Twenties

“Filmmaking is a chance to live many lifetimes.”

“Filmmaking is a chance to live many lifetimes.”

Robert Altman

The more Peter spoke on tape about his life, the more I realised that he hadn’t been honest about his childhood, or indeed most of his life before the war. It left me with a dilemma.

Do I continue to encourage him to speak frankly on the record about his life, knowing that I’m helping to create a testimony that, if published, would shock and possibly devastate many of his friends and family, as well as change people’s perceptions of Peter Shure forever?

Or should I advise Peter as his personal assistant, his agent, and as his friend, to forget about telling the unvarnished truth, destroy the tapes we had made so far, and stick with the fiction that he had been rehearsing for the best part of 40 years?

As these excerpts from my forthcoming official autobiography ‘The Sleeping Agent’ demonstrate, Peter and I decided to keep going. His only condition was that the content of the tapes should not become known until after his death. I kept to that condition and went further, surrendering a copy of the full unedited transcription of all the tapes to Peter’s family before publication, so they could come to terms with the revelations contained within.

When we started the recordings, I suspect themes of false identity and impostership were looming large for Peter, having just completed a small sleeping role in ‘The Return of Martin Guerre’.

It was clear Peter was re-evaluating things and was regretting some of his more telling fictions. I did start to wonder how many men of his generation had done the same thing: got back home in ‘45 or ’46 and decided to wipe the slate clean, reinvent themselves and basically erase and redraw the family tree.

He’d also, at this time, been having long phone conversations about children and 'the generation gap' with Robert Altman, who had seen ‘The Body in the Woods’ and wanted Peter to have another shot at playing in a teen movie, perhaps with his son Chris again. As we all know ‘The Body in the Woods’ had not been a success for either father or son, but family – particularly the fate of his son – was weighing on Peter’s mind and he still had ambitions at this point to help Chris in any way he could. Peter does appear in an Altman movie, by the way. Look carefully and you’ll spot him playing a ‘wino’ in the ill-fated ‘O.C. and Stiggs’. There was no part for Christopher.

===

TAPE 042 150582

When did you end up going to boarding school?

I was eight. So that’s 1927. Must have been September 1927.

But I remember you telling me that you grew up on the streets of London and hardly ever went to school.

I did, didn’t I? Well, that wasn’t strictly true.

[Peter takes a drink]

Why... why did you lie about that?

I… I don’t know really. I’m not sure. I suppose I didn’t want people to think of me as too posh. I mean, it’s quite a boring existence at a boarding school. Nothing much happens to you outside of the daily regimen. And all the other actors around me after the war had such interesting lives. Donald and I had been cooped up in a POW camp for quite a while, and I’m not saying it was like a boarding school because it was a bit rougher than that, but it wasn’t active service. And the years before the war, a lot of chaps had really struggled their way through the Depression and unemployment and wot not, whilst I’d really had quite a comfortable life, getting through prep school and then a couple of years at Lincoln Technical College trying to get my head round electrical engineering, helping out my uncle up at Skeggie.

Skeggie doesn’t sound that posh.

No, it doesn’t, does it? But it was quite an easy life, and I suppose I wanted people to think I was a bit tougher than I was, and that life had been rougher than it was. My dream at the time was to get to Cranwell, down the road. And eventually when everyone with any brain could see war was coming, I did get taken on and worked my way up quite quickly in the RAF.

You’re doing it again, Peter – jumping ahead.

Sorry.

[Peter takes another drink]

So what was your boarding school like?

School? Well fairly typical I suppose. In the middle of nowhere. A big old school house and outbuildings with lots of dormitories, changing rooms, assembly hall, a central feeding area, library that kind of thing. And quite big sports fields – rugger pitches, cricket squares and so on. And a river! I remember the river at the bottom of the grounds. We were allowed to swim in it in summer. I practically drowned there once!

You nearly drowned?

Oh yes! There was really very little supervision by the teachers outside of the class room, you know. In the summer at the weekends we would all pile on down to the river in our games shorts and plimsolls. And we’d all dive-bomb each other off a wooden jetty. And eventually there was just a big scrum of us in the water. It was shallow enough to stand up, but very muddy, very squidgy, and also quite weedy.

Sounds like a health and safety nightmare, Peter!

It was just one of those moments when a group of rowdy boys get over-excited and we all tried to duck each other under the water – just plant your hands on someone else’s shoulders and jump right up and then press down on them to push them right under.

I remember everyone laughing and shouting. And then some bigger boy – Hamish Mcsomething I think it was - put his hands on me and shoves me down and I’m fully trapped. I manage to wriggle free of his hands, but then the melee of boys has me pinned down and I’m trying to rise up but there’s no gap and there are just too many bodies crowded close together and I’m getting entangled in their legs and bums and knees.

