London Walks - Charlie Chaplin, Pubs, Music Halls & Beyond

Join Publicity – The Guidebook Gap in our two-mile walking tour of Charlie Chaplin’s London neighborhood. Our walk maps how institutional poverty and family chaos produced the raw material of Chaplin’s art.

We’ll visit pubs, music hall sites, residences, markets, and street art in Walworth, Kennington, Lambeth, and Camberwell. Discover how Chaplin’s character of The Tramp was not invented in California but assembled from lived experience on these specific streets. 

We begin with Chaplin's disputed birth on East Street in 1889, run through his parents' separation, mother Hannah's mental collapse, the workhouse, the pauper school at Hanwell, and the death of his alcoholic father.

We then follow Chaplin’s professional growth from a childhood spent absorbing crowd mechanics at the Canterbury Music Hall, to Fred Karno's mime-based training at the Fun Factory in Camberwell, where the grammar of silent performance was drilled into him six years before Hollywood needed it. 

We pivot through Chaplin’s American ascent, The Tramp's debut at Keystone in 1914, the political courage of The Great Dictator, and the revocation of his re-entry permit at sea in 1952, before closing with his honorary Oscar, his 1975 knighthood, and that stolen coffin. 

At our final stop at the Chaplin Mosaics at Chandler Hall on Lambeth Walk where we consider that pub back rooms created music hall, music hall created Chaplin, and Chaplin by removing dialogue, turned a South London street education into a global art form.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

