CELEBRATING YOUR DISCOVERIES
On the night of 20 October 1898, Mary Ann Aliban headed out to buy her ‘supper beer’ from a local alehouse. She lived alone on Latimer Street, Birmingham, in a working-class area of back-to-back houses. The following day she was found dead.
Mary Ann, who was in her sixties, had been tied to a bed and gagged, and a handkerchief had been stuffed into her mouth. The postmortem revealed that she had suffocated when the handkerchief pushed her false teeth down her throat.
Robbery was clearly the motive, because Mary Ann owned houses nearby and would walk the neighbourhood collecting rent money which she stashed at home. The hue and cry went up for two young men who had been seen loitering in the area. They were described by witnesses as being of the ‘Peaky Blinder’ class.
These criminals were notorious in Birmingham long before the BBC drama began in 2013. They dominated the