I’m trying not to panic and hold my breath, but I’m getting scared now and I’m thrashing about like a fat carp and desperately wanting to gasp and shout, but I’m mindful enough to know I need to hold my breath.

My chest is starting to hurt and I can feel the pressure building up and the blood’s thumping. I can’t hold my breath for much longer. I know I’ve got to fight now and push and shove, but I’m still being shoved back down in return by a mass of bouncing, wrestling wriggling boys, and I can feel the sloppiness of the mud churning around me and the weed wrapping around me in clumps. And I open my mouth and taste the silty gritty water. And I fight and fight with all my might not to breath in and I think my lungs are going to burst.

And I'm just at the point where I really start to think I might die, when I find my footing on something solid rather than the mud and the weed and I push up my legs and knees with all my might, and I break the surface, suck in air blisfully, along with a huge slosh of water, and I cough and cough and cough and push my way towards the jetty.

I remember having enough strength in my arms to pull myself up and I just lay on the timbers there for a while, spluttering and breathing heavily and spitting out bits of weeds. And do you know? I don’t think anyone even noticed!

It's obviously a vivid memory for you.

Oh yes. But not horrible.

[Peter takes a drink]

It’s something I go back to often when I'm lying in bed about to drift off to sleep. It doesn’t panic me. It’s actually a rather relaxing memory of being under the water, pushing and shoving, being quite frantic and then surfacing and sucking in the air. I suppose it’s something like a birthing memory. Writhing around in muddy water, then rising up and sucking in the sweet air and removing the pain from one's lungs - I sometimes think I'm like the first fish that decided to leave the water and become a land animal. I'm on the way to becoming human.

You’ve said before you have particular memories you use to help you sleep.

Yes, that started at school, in fact.

You haven’t mentioned that before.

Well no. But I had trouble settling down when I first got there. Couldn’t sleep. So I’d get up at night and wander about a bit. An obviously the teachers didn’t like that.

So this was when you were eight?

Yes, eight and then nine.

Wandering about in the dark on your own.

Yes. I supposed I was trying to work up the courage to run away, but I never did. I think most of the chaps there had a sense early on that they were on their own; our parents had rather left us in the lurch and each of us worked out our own reaction to that. I don’t mean that tommy-rot of feeling unloved and abandoned. I can’t think of anyone I knew at school who thought their parents didn’t love them. We just all knew a certain kind of loving was over and we had to sort ourselves out - because nobody else was going to do it for us. So I would say my night walks were my way of developing a bit of self -reliance and independence - and also to show I wasn’t scared. I wasn’t stupid. I knew if I got a reputation for that kind of thing, most people wouldn’t think me weak and would steer clear, if you know what I mean.

[Peter takes a drink]

But, of course, when it all came out what I was up to, they packed me off to some child expert who was supposed to help me get off to sleep and stay put in my dorm.

So you had sleeping lessons?

Ha! Yes you could say that. Sleeping lessons, that’s a good one.

And did they work?

Oh yes. Very much so. It was a good trick. The idea was to go for the same walk around the school, but just do it in your head and do it in some detail, take you time sort of thing. And then he’d suggest I could do a walk around my childhood home and garden instead – or some other place that I knew quite well, a walk from my past I’d taken repeatedly. So I'd often go back to being three or four and trying to walk around the perimeter of the family garden without being seen or 'caught' by anyone.

And this chap - the shrink - he’d ask me at first to close my eyes and narrate out loud  whichever walk I was undertaking, and do it rather slowly. He’d ask me questions about what I was seeing and which way I was choosing to go.

Then we got on to me simply closing my eyes and imagining the walk in silence. Occasionally he’d whisperingly ask me where I was, what I was noticing, where I was going next, but after half a dozen sessions he didn’t even have to do that. Within a few minutes I was gone, off to the land of the Nod. I’d never actually get round the whole of the school or the garden or the beachfront before I was asleep. It was a neat trick, I have to say.

And it always worked?

Oh yes, I still use it now. I still walk around that school in my mind’s eye, and very quickly I can nod off.

And do you still remember it as clearly as you did all those years ago?

Oh yes, of course. I don’t think anyone who goes to boarding school ever forgets the place, do they? They may want to, but I’m pretty sure they don’t. I’m rather blessed though. Other people will tell you about shivering and crying in their beds, or getting slippered by prefects or monstered in the changing room or eating disgusting food, but I just have this rather calm walk.

But you still chose not to tell anyone that you went to the school.

Yes, that’s true. But maybe I needed to keep it to myself. If I’d told anyone else about it, it wouldn’t be my walk any more, would it? And it might not have the power to relax me.

