The Biographer

The Battle For The Ardennes

‘The Battle for the Ardennes‘ was to be Shure's last major role in the US for 12 years, and the movie didn’t even make it into the cinemas.

Shooting was abandoned after just three weeks, due to spiralling costs and the lead, Burt Lancaster, walking off the set over disagreements with the director.

This was a classic band of brothers WW2 movie - popular at the time - based loosely on accounts of Ernest Hemingway’s macho adventures in France and Germany in 1944/45.

Shure was one of six soldiers and a war reporter banded together into a troop and tasked with clearing an area of wood held by elite force of German stormtroopers.

The script is a lazy melange of war movie clichés – think ‘The Magnificent Seven’ or ‘The Dirty Dozen’ meets ‘The Battle of the Bulge’ meets ‘A Bridge Too Far’. The running ‘gag’ of the movie is that the team becomes known as the Seven Dwarves, with Shure inevitably being cast as ‘Sleepy’.

The casting was ambitious. And, as it turned out, impossible. Fellow Brit Donald Pleasance was to play Bashful – a boon for Shure since both men were friendly, having spent time in the same German prison camp during the war.

The casting director wanted to take a punt on a couple of other up-and-coming Brits - Tom Courtney (Dopey) and Ian Holm (Grumpy) – but neither of them would turn up on set before the film had collapsed, due to theatre commitments.

Correspondence in the Warner archive suggests Sidney Poitier was being sought out for the role of Happy, but by then he was too big a name to attach to a movie that everyone knew was troubled. Sneezy was never formally cast, although Jerry Lewis claims to have been offered the role.

Shure’s diaries suggest the two weeks that he had on set were harmonious and, for him, creatively successful. His big scene was, naturally, his death scene. Lucky for us, it was filmed early in the schedule and a copy of it resides in the archives of the American University, Washington D.C.

Given that Pleasance and Shure were the only two lead actors who’d actually turned up for the opening week of shooting, it was decided to film their scenes first with the vague hope that the others would arrive shortly. Within days, we can see from the script revisions it had been decided to boost Pleasance and Shure’s roles in order to be able to keep filming something. These revisions were the source of Lancaster’s initial displeasure that quickly led to him abandoning the project.

In fact, Shure himself was getting fed up with being typecast and wrote a note to the director about how his death scene was too long and, even so, left him with few lines. “I am, yet again, being asked to lie around with my eyes closed whilst Donald et al. get the opportunity to run around, shout, emote, laugh, cry etc. I am actor too. Let me ACT.”

His pleas fell on deaf ears. The scene is indeed long, and Shure spends a lot of the time unconscious and then dead. It starts with Shure being found in a wood by Pleasance. Shure is leaning up against a tree, his army jacket soaked with blood. He has been fatally wounded whilst attempting to disable a German tank.  

Pleasance attempt to give him some water from a flask. Shure splutters and coughs.

SHURE

Did I get it? Did I…?

Pleasance looking around nervously. He's aware that the tank is intact and nearby. There is the sound of gun blasts and explosions. Pleasance flinches. He knows he's in a tight spot.

PLEASANCE

Please don’t worry about that.

SHURE

But did I…?

PLEASANCE

Yes, yes. You did it, Sleeper. You did it. Keep your voice down, will you?

Gun fire gets nearer. Pleasance turn s to see enemy soldiers advancing through the trees.

PLEASANCE

Christ!

He momentarily steels himself, overcomes his Bashful nature and opens fire with his machine gun with Shure semi-conscious by his side.

SHURE

A medal… That would be nice...

Shure drifts off with a dreamy look of satisfaction on his face. Pleasance is to busy holding off the enemy to notice.

PLEASANCE

I think it's time we got ourselves out of here.

Pleasance engages the enemy again with his machine gun. All the time we can see the unconscious Shure in frame, as magnetic as usual in his death pose. Pleasance is frantic now. He doesn’t notice his friend is dead. After more gun fire, he knows he’s outnumbered and turns to Shure

PLEASANCE

Sleeper, we've got to move... Sleeper...? Sleeper...?

Shure is dead. Pleasance pauses for the briefest moment, struck like the rest of us at how compellingly still and lifeless Shure is. More gunfire. A bullet ricochets off the tree.

PLEASANCE

Christ...

Pleasance fires off one more volley of machine gun blast then turns and runs. The camera holds on Shure’s dead body for a few seconds more. An enemy tank crashes through the trees.

ENDS

The end close-up image of Shure lifeless against the tree was later immortalised by Andy Warhol as one his famous multicoloured screen prints. Another example of Warhol finding Shure's performances to be endlessly inspiring. Or as Shure would see it - "Andy should give me a bit more credit for his career, frankly. He's made more money out of sleep than I have!"


Half stupid, half drunk, and half asleep

"the people of Great Britain always are half stupid, half drunk, and half asleep"

Catherine Macauley

By 1967, Shure was divorced and supposedly fancy-free. But his diaries show a man who felt trapped and uncertain about what the future could bring.

“I have become pigeon-holed. They call me the ‘Sleep Artist’. I am only ever hired to lie down and close my eyes. Play dead. Yes, I am well paid for my contributions. One scene in ‘A Man For All Seasons’ last year covered all the lawyers fees and kept me fed for months. So I am comfortable. BUT BORED”

Shure is being disingenuous at this point. London was an interesting place to come back to, much changed from the city he’d left in 1959. There were plenty of ways of not being bored.

He can be seen in dozens of photographs of the period, shmoozing and boozing with film producers, pop stars, fashion designers, gallery owners, fine artists and avant-garde writers.  There are also several sets of slides and some short home movie clips showing Shure with his children on seaside trips, at the zoo, occasionally abroad.

He could still afford to keep a small apartment in New York, spend time in Paris staying with friends, and maintain a relatively large house and garden in Twickenham where the children could stay.

What he clearly wasn’t doing was working. Or rather he wasn’t working in the movie business anymore.

In the last knockings of his time in California, Peter had been keeping company with artists and poets rather than movie people. A famous friendship in the early 60s with Dennis Hopper had brought him many connections.

A chance encounter with a fellow POW camp survivor drawn him even deeper into the West Coast arts community. Shure and poetry professor Mark Linenthal Junior had bonded over a love of EM Forster whilst enduring the privations of Stalag Luft 1. (Quite why there were so many copies of EM Forster in the prison camp library remains a mystery).

Mark was not a natural member of the Californian counter-culture. He was the same age as Shure and had been brought up in a relatively conservative family, educated at Harvard and developed a life-long passion for the outdoors and hunting. The two men enjoyed long weekends up in the far north of California stalking deer and elk, sometimes in the company of Norman Mailer, an old college friend of Linenthal's . (interesting aside - Shure famously shared these hunting stories with ‘The Deerhunter’ director Michael Cimino whilst making Kool cigarettes ads).

 The second Mrs Lilenthal – feminist poet Frances Jaffer – changed things for Mark spectacularly and, by association, for Peter too. It’s fair to say this younger, more ‘turned on’ generation of artists wasn’t a community that Peter felt a natural affinity for. He was perhaps just a bit too old to entirely embrace the counterculture. He had fought in the war believing that he was fighting for established institutions. His tastes were formed in a POW camp and then by the patriotic films and music of the late 1940s and early 1950s. Francis Bacon and Henry Moore were his artistic heroes. He often judged people in his diaries as whether they knew anything at all about Noel Coward. Very few of Jaffer’s circle knew who Coward was.

Nevertheless, the Californian crowd appear to have been fascinated by Peter and his ability to sleep in a compelling way. In part, it was his association with Warhol that gave Shure kudos. This always annoyed him, given his ongoing love-hate relationship with Warhol. But it didn’t deter him from agreeing to appear in works of the time. It is highly likely - though never confirmed - that the male figure in one of Gunvor Nelson’s most famous works of that period is Shure, for example.

