Morecambe and Wise (Text Only)

‘It’s up to me’, Sadie said to her son, ‘to see that you are never tied to a whistle like your dad.’34 Her problem now was to find an alternative means to achieve that dream.

The solution, when she thought about it, seemed obvious if also fraught with serious risks and the threat of future hazards. If Eric was too distracted to succeed at school, she reasoned, then she would have to make the source of his distraction into his principal vocation. He was not only a natural performer, she felt, but he also had, like many of his contemporaries, a growing fascination for the world of entertainment. Entertaining people, thrilling them, making them laugh and applaud, seemed a marvellous job, whether it involved racing up and down the wings of a football pitch or standing on the stage of a music-hall. Eric, while unsure of how suited he really was to such a world, would certainly have known that, for a working-class youth, it represented a possible escape from a future of endless toil in humble circumstances.

He would, he said, ‘have liked to have been a professional footballer. Purely and simply because it meant £5 a week. That was a lot of money. My father was getting 30 bob. Five pounds a week for playing a game of football I thought was easy. But I was never ever big or strong enough.’35 Such physical limitations would not, however, preclude a career on the stage, or, indeed, the screen, as other youthful British-born performers from working-class backgrounds – such as Charlie Chaplin (from South London) and Stan Laurel (from Ulverston, just the other side of Morecambe Bay) – had already demonstrated. This was also, of course, a period when the precocious child star – such as Shirley Temple, Mickey Rooney, Judy Garland and the London-born boy with the very familiar surname, Freddie Bartholomew – was firmly in fashion. This was, as Joan Morecambe put it, ‘all dream stuff’,36 and Sadie allowed herself, just a little, to dream.

Eric had become an avid movie-goer, showing particular enthusiasm for – besides the ubiquitous Westerns – comedians such as Will Hay, Laurel and Hardy (it was the era of Our Relations, Way Out West and Block-Heads), Harold Lloyd and Buster Keaton (both of whom were long past their best but whose classic shows were still in circulation) and – hugely popular at the time – Abbott and Costello (in such box-office successes as Who Done It? and Pardon My Sarong). His admiration for Variety performers such as Arthur Askey grew through listening to him regularly on the wireless (the BBC started broadcasting Band Waggon in 1938); and he could hardly have failed to have been impressed by the extraordinary national celebrity of George Formby Junior.

Formby – guided by his formidable wife, Beryl – had gone from the difficult early days of playing the Northern music-halls in the shadow of his then famous father to first stage and then screen stardom. He held the enviable position of top British box-office attraction from 1937 to 1943 with the help of such movies as I See Ice and Trouble Brewing and such popular songs as ‘When I’m Cleaning Windows’ and ‘Chinese Laundry Blues’. Eric was by no means an unequivocal fan, even in those days, of everything Formby was famous for – the songs, he thought, were wonderful, but ‘as a comic he was about as funny as a cry for help’37 – but he did, none the less, come to think of him as something of a personal hero. It is not difficult to imagine why.

Formby, with his flattened vowels and thickened twang, the general air of under-nourishment about him and that spectacularly unfortunate face that seemed forever pressed tight against the outside of a fìsh-and-chip shop window, must have appeared triumphantly, perhaps even deliriously, ‘ordinary’. A popular anecdote from that time – probably apocryphal but quite believable none the less – had a young boy point to a poster outside a theatre and ask his father, ‘Dad, is that George Formby?’ His father is said to have nodded and replied, ‘Yes, and if you keep playing with yourself you’ll end up looking like that!’38 Although he was not, in reality, from the conventional working-class background that his image suggested, he was, like Eric, a Lancastrian, and, with his humorous songs that poked unpretentious fun at the back-street lives, humdrum experiences and minor embarrassments of his public, he was a professional performer who never seemed to let down those who identified with him. At a time when more than two million people found themselves face to face with what George Orwell called ‘the frightful doom of a decent working man suddenly thrown on the streets after a lifetime of steady work’,39 and thousands more than that were contemplating a probable future of bleak immobility and deadly deprivation, George Formby, however implausibly, seemed an inspirational figure.