19th of September, nineteen fifty-two. The RMS Queen Elizabeth is two days out of New York. On board? Charlie Chaplin, wife Una, and their four young children. So traveling to London for the premiere of his new film, Limelight. Chaplin has lived in America for forty-two years and has never taken American citizenship. On this day, United States Attorney General James McGranary signs an order revoking Chaplin's reentry permit, informing Chaplin while at sea. If Chaplin wants back into the country where he has built everything he owns, he will first have to submit to a hearing on his political views and his moral conduct. Chaplin's public statement is careful. I do not want to create any revolution. All I want to do is to create a few more films. His position hardens. He surrenders his re-entry permit voluntarily. Uno returns to America to transfer his assets to European bank accounts and to close his studio on LaBrayer Avenue. The American chapter ends with her closing the door on her way out. In today's episode, we're going to delve into Charlie Chaplin's upbringing on the streets of South London to see how life invokes art. Chaplin's career emerged from the music halls of the poor streets of South London. The music halls, as with much in Britain, originated with the pub. Number one, I thought he was American. Number two, I couldn't understand how someone with classic movie star looks did not emerge as your typical romantic lead. I got both my misdirections corrected once I dug into his background. It's shocking to me that someone could escape such a brutal upbringing on the streets of late Victorian London, travel the other side of the world for work, and become not only a global star in the early days of Hollywood, but a self-made man in the process. The choice of leading character Well the answer to that is in the pubs, music halls, and those streets of South London that we will explore on today's episode. Our walk in tour will cover roughly two miles of South London, Walworth, Kennington, Lambeth, and Camberwell, neighborhoods most people don't cover on their first or subsequent trips to London. This is the territory that made Charlie Chaplin. In the late 19th century, on Charles Booth's poverty maps, this area included heavy bands of poverty, streets marked very poor, and chronic want. We're going to walk the area in the order that it shaped Chaplin. Broadly south to north through Kennington, finishing east into Camberwell. There are a handful of places that belong to the story but not to the walk. Our story will go there without your feet having to follow. Before we get into the story, I just wanted to ask a favor of you. If you're enjoying this podcast, then please share it, share a link to the show, and share specific episodes with people that you think would appreciate it. Thanks for listening. The market has been trading six days a week since the 1880s, and it's still pretty much recognizable as it once was. It's loud and dense with stalls laid out end to end. Vendors work the crowd with the specific performative energy of people who understand that in a market, attention is money. The hustle is a form of theatre. Charles Spencer Chaplin was born on the 16th of April, 1889. The exact address is disputed. The historical record offers several possibilities in the Woolworth area. But the official Chaplin Estate Biography places his birth on East Street. His father, Charles Chaplin Sr., was a comic singer on the South London Music Hall circuit, dressing in the character of an elegant swell. His mother Hannah Hill performed under the stage name Lily Harley. She was a singer and character comedian in the music halls. Both parents were genuinely talented. The 1891 census places Hannah as head of household at 94 Barlow Street, Walworth, with Sydney and two-year-old Charlie. Charles Sr. was found on the same census, lodging nearby with fellow theatrical performers. The marriage was effectively over before Charlie could even walk steadily. Chaplin's parents separated in 1892 when he was just three years old. Chaplin moved in with his mother and brother Sidney to this address. Hannah had begun a relationship with another musical performer, Leo Dryden, bearing him a son, Wheeler. This was a stable, happy period in Charlie's young life. West Square is a Georgian square dating from 1791, its terraced houses surrounding a communal garden. They all lived at 39 West Square until the relationship broke down, and Dryden left with his son in 1893. Hannah's health declined quickly from here. Her voice began to fail. This prompted her son Charlie's first stage appearance. In 1894, when Hannah lost her voice amid performance before a rowdy audience in Aldershot, the stage manager led five-year-old Charlie on in her place. He sang a popular song and when the audience threw coins onto the stage, he stopped to pick them up before continuing. That got a bigger laugh than the singing. He was five years old. The mechanics of performance and audience management were already running. 1895 and a 20-minute walk brings us to 164 York Road and the first recorded splitting of the family unit by institutional intervention. By June 1895, Hannah is suffering terrible headaches and a fail in voice and is admitted to Lambeth Infirmary. Six-year-old Charlie is lodging with a family called Hodges at 164 York Road. Sydney is in the workhouse. By 1896, Charlie's father had stopped maintenance payments. Hannah, unable to work, cannot meet the payments on her sewing machine, and it gets repossessed. With no income, Hannah could no longer look after the children, and the choice was grim. 1896 brings us a brisk 25-minute walk to the site of the Lambeth Union Workhouse off Renfrew Road in Kennington and close to where the Imperial War Museum stands today. The workhouse building still stands. It's now the home of the Cinema Museum. By May of 1896, Hannah could no longer provide for the boys, and she admitted herself and both children to the Lambeth Union Workhouse. Within weeks, Charlie and Sydney were transferred to the Central London District School at Hanwell, a pauper school twelve miles west in what is now Elin. They were transported there through the streets in a horse-drawn bakery van. At Hanwell, Sydney was separated from Charlie. The authorities selected older boys there for maritime training. In November 1896, aged eleven, Sidney was transferred to the training ship Exmouth, moored off of Grays in Essex. This was an old warship repurposed to train pauper boys for sea service. He stayed fourteen months, leaving in January 1898, with a certificate of proficiency in seamanship. The system that had separated the brothers had, in Sidney's case, also given him a trade. In his autobiography, Chaplin describes the day they entered the workhouse gates. He notes being separated from Hannah, the institutional uniform replacing their own clothes, and records with forensic precision and without self-pity. At some point during the boys' time at Hanwell, Hannah discharged herself from the workhouse to see her children. She spent a single day with them at Kennington Park, where they sat on a bench eating cherries and played catchball with a crumpled newspaper, and a visit to a coffee shop. Then they had to return, as if the day hadn't even happened. The park is a ten minute walk from the workhouse on Renfrew Road. It still exists. It's a very ordinary green space in South London.

SPEAKER_01 9:47

Into the blue just a gesture.