The work is a companion piece to Nelson’s better-known work ‘Moon’s Pool’. It is shot in the same swimming pool and has a similar aesthetic. Shot under water, instead of two bodies – a man and a woman, turning, writhing and colliding – there is just the one male body, passively floating, sinking and rising in what is supposedly moonlit pool.

The body is filmed close up and is very still, as if the swimmer is pretending to be dead or unconscious, or perhaps is in a moment of trying to quietly drown himself. The soundtrack is the sound of water, mixed with other found environmental sounds and a few unintelligible whispered words.  The film lasts 15 minutes and the face of the swimmer is never fully revealed.

Fans of the work talk of its dream-like qualities and the sense of death as a return to the womb, a state where we all are floating, silent and dumb, half-asleep, half-alive in a small universe of mother fluid. Others have dismissed it as ‘cornball late-hippie psychedelia”. Linenthal rather unkindly, whilst trying to be funny one assumes, cited the work as evidence that “women artists can have dumb guy energy too”.

Shure never admitted to being the drowning man in this work, but he certainly became very engaged with video and performance art.

During this period, he moved regularly between New York and London and in both cities he’s mixing with up-and-coming talent of the period.

He can be spotted briefly in Stan Brakhage’s ‘Deus Ex’ lying in a hospital bed. The two men went on to collaborate several times on series of short films in the 1970s. In Brakhage’s ‘The Text of Light’ series, in which everything is shot through the multi-coloured glass of an ashtray, it is possible occasionally to spot the blurred and abstract shape of Shure. It’s suggested by some that the ashtray was found by Shure in a Paris bar and given to Brakhage as a gift. A few years later Brakhage filmed a whole series of very short experimental films using the ill-fated Polavision camera, with Shure as his subject. The whereabout of these films is currently unknown.

In London, Shure can be spotted in several of Richard Hamilton’s works, always with his face covered. In one, Hamilton supposedly captures the moment when Shure is told that Andy Warhol had been shot.

Shure is in Paris during 1968 and photographed supposedly propped up against a wall on a street whilst all around him students riot, burning cars and hurling paving stones. Above him wall is sprayed the slogan ‘REVEUR EVEILLE!'

Shure also worked with Chris Burden on the idea of sleeping in an art gallery as some form of endurance art. Burden had the simple idea of leaning a large sheet of glass against a gallery wall and placing a clock above it. Shure was to lie down behind the glass and sleep or play dead for as long as possible - or rather, as long as the gallery curators would allow.

It was Burden’s plan that Shure should stay behind the glass all day and not get up even when the gallery formally closed. He was meant to stay there all night if needs be, and the next day, not taking any food or water, waiting for the point when the gallery would intervene and stop the show. In one set of surviving documentation there is the suggestion that Shure would ‘wake’ and smash the glass before exiting the building.

Shure was definitely keen on this piece, so much so that he attempted to pass it off as his own and approached several London galleries about performing it. When Burden got wind of this in New York, he kicked up rough, firing off several lawyer’s letters and asserting his ownership in several magazine interviews.

In Shure’s diaries he uses the excuse to desist from pursuing the gallery installation idea of being worried that his sleeping skills would not translate into a live environment and always worked best on celluloid and in video projection. But the truth is that Shure was yet again under something of a cloud, gaining a bad reputation around town and in need of yet another act of re-invention. 


I can sleep anywhere.

Of Peter Shure’s parentage we are unsure. Born in 1919, and with no birth certificate or other family records to be found, we only have Peter’s word for who his mother and father were.

His 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 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 sizable riot between US and Canadian soldiers and the British police. Peter would have only just been born at this point, so where he got this story from is unclear. The insinuation is that quite soon after this incident his father abandoned his mother and went back to Canada never to be seen again.

Peter’s mother is no less elusive. A maternal uncle is mentioned as being some kind of father figure to Peter during his teens, with the surname Hayter. But we find no record of a woman called Hayter giving birth in 1919.

Peter sometimes refers to his mother 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. Who cared for him at this point is not clear. The suggestion is that the Hayter family may have been an extended clan across south and east London that Peter could feel safe with. Certainly he has strong memories of helping to run stalls and concessions at various fairgrounds and circuses throughout the late 1920s and early 1930s. Another 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.

Quite how Peter learned to read and write and generally acquire an education is, again, unclear. Certainly he was a keen reader. During his internment in a POW camp during WW2, he claimed to have read every book that ever came into the camp - which his fellow ‘Kriegies’ can attest to. In childhood, he tells us he liked to visit libraries (possibly true) and read every Dickens novel in order (unlikely). His facility for maths, he claimed, came from the stalls – working out what to charge, what change to give, what to pay for a concession and so on. There were obviously some attempts to send him to school, and a couple of times it seems the authorities picked him up and sent him to some kind of workhouse or reform school in South London. But he would regularly run away from these institutions and disappear back into the fairground world.

He makes no reference to having any friends throughout this time and certainly no siblings. The sense is that he was either wandering the streets of London making his own entertainment, or working on fairground stalls when he badly needed to eat and find a place to sleep. He rarely saw his mother except when she returned to London after each tour of the provinces. During various interviews and conversation in his later years, Peter is often tempted to wonder if she was his mother at all, or could have been a sister, an aunt or a niece for all he knew. He certainly asserts strongly throughout his life that he felt no real connection to his mother and, perhaps, as his own life became more prosperous and sophisticated, he felt a certain amount of snobbish antipathy towards her. Certainly he developed his own narrative about why he never tried to reconnect with his mother or track her down after WW2.

"When I returned from the war I considered myself to be an orphan. I went to the part of East London where my mother’s family came from, and it had been completely flattened by German bombs – not a single building had survived on the terrace I might have called home. And everyone who had lived there had either perished or moved away with no forwarding address.

I made some basic efforts to find out what happened to my mother, but it seems the records relating to her existence also perished during the Blitz. She may have survived. I don't know. But did she really want me to find her? I don’t think so. I was filled with the idea that I could start again after the war and re-invent myself. So why wouldn’t she feel the same? I like to think she did exactly that. She let her traveller heritage rule her, perhaps, and went forever roaming. I think that’s a rather lovely thought, and great way to think of my mother out there on the road, feeling free and in control of her life. It’s a better memory than the more likely scenario, of her being trapped, perhaps maimed, in a basement after a bomb blast with the mains water rising all around her."

Peter had already more or less said goodbye to his mother much earlier than 1946  when, at the age of 15, he takes off to Skegness with his uncle in order to work full time at the Butlins fairground and newly launched holiday camp.

Peter clearly loved this time of his life. It was in Skegness that he discovered his facility for electrical engineering and generally tinkering with machinery. By the age of 17 he was in charge of maintaining the dodgems and making sure the lights stayed on across the park. There is a sense that he was protected at this point by his uncle and the sense of security that came from that helped Peter to thrive.

If there’s one place that Peter Shure might think of as home, it would be Skegness. And if the war hadn’t come, it’s likely Peter would have made his way up the management chain at Butlins to become a site manager or head of department overseeing several Butlins camps. [insert research about Skegness in 1936...]

But the war did come and Peter saw it coming earlier than most. At least, he decided he wanted to be part of the action and in 1938, a few weeks after his eighteenth birthday, he applied to join the RAF. His practical engineering  and organisational skills made it easy for him to get in. And having joined more than a year before the war started, he was one of the few working class kids to get the opportunity to fast track into the officer programme.

He became known within his squadron as a quiet but rather tough man, who remained quite distant from most other people but was reliable in a jam, always on time and prepared, and notably brave. Obviously, a life on the streets must have toughened him up and perhaps desensitised him to anything going on around him. One can only imagine some the violence and deprivation he must have witnessed at a very young age. He boldly claimed that he’d seen many dead people on the streets of London before the Second World War that helped him cope with seeing people die around him whilst he was in the RAF, and again when interned in the camp in Germany.