Sadie was convinced that Eric, if only he applied himself to the task, had the ability to become, like Formby, a professional performer. She made every effort to encourage him to explore his latent talents. It would not, she appreciated, be easy: she had a name for him – ‘Jifflearse’40 – that had been inspired by the strange, nervy restlessness that characterised so much of his behaviour, and it would be heard often, and at high decibels, during the months that followed. She did succeed in persuading him to learn how to play the piano, the clarinet, the guitar, the trumpet, the euphonium, the accordion and the mandolin. ‘But’, she would complain, ‘when he’d got it, he dropped it.’41 At the same time, she also decided – on what seems to have been not much more than a whim – that he should go to dance lessons. One day, when Eric was ten years old, his cousin Peggy – a near-neighbour – called at the house: ‘Aunt Sadie,’ she is reputed to have said, ‘I’m going to dancing class on Saturday.’ ‘Where’s that?’ Sadie replied. ‘Miss Hunter’s, above the Plaza,’ Peggy said. ‘A shilling a lesson.’ ‘Do me a favour,’ asked Sadie, sensing a chance for a brief break from the antics of her increasingly boisterous son, ‘take Eric with you.’42

Eric, it appears, was rather impressed when he discovered that his first dancing partner was to be a girl – slightly older than him – named Molly Bunting. Miss Hunter, it appears, was rather impressed as well when she discovered that her new pupil could dance. Eric remembered:

Miss Hunter, after I’d been there about six weeks, came and saw my mother and said, ‘I think this boy’s got something, Mrs Bartholomew, he’s got a rhythm, you know!’ and me mother said, ‘Oh!’ So Miss Hunter said, ‘Yes, I think he ought to have private lessons’ – private lessons with her in her front room in Rosebury Avenue, at half a crown a time! So me mother said, ‘Oh, yes, all right then, give him private lessons if you think he’s got talent.’43

Sadie, in order to pay for those lessons, had to take on work – in addition to her existing job as an usherette at the Central Pier Theatre – as a daily help, cleaning at three or four houses every week, but she did so, more or less, without complaint, because she now felt a sense of vindication: Eric was, at long last, succeeding at something.

She found a plank of wood for him to tap-dance on at home, and made him a cut-down Fred Astaire-style outfit of top hat, white tie and tails for his lessons. She worked with him over time on a series of mini-routines that included borrowings from the likes of Flanagan and Allen and the latest Hollywood musicals.44 She also had a calling-card made – ‘Master Eric Bartholomew. Vocal Comedy & Dancing’ – and started to find him opportunities to perform in front of an audience: low-key social events known locally as ‘pies and peas’ (because young amateur performers entertained elderly people – usually in a church hall – and, in return, were given a hot meal of meat pies and mushy peas). On at least a couple of occasions Eric also appeared at benefits at the Central Pier, where he would black-up and imitate G. H. Elliott, ‘The Chocolate-Coloured Coon’ – a very popular musical act of the time – singing ‘Lily of Leguna’.45 Offers of further work started to arrive. When George and Sadie took Eric to the Silver Jubilee Club – a working men’s club – in nearby Torrisholme, the concert secretary asked George if Eric would perform for them at dinner time on the following Saturday. Eric recalled: ‘My dad said, “Oh, yes, he’ll do it.” So the feller said, “How much will he want?” My dad said, “He’ll do it for nothing.” He didn’t want anything for it! And me mother hit him.’46 After Sadie’s swift intervention a fee of five shillings was agreed – the first sum of money Eric had ever earned for a performance. He arrived on time, put on his pumps (‘they wouldn’t let me put my taps on’), clambered up on to the billiard table that had been commandeered as a make-shift stage, and, there and then, did his act (‘There were balls flying everywhere!’).47 So popular was the performance that Eric found himself booked again for the following week.

