“Life can be wonderful if you're not afraid of it. All it needs is courage, imagination ... and a little dough.”
Charlie Chaplin
“I blame Chaplin for much of it. I was entirely under his spell. We all were. It’s difficult for younger people to get their heads around it. I try to explain it to them by saying he was like our Beatles. Chaplin was all around me all of the time – just like the Beatles were for my kids. I won't say he was bigger than God. But he was friends with Einstein and did hang out with Ghandi, so...
Everything he did was so damned important. He set the agenda for how people were thinking and feeling. Every new film, we’d watch it a dozen times, analyse it, discuss it. And he’d be talking about what was really happening - the Depression, strikes, poverty, child labour, drinking, industrialisation, unemployment, communism, totalitarianism, all of it. And for me, it opened up new thoughts and worlds about what I could do. Just to think he could go to America and get rich and famous, and all that having started in South London, in Victorian schools and workhouse-type places, and with a drunk for a father and a certifiably mad lady as his mother. Incredible, really. He was everything. It really was like that for me with Chaplin’s films when I was a kid. They spoke to me.”
Peter Shure, taped interview with Martin Chambers 1982
The influence of Charlie Chaplin on Peter Shure can hardly be overstated. Chaplin is mentioned in Shure interviews and in his diaries with a regularity that borders on obsession.
He claims to have sneaked into London cinemas as a very young boy to watch every Chaplin film as soon as it came out. The sequence of masterpieces – ‘The Gold Rush’ (1925), ‘The Circus’ (1928) and ‘City Limits’ (1931) - dominated his childhood imagination.
They presented a picture of a lone hero – the Little Tramp – wandering the world, seemingly homeless, desperately seeking the three essentials of the Chaplin universe: food, money… and love.
Here was the consummate clown with a heart, always fighting to retain some kind of dignity in a world of humiliation and hardship. A silent star capable of great feats of pantomime and slapstick who could also produce scenarios and incidents with deep emotional and psychological impact.
It seems almost too obvious to note the similarities between Chaplin’s moments of pathetic stillness in his films and Shure’s ability to sleep on screen. Both men manage to capture something of the mysterious and the universal.
In ‘The Gold Rush’ we several times see Chaplin asleep in the snowbound hut. In ‘The Circus’ he is found early on curled up in a small cart. In ‘City Limits’, our first sight of the Tramp is asleep on the arms of a public monument.
Where Chaplin goes further than Shure is in showing us the dreams and nightmares that sleep may conjure up. The legendary ‘bread on forks’ dance in ‘The Gold Rush’ comes in a moment of fantasy where Charlie can become the life and soul of the party and bewitched the woman he loves. In ‘City Lights’ there are long scenes of drunken oblivion – expensive drinks, fast cars, silly antics - all forgotten the very next day, as if it all had happened in a bad dream.
‘The Circus’ relentlessy works toward a central (and Freudian) anxiety nightmare of Chaplin tightrope-walking with no safety net in front of hundreds of people, only to be attacked by monkeys and have his trousers pulled down, to reveal he is wearing no tights, only baggy underpants.
So strongly did Shure identify with the world that Chaplin presented, he decided from quite early on to change the narrative of his own life to make himself be more like Charlie. Many of the lies and confusions that Peter offered about his past, about his parents and his upbringing can be traced back to Chaplin.
We only have Peter’s word for who his father was, for example. Shure’s story, told in fragments over many years across many interviews, appears to be that his father was a Canadian soldier. Research shows a number of Shure families in Quebec at this time, and almost certainly some of the young men from those families would have enlisted at the beginning of the Great War and found their way to London. But without DNA evidence it's hard to pin down a particular soldier.
In most versions of his tale, Shure characterises his dad as a violent alcoholic, very much like Chaplin’s father. In one interview, Peter revels in an anecdote about his father being arrested outside what he calls ‘the Y’ (presumably the YMCA) for playing dice on the street. Peter claims this led to a sizeable riot between US and Canadian soldiers and the British police.
One can’t help feeling this is precisely the kind of chaotic scene that might swell up around the Little Tramp, akin to the rowdy bar scenes in ‘The Gold Rush’ or the frenetic chase across a fairground in the opening of ‘The Circus’ - police pursuing Chaplin in and out of the hall of mirrors and he consequently causing mayhem and laughter in the middle of a circus performance.
And it is almost certainly not true. By all accounts, Shure’s father disappeared back to Canada before Peter was even born. It is purely an invention of Peter’s that his father might be the kind of chaotic bully that Chaplin pits himself against time and time again. - the Klondike killer, the prize fighter, the love rival, the ringmaster. Not only is it a perfect example of cinema as an engine of personal fantasy (who amongst us has not re-imagined bits of lives as being out of a movie?), but it is a good demonstration of Peter Shure’s consistent intention to construct a Chaplinesque version of himself.
His mother quickly becomes a part of this partial fiction too. Peter sometimes refers to her as a ‘traveller’ who took to working on itinerant fairgrounds once her husband had left her. Peter regularly asserts he has no memory of travelling with his mother and would often claim he was largely left to fend for himself on the streets of London from the age of about five. He paints his mum as an unreliable transient figure in his life - a woman who would spend two thirds of the year on the road.
This can now be proven to be a certifiably false picture of what Peter Shure's mother was like, but it played powerfully into the idea of himself being a little London street urchin - as was Chaplin – running errands, avoiding school and working fairground stalls for pennies.
A favourite anecdote Peter could pull out at the drop of a hat is his claim to have helped run the first fairground stall to be stocked with dozens of empty fishbowls, which one could attempt to throw a ball into and thus win a goldfish. He even developed in later years a smart bit of Chaplin business to go with this story involving balls bouncing out of the bowls and into ladies’ cleavages, and one of Peter’s many uncles and cousins accidentally swallowing a goldfish.
That fairgrounds played a very large part of Peter’s upbringing and journey into adulthood is, perhaps surprisingly, true! Many that knew Peter thought this love of an amusement arcade and a big a top simply came from his obsession with ‘The Circus’. But it turns out he did indeed hail from a large extended family clan of fairground people, initially based across south and east London.
Whilst Peter wanted the world to think this was a rough-tough business for a child to be working in, akin to being stuffed up a chimney or locked up in a blacking factory, the hoopla stall and fairground ride business was, by the time Peter came along in 1919, an established and sometimes respectable line of work. Family operations such as the Tubys, the Silcocks and the Barkers were sizable and legitimate concerns. Fairground managers could rise in their communities to becomes councillors or mayors, and might even benefit from royal visits and even invitations to Buckingham Palace.
The Hayter family to whom Peter was connected operated both in London and in Lincolnshire, most famously at Skegness. Ancestry records also suggest there may be a family connection with the Barkers of Wisbech. Both families were prosperous members of the middle class by the time Peter was born and were aspiring to propel their children even further up the British food chain using private education and business patronage.
We now know his mother - Dorothy Hayter, born 1900 - was, in fact, comfortable enough in terms of money and family support to stop working for the travelling fair once Peter was born. Instead, she took up a concession at the London Olympia fairground and rented a house in Hammersmith for a few years. After that, she moved to Lincolnshire to work at the new Butlins fairground in Skegness, opened in 1927, as did several other members of the Hayter family. There is, therefore, absolutely no firm evidence of hardship in Peter Shure’s childhood and it seems the image of a solitary young man, of no fixed abode and always on the move, ready for the next adventure came from only one place – the movies.
Peter was eight years old when the move to Skegness came. With the benefit of hindsight and some basic research it now seems screamingly obvious that his mother would never have left him in London.
Why everyone around Peter never questioned him about his blatantly false backstory remains a puzzle – although one could ask this question of many fathers.
Many parents - fathers in particular, it could be suggested – do often remain free within a family to tell whatever story they like about themselves. And rarely does any other family member dare to verify or discredit what is being offered as gospel. It’s only after the father has died that the truth often comes out.
As we move into a digital age, with less and less written and photographic evidence available in the form of letters or albums, it's becoming even easier for people to construct a past for themselves that bears little or no relation to the truth. Perhaps Peter Shure was something of a harbinger in this regard.
Tapes held by Martin Chambers (subsequently the subject of a prolonged law suit between Chambers and the Shure family) contain a number of interviews with Peter that reveal a very different story of his youth.