SPEAKER_00 10:05

There's a building on Westminster Bridge Road that you won't need to visit today. It's north of where we're heading, but it's long gone. It's the most important room in Charlie Chaplin's education, however. The Canterbury Music Hall. It was one of the first purpose-built music halls in all of London. It could hold three thousand people, and Chaplin's estate tells us that he recalled seeing his father perform there. What the young Chaplin was watching in his early musical days was a specific transaction with the audience, the slow burn, the gag delivered at exactly the right tempo, the geometry of a laugh, the mechanics of the moment an audience decides to grant attention, and the moment it decides to withdraw it. All skills that ultimately were transferable to silent film. Chaplin was watching his father work a room that owed him nothing. He was still only nine years old. We've reached the period 1895 to 1898, a short distance north from the Cinema Museum, and we arrive at the Queen's Head Pub at 71 Black Prince Road, SE 116AB. The pub sadly is no longer there. The building is currently in use as the Queen's Head Cafe and Bistro. Charlie Chaplin's uncle was the landlord here, which means this was, for a stretch of the 1890s, something approximating a stable point in an otherwise chaotic childhood, a place with a family connection, a place where he was known. It's where Chaplin situated the first version of a story he would return to more than once. It is the origin of the tramp's walk. A man called Rummy Binks worked here at the Queen's Head, taking care of the horses. Chaplin recalled watching him cross the road. He had a particular shuffle, a way of carrying a body that had been worn down and bent into shape by hard work and harder luck, misfitting clothing and large bulbous feet. As always, Charlie paid attention and filed it all away.

SPEAKER_01 12:31

A penny for a tumble, a pound for a grill.

SPEAKER_00 12:38

September 1898 and a nine-minute walk north and were at 287 Kennington Road. A plaque marks the site today. Hannah is admitted to Cane Hill Mental Asylum. She had developed psychosis brought on by syphilis and malnutrition. The admission date, 15th September 1898. The boys went for the first time to live with their estranged alcoholic father at 287 Kennington Road. The father was living there with his mistress Louise and their young son. Louise did not welcome the boys. It was she who eventually enrolled Charlie at Archbishop Temple Boys School.

SPEAKER_01 13:18

London was a throat full of rough dust.