It's also his rough childhood that, in part, allowed him to develop one of his oft-repeated catchphrases: “I can sleep anywhere.”

Peter’s journey, therefore, was one of impressive self-reliance, resilience and self-improvement. To travel from being a London street urchin to an officer in the RAF in just 15 years tells you something about Peter’s abilities and ambition.  It mirrors, in part, the childhood of one of his great heroes, Charlie Chaplin, and it’s certain that Chaplin’s life progression always convinced Peter there would always be a way up and forward, through consistent optimism, energy and self-education. Perhaps also in the back of his mind, Shure was also thinking of a way to ultimately end up in the film business like Chaplin.

That must have felt like a very distance dream whilst servicing a grubby bumper car in a high North sea wind in 1937 on the edge of the world at Skegness. How could he foresee that a chance friendship in that German POW camp would lead to his first role in a film just eleven years later, two years after the war had ended?


Little St Hugh’s Preparatory School for Boys 1927-32

Thanks to documents that have come into the public domain since his death, it’s now clear that Peter Shure’s childhood was very different from the picture he liked to paint in interviews.  In his early years, he most definitely was not the Chaplinesque ‘street urchin’ he pretended to be all his life. 

The section of this book entitled ‘I can sleep anywhere’ has been left in this edition as one of several reminders that Peter Shure’s life is in no sense a single clear linear narrative, and his own narration of his life is not to be trusted.

He lied repeatedly about his past not just to the press but to his family and friends, to his own children even. At times when writing this saga it feels as if the only honest and straightforward moments in his life were when he was asleep.

Yes, his father is likely to have been a Canadian soldier called Shure, who he never met. Yes, his family on his mother’s side were indeed fairground people, but in the 1920s this wasn’t always the shady semi-lawless profession that Peter Shure liked to tell everyone it was.

Family operations such as the Tubys, the Silcocks and the Barkers had all become respectable businesses. 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.

Shure is most dishonest when it comes to talking about his mother. He paints her as an unreliable transient figure in his life - a woman who would spend two thirds of the year on the road with the fair, leaving Peter either with extended family or sometimes just leaving him to fend for himself.

Shure even goes as far to suggest his mother was not his mother – but perhaps his sister or an aunt. He had absolutely no proof of this. And we now know his mother actually stopped 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, it is likely she moved back to Lincolnshire to work at the new Butlins fairground in Skegness, opened in 1927, as did several other members of the Hayter family.

Peter was eight years old at this point. With the benefit of hindsight and some basic research it now seems screamingly obvious that his mother would never have left him in London. And the truth is she didn’t. Why everyone around Peter never questioned him about his blatantly false backstory remains a puzzle – although one could ask this question of many fathers. Most mothers and fathers  - fathers in particular – seem to be free to sell a story about themselves to their families that nobody ever bothers to verify or discredit.

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, it seems, 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 Shure’s personal assistant, unknown to the family at the time of this book’s first publication, contain a number of interviews with Peter that reveal a very different story of his youth.

This was not a tale of hardship and mean streets. Far from it. Peter was 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 he appears on the entrance records for a small boarding school called ‘Little St Hugh’s Preparatory School for Boys’, which appears to have been 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 on to the gym wall – Bulldog Drummond, the life of Livingstone, reconstructions of the Battles of Ypres and Mons, and, memorably for those interviewed, 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 8 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 an 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 terribly 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 battering 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!”


‘Gah, matey, you want more grog?’

"Milk! I've been poisoned!"

Robert Newton (as ) in Long John Silver

 

Peter Shure often liked to give the director Guy Green the credit for getting him into the movies.

When he graduated from cinematographer to director, Green seemed to be drawn to films with a lot of machinery in it – bank robber movies with plenty of cars and vans, war movies with planes and tanks. Shure’s experience as a mechanic and engineer, plus his association after the war with a racing car shop in Egham – conveniently near the big British studios - meant he was the perfect man to help Green source and maintain whatever hardware he might need.

By 1952, Shure was becoming indispensable to Green, to the point he was being flown out to exotic locations as a key member of the production team - sorting out fleets of lorries, getting old tanks back into working order, reviving aeroplanes that had been left to rot since 1945. For Shure, it was a natural step up from the fairground repairs and dodgem maintenance he’d been responsible for in his youth.

When Green pivoted away to period movies, pirate movies, old naval adventures and even Robin Hood type ventures, he still kept Shure close. There were no cars, but there was still a lot of engineering on the sets: elaborate boat scenes with lots of moving parts, canons firing, swinging ropes, collapsing masts;  castle scenes with hidden trampolines, cascading barrels, exhausting horse stunts.

“And then one day we’re shooting a boat scene,” recalled Green in an interview just before his death, “I can’t even remember which film it was – and I say to Peter: ‘Can you stand in?’"

 “I felt strongly at the time that we needed someone half-way up a mast waving a sword for the shot to really work. I was instinctive like that – or bloody-minded, take your pick. So I told him – ‘Go over to costume and get them to deck you out, and we’ll stick you up that mast.’ So quick as a flash, of course, he said ‘I’m not getting paid to do any acting’, and I just said ‘Hop it. You are now!’.  To his credit he ran off and was back in less than 30 minutes  -and I have to say I thought he rather stole the show.”

From then on, Green would always find a small non-speaking part for Shure, that would ensure that he always doubled his pay for the day. He became known as ‘Green’s Hitch’ for always turning up somewhere in a silent cameo role - as a merry man lounging on a tree branch, or a lazy pirate supping rum in a quayside inn. At one point Shure was signed up to appear in the background of a prisoner of war movie, without anyone realising he had actually been in a prison camp. At one point, Shure plucked up the courage to tell Green that he’d got something wrong about how a shot was set up and how the camp looked. Green blew up: ‘So you’re a director now as well as an actor and a sparkie are you?!’.

Only later did Green find out that Shure had actually been a kriegie. He apologised in front of the whole crew and appointed Peter as a special consultant on the spot. Shure was now tripling his pay on every shoot. Coincidentally, a few years later, exactly the same thing happened to Shure's friends and fellow kriegie Donald Pleasance on the set of ‘The Great Escape’.

Finally, the time came for Shure to attempt a speaking part. It wasn’t, though, in a Guy Green film. Rather, it was a vehicle for Robert Newton playing his usual louche drunken charismatic, always delivering his lines with a familiar Charles Laughton drawl. The story was a sub-Graham Greene tale of an English diplomat abroad, becoming embroiled in tribal politics on an island far way, whilst battling with the bottle. It was initially meant to be a comedy, but the director Muriel Box injected some seriousness into the film with the introduction of a female missionary, designed to be both Newton’s love interest and a spokesperson for the rights of indigenous peoples still under the yoke of British imperialism in the guise of the Commonwealth.

Shure has been loaned out to sort the many boats used in the film. He then filled in as one of the villagers (inappropriately blacked up) in a scene where Newton is laughing and drinking with the locals, then getting into a row with the difficult but beautiful missionary, played by Glynis Johns.

All that was required of the extras was to pass a bottle around, laugh along with Newton, witness the row and then get back to drinking and singing with Newton at the end of the scene. And this is indeed the scene as we see it in the final film.

But in the first take  - now archived at the University of Texas Film Archive – Shure takes it upon himself near the end of the scene  to say the immortal line: ‘Gah, matey, you want more grog?’. We then hear the director shout ‘cut’ forcefully and just before the film stops we see her appear in the frame clearly intent on berating the extras.