And what would be the point of sharing anyway? I don’t remember my parents telling me much about their childhood. They didn’t want to trouble me with it, I suppose. And frankly it probably would have bored me to tears. I imagine it’s the same for my children. They aren’t that interested. And they shouldn’t be really. It’s a bit like the war, isn't it? Is there much benefit to be had in telling people about the terrible things one experienced? I don’t think so. That stuff’s just for me really. Best it stays in my head.

[Silence. P:eter takes another drink]

Bloody hell. This is just like going to the shrink, Martin! Switch it off, for Pete’s sake!


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!”


The Lincolnshire Star 01 July 1927 - Let The Sun Shine In

Local schoolboy wins scholarship to top preparatory school

 

Our congratulations go to Peter Hayter (8) from Skegness for winning the annual Norman Angell Scholarship prize for entry into Little St Hugh’s Preparatory School, one of the county’s most highly regarded schools.

Peter won the scholarship for high scores in the school’s forward-looking entry exams, that include not just Maths, English and Science, but also a Money Management paper and a Story Challenge. The exams have been developed in association with esteemed alumnus former Labour MP, Norman Angell, who is perhaps best well-known for his internationalist anti-war views and is also a past contributor to this very organ.

So impressive was Peter Hayter’s contribution to the Story Challenge, written at such a tender age with great maturity and fine feeling, that we felt compelled to seek permission from the Hayter family for Peter’s story to be republished to a wider audience. We’re delighted to report that permission was given and below is the aforementioned story.

The challenge for all the boys who undertook the Story Challenge was to choose one of three suggested titles and produce an essay of at least two sides of exam paper in length, taking only one hour. to write it.  The suggested titles were: The Way Forward; Let The Sun Shine In; Man’s Best Friend.

We think our readers will agree that Peter Hayter is a young writer of great promise and we all look forward to seeing how he progresses at Little  St Hugh’s – and beyond!

Let The Sun Shine In

The stars were very bright on the night that the tramp walked into the town.  It was very late and everyone in the town was asleep.

The tramp tried to walk as quietly as possible so that he did not wake anyone up. He was worried that his old shoes were very noisy, but he could not do anything about that.

All his clothes were very old and dirty. He had a long coat on with lots of holes in it and baggy trousers with a piece of orange string as a belt. He didn’t have any gloves but he did have a large felt hat. His beard was long and dirty. His face was dirty. He looked like he had not eaten a proper meal for a long time, which was true.

What he knew was that a clear sky meant it would be very cold all night and that there might even be a frost. He had no bed for the night and no means of keeping warm. He stopped walking for a moment and shivered. It was going to be a long, cold night.

What he wanted was to find some food, any food, and then try and find some place where he might be able to sleep safely until morning. But the town was an unfriendly place. The tramp knew that people did not want him there which is why he came in the night. During the day he would go out into the countryside or by the sea and ask people for work or for food. Most of the time they would tell him to go away.

The town was the best place to find food, but it was dangerous too. The tramp knew to look in people’s bins for leftovers and also to look out the back of shops.

He went down a dark and narrow alleyway. His footsteps echoed off the corrugated metal fence. He stopped for a moment and tried to see if he could see any bins or bags in the dark. The silence all around him scared him.

Then he got even more scared because he could hear scratching noises. He could hear scuffling. He could hear the wind blow, and a window rattle, and something drop onto the stone path from a window shelf. Suddenly there was the clatter of a bin lid falling off and it rang around the town like a giant cymbal.

Now that his eyes were getting used to the dark the tramp could see two animals on top of the bins digging into something. He wasn’t sure what the animals were. They were probably cats but they seemed scarier than that and when one turned to look at him he could see two scary round eyes that shone like tiny pocket torches.

The tramp turned and hurried away. He would get no food tonight, but maybe he would find somewhere warm to sleep.

Then the wind got up, the sky clouded over and cold rain started to fall. The weather changed so quickly on the coast, he thought. And I don’t have a raincoat.

The water seeped into his rotten coat and his felt hat became soggy. The water dripped off his fingers and flooded into his leaky shoes. He felt like a drowned rat. Rats! He thought. The animals in the bins were probably rats. Rats might eat him if he fell asleep.

The tramp became very afraid and very cold and decided to walk around some more so that he didn’t freeze to death and the rats would not get him.

He was so cold and frightened and so hungry that he thought the night would never end and he would die. But just at the moment when he thought everything was lost, the first rays of the sunrise appeared. The sky went from black to purple to blue. The sun went from a tiny line of pink to a big strip of orange and then went full in the sky as a burning yellow flame. The frost melted off the trees. A mist rose off the pavements. Birds started singing.

The tramp turned his face toward the sun and felt the warmth on his skin. He felt his clothes drying off and he stopped shivering.

Let the sun shine in, he thought.

By Peter Hayter (8)


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.


Circusfinal
Circusfinal
Circusfinal
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.

Sleep_mother
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.

Sleep_stall
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.

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