Beginnings: Charlie Chaplin’s London | Little White Lies

Beginnings

Begin­nings: Char­lie Chaplin’s London

09 Sep 2020

Words by Adam Scovell

Terraced houses with red and green doors, windows, and trim on a grey facade.
Terraced houses with red and green doors, windows, and trim on a grey facade.
Retrac­ing the com­ic master’s for­ma­tive years across the Eng­lish capital’s south­ern boroughs.

If any actor holds the record for most plaques and com­mem­o­ra­tions ordained due to their time in Lon­don, the chances are it is Char­lie Chap­lin. Though most asso­ci­at­ed with Hollywood’s ear­ly years of pop­u­lar cin­e­ma, Chap­lin was first and fore­most a Lon­don­er, some­one whose for­ma­tive years took place around the bor­oughs south of the Thames.

The sheer amount of build­ings hold­ing plaques to cel­e­brate some­times small links to the actor is astound­ing and undoubt­ed­ly he would like­ly be sur­prised. Chaplin’s time grow­ing up in the city was not a pleas­ant one, the actor boast­ing one of the most Dick­en­sian sto­ries of pover­ty and strife of any Hol­ly­wood star. As Chap­lin biog­ra­ph­er David Robin­son famous­ly described it, the actor’s ascent to Hol­ly­wood suc­cess was one of the most dra­mat­ic rags to rich­es sto­ries ever told.”

Chaplin’s life in Lon­don before the glitz and glam­our of Hol­ly­wood was noto­ri­ous­ly tough. Charles Spencer Chap­lin was born on 16 April, 1889. He was the son of two music hall per­form­ers, Han­nah and Charles, who were vir­tu­al­ly estranged, with Charles being a heavy drinker even­tu­al­ly lead­ing to his death at the age of 38. It is like­ly that Chap­lin was born in a house in East Street in Wal­worth. There is even strong spec­u­la­tion that Chaplin’s ear­ly short Easy Street is based on the rough and tum­ble of life in the deprived neigh­bour­hood, and the cos­tume he would even­tu­al­ly make word-famous with his char­ac­ter of The Tramp is also pos­si­bly derived from the typ­i­cal cloth­ing worn by char­ac­ters in the area.

Forced to look after Chap­lin and his ille­git­i­mate half-broth­er Syd­ney, Han­nah then lived in a vari­ety of hous­es though the actor was often forced into the Lam­beth Work­house and sev­er­al oth­er insti­tu­tions for London’s des­ti­tute fam­i­lies. His moth­er would even­tu­al­ly be com­mit­ted to an asy­lum due to psy­chosis. She returned to it many times until even­tu­al­ly com­mit­ted per­ma­nent­ly. In this time, Chap­lin had start­ed to fol­low in his par­ents’ foot­steps as an enter­tain­er, tour­ing music halls around the coun­try. Even­tu­al­ly he reg­is­tered with an agency in the West End where he soon drew the atten­tion of audi­ences and crit­ics alike, before jump­ing onto America’s vaude­ville cir­cuit and final­ly to Hollywood.

Lon­don life was undoubt­ed­ly dif­fi­cult for Chap­lin. In his auto­bi­og­ra­phy, he talks of his despair at being sent to the Lam­beth Work­house in South Lon­don and the Han­well School in North Lon­don, as well as the joy he felt when his moth­er, briefly recov­ered, organ­ised his release from them. It was a for­lorn exis­tence,” he wrote, sad­ness was in the air”.

His oth­er mem­o­ries of Lon­don tend to be of wan­der­ing hun­gry and alone when find­ing no one at home. I wan­dered through Lam­beth Walk, look­ing hun­gri­ly into cook-shop win­dows… For hours I watched the quacks sell­ing their wares. The dis­trac­tion soothed me and for a while I for­got my plight and hunger.” This was a piv­otal night for Chap­lin, how­ev­er, as, sat on Ken­ning­ton Cross wait­ing, he heard a musi­cal per­for­mance com­ing from the White Hart pub (now The Tom­my­field) which lift­ed his spir­its. Enter­tain­ment was clear­ly the way out.

Plaques and cel­e­bra­tions abound of Chaplin’s haunts in Lon­don. Above the entrance of East Street Mar­ket one cel­e­brates the actor’s ear­li­est years in the area. At Methe­ly Street, a plaque from the Dead Comics Soci­ety cel­e­brates Chaplin’s life in the house from 1898 to 1899 while many peo­ple also vis­it Pow­nall Ter­race and West Square where the actor lived var­i­ous­ly, being two of the few hous­es that have pho­to­graph­ic proof of Chap­lin revis­it­ing in his lat­er years.

After some of his and Sydney’s tour­ing suc­cess, they lived togeth­er at 15 Glen­shaw Man­sions on Brix­ton Road, Chap­lin call­ing it our cher­ished haven”. A blue plaque from Eng­lish Her­itage now adorns it and the café below is called Chaplin’s Cof­fee & Co. Even on Lam­beth Walk where the actor wan­dered in such des­ti­tu­tion, sev­er­al mosaics abound cel­e­brat­ing the actor’s most famous films.

Brick terrace houses with colourful doors and windows, greenery.

Yet it was 287 Ken­ning­ton Road that I was most drawn to from Chaplin’s his­to­ry, the house of his estranged father where the actor stayed when Chap­lin Sr was forced to take cus­tody of Char­lie and Syd­ney after Hannah’s insti­tu­tion­al­i­sa­tion. At least, as Chap­lin sug­gests, Ken­ning­ton Road was famil­iar and not strange and som­bre like Norwood.”

It boasts only a small plaque but con­sid­er­ing the his­to­ry of Chaplin’s trou­bled ear­ly life, it seemed the most appro­pri­ate in regards to the strug­gles he endured and how the per­form­ing arts first helped him escape his harsh real­i­ty. As with many old­er prop­er­ties in Lon­don, the house today is lux­u­ri­ous. The area has iron­i­cal­ly fol­lowed a sim­i­lar tra­jec­to­ry to Chap­lin, quite lit­er­al­ly from rags to riches.

Chap­lin would revis­it the city var­i­ous times. Around the time of his 1921 film The Idle Class, and with unusu­al encour­age­ment from the writer HG Wells, he revis­it­ed. Even at that point in his career, well before clas­sics such as The Gold Rush, Mod­ern Times, and The Great Dic­ta­tor, Chap­lin was acute­ly aware of how far he had come since those ear­ly begin­nings. I had known Lon­don as a strug­gling young non­de­script from Lam­beth,” he wrote, now as a man cel­e­brat­ed and rich I would be see­ing Lon­don as though for the first time.”

His work was to be cel­e­brat­ed many years hence in a stat­ue by John Dou­ble­day at the cen­tre of the West End in Leices­ter Square, the area that gave him his most impor­tant shot. At one point the stat­ue was at the cen­tre of the square, and though now moved in place of one cel­e­brat­ing William Shake­speare, its place­ment at least acknowl­edged for a time that the actor was in all like­li­hood the most famous Lon­don­er in the world.

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