Shure’s improvisation had consequences. Box was so infuriated she made it her business to see that Shure didn’t work on any of her films ever again. Newton, however, was intrigued by Shure’s choice of line and the way he said it. He insisted the two men have a long and boozy dinner together, during which Newton demanded that Shure teach him how to ‘talk like a pirate’. The seeds of Long John Silver were thus sown and the whole tradition of piratical talk in the movies had its genesis

Despite Muriel Box’s displeasure, Shure ‘s strong male friendships guaranteed that he would continue to win more and more bit-parts. Donald Pleasance would always put in a good word for him, but it was Marius Goring in particular who helped develop Shure’s career as an actor.

As well as working on films in the late 1940s and early 1950s, Shure also moonlighted at the Arts Theatre in Central London, sorting out lighting, painting sets and even unblocking the toilets if required. All in all, it was very much like helping out at the holiday camp in Skegness, so Shure felt very much at home.  

Goring certainly took a shine to him and would always put him up for small parts in any film he was in. He can be seen in many war and spy films of the time – in which Goring mainly plays haughty German officers, dodgy foreign professors or suspicious spymasters. Shure is always limited to a few lines and is generally unremarkable. But he made good use of his passport into a world of famous actors and actresses, developed a reputation for being dependable, personable and useful on set, so by 1956 he was ready to take on larger parts.

In reality, only one major part ever came his way – ‘After The Fall’. It failed to make his name despite his name appearing for the first time above the title. After that, he continued to get parts, but a lead role would forever elude him.

His downfall – like greater screen actors such as John Gilbert before him – was his voice. Robert Newton had thought that Peter Shure has been putting on a voice when he famously gave his first unbidden and ultimately excised line in the Muriel Box feature. But his voice truly was a mixture of pirate, pre-war car mechanic and Noel Coward. It grated, lacked tone and gravitas, and audiences decided quite early on that it wasn’t nice to listen to.

Much as Peter Shure had aspirations to make it in the talkies, his ultimate destiny lay in being silent.


"The glory of nature and a life of shared purpose with a beloved woman are a natural pair"

"They enchant all the ladies and steal all the scenes/With their up, tiddlee up, up/They go down, tiddlee down, down"

In 1965 Peter called time on America and announced to his wife, Helen, that he was coming home for good.

Helen did not receive this news with unalloyed joy. She had become quite used to a life of independence in London. Yes, there had been the struggle of bringing up a baby without the day-to-day support of a husband. But it’s clear from her letters to Peter that she was not immediately sure she wanted Peter back full-time.

Peter reacted to her diffidence with surprise. He had assumed he could walk in and out of his wife’s life whenever he pleased. He was, after all, nearly twenty years older then her, and perhaps still held some pre-war prejudices about how wives should behave. There was also more than a strong hint in his letters that he believed reviving his career back in Europe would require Helen to hitch her star more closely to his wagon, professional speaking.

Peter’s letters talk in some detail about how he and Helen should be thinking of developing projects together. He expresses strong views about any work that Helen is being offered.

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For example, he flatly forbids her at one point to take a role in Godard’s ‘Le Pierrot Le Fou’. With Richard Burton being considered for the lead, Peter asserted that Helen would be overshadowed and out of her depth. When the lead role finally went to Belmondo, Peter wrote:

“That man is out entirely for himself, to get whatever he can, while he can. I see these Belmondo types wherever I go these days, and that kind of man is capable of anything. Martin [his agent] and others want to tell me he represents something ‘tough yet vulnerable, an attractive alternative to all that neurotic stumbling and slurring of the Brandos and the Newmans, but honestly, Helen, you would find very quickly that he only takes care of one thing. And, no, it’s not you. It’s himself.”

In all honesty, Peter was worried that Belmondo might very well take care of his leading lady. And there is a sense in Peter at this time of a growing possessiveness about Helen – hypocritical as that may be, given the rumours about his own ongoing flirtation with Ursula Andress (who of course ended up in a long term relationship with… Belmondo!).

In a sense the return to the UK was Peter attempting to reassert his authority not just over his marriage, but also over the British and European film industry, using some of his wife’s reflected glory as one of his ways of impressing casting directors and producers.

Helen certainly resented being used in this way. Yes, she wanted the marriage to work – but not at the expense of everything she had created for herself whilst Peter sunned himself in California.

A good example of how tricky things were between the couple can be seen in a letter written by Helen in October 1965, just a few weeks before Peter would finally leave LA for good. It demonstrates how Peter was trying to involve himself in Helen’s affairs more deeply and intrusively, and how she tries to resist. And yet it also shows Helen’s genuine attempt to make things work between the two of them.

Alas, the reality of being in the same country and in the same house, together for more than a few days at a time, turned out to be too much for both of them. For the first few months they both pretended to be madly in love with each other again. They then pretended passionately to hate each other, as if auditioning for ‘Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf’ (which by all reports they did…). And within two years of this letter having been written, the couple were divorced. 

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Peter

There really is no need for you to be my knight in shining armour over this Schlesinger business. I am entirely capable of looking after myself. I have been rather forced into a state of self-dependency due to your long absences. Now that you’ve announced you’ll be coming home, please do not expect to walk in and immediately assume the role of an authoritarian pater familias. This is not the 1950s anymore.

I have telephoned John and let him know my feelings about the film. He freely admitted that Julie’s performance was informed by his knowledge of me, and by the work we did together when I misleadingly thought the part was mine. But he doesn’t think it was in any way cruel, and ultimately – he said – it’s not recognisable as me, since it was a portrait of any number of women he knew. Not that the company of women is what he seeks, as we both know.

Yes, I am still angry. I sense they’re all laughing behind my back – all the queers – Dirk, Laurance, John. They all must have had a great laugh telling Julie about my mannerisms, my turn of phrase, my way of dressing. It’s so very obvious when you know. Admit it, as soon as you saw the film, you must have noticed. It’s not even that it’s a mean portrayal of me, it’s more that it shows me and women like me as rather two-faced, hedonistic and selfish. You may say I have some of those qualities – but why pick on me? Did John think I was so bloody awful to work with?!

I put a lot of effort into preparing for that part. So to have it whisked away because he’d had his head turned by ‘Billy Liar’ was insulting. As far as I understand it, she’d been thrown off ‘Dr No’ for being no good. But then you’d know more about that than I, given your reported friendship with Ursula!

Anyway, there really is nothing to be gained by you berating him too. Schlesinger is very much on the way up, and who knows when he might have a part for you, or me, or both of us. We do after all have to thank him for work on ‘The Four Just Men’. I know you’ve never been a fan of TV, but for me that was a very good stepping stone. Without television work I’d be nowhere by now. Or rather I’d be sitting at home with Isabelle on my knee waiting for you to send money from LA. You should be glad that I’ve managed, to a large extent, to be financially independent. We’ve never argued about money and I’m not about to start now.

Anyway, the good news there is one project Martin C has put under my nose that might end up being something we could do together (Did you put him up to it, I ask myself?)

You no doubt remember Annakin? You told me you fell out with him many moons ago about him stealing some idea of yours to set a film in a holiday camp. I imagine you’re rankling as you read this, given how long and hard you can hold a grudge. But he is about to go into production with a rather funny film about the early days of flying, all based around a race across the Channel.

The idea is that each contestant in the race is a particular nationality or has a particular personality trait, so it’s very much an ensemble piece. Martin seems to think we could play a couple -  you would have trouble staying awake in the cockpit of our plane and I have to become a bit of a Amy Johnson figure to make sure we stay in the race. There is the idea that maybe in the end we both fall asleep and fly off indefinitely to the North Pole by mistake – or something.

I’m not making this sound very good, but by all reports a number of good people have signed up and our part of the script could be very funny. For you it would be chance to meet a lot of people quickly and get yourself plugged in, as it were. Anyway, you can ask Martin all about it when you get back, if he hasn’t briefed you already.  

