Was Charlie Chaplin a Gypsy?

„Chaplin's birth certificate has never been located. His mother, Hannah – maiden name Hill – was descended from a travelling family. In the 1880s, the Black Patch was a thriving Romany community on the industrial edge of Birmingham. It is not beyond the bounds of possibility that Charlie Chaplin was a Gypsy from the West Midlands. The idea of rewriting Chaplin family history does not faze Michael, his eldest surviving son, and the man who brought Hill's letter to my attention. It must have been significant to him, he says, or why would he have kept it? Perhaps a man who has been spotted in 800 places simultaneously is entirely capable of being born in two places at once.

Like the rest of his siblings, Michael is preparing for a new phase in his father's afterlife. The Chaplin family home, high on the slopes above Montreux, will soon become a museum. We walk together around its unheated spaces, progressing up the curved staircase to the room in which Charles Spencer Chaplin breathed his last. You could say there were ghosts here, he says, as the last of the day's light drains from the air. I think we all saw things at certain moments, but I don't know if that was him, or us, or the house. When I went to see him when he was dead, it was extraordinary. He was such a power – and suddenly, looking down at him, you could see that just the shell was there. All that was him had vanished.

Except, of course, that part of Charles Chaplin that the screen has captured for ever – and the man who might yet be conjured from the box files stored in that vault at the foot of the mountain.”