually also later went on to found the Glasgow branch of the Ku Klux Klan and was also involved with the British Union of fascists and I think this is really the show's attempt at portraying Billy

Fullerton now I realized in the show he's called McGovern or something like this and not Billy Fullerton but I think he's kind of the leader that they're portraying and I think a lot of the things that he does in the way he acts are reminiscent of the accounts that we have of Billy Fullerton now as I said he's also involved in the British Union of fascists and he actually created a unit or a local branch of this organization in Glasgow and we hear from Arthur also saying that they provide muscle for fascist rallies so one of the big tactics that fascists used in 1930 was going and breaking up the political events of other parties especially the Communists so Hitler did

this in Germany Mussolini did this in Italy and so they would basically be the ones who went in and would beat up the other politicians and break up the rallies and protect their own rallies from the communist gangs, for example, this is of

course gonna make things very interesting for Tommy because they are then working for sir Oswald Mosley who would form the British Union of fascists actually it I think it formed in 1932 so it's not happened yet in the show but they're clearly talking about it they're in this scene in the wheat field when they're shooting they were talking about it as well so that's gonna be interesting to see how he manoeuvres that

because obviously Oswald Mosley and Billy Fullerton in historically were

working on the same side they were both fascists whereas I'm not sure what Tommy's gonna do in this situation but I'm sure the BBC won't be making Tommy a fascist or I think his approval ratings will drop rather significantly but it will be interesting to see how that

plays out now as well.those mentioned of the Ulster Volunteer Force that they have ties to the UVF and initially I thought this was a mistake because of the UVF actually only formed in the later troubles so in the 1960s when the troubles kicked off in Northern Ireland they formed as power paramilitary group in Northern Ireland serving the world I say serving the Protestant interest they

they said they were serving the Protestant interest and fighting back against the IRA and the Catholic minority there but actually, I looked into this and they there are references to the Ulster militia which was essentially a similar thing but in the nineteen in the wake of the 1916 Easter Rising they also fought during the Irish war of independence and then afterwards

in Northern Ireland against Republican elements there and they all sometimes referred to as the UVF who looked UVF the organisation that everyone thinks of when you say UPF wasn't formed until later so what actually ended up

happening to the Billy Boys in Glasgow well the violence in the city got so bad that they called over a special Chief Constable Percy sillerton now Percy

salato was famous because he had actually sorted out the very bad gang

the situation in the city of Sheffield in the years before and when he was called in the basically employed the tactic of you can't make an omelette without breaking a few eggs and basically hired lots of really strong big bulky men from the highlands to come into Glasgow got them in uniform and essentially they became called the biggest gang in the world so the idea was that if there was a street fight with these guys members the police would always come out on top because they had bigger and stronger men fighting the gangs and this seems to have worked he also employed civilians to work in a police capacity so even gathered a lot of intelligence on the various gangs in Glasgow as well as then employing these wireless radios between police who had before just used police boxes which was the most efficient system and actually the reason that police in many countries where this which is called the Sillitoe tartan is because of Sir Percy Salado because he

was so successful in stopping the razor gangs in Glasgow and that's why they wear this to this day enlistment in these razor gangs also declining alas goes Protestant population because they simply started to join the Orange Order which still has a very large following in Glasgow to this day.