I hope this shows you that I do want to try and make this work between us, Peter, and help you to be a happier person. These past few years I have disciplined myself to keep the pilot light on in our marriage. I hope you can see that. I am not yet 30, so there is plenty of time for a restart, and a new life where we actually try to like each other, even to love each other again. I am sure that if we spend more time together I can learn to love you. Can you learn to love me?

Your wife

Helen


Gold, explosives and sleep in a deep dark cave: 1940-42

“Sleep is one part of human performance modification where significant breakthroughs could have national security consequences”

If Peter Shure is to be believed, he spent the first two years of the war living in a cave.

War records do not entirely match Peter’s story. There are, though, redactions and omissions within the public record that allow an active imagination to fill in the gaps.

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Between January 1940 and March 1942 Shure is listed as a low-ranking engineer stationed at the newly built RAF Stafford. This was a non-flying base dedicated to equipment maintenance and parts storage. The base’s motto was ‘Instumenta Fundamenta’ - 'Supplies are the Foundations'.

Given Peter’s background as a fairground mechanic and his training at Cranwell, it’s no surprise to find him working at the heart of the RAF’s increasingly complex logistics network. His encyclopaedic knowledge of mechanical components is something he always prided himself on. After the war, he was known as ‘the walking manual’ at the burgeoning motor racing works where he worked with his friend Bob Cowell. At Stafford, with its growing network of vast warehouses, stuffed with aeroplane parts, one could assume Peter would have been happy as a sandboy.

And yet, Peter claimed many times in interviews after the war that he was not in the Staffordshire region simply to sign equipment in and out of the base. Rather he was involved in what he liked to call ‘top secret’ research.

There was indeed a lot of ‘hush-hush’ activity going on in that part of the world in the early years of the war. The Bank of England and the main clearing banks, for example, were moved to near Stoke in order to protect Britain’s financial systems from being pummelled and compromised by the Blitz in London. Thousands of workers moved into the area, processing sometimes more than a million cheques every day. It was rumoured, too, that Britain’s gold reserves were moved at the same time and hidden in local caves.

Nearby there was also a large munitions factory: ROF Swynnerton. This, alongside the financial centre, was another very tightly guarded place. shrouded in secrecy. In some local stories the caves are mentioned as a place where highly combustible materials might have been stored for safe keeping - although it seems highly unlikely that the country’s gold would have been hidden away alongside a horde of nitro-glycerine.

The important thing to note is the presence of the caves, since this is where Peter Shure claims he spent most of his time in 1940 and 1941. And what was he doing there? Peter Shure claims this is where he was officially paid, for the first time in his life, to sleep.

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Referring back to the war records from the period, it is very hard to find any evidence of sleep research being carried out in the UK by the Government. But we can almost certainly be sure it was. Finding ways to keep soldiers and air crew awake and alert for long periods of time was deemed by many within the War Office to be of critical importance.  

In an armed forces report written in 1938, as Britain was starting to think about the many different ways it needed to prepare for war, it is stated:

“If the German army were to have a significant sleep advantage over us, this would pose a serious threat… the manipulation and understanding of human sleep is one part of human performance modification where significant breakthroughs could have national security consequences.”

Everybody knew at the time that Britain’s soldiers were destined to suffer severe sleep deprivation in the coming years. Britain’s air force, in particular, was expecting to be on high alert 24 hours a day, seven days a week, leading to a cohort of very sleepy, very stressed pilots.  The kind of performance degradation this could lead to could have been devastating.

Casualty rates, for example, could be seen to depend strongly on how well and how long fighters slept. It’s estimated in one research paper of the time that casualty rates might be reduced by as much as 20 per cent if a way was found to reduce the impact on human performance of sleep deprivation.

Not surprisingly, military commanders took an interest in this kind of statistic. But their response wasn’t necessarily to allow troops to get a better night’s sleep. Far from it. Given that regular sleep on the battlefield, and at the ever-ready airfields, was unlikely to be possible anyway, the plan was not to ensure more sleep, but to try to enhance a soldier’s ability to perform better with less sleep.

As the research paper mentioned above goes on to say:

“Suppose a human could be engineered who slept for the same amount of time as a giraffe (1.9 hours per night). This would lead to an approximately twofold decrease in the casualty rate. An adversary would need an approximately 40 percent increase in the troop level to compensate for this advantage.”

The general idea then was to train soldiers to sleep less, but with less negative effects. This way, an army could keep fighting, an air force could keep dropping bombs, whilst their opponents were becoming more and more drained and ineffectual due to the lack of rest and recuperation allowed to them.

The point was somewhat proven nearer the end of the war with General George Patton’s legendary campaign in the Pacific theatre. Patton believed that by moving rapidly and relentlessly forward, he could ensure fewer casualties due to the enemy’s state of exhaustion and inability to handle the effects of long-term sleep deprivation. The dropping of the atom bomb never allowed him to fully prove his point.

In effect, at its base level this approach to sleep management meant feeding the fighting force a steady diet of drugs, chiefly amphetamines and caffeine. But it was quickly recognised that this could have long-term physical and psychological side effects. The military came to much the same conclusion when experimenting with LSD in the 1960s.

And so an alternative view quickly emerged in 1939/40, positing that a better solution might be to ensure that the sleep soldiers did manage to have was provably restorative and healing. The emphasis became not on the length of sleep one could have, but the quality of that sleep.  

And it’s precisely this kind of sleep research that Peter Shure claimed he was part of between 1940 and 1941.

First, he was allegedly taught how to get to sleep quickly using a method that was later published in the best-selling book ‘Relax and Win: Championship Performance’. The aim was to allow soldiers to get to sleep within two minutes and, thus, grab more sleep, in a series of naps if necessary. The method now seems alarmingly simple:

  • Relax entire face, including forehead, eyelids, jaw, and tongue.
  • Drop shoulders and hands, letting them fall to either side of the body.
  • Inhale and exhale to relax chest.
  • Progressively relax legs, starting with thighs, calves, ankles and feet.
  • Clear the mind for ten seconds. Visualize a relaxing scene - the rolling waves at a beach, being in a dark room, or swinging in a hammock looking at clouds in the sky. If visualization doesn’t come easy, repeat “don’t think” to yourself over and over.
  • Once the body is relaxed and the mind is cleared, sleep will come

This then progressed – according to Shure – into research about whether sleep could be achieved any time of the day, rather than always at night. And perhaps sleep could be extended into longer chunks of time, so that one could sleep for one whole day, and then be awake for three days straight without any detrimental effects.

It is at this point that Peter wanted to assert that he was shut up in a cave for several days to see if his sleep patterns could be unmoored from the natural tyranny of the rising and the setting of the sun. Many believe this is just Shure trying to create a bigger myth around his persona as a sleep artist. But there is some evidence that activities like this were taking place at the time.

One has to remember that sleep research was at a very primitive stage at this time. It had only been in 1938 that two American scientists Nathaniel Kleitman, PhD, and Bruce Richardson had suggested the idea of such a thing as an ‘internal circadian rhythm’ – the ability of humans to regulate their sleep without reference to sun, in order to ensure effective rest and recuperation and high performance when awake.

Kleitman and Richardson shut themselves in a cave in Kentucky for six weeks, living in complete darkness and continuing to monitor their sleep patterns. The conclusion was that regular sleep at regular times could still be achieved in an environment where night was indistinguishable from day.

Peter Shure’s claim is that he was not only used as a guinea pig to repeat these American experiments and apply them to British troops, with the view to ensuring that soldiers could sleep regularly in whatever circumstances. But he also asserted throughout his later life that he was involved in psychological experiments in the cave, aimed at understanding how sleep could be used to allow stressed and psychologically damaged soldiers heal more quickly and thus return to action.

There is absolutely no evidence of this kind of research going on in Staffordshire at this time. However, we do know that the well-known brain-washing scientist William Sargant – possibly the inspiration behind the famous book & film ‘The Ipcress File’ - did spend the war years developing the concept of both deep sleep therapy and psychotherapy under sedation. Where he did this work continues to be a state secret.