SPEAKER_00 13:22

The shouting never seemed to end. Fast forward to November 1898, and a 20 minute walk brings us to our next stop, 39 Methley Street in Kennington. Hannah is discharged from Cane Hill in November of 1898. The family reunited here, one room beside Haywood's Pickle Factory and a slaughterhouse on Kennington Lane. Act two The Train In 1898 to 1910. Before we continue the walk, we need to run the professional story alongside the domestic one. The two tracks cover the same years. They don't always point in the same direction, however. It's now the autumn of eighteen ninety eight, and while Charlie and Sydney were still shuttling between their father's house on Kennington Road and their mother's room in Methley Street, Charlie Chaplin's professional career began. Charles Chaplin Sr. used his professional connections to get his son the vacant place in a troupe that was known as the Lancashire Lads. Within just eight weeks of rehearsal, a nine-year-old Charlie made his debut on Boxing Day 1898 at the Theatre Royal in Manchester in the pantomime Babes in the Wood. This is what Charles Sr. gave his son. No maintenance, no stability, but a professional connection. It was not enough, but it also was not nothing. At Christmas 1900, the Lancashire lads moved into a different kind of work. The troupe were engaged to play animals in the kitchen scene of the pantomime Cinderella at the new London Hippodrome. Charlie Chaplin was dressed as a cat. The British Film Institute notes that this was his first opportunity to make people laugh as a character rather than as a dancer. He had spent two years learning what a crowd looked like from the front of it. Now he was learning what it felt like to be the reason they laughed. April 1901, six minutes north from Methley Street, brings us to 14 Chester Street, now Chester Way, in Kennington. Two rooms above a barber shop on Chester Way. Sydney had taken a new birth, sign in as an assistant steward and bandsman with the Union Castle Mail Steamship Company on the Cape Run to South Africa. Hannah and Charlie moved in with what he'd left them. Orange crates covered in critons served as furniture. When Sydney's return was delayed, they would move again to Pownell Terrace, but for now it was theirs. Situated directly opposite the Imperial War Museum, this pub was well known to Charlie Chaplin and his family. There's a small snug area called Chaplin's Bar in the pub today. It's a freehouse featuring beers from London breweries. It's also a gastro pub, emphasizing free range and ethically sourced products. It has original cast iron pillars and a tiled splash around the bar counter. Chaplin wrote in his autobiography The three stags in the Kennington Road was not a place my father frequented, yet as I passed it one evening, an urge prompted me to peep inside to see if he was there. I opened the saloon door just a few inches, and there he was, sitting in the corner. He was about to leave, but his father's face lit up and he beckoned Charlie in. Chaplin wrote that his father was never demonstrative. Chaplin Senior looked very ill, his eyes were sunken, and his body had swollen to an enormous size. He rested one hand Napoleon like in his waistcoat, as if to ease his difficult breathing. That evening the father asked after Hannah and Sidney. Before Charlie left, his father took him in his arms and for the first time kissed him. Chaplin wrote That was the last time I saw him alive. Charles Chaplin Sr. died on the ninth of may nineteen oh one of liver cirrhosis at the age of thirty eight. He had been working to the end, or at least trying to Now we reached the period nineteen oh one to nineteen oh three. Our walk takes us to a site that no longer exists which is fit in because of what happened here. Three Poundle Terrace was a garret in the roof. A few minutes from the Three Stag's pub, the building was demolished in nineteen sixty six and is now part of the Ethelred estate. It was the last address at which Hannah, Charlie, and Sydney ever lived together under the same roof. In May 1903, Hannah's health failed completely. She was readmitted to Lambeth Workhouse and transferred to Cane Hill Asylum. Charlie Chaplin was fourteen years old. He walked his mother to the asylum himself. Charlie Chaplin then lived alone for several days, searching for food, occasionally sleeping rough until Sydney returned from sea. Hannah was released from the asylum eight months later. Her illness reoccurred in March nineteen oh five, and this time sadly it became permanent. That is the scene that's missing from every tourist map of Charlie Chaplin's London. Not the tramp, not the funny walk, but a fourteen year old walking his mother to an asylum and then walk in the streets alone, homeless. It's 1903 and we have a short walk to bring us to the Tommy Field Pub at eleven Kennington Oval, SE eleven six PT. It's formerly the White Heart Pub. Part traditional London pub, part gastro, and part boutique hotel these days. It has guest accommodation of six bedrooms attached and a regular bill of comedy acts. It's located near the Oval Cricket Ground on the Georgian Cleaver Square, an 18th century garden square that dates specifically to 1789. It was the first in South London. Also nearby are the Garden Museum, housed in a former church on Lambeth Palace Road, the Imperial War Museum, and the Beef Eater Gin Distillery in Montford Place. In Charlie's own words, I wandered through Lambeth Walk looking hungrily into cookshop windows. For hours I watched the quacks selling their wares. The distraction soothed me, and for a while I forgot my plight and hunger. He ended up on the steps at Kennington Cross, waiting, no money, no food. Sydney was away at sea, the house empty. Music drifted from the Whiteheart pub on the corner, now the Tommy Field pub, and the music stopped him in his tracks. He was fourteen years old and he'd just walked his mother to Cane Hill Asylum. Hungry, alone, sitting on a curb in the dark, a pub performance momentarily lifted him. He already knew entertainment was the way out. This was the night it became a conviction. By 1903 Chaplin had a speaking part, playing Billy the Page Boy, in a tour in production of Sherlock Holmes under H. A. Sainsbury. This was a small yet speaking role across a full evening that taught him how to sustain a character over two hours. His brother Sidney had joined Fred Carnor's prestigious comedy company in 1906, becoming one of their top performers by 1908. He lobbied Carno to hire his younger brother Charlie. Carno at first was reluctant, considering Charlie a pale, puny, sullen looking youngster who looked much too shy to do any good in the theater. Well, Charlie got a two week trial and after. After a good impression on his first night at the London Coliseum, he was signed to a contract. He began playing minor parts, progressing to starting roles by 1909. And you know, Charlie's understudy, he was a certain Arthur Stanley Jefferson. We all know him as Stan Laurel of Laurel and Hardy fame.

SPEAKER_01 22:20

Why speak when the eyes do the heavy work? A lift of the brow tells the whole story. It is better to be a ghost than a man who has to scream to be heard.