His parents applied for a special licence from the local Education Committee that enabled him to perform in the local clubs, and the bookings began to accumulate: ‘For a Saturday dinner time and Saturday evening we used to get, I think, fifteen shillings to a pound, which was quite an addition to the family budget.’48 Sadie soon realised that the act would need more material to hold the attention of the often noisy and easily distracted audiences. She came across the sheet music for an old song made famous by Ella Shields – a male impersonator – entitled ‘I’m Not All There’ which, she felt, would be perfect – once shorn of its saucy connotations – for ‘Our Eric’: ‘I’m not all there, there’s something missing,/I’m not all there, so the folks declare./They call me looby,/Looby as a great big booby …’ Eric, who thought the song was ‘ghastly’,49 was also unimpressed by the costume Sadie designed to accompany it: from the top down, he wore a flat black beret, a kiss curl, round turtleshell spectacles, black bootlace-tie over a white shirt, a very tight waiter’s jacket ‘with a great big pin where the button should be’, very short pin-stripe ‘business trousers’, suspenders (which he would use to such comic effect thirty years later), red socks and black shoes, and he held in his hand an enormous lollipop – ‘as big as a plate’ – with a child-size bite taken out of it.50 From club to club, week after week, in front of audiences swelled by the combined presence of Sadie, George and all of George’s brothers, Eric would stand, dressed in this outfit, sporting a suitably gormless expression on his pasty-white face, and sing the song he grew to hate.

‘In those days’, he recalled somewhat ruefully, ‘it was a Northern trait that a comic had to be dressed “funny” – to tell everyone, “look, folks, I’m the comic!”’51 Although the ‘I’m Not All There’ routine worked extremely well, thus confirming Sadie’s shrewdness as his unofficial manager, he always resented having to perform it. The warm reception his act usually received may well have been welcome, but the succession of cramped and dingy clubs, each one smelling of stale ale and cigarette ash, harboured no hint of glamour for a young boy uneasy in his ‘gormless’ attire. ‘It was a thing I never really wanted to do,’ he would later protest. ‘I never really wanted to be a performer.’52 There was, it seems, no burning ambition, no sharp sense of urgency, no irresistible will to succeed, no discernible drive: ‘I had no bright ambitions. To me my future was clear. At fifteen I would get myself a paper round. At seventeen I would learn to read it. And at eighteen I would get a job on the Corporation like my dad.’53

If it had not been for his mother’s forcefulness, it seems doubtful that Eric would ever have become a professional entertainer. In later years he would certainly appear eager to seize any opportunity to express the opinion that Sadie had been a hard taskmistress – sometimes too hard – and a few of the jokes he would make at her expense seemed to carry just a hint of bitterness beneath the surface playfulness:

ERICAh, that’s me mother’s favourite song, that. If she was out there in the audience tonight there’d be tears in her eyes.ERNIEWhy?ERICShe can’t stand me.

Deep down, however, there were genuine feelings of respect and, in time, gratitude. As much as he adored his father, Eric knew that ‘the reason no one ever had a bad thing to say about him is because he never put himself in a position where he had to rock the boat, where he had to be judged’,54 whereas Sadie would sometimes be prepared to come into conflict with her son – and, for that matter, anyone else – if she believed that she had his best interests at heart.