Every few weeks, Shure claimed he was taken to the caves and subjected to large doses of barbiturates so that he would sleep not just for hours, but for days and sometimes weeks. When finally awakened, detailed tests and interviews would be carried out to assess his sense of mental well-being and calmness.

It’s not clear what the results of these tests were, since no official  record of any of this activity has ever been found. Shure, though, always maintained that this is where his capacity for sleep was honed.

By early 1942 he went onto assert that he was joined in the cave by soldiers returning from the front suffering from ‘shell shock’, deep depression and other severe mental health problems related to trauma. In these experiments, Shure and the others were not put completely asleep. Instead, they were subjected to a form of psychotherapy under sedation, which we might refer to today as “narcoanalysis” or “narcosynthesis”.

The aim was to use a weaker barbiturate injection to induce a form of  ‘twilight sleep’ whereby the drug might help to disinhibit the patient, encouraging him to express openly his deeper thoughts and feelings.  A therapist would gently ask questions and offer suggestions, and in this unguarded state it was hoped the patient might be able to relive a foundational trauma as if it were happening again in the present moment. In doing so, a cathartic release of repressed emotion might be produced.

In Peter Shure’s case, there was very little trauma – unless you count the absence of his father and the tempestuous relationships with both his mother and his uncle. But one might assume there might be some control element in these experiments, if they ever happened. So perhaps Peter might have been a useful specimen in that regard.

He does claim in one of the taped conversations with his then agent, recorded near the end of his life, that these experiments were used widely at the end of the war, in order to help veterans readjust to civilian life. If true, it is disturbing to note that William Sargant, mentioned above, did confess at one time that “quite imaginary situations to abreact the emotions of fear or anger could be suggested to a patient under drugs this same treatment.”

Sargent confidently suggested that imagined experiences worked as well as, and sometimes even better than, actual experiences to produce ‘the desired effects’.

This rather begs the question as to whether Peter Shure with his stories of cave-dwelling and enforced sleep was not expressing a memory that he'd retrieved naturally, but perhaps these were false memories that had been produced or placed in some way by a mixture of drugs and therapy. We know Shure was something of a fantasist throughout his life, encouraged mainly by the films he found himself watching. Film was, to some extent, his way of making his own life more exciting than it really was. and we do know he was a fan of 'The Ipcress File' and the other Harry Palmer films, one of which was directed by his friend Ken Russell.

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Forever, a Leslie Howard fan, in 1942 Shure wrote in his diary about ‘Pimpernel Smith’ and how possible it might be for someone like himself to masquerade as a humble maintenance engineer whilst in fact operating as a ingenious spy, rescuing people from the clutches of the Nazis. He was also very much taken with ‘The 49th Parallel’, and liked to think of himself rooting out Germans spies snooping about RAF Stafford, attempting to steal Britain‘s gold reserves or perhaps plotting to blow up munitions factories. Operating in such a high security environment day after day would have made tales of nefarious goings-on all too plausible. And for a young man looking for a starring role in the great conflict, but stuck in a Potteries backwater signing boxes of bolts in and out, it must have been tempting to invent adventures for himself.

If any of this is true, it’s rather wonderful to think of Peter Shure perfecting his craft in a dark dark cave, dreaming of becoming Leslie Howard and Laurence Olivier, emerging into the wartime daylight refreshed and full of energy and ambition.

And it might explain his rapid rise thereafter. Less than a year after all this is supposed to have happened, we crops up in the war records much changed and in a different place. He has come home to Lincolnshire at RAF Coningsby, and he’s is no longer repairing and maintaining planes, he’s flying them – a flight engineer in a Lancaster squadron, with a commission no less.

Whatever did happen in Staffordshire, it led to rapid promotion and the chance to do some real fighting in an important role. From Peter’s point of view, the long period of sleep had paid off.


The Tramp and other lies

“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.


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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.

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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.

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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.

Circusfinal


Actresses, fairgrounds and fast cars: the Skegness years

“We're not people, we're lithographs. We don't know anything about love unless it's written and rehearsed. We're only real in between curtains.”

Carole Lombard in '20th Century'

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The family move from London to Lincolnshire in 1928 was significant for Peter. Throughout the whole of his life he liked promoting the idea of himself as crafty street kid ducking an diving his way through the Big Smoke, like his heroes Chaplin and Raines. This self-image was going to be harder to preserve on a wet and windy night in Skegness.

Until the age of eight, he could spin his tale with an element of truth, his roots lying in the fairground families of south and east London. How he learned to read and write is unclear, mind, given he was more than likely working pretty much full time on hoopla stalls from a very early age and running errands between the various fairgrounds scattered across the heaths of London. It is likely his mother was responsible for any formal education he received at this point.

Life became very different in Lincolnshire. The family moved there at the behest of Billy Butlin, who was looking for experienced reliable people to help run his latest fairground venture in Skegness.  Butlin was a generous employer to people he trusted and he clearly trusted Peter's mother and uncle, both of whom are listed in the employee records of the period as senior managers.

In later life, Peter was disparaging about this time in his life, considering it provincial and boring. But the discovery of Peter's pre-war diaries and the publication of taped conversations made with his agent, Martin Chambers - both emerging some years after Peter Shure's death - paint a very different picture of the 'Skegness years'.

His schooling turns out to have been privileged and traditional, involving the very young Peter being bundled off to a remote boarding school, situated between Lincoln and Gainsborough (Peter's experience of this will be covered in a subsequent chapter). When he returned to the family fold in 1932, any aspirations of progressing to a public school, or perhaps even ending up at university, were quickly dashed. Yes, he did obtain his Education or 'Junior' Certificate, possibly through attending a school at Sleaford. But the family expectation was that Peter would become part of the business as soon as he left school at 15, working at the fairground park and, in particular, helping out with the ever-growing inventory of new amusements and rides including the new-fangled 'Dodgems', the maintenance of which he was good at.  

We see from Peter's diaries that he wasn't always so disparaging about Skegness as he became in later years. There were long summer months when he was clearly enjoying himself. This was, after all, the beginning of the town's 20th century hey-day.

His world would have been a heady of mix of bizarre fairground acts, circus animals and adrenaline-based machine rides. In his diary he records watching elephants, shipped up from London for the summer, regularly bathing in the sea and practising tricks such as pretend-shaving each other's trunks with foam and a giant fake razor.

He watched on as the famed escapologist Prince Barham Khan (in truth an Albanian immigrant) was handcuffed and chained, tied in a sack and then pushed off Skegness pier into the sea, only to emerge  scot-free a few minutes later.

He was invited to ride 'the world's smallest racehorse'. He observed Zeppelins buzzing along the coast. He particularly loved seeing souped-up motor cars racing across the sands.

He must have engaged with people from all over the UK - mainly working-class people enjoying their few weeks of holiday time by the sea-side,. He will have thus witnessed all the usual human interactions: drinking, flirting, fighting, laughing, singing.

In one darker moment, Peter writes about finding a dead new-born baby on a beach and reporting it to the police. It turned out to be not an irregular occurrence, given how many Skegness holiday romances ended up with local young women becoming pregnant. Peter notes that at least two of his friends found dead babies on the beach during that period.

Not that Peter dwells too much on the sinister side of Skegness holiday life in his diaries at this early age. His main obsession - developed well before any notion of becoming an actor had entered his head - was  the glamour of the theatre, the music hall and, above all, the cinema.

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The share of his wage that didn't go back to his mother appears to have been spent regularly on cinema tickets at the Tower. He writes enthusiastically about several films of that period. He developed a huge crush on Carole Lombard in '20th Century' (a film which somewhat presciently for Peter includes a moment when Lombard is duped  into agreeing to play the role of 'Mary Magdalene' in a Broadway play).