SPEAKER_00 22:43

It's 1908 and we have a ten minute walk southeast from Kennington Road to 38 Southern Road in Camberwell, formerly Vaughn Road. Carnor's Company rehearsal studio and production center was located there, and it was known as the Fun Factory. A commemorative blue plaque was unveiled there in 2012, a five-story building that still stands, still in creative use, as clockwork studios. Dialogue had been banned from the music halls in an attempt to promote the theater industry, but Carno circumvented the rule by training speechless actors to use exaggerated body language to portray their characters. These mime-based performances were systematic in a way most treated as entirely instinctive. Every sketch was structured with the precision of a mechanism. Entrance, setup, escalation, misdirection, release, exit. Nothing happened because it was funny in isolation. It happened because of where it fell in the sequence. What he was teaching at 38 Southern Road in Camberwell was the grammar of silence. Six years before Silent Move In Pictures came along. Chaplin quickly rose to the lead role in one of the company's signature pieces, A Night in an English Music Hall. He played a drunk man in a theatre box who progressively, methodically destroys the performance happening on the stage below him. The character is prosperous, besotted, catastrophically well-intentioned, and entirely unable to understand the damage he's causing. The class dynamics of the man with money and no situational awareness versus the performers trying to keep their livelihood intact were not lost on a boy from Walworth. This is not a character invented in a rehearsal room. It's a character assembled from years of watching both sides of that specific relationship.

SPEAKER_01 24:32

Then the water stretched out for weeks. The salt air washed the noise away.

SPEAKER_00 24:41

In September of 1910, Conor's company sailed for the first of two American tours. Chaplin left his London flat at the top floor of 15 Glenshaw Mansions on Brixton Road, the first home he ever called his own and shared with his brother Sidney. Chaplin described it as a cherished haven. A short walk southwest from the Fun Factory, 15 Glenshaw Mansions, still stands today. It has an English heritage blue plaque. It was not a workhouse bunk, nor theatrical digs, or his father's floor. He had found it at age nineteen, an entire childhood spent without a permanent home. He left a note for Sydney on the table because he disliked goodbyes, and at age twenty one, he left home.

SPEAKER_01 25:28

I found a hat that was a size too small, and a cane made of thin willow. The world got big while I stayed small. I speak when the eyes do the heavy work.