‘The truth’, reflected Gary Morecambe, his son, ‘was that he would have achieved much less in his life without her constant support. Since this was perfectly well understood between them, the gibes were a ritualistic repartee of their relationship.’55 Joan, Morecambe’s widow, agreed: ‘They’d always row. Always. Never in a vicious sense, not like that, but they would never see eye to eye, so you always used to know that they were going to clash over something or other. You’d know it was ticking away somewhere in between them, ready to explode at any minute.’56

Eric may well have found performing a ‘chore’, and he may well have felt ‘a right Charlie’ in his comical costumes, but he knew that his ‘mother’s motives were the highest’. As he watched her cut out every reference to him in the local newspapers and paste them carefully into her album, he came to appreciate the fact that, for all their occasional disagreements, she clearly was devoted to him.57 It is also unlikely, said Gary Morecambe, that Sadie, had she known just how uncomfortable performing was making her son feel, would have persisted with her plans: ‘She genuinely believed he adored performing, and was unaware of his real feelings … Had Eric displayed abject misery, then she would not have pushed at all.’58

As it was, Sadie continued to push and to push. She entered her son in a swift succession of local talent competitions, and he did well enough to win several of them, attracting as a consequence his first reviews in the local press:

MORECAMBE BOY FIRST

A show within a show was staged at the Arcadian Theatre on Saturday night when the final of the talent-spotting competition took place.

The standard of local talent was surprisingly high and the audience enjoyed it immensely. It was only after considerable difficulty that Peter Bernard, one of the artistes in the Variety show, was able to select the three winners, who were chosen by the applause the audience gave them.

First prize was won by the Morecambe boy, Eric Bartholomew, whose singing of ‘I’m Not All There’ really got the crowd going.59

One day early in 1939, after a number of minor successes, a relatively major opportunity presented itself. Sadie came across an advertisement for a talent contest to be held at the Kingsway Cinema down in Hoylake, near Birkenhead. ‘In those days’, Eric would recall, ‘to me, going to Hoylake was like going to Australia.’60 This, however, was no ordinary contest: organised by a music weekly, Melody Maker, this was the Lancashire and Cheshire area heat of a national ‘search-for-talenť competition, and the prize for whoever came first was an audition before the important impresario Jack Hylton. Sadie travelled with Eric, and Melody Maker carried a report on the final in its next issue:

There were a hundred competitors in the area and the ten finalists appeared at the Kingsway Cinema, Hoylake, a week ago. Eric Bartholomew put over a brilliant comedy act which caused the audience to roar with laughter. In an interview, he said, ‘My ambition is to become a comedian. My hero is George Formby.’61

Eric was less than thrilled, to say the least, to discover that his prize amounted to nothing more than yet another audition. He found auditions nerve-wracking affairs at the best of times, and this one, in the presence of the well-known band leader and showman Jack Hylton, struck him as more of a punishment than a prize. Sadie, of course, was delighted. They were instructed to travel to Manchester, where Hylton’s latest touring show was next due to visit. This, Sadie reminded her apprehensive son, would be the opportunity that they had both been working so hard for. It would also be, unbeknownst to either of them, the first, fleeting, opportunity for Eric Bartholomew to set eyes upon the boy who would eventually become his partner, one Ernest Wiseman.

CHAPTER III

Wise before Morecambe

Good evening ladies and gentlemen and welcome to the show.

ERNIE WISE

The past would never die for Ernie Wise. It would thrive in his mind throughout all the years of arduous struggle and subsequent success, and, even deep into advanced middle-age, his reference points would remain the same: ‘Hollywood’, for him, would always be the Hollywood of the ‘Golden Age’ of the thirties and forties, and ‘Yorkshire’ would always be the Yorkshire of cloth caps, coal, parkin and pies, and ‘celebrity’ would always be a relative state to be measured against the extraordinary renown of the luminous idols of youth.

The memories, far from fading, seemed to grow more vivid with each passing year, with every cherished moment, retrieved in the mind, appearing more detailed and less doubtful than before, gleaming sharply with the over-polished clarity of a rare and precious piece of crystal. The following, for example, is his adult recollection of a weekly routine from some forty or so years before:

Breakfast was usually bread and dripping, and that went for tea when, occasionally, there might also be a boiled egg. The big meal was dinner, at midday, for which my mother usually made a stew in a saucepan as large as a wash-basin with perhaps fifteen or sixteen large dumