Enforcer

He was shot in the stomach at close range in a London street and told the police he had no idea who did it. He knew exactly who did it. That refusal was the whole man: Billy Kimber ran the largest racecourse protection operation in Britain outside London, and he ran it on the understanding that nothing was ever settled by anybody in a uniform. He controlled the northern and midland tracks — the bookmakers' pitches, the chalk, the stools, the lists, the levy on every man taking bets in a field — and he did it by being the person other hard men agreed to work for. At his height he could put hundreds of men on a train.

The instruments were simple and the intent was not to kill. Razors, hammers, iron bars, and coshes; the razor was the signature, because a cut face is a message that walks around afterwards. His men worked the courses at Birmingham, Doncaster, Newcastle, and the whole northern circuit, and when the Sabini organisation moved on the southern tracks the two firms fought openly for years. The worst of it came at Epsom in 1921, when a Birmingham convoy was ambushed in a country lane by a hundred men and beaten in daylight, and at Alexandra Park, and on the trains, and in the station yards. Twenty-three men went to prison for the Epsom ambush. Kimber himself was assaulted repeatedly, shot once, and convicted of almost nothing.

He came out of a Birmingham slum. Summer Lane, one of the poorest streets in the city, a family that moved between addresses because rent was what you owed and left behind. He worked as a brass caster and as a labourer, and he came up through the street gangs of the 1890s — the loose, brutal, territorial mobs of the Birmingham back-to-backs — where a boy learned to fight before he learned a trade. What separated him from a thousand others in the same streets was that he could organise. He worked out that the money was not in the fighting. It was in the arrangement that stops the fighting, sold weekly, to people who needed a field to work in.

He drifted out of it in the twenties. He moved south, kept business interests in bookmaking, made peace where peace was cheaper, and died in Torquay in 1945, respectable enough on paper, with an estate to leave. His name was largely forgotten until a television series made it famous and got most of the details wrong.

Forget the tracks and the razors and the hundreds of men. Remember only this: he understood earlier than anyone that the point is not to hurt a man — it is to make him quiet, and keep him quiet, for as long as you need him to be.