A Thousand Blows True Story: The Real Characters Behind the Historical Drama

In his own words, screenwriter Steven Knight “does legends”. The Peaky Blinders, Taboo, and SAS: Rogue Heroes creator takes elements of real-life history and turns them into swaggering myths. With an ear for an unusual name, and a knack for conjuring flesh-and-blood icons out of historical figures that crop up in newspaper reports and census […]

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In his own words, screenwriter Steven Knight “does legends”. The Peaky Blinders, Taboo, and SAS: Rogue Heroes creator takes elements of real-life history and turns them into swaggering myths.

With an ear for an unusual name, and a knack for conjuring flesh-and-blood icons out of historical figures that crop up in newspaper reports and census columns, Knight has rehabilitated the British working class period drama. He’s taken the gratitude and drudgery out, and written ambition, glamour and modernity in. He made icons out of real-life Birmingham gangsters in Peaky Blinders, and he’s about to do the same with East-End boxers and female thieves The Forty Elephants in new drama A Thousand Blows.

As the six-episode first series (a second has already been filmed) arrives on Disney+ in the UK and Hulu in the US, let’s have an overview of the real history of A Thousand Blows, and some pointers on where you can find out more.

Hezekiah Moscow, Alec Munroe & Sugar Goodson Were All Real

To learn about the real Hezekiah, Alec, Sugar, Treacle and more, go no further than the historical research that inspired A Thousand Blows, conducted by the show’s boxing historian and historical consultant Sarah Elizabeth Cox. First published online in 2019 on her Grappling With History website and currently being expanded into a book, Cox’s findings include photographs, posters, newspaper articles, census entries and more detailing the lives and careers of the real people who inspired the show’s characters. As Cox writes, “A Thousand Blows is not a document