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Peaky Blinders is back - and fans are loving new character Jessie Eden.

Jessie Eden, brought into the BBC Two crime period drama as a a potential love interest for Tommy Shelby, really existed.

In fact, she was a real Brummie heroine in the fight for equal pay, leading thousands of women out on strike from the Lucas factory.

She was a major figure in the 1926 General Strike, which features heavily in the new series of Peaky Blinders.

Of course, the fictional element is Jessie falling in love with Tommy Shelby, played by Cillian Murphy.

(Image: © Caryn Mandabach Productions Ltd 2017)

But as a shop steward she would have negotiated with Birmingham factory owners like him, which she does in the first episode.

She makes a fantastic entrance as a shocked man finds her putting on her lipstick in the gents’ toilets.

She calmly replies: “You don’t have a women’s lavatory on the second floor because no women get this far up.”

Creator Steven Knight explains how he discovered Jessie: “There’s tons of stuff about General Brigadier Whoever in the history of the General Strike, but I just got a glimpse of Jessie Eden.

“I actually came across her in the last series when researching the head of the Birmingham Communist Party in the 1920s, when she was mentioned.

(Image: © Black Country Living Museum Production credit: A Caryn Mandabach and Tiger Aspect Production)

“There’s very little you can find out about her, there are just fragments, but she was a fascinating woman.

“I also found there was a pub in Small Heath called The Chain, which was where the women chain makers would go. They were hard as nails and if a man went in there, they’d get beaten to death.”

Jessie is played by Irish actress Charlie Murphy, best known for playing police woman Ann Gallagher in Happy Valley and Anne Bronte in To Walk Invisible: The Bronte Sisters. She was also in Love/Hate, The Last Kingdom and Philomena.

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Charlie says: “Jessie was an extraordinary woman. Imagine bringing 10,000 people out on strike for equal pay in her mid-20s.

“Back then that was just phenomenal, so she’s a very brave and powerful woman to play.

“She was very intelligent, very funny, a hard worker and a strong woman. I don’t know why more hasn’t been written about her. She’s lost in history, which is bizarre. I haven’t met her descendants, but I understand they have been told about the storyline and are happy with it. We want to treat that with respect.

“When she meets Tommy, she’s done her homework on him and that takes him by surprise. Tommy caught off-guard doesn’t happen very often.

“There’s a spark between them based on intelligence.”

Who was Jessie Eden?

She was a very important historical figure, especially in Birmingham, and yet her story is hardly known.

She was a shop steward and a mass leader of women workers who led thousands out on strike for equal pay. She also helped to build the Moscow underground system and was a Communist election candidate.

There isn’t a huge amount of information on her. But this is what is known, including information gleaned from an interview in the Birmingham Post in 1976 to mark the 50th anniversary of the General Strike.

Jessie was born Jessie Shrimpton on February 24, 1902 at 61 Talbot Street in Winson Green.

(Image: Mirrorpix)

She married Albert Eden in Kings Norton in 1923, but it didn’t seem to be a very happy marriage. They adopted a son, Douglas.

Three years into their marriage, records have no mention of them living together at her house in Sparkbrook.

She became a shop steward for the Transport and General Workers Union and worked at Joseph Lucas’ motor components factory, filing shock absorbers.

Toolmakers came out en masse at Lucas in 1926, closing the plant. Jessie marched out of Lucas, too, taking all the men in her section with her.

(Image: © Caryn Mandabach Productions Ltd 2017)

That year, the evening of the traditional May Day march on the streets of Birmingham, saw 25,000 in procession and 100,000 spectators.

In the Birmingham Post interview, Jessie remembered: “One policeman put his hands on my arm. They were telling me to go home, but the crowd howled, ‘Hey, leave her alone’ and then some men came and pushed the policemen away.

“They didn’t do anything after that. I think they could see that there would have been a riot.

“I was never frightened of the police or the troops because I had the people with me, you see. I don’t know what I’d have felt like on my own.

(Image: Daily Mirror)

“As the strike went on, more and more people were joining in. We used to take our turns picketing or join the big meetings in the old Bull Ring. “Sacrifices had to be made.

“We had practically no meat during the strike. We lived on bread, jam and marge and my mother would try to make us a milk pudding if she could.”

In January 1931, Jessie went down in history by leading 10,000 women out on a week’s strike, an extraordinary thing to do in those times. It eventually led to a mass movement towards unionisation amongst women.

(Image: © Caryn Mandabach Productions Ltd 2017)

She joined the Communist Party during the strike and was sent by it to Moscow, with nobody knowing where she was for two years.

She was sent to help rally Soviet women workers in the building of the Metro in Moscow.

Back in Birmingham, she lived with fellow Communist Walter McCulloch, who she finally married in 1948.

(Image: © Caryn Mandabach Productions Ltd 2017)

They lived at various times on Heathfield Road, Handsworth, Walsall Road, Perry Barr and Hob Moor Road, Yardley.

Jessie was the Vice-President of the Central Tenants Association during the 1939 rent strike in Birmingham.

She contested the August 1945 general election in Handsworth for the Communist Party and lost, but continued to be politically active – in 1969, she and Walter led a march in Birmingham against the Vietnam War.

Walter died of lung cancer in 1977, Jessie in 1986 aged 84.

Peaky Blinders returns to BBC2 in mid-November