Peaky Blinders creator explains off-screen backstory behind 'in the bleak midwinter'

In the depths of their despair, a number of characters in Peaky Blinders all utter the same haunting line: "In the bleak midwinter."

It's a phrase which crops up at least once in every season - bar one - and it typically surfaces in scenes where death appears to be dangerously close.

Fans of Steven Knight's hit series have already made their own assumptions about the deeper meaning behind this emotionally-charged expression, and now, he's finally shed further light on the story behind it.

Ahead of his highly-anticipated feature film, Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man, hitting cinemas on Friday (6 March), Knight revealed the source of the sombre remark.

Take a look at the trailer for the movie here:

Longtime viewers reckon it's pretty much guaranteed to be included in the film which wraps up Tommy Shelby's (Cillian Murphy) story, given it's been such a huge part of the series.

Peaky Blinders buffs will recall how we first heard Tommy deliver the 'in the bleak midwinter' line way back in the first ever episode, as he attempted to calm down his fellow former soldier and PTSD sufferer, Danny Whizz-Bang.

He also spits it out when members of the Irish Republican Army have a gun to his head after kidnapping him in the finale of season two, before a choir are heard singing it at his nuptials to Grace in episode one of the third series.

Tommy's brothers Arthur and John quote it as they're set to be hung at the beginning of season four, before the Shelby patriarch then says it again while looking over John's body in the morgue.

And, arguably, the most poignant use of the term comes in the final ever episode of the Peaky Blinders series, when Tommy prepares to take his own life as he believes he's got an inoperable brain tumour.

So, what on earth does 'in the bleak midwinter' actually mean?

Characters including Peaky Blinders protagonist Tommy Shelby utter the line when death appears to be dangerously close (Netflix)

Well, it's somewhat explained in the series, as Knight pointed out while appearing on the Netflix podcast which is dedicated to Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man.

Following the death of his younger brother John, Tommy tells the mourners gathered at his funeral how those four words willed him and the rest of his military unit in WW1, the Small Heath Rifles, to accept imminent death.

But when it never arrived, the squaddies repurposed it - and since then, it served as a reminder that they were living on borrowed time.

"We died together, once before - Arthur, me, Danny Whizz-Bang, Billy Thorne and John," Tommy reminisces. "We were cut off from the retreat, no bullets left, waiting for the Prussian calvary come to finish us off.

"And while we waited, Jeremiah said we should sing, 'In The Bleak Midwinter'. But we were spared. The enemy never came. And we all agreed that everything after that...was extra."

As Tommy mentioned, it's actually a song which was popular among British troops in the trenches during WW1 - however, it first originated as a poem.

It is explained that the Shelby brothers - Tommy, Arthur and John - each served in World War One in the series (Netflix)

London-born writer Christina Rossetti published it in 1872 under the title 'A Christmas Carol', before it was later musically adapted by the likes of composers such as Gustav Holst and Harold Darke.

Now, Knight has offered some further insight into the backstory of the legendary line in the Peaky Blinders universe, which viewers didn't get to see unfold on screen.

Speaking on the Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man Podcast, the 66-year-old screenwriter explained that in WW1, it wasn't unusual for men who were friends to be on the frontline beside each other.

Explaining how he incorporated this nugget of knowledge into the series, Knight said: "They put pals together...they believed it was good for morale to be with your mates.

"The difficulty was, one shell lands and an entire village back in England is wiped out, and that’s when they started to separate people.

"The [Shelby] brothers, Jeremiah and everybody else would have all been in the same unit, in the same place. They would have been together in the tunnels, and that’s what I think bonded them."

Screenwriter Steven Knight has now shed further light on the origin story behind the phrase 'in the bleak midwinter' (Netflix)

Knight said he 'had this thought from the beginning' about what united the blokes in Peaky Blinders, before revealing some more details about the origin of the 'in the bleak midwinter' line that viewers 'never saw'.

"They all came up out of the ground and were in a place in no man’s land where they had no chance," he said. "They were definitely going to die. And so they sang ‘In The Bleak Midwinter’.

"We never see this, but this is what happened. They sang and then they get rescued - completely miraculously, rescued. And as they are rescued they say to each other, ‘From now on, everything is a bonus. We died then, now we do what we want - we do whatever we want, because we were already dead’. And that's the thing that sort of motivates them from then on."

So, it turns out that the long-running line is a source of comfort for the characters, even though it's tinged with sorrow.

It reminds the Peaky Blinders that they can't escape their own mortality, even if they are the most brutal specimens to come out of Birmingham.

Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man releases in cinemas on 6 March and will be available to stream on Netflix from 20 March.