Saturday, 15 April 2017

Charlie Chaplin: was the entertainer really born in Smethwick?

Posted by sizzledfeed on 23:04

David Gritten embraces new evidence disputing that Chaplin was born in London, as was previously thought, but in Smethwick.

It’s always been assumed that Charlie Chaplin was a Londoner, born in Lambeth in 1889. The city has always embraced him as one of its own – you need look no further than Leicester Square and its famous Chaplin statue as evidence.

So our capital city likes to claim it’s the birthplace of the two greatest Englishmen in film history – Chaplin and Alfred Hitchcock, born in Leytonstone 10 years later.

Now that claim is in dispute. Matthew Sweet, the erudite and entertaining film historian, has visited the Chaplin family home in Montreux, Switzerland, and inspected a Chaplin archive in a concrete vault. It contains letters, press cuttings and reel-to-reel recordings of him playing the piano.

But the most remarkable document of all is a letter to Chaplin from a man called Jack Hill, who in the 1970s was living in Tamworth, Staffordshire. He informed Chaplin that he was the nephew of a woman known as The Gypsy Queen, who at one point in her life lived in a caravan on a travellers’ site known as The Black Patch, in Smethwick, near Birmingham. This caravan, he informed Chaplin, was the place he had really been born.

Sweet, who presents a Radio 4 programme called The Chaplin Archive on Monday at 11 a.m., observes that Chaplin’s birth certificate has never been found, but his mother Hannah was descended from a family of travellers. Both Hannah and Chaplin’s father Charles Senior, were music hall entertainers and constantly on the move. Chaplin’s son Michael, who is now 64, believes Hill’s letter is ‘significant’ and quite possibly true.

I’d like to think so. My interest in this story is twofold. I write about film for a living, and Chaplin is a giant figure in film history – perhaps the biggest single name in over a century of cinema. And then there’s the fact that I’m from Smethwick myself. I lived there for the first 17 years of my life.

It’s a place with an unfashionable reputation, to put it mildly. To people of a certain age its very name is infamous, after Peter Griffiths was elected its Conservative MP in 1964, having conducted a notoriously racist campaign. Still, as a Smethwick boy, I feel protective of the place – and these days a variety of ethnic groups live there peaceably. Still, the notion that Charlie Chaplin, one of the most famous figures of the 20th century, was born there would be good news for the town – which has now been incorporated into the metropolitan borough of Sandwell, but still retains its identity.

I remember the Black Patch slightly. It’s now a park, located right at the heart of this country’s Industrial Revolution, and it used to be surrounded by factories that formed the manufacturing hub of England. Many of those factories have closed their gates, but the park lives on – as does its legacy as home to travelling gypsies in the latter half of the 19th century.

I have a feeling the controversy about Chaplin’s birth won’t go away in a hurry. London has a vested interest in re-affirming itself as his birthplace. Me, I like to think that it was Smethwick all along, and this little corner of the Black Country was the place this legendary figure first drew breath.

Credit: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/film/film-blog/8333101/Charlie-Chaplin-was-the-entertainer-really-born-in-Smethwick.html