SPEAKER_00 25:42

So here is what a two-mile radius of South London had produced by the time that ship sailed, carrying Charlie Chaplin to America. A man who had been stripped, processed, and classified by an institutional system designed to communicate permanent failure, and who had watched from the inside of it exactly how attention and dignity actually work, who had conducted a childhood education in crowd mechanics at the Canterbury Music Hall on Westminster Bridge Road, who had learned the systematic grammar of silence in a rehearsal rule in Camberwell. The South London material was complete. The only thing missing? A camera. Six months into his second American tour in May 1913, a representative from the New York Motion Picture Company made contact with the Carnot Tour manager in Philadelphia. He was looking for someone who could replace a departing star at their Keystone Studios in Los Angeles, California. Chaplin signed with Keystone in September 1913, arriving in Los Angeles in December, and he began working at the studio on the 5th of January 1914. The character that was about to make Charlie Chaplin the most recognizable person on earth was not invented in California. It was assembled from everything that had already happened to him. The workhouse, the pantomime cat costume, the drunk in the theatre box. The tramp is a South London kid in borrowed clothes. Act 3 America, the Tramp and the Exit. He had no idea of the character, yet the moment he was dressed, the clothes made him feel the person he was. By 1915, the most recognizable face on the planet. His image was on more surfaces in more countries, in more languages than any political leader or head of state. There is no precedent for what happened to Chaplin's fame in that period. The tramp worked for reasons that are easy to feel but yet hard to explain. He is poor but carries himself with dignity. He is defeated by circumstance but not by character. He falls, he gets up, he tips his hat, he walks away. Not with naivety, but with the specific resilience of someone who has weighed the options and concludes that resilience is the only rational one available. The poverty the tramp carries is real poverty, rendered without sentimentality, it's why it still connects with us now. Modern Times in 1936 was Chaplin's last tramp film. The Great Dictator in 1940, his first true sound film, was a full-length caricature of Adolf Hitler at a time when America had not yet entered the war. The movie ended with a direct address to camera that fascism is a choice, that cruelty is policy, that choosing otherwise is still possible. One of the most politically courageous films ever made in Hollywood. By the time Chaplin boarded the Queen Elizabeth Ocean Liner in September 1952, he had spent three years making the movie Limelight. This was a movie set in the 1914 London music hall world about an aging comedian watching his audience leave him. He was 63 years old, his American audience had largely left him. The film and the life had become at that point difficult to tell apart. His reentry permit was revoked while he was at sea. He never went back to America. Act 4. Exile, the Oscar and the Knighthood, 1952 to 1977. While Chaplin was in England for the Limelight premiere, his wife Una flew back to America alone. She went into their house in Beverly Hills, into the studio on La Brea Avenue, transferred his assets to European bank accounts, and closed everything up. Then she flew back. His LeBrea studio? Musicians Herb Albert and Jerry Moss bought the La Brea studios off of Chaplin and used it to found AM Records. In January 1953, the Chaplin family settled at the Manoir de Barnes, a 19th century estate in Coisier Service on the north shore of Lake Geneva. Chaplin's formal rehabilitation began in April 1972. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences invited Chaplin to accept an honorary Oscar. He was hesitant. He'd not been in America for twenty years. It was Una who encouraged him to go. He accepted. He received a stand in ovation that lasted twelve minutes, the longest in the ceremony's history. Chaplin wept on stage. He was eighty-two years old. Recognition in Britain took three more years. On March 4th, 1975, aged 85, Charles Spencer Chaplin was finally knighted at Buckingham Palace. Una and several of his children were there. The honor had been delayed for decades while others, like Laurence Olivier, were recognized. Charlie Chaplin died on Christmas Day 1977, aged 88, at his home by Lake Geneva. He had come from disputed origins in Walworth and ended as a knight, father of eight, and recipient of the longest standing ovation in Academy Awards history. Two months later his coffin was stolen and held for ransom. Una refused to pay, it was recovered eleven weeks later and reburied under concrete. Act five The Lambeth Walk, the film's look back. Our walk will end at Lambeth Walk and the Charlie Chaplin Mosaics at Chandler Hall. The street now displays the artists they made. Lambeth Walk was a working class thoroughfare and an evening promenade. It was immortalized in the 1937 musical Me and My Girl. It ignited a dance craze I can remember my parents' friends still doing at their house parties in the early 1970s. You can watch Tony Award-winning actor Robert Lindsay evoke Chaplin's spirit wonderfully in his Lambeth Walk scene from the Broadway adaptation. It's on YouTube. I'll link to it in the show notes. So really this is the whole point of the walk. Not that Chaplin happened to be born in South London, but that South London remained legible in his art. His films are not detachable from the streets. They are the streets, just reorganized. That lead-in-man decision? Not really a choice given that moving pictures were in a very early experimental stage. Short films shot quickly with no script. They just made it up as they went along. Slapstick comedy is a natural fit for such improvisation. So, Charlie Chaplin's decision to emerge as the tramp versus romantic lead? It wasn't so much of a choice, but a directive born out of his background and the state of the art of motion picture making at the time. It wasn't escapism, it was recognition. Pub backrooms and music halls also offered rare independence for working class women. Performers like Hannah Chaplin built their careers there. The music halls promoted countercultural values of rivalry, baudiness, hedonism, the mockery of authority, and the equality of the sexes in work, leisure, and desire. All of it lives in the character of the tramp. He is poor but will not be diminished by it. He falls, gets up, tips his hat, walks away. He mocks authority by surviving it. He has dignity without money, which is the one thing the workhouse was specifically designed to make impossible. A universal character born from local culture. The pub creates the music hall, the music hall creates chaplain. Chaplin removes Lamwage and in the process creates a global art form. It all begins in a pub back room and the streets of Lambeth, South London. I'll be back in two weeks with another episode with more pubs, another neighborhood, and more overlooked pieces of London. In the meantime, share this episode with someone who you think would enjoy it. Thank you for listening. This has been Expat Andy from Publicity the Guidebook Gap.