He attempted to grow a moustache and take up drinking in order to be more like William Powell in 'The Thin Man'. He dumped Carole Lombard in the autumn of 1935 on seeing Merle Oberon in 'The Scarlet Pimpernel'. And Oberon, in turn, is replaced by several cuttings and photos relating to the stage actress Rita Cooper.

This was a more real and visceral adolescent passion given that Cooper actually hailed from Skegness and liked to return to her home town in the summer season. She could be seen regularly around town, often on the arm of the playboy racing car driver Adrian Conan Doyle (son of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle). Peter rather obviously made it his business to turn up wherever Cooper might be, and obtained signed photographs from her several times over a period of a couple of years. He also had himself photographed in front of Conan Doyle's cars. Thus, Shure's life-long passion for actresses and motoring was imprinted at an early age.

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By late 1936, the moustache project had been abandoned and the new role model was now Leslie Howard in 'The Petrified Forest'. Peter shared the Howard character's love of a shabby outfit and a romantic dream about becoming a writer of some kind. His diaries at this point become more self-consciously literary, and he makes time and space for poetry and practising more ambitious descriptions of people and places. Fragments of a horror story appear, about dastardly dealings at the new-fangled Skegness solarium (which Peter may have helped his uncle to wire up, given his growing knowledge of electrical engineering), where a series of innocent visitors are fried to death in grisly circumstances.

Peter also starts to make lists of smart cars he's spotted around town. There's particular excitement when a new Vauxhall dealership opens up near his home in Wainfleet. At one point he pledges to himself in his diary that he will become rich enough to buy a Frazer-Nash when he's older. Only a year later, another entry goes back on this pledge, having discovered  that Frazer-Nash had become became the official importer for German BMWS.

As the war began to loom on the horizon, Peter became a more serious and gloomy teenager. There were growing instances of arguments with his Uncle Norman - officially his boss - and the seaside entertainment business became markedly more cut-throat and aggressive. Sunday opening meant more work for less pay. A rival fairground, the Pleasureland, appeared in town. Late-at-night sabotage of rides and arson attacks were not unknown. Corners started to be cut and safety procedures ignored in order to keep up with the competition. Contaminated water from the new holiday camp swimming pool was rumoured to have leached into the local dykes and poisoned a herd of dairy cows. In the summer season of 1937, a vacationing vicar was mauled by one of the performing lions.

Perhaps it's no surprise, then, to find signs of disillusionment and anger within the diaries from 1937 onwards. Perhaps it was always going to be true that a man like Peter could not be contained in such an environment. On his 18th birthday, matters came to a head. Peter appears to have become very drunk, accused his uncle of being a black-shirted Mosely-ite blackshirt, and at the end of the night lost his virginity to the local fairground contortionist. Some birthday party.

This sets something of a pattern for Peter Shure for the rest of his life. There are long periods of quiet conformity masking a rich and secretive fantasy life, leading to growing dissatisfaction and frustration that is only assuaged by violent but life-altering explosions of emotion and rash action. As if the sleeping man awakes from a long dream and erupts at the intrusion of reality. Or is it the first angry scream of a new-born baby when the harsh cold air of the world first enters the lungs and the safety of the womb is gone forever?

In this case, Peter created a rupture with his family that could never be mended. Whether he was fired from his job at the fairground or simply ran away is not clear. The next time we find him, he has used his mechanical and electrical engineering skills to quickly gain himself a place at RAF Cranwell as a trainee. He's also found to be registered with the Royal Air Force Volunteer Reserve, which would mean he could be learning to fly at evenings and weekends.

You could say that Peter was still bringing his fairground skills to bear on his work,  sorting out electrics, bashing metal things into shape and enjoying the occasional thrill-ride in a flying machine. The difference was, though, the focus would never again be on ensuring fun and laughter for seaside punters. For the next phase of his life, Peter was all about dealing out death. 


1958: Marriage and ‘Enemy In The Camp’

Take Cleopatra and Camille
You add some more sex appeal
You mix the lot and what have you got?
Magnolia

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1958 was shaping up to be a pivotal year for Peter Shure. His leading role in ‘After The Fall’, the year before, had got him noticed. As a result, he’d not only secured a significant cameo role in a big budget Yul Brynner pirate movie, which had garnered him positive reviews. He was also now lined up for a part in a major British production, the POW classic ‘Enemy In The Camp’, rubbing shoulders with many of the leading actors of the period – Attenborough, Lee, Wilding, Todd.

It’s considered a coincidence that the film is based on a book written by Shure’s lawyer, Michael Gilbert, but given how many other productions Shure ended up appearing in based on Gilbert’s work, it’s likely that some kind of favour was being pulled.

As well as this exciting opportunity, Peter’s old wartime pal Donald Pleasance had swung him a part as a drowsy clown in the macabre chiller ‘Circus of Horrors’. And to top it all, his ongoing romance with Helen Grosvenor had now progressed to a formal engagement, with a wedding planned to take place before the end of the year (subject to their busy filming schedules).

Helen Grosvenor – a mere 22 to his 39 – was a vivacious young actress who he’d met on the set of ‘After The Fall’. Before they met, she’d been closely linked to Michael Wilding, described by her only as ‘a family friend’, but talked about in the gossip column as one of the reasons for the break-up of his marriage to Elizabeth Taylor. (Taylor and Grosvenor, curiously, remained good friends for life, corresponding regularly and sharing their woes about men, movies and children).

The courtship between Shure and Grosvenor was what could best be described as ‘cagey’ – on both sides. Shure was never fully convinced that he should settle down, and had reservations about sharing his life with a woman.

He had throughout his life enjoyed the company of men – at school, at the fairgrounds, at RAF training, in Stalag One. By now he was rather set in his ways. He kept a room at the Pen Club in Bloomsbury for when he was in London, and otherwise resided in a comfortable country house in West Sussex, where he welcomed guests regularly, mainly other actors and writers, almost exclusively male, and played host to a number of musicians and bands associated with the ‘New Orleans revival’ movement. Mick Mulligan and George Melley, in particular, were regular drinking buddies.

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Helen’s family regularly expressed to her their worry that Peter was too old for her and not of the right social class. The age difference certainly did not worry Helen. All the men she knew well up to that point had been significantly older than her. She made her first film in 1950 aged just 14, and from the age of 16 came under the spell of veteran French filmmaker Jean Duvivier.

Hitchcock is said to have considered her for ‘The Trouble With Harry’ before giving Shirley Maclaine her screen debut. She first met Wilding - 39 at the time - through a family association with Elizabeth Taylor’s father, a well-known art dealer based in London before the war. Controversially, Wilding put Helen under contract to make films with him, but Hollywood lured him across the Atlantic before any film could be made (and perhaps wisely Taylor encouraged her husband’s move to LA).

The class issue was also of no concern to Helen. She was, in fact, much more left wing than Peter and was far more interested than him in making films with directors and writers who hailed from the ‘kitchen sink’ school of drama. She was already friendly with Jonh Osborne and other writers from the Royal Court theatre set, and, due to frequent trips to Paris in her teens, she was familiar with the main protagonists in the ‘nouvelle vague’ movement. Helen was clearly looking to the future. Meanwhile Peter was very much content to appear in the traditional mix of war, pirate and gangster films, perhaps not noticing that the world was changing rapidly.  

Helen's main reservation about marriage to Peter was, in fact, his competitiveness and, as she expressed it, his “capacity for professional envy”. Helen had seen how angry and upset Peter could be if he felt someone else in the movie business was doing well at what he felt was his expense. Peter regularly bad-mouthed Helen’s good friend Dirk Bogarde, for example, to her face but always behind Dirk’s back. Peter found it exasperating to see Bogarde playing roles that Peter thought he should have got. When Bogarde secured a part as an air pilot, for example, Peter hit the roof. Quite naturally, Helen wondered what he might say or do if her career took off and his didn’t.

