"I don't think any word can explain a man's life"

It turns out Dorothy Hayter had not died in a WW2 air raid, had not been electrocuted on a fairground ride, had not emigrated to Canada, had not run off with a notorious bank robber, had not been murdered by her fascist partner, had not driven over a cliff – all stories Peter had made up for his family and friends at various stages of his life.

Instead, she had been living a quiet life in Skegness. Her chief obsession during all that time was to hoard information about her son – storing up every last scrap of news she could find, from the moment Peter Shure first appeared in the public eye until well after his death in 1990.

The earliest cutting from her vast collection is an article from ‘Motor Sport’ magazine, dated October 1948, in which Peter Shure is named in Harry Lester’s winning MG team at Goodwood in the race for 1100cc open-cockpit sportscars.

The 29-year-old Shure would have witnessed Stirling Moss announcing himself to the world that day and seen Reg Parnell in a Maserati winning the Goodwood Trophy, the first time Formula 1 race to take place on British soil.

Dorothy proved to be obsessive and eagle-eyed when it came to spotting references to Peter. She spots him in the background a photograph of motor engineers working at the Jersey Road Race in April 1949, for example.

Once Peter moved into the movie business he was much easier to find, and Dorothy’s collection reflects the growing interest in his work from 1954 onwards. In the 1960s and 1970s she appears to have found friends abroad who could supply her with Italian and Spanish language movie magazines containing relevant reviews and interviews. There’s also an extremely rare edition of ‘Interview’ magazine, not available in the UK at the time – certainly not in Skegness - in which Peter talks about his relationship with Warhol and other artists of the period.

The sheer range of artefacts in her possession is at times boggling. In 1957 alone, over 60 items have been catalogued gleaned from publications as varied as The Sunday Times, Cahiers du Cinéma, Playboy and Ariel Magazine, as well as publicity materials from The Rank Organisation, Amalgamated Productions and British Lion.

Childhood memorabilia were stored by Dorothy in a separate box. Included in that cache are: short pieces of creative writing from Peter’s schooldays; home-made birthday and Christmas cards; drawings (of motor cars inevitably); photos of various fun-rides and fairgrounds; brochures and posters promoting Butlins holiday camp; cuttings from local newspapers; a number of home-made finger puppets made from felt and wool.

Pointedly there are very few letters from Peter to his mother – just one dated 1944, and a further two dated post-1945. There is also one letter from Helen Grosvenor to Dorothy dating from early 1967. (She kept a cutting from the Times announcing Peter’s divorce from Helen.) 

For researchers, biographers and general cinephiles looking for complete coverage of the events surrounding Peter Shure’s death, Dorothy Hayter’s hoard is hard to beat. Every newspaper article, every interview, every conspiracy theory that was ever published appears to be here. A first edition of Martin Chambers’s memoir is included in the collection, as is a number of articles by the film maker, Devon. Surprisingly, Dorothy even started to collect punk and rock music magazines that included material about Christopher Shure. Quite how and where she sourced these magazines is unclear. 

Could we think of this obsessive tracking as an act of love, of adoration? Or was it simply the collector’s addiction to completeness and control? Perhaps, the lack of direct contact  - at Peter’s insistence - drove his mother to find a different way to be close to him.

The size and scope of Dorothy’s collection is, some might say, a monument to Peter’s cruelty in excommunicating his mother so completely and attempting to erase her from his history.

He did send her money regularly – a monthly stipend that paid the mortgage on her house and covered most of her living expenses. This paid for her silence, no doubt, and allowed Peter to tell whatever lies he liked. It may also have helped to muffle any guilt he may have felt about being a less than dutiful and loving son.

Over the years, Peter was always adamant that Dorothy had never loved him, hadn’t supported him the way that he wanted. He’d sometimes would go as far to say how good it was to be an orphan. Only a small coterie knew the truth that she was alive and well in Skegness – the two Martins, Helen, Bob Cowell, Donald Pleasance possibly, others who had died in car crashes or assassinations. But not the children, Isabella and Chris. They were never told anything their grandmother except that ‘you wouldn’t have liked her’ and that she was ‘a mad old lady’.

Peter Shure would not be the first actor to have had a troubling relationship with his mother (she was a single parent let’s remind ourselves). His great hero Chaplin would be a prize example, although he was always solicitious about providing his mother with medical care and seeing her when he felt he could. He certainly never denied her existence.

Coming from nowhere, coming from out of the war with a new sense of self and a forgetting of what he had been before was of ultimate importance to Peter. More important that anyone suspected until Dorothy’s horde came to light.

Her collection could now be seen as something of a metaphor for how all childrens’ lives are, to some extent, curated - and even defined by - parents. Peter was forever rebelling against this idea. Nobody was allowed to define Peter Shure or decide what he was to be like apart from Peter himself  and, one might suggest, the audiences that watched him asleep on the screen.

When we watch Peter asleep we can project our own ideas on to him about where he comes from, what he is like, what he is dreaming of. It was an important part of his mystique, his power, that Peter was not easy to know. what better way to maintain that power of people than to erase any hint of a specific and prosaic truth?

For, in the end, where would be the mystery of a sleeping man if we knew everything about him? What if we could only imagine him dreaming of a plain pebble-dashed semi-detached Skegness home and a dear old mum seated at a table with blue-rinse hair and a floral housecoat, earnestly and carefully employing her embroidery scissors to cut out yet another precious article from the latest magazine?