Peter was indeed brought up in a perfectly respectable family home with a loving mother. Yes, he was expected to help out on the fairground concessions when he was small, but newly available internet archive records now show he definitely attended private nurseries and pre-prep schools from an early age. School records also prove to be the key to tracking Peter beyond London, when he moved to Lincolnshire.
In 1927, aged 7, he appears on the entrance records for a small boarding school called ‘Little St Hugh’s Preparatory School for Boys’, situated in a rather remote location between Boston and Grantham. (It no longer exists).
Interviews conducted with Shure’s contemporaries suggest a very traditional environment. The curriculum covered English, French, Maths, History, Latin, Geography, Music and Science. Sport was played four times a week – rugby at Michaelmas term, hockey at Lent term, cricket and athletics in the summer. Meals were served at strict hours in a central refectory. Boys slept in dormitories, sorted according to age, with one older boy appointed as the prefect for each dormitory. Boys were set ‘lines’ as punishment for minor rule infringements, The cane and the slipper were employed by the headmaster for more serious misdemeanours. Assemblies with hymns and prayers took place twice a day, plus attendance was compulsory at Sunday Service every week at the local parish church.
Every boy was expected to have a pocket bible by his bed and a hymn book in his blazer. Casual clothes – overalls, track suits or games clothes - were only allowed on Saturday and Sunday afternoons and evenings, when unsupervised activities were permitted such as den-building, egg -collecting, mass games of British Bulldogs or Kick the Can, billiards and table tennis.
Every other Saturday, a film would be projected onto the gym wall – Bulldog Drummond, the life of Livingstone, reconstructions of the Battles of Ypres and Mons, and, memorably, Chaplin’s 'The Gold Rush'.
Older boys were permitted to bring bicycles to school (if they could afford them) and take them out for rides in the local area on Sundays, usually with a teacher accompanying.
This is the world that Peter Shure grew up in from the age of 7 to 13 and it was he, not his mother, who was absent from the family home for two-thirds of the year.
And these were formative years. Sleeplessness and night-walking appear to be issues for the young Shure when first forced to bed down in a dormitory with a dozen of his peers. Fellow boarder Martin Underwood recalls:
“I remember the deputy head liked to come in each night and open up the windows, whatever the weather. He claimed that cold air was better for us than warm air. I think he was more worried about the terrible honk we could all make in our beds. And Shure was always creeping out of the window and going for a wander. He didn’t blub like the rest of us, and he was good at avoiding the prefect’s slipper that was a regular event, but rather he’d stay in the background, all quiet til most people were asleep and then he'd slip out.
God knows what he got up to. I thought maybe he was sneaking into the kitchens for extra grub. That’s what I would've done, but he never came back with anything. And of course he got nabbed several times by the teachers or matron or the night janitor or whatever.
I think they sent him off to some shrink to get seen to – you know, get him to go to sleep like the rest of us and learn to toe the line. It was funny really because I think it must have worked a bit too well.
I remember once the deputy head coming in to check on us one night – on him, I reckon, and Shure started calling out ‘My finger! My finger!’ over and over as if he was in pain.
And the deputy head went over to him, thinking him awake, and asked him what was wrong with his bally finger. And Shure just sat up bolt upright, held out his finger and said, ‘Say hello to Mister Finger!’
We all rolled about at that and the deputy head didn’t like it one bit, being made a mug of, so he marched Shure out for a caning or the slipper or whatever. But I honestly don’t think he was awake during any of it. I think he was fast asleep. He never admitted to remembering it, that’s for certain. And I don’t remember him doing any more night wandering after that!”
Was Shure really asleep during this ‘finger' episode? Or was this a first attempt at his own version of a Chaplin routine - the equivalent of an false handshake that turns into a thumbing of the nose, the faux politeness of a raised bowler hat followed by a kick in the pants? Perhaps here we find the first signs of Shure using sleep as cover for something subversive and anti-establishment. A way of asserting his individuality and, like Chaplin in ‘Modern Times’, becoming the grit that jams up the machine.
One thing is for certain, for a boy who grew up in and around fairgrounds and circuses, this idea of a silent performer with a romantic and tempestuous inner life, of a young man who had somehow found a way to insulate himself from sadness and humiliation inflicted by his rough tough male peers, of a travelling loner who could always be moving on to new horizons – all of this became embedded in Peter Shure’s psyche. It was as if he was destined for the movies.