Before agreeing to marry, she asked for assurances from Peter that he would not attempt to stop her working. He gave them. She went further, and extracted a promise in writing from him that he would not interfere with her career at all, and would always support her in her career choices.  Only a few years previously, she told him, she had watched ‘The Country Girl’ and ‘A Star is Born’ back-to-back and had heeded the warning in both films. Peter responded:

“I promise you, my darling, we can both be successful together side by side. I’m doing well. You’re doing well. I have a dream. You have a dream. We can help each other make those dreams come true. In fact, all I feel like saying to you right now, as your future husband, is to quote that movie right back at you. Remember it? What James Mason says? THE DREAM ISN’T BIG ENOUGH!”

What really united this glamour couple was the need to create a family of their own. They both desperately wanted children. Peter had, for various reasons, ceased all communication with his mother before the war and had no siblings. He told most people that his mum had been killed when a bomb had dropped on a cinema in Skegness in 1942, and that he’d been an orphan since then.

Helen’s parents had pushed her into show business at an early age and had micro-managed her career until Jean Duvivier had come along and – in her words – ‘cut the cord’. Her father also very publicly disapproved of Helen’s interest in spiritualism and the occult, and famously made fun of her in a newspaper interview when it was revealed she’d paid a sizable sum to buy a set of tarot cards allegedly designed by Aleister Crowley. By 1958, she still saw her parents regularly for family meals and public events, but the relationship was always formal and frosty.

The idea of being parents allowed them to believe they could create their own little nuclear family – immune from interference by others - and thus set their own rules about how a family could and should be. For his part, Peter genuinely liked goofing around with children, playing silly invented games, making paper hats and going to the pantomime and the circus. Helen thought there might be increased status to be had in becoming a glamorous matriarchal figure. Producers and directors, she thought, might take her more seriously if she was officially spoken for and seen to be in charge of a household.

Both Peter and Helen also understood that the marriage could be good for business. They had seen how the press were drawn to celebrity couples. By being in the public eye constantly and appearing to be box-office gold, they could be sure of picking up plumb roles. Economically and tax-wise it made sense, too, to pool their resources.

Cracks in this plan became apparent even before the wedding in December. Helen spent most of the summer abroad making earnest ‘social realism’ films in Italy and in Africa. She can be seen in publicity photographs dining with the likes of Roberto Rosselini, Chris Marker and inevitably, Michael Wilding. She appeared on the cover of National Geographic, highlighting the plight of elephants and rhinos in Africa and calling for a moratorium on ivory trade many years before any other celebrity thought of doing the same.

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Peter, meanwhile, was stuck in England, and feeling increasingly unhappy about his roles in ‘Enemy In The Camp’ and ‘Circus of Horrors’.

‘Enemy In The Camp’ was to be a film about the hunt for a dastardly informer inside an Italian prisoner of war camp responsible for thwarting a number of escape attempts with murderous consequences. The decision had been made early on to pack the film with a wealth of well-known actors, all of who could be suspected by the audience of being the mysterious quisling.

Peter had high hopes of being able to hold his own against strong competition from the likes of Richard Todd and Richard Attenborough. He had been led to believe that there was going to be room for a certain amount of improvisation when it came to developing a character, and in that way the film could become a compelling ensemble piece. Also, he felt he had the upper hand over the rest of the cast given he was the only person who had actually spent any time in a real-life prison camp.

When it came to filming, however, the competition became fierce to grab as many lines as possible and steal the limelight in every scene. Elbows were very much out, especially in the scenes in which Attenborough was involved, who – as everyone knew by then – had ambitions of being a producer and director in his own right, rather than just an actor.

Peter started as a character named Wilmot, a lookout who spent much of the time sunbathing and reading books, but who then becomes interested in accessing the camp’s sewers and roaming around them on a rubber mattress, seeking out  a possible means of escape.

This quickly changed when another hut member was required for scenes involving Attenborough and Todd. Attenborough wanted more colour and a bit of light comedy in his scenes and had discovered that Peter could play the French accordian (something he’d picked up from his fairground days). Before he could say no, Peter had become a character called Pierre who sat in the background of scenes, playing away on an accordion, or sometimes emerging from an escape tunnel  - or simply lying on his bunk in silence.

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Famously Todd ad-libbed the famous line about Pierre – “Does he have to play that thing?” Shure’s lines were very much reduced to a basic ‘oui’ or ‘non’ - not just due to the machinations of Attenborough either, but very much at the request, it has to be said, of the director, who like many filmmakers before him found Shure’s voice to be rather harsh and odd.  

In the last week of filming, the simmering feud between Shure and Attenborough blew up into a full scale row, when Attenborough shoved Shure’s head down into an escape tunnel hatch with the line ‘Au revoir Pierre’. Shure exploded. He proceeded to loudly critique his rival with observations ranging from ‘why don’t you stand on the box if you want to always be the tallest person in the shot?’ to ‘you wouldn’t be wearing glasses like that in 1945’ and ‘you don’t even know how to wear army shorts properly’ and ‘you were bloody shit in Brighton Rock’.

When the director attempted to interrupt, Shure turned on him, listing up to twenty different ways that the filming of the camp was historically and factually inaccurate.

When the dust finally settled, Peter was invited to act as a consultant in advising the production team on the actuality of life in a prison camp. But his lines and any further scenes with Attenborough were cut.

In the end, the very young and very unknown Michael Caine came away with more to say than Peter. If one had put a bet on which actor was going on to fame and fortune, before ‘Enemy in the Camp’ one might have put a bet on Shure. In hindsight, we can see that 1958 was a fork in the road for these two actors, and for Caine it was to be the more rewarding path.

Something similar occurred in ‘Circus of Horrors’, except in that movie Donald Pleasance had already warned Peter that the clown role was not substantial (but well paid), and that the director was one of an already growing band of filmmakers who really only wanted Peter Shure for a sleeping or ‘resting’ part, and an inevitably early death. When Peter famously complained to his friend that he was expecting to talk in the movie, Pleasance famously replied: “No, Peter, we’re expecting you to die!” Only a few years later the quip was adapted by the writer Richard Maibaum in the script for ‘Goldfinger’.

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When Helen arrived back in London to prepare for her wedding, tanned and healthy having avoided the grey and dismal British autumn months, she found a pale, miserable and severely hung over Peter. He had decided to douse his professional disappointments by organising the mother of all stag-dos. He dubbed it ‘the rave in a cave’, decking out the very same cave he claimed to have lived in in the early years of the war with bunting, trestle tables, thousands of candles, a stage, sofas and chair, a dance floor and long, long bar. The Magnolia Band played all night. The Goons performed skits. Film stars, fairground workers, kriegies, motor racing drivers -  people from all phases of Peter’s life turned up and danced and drank the night away. It was rumoured that both Princess Margaret and the Kray Twins had attended. Richard Attenborough had not been invited, even though the rest of the cast of ‘Enemy In The Camp’ were.

Helen was furious at the resulting press coverage and photos of Peter et all dancing to ‘Magnolia’ with a string of starlets (including Claire Bloom and a very young Christine Keeler). She threatened to call off the wedding. Suitable chastened, Peter promised to smarten up his act and to cut some of his rowdier friends out of his social circle. The guest list for the wedding was pruned drastically, so that only close friends and family were to attend the ceremony itself and the number of dinner guests at the Dorchester was limited to 100.

Just one week before Christmas, Peter and Helen flew out to the Alps for a romantic ski-ing holiday. The newspaper photo of them waving goodbye at the airport shows Helen in an expensive fur coat and immaculate make-up, smiling for the cameras. Peter is in a plain mac and astrakhan hat. He has blinked at the critical moment and appears to have his eyes closed, as if sleepwalking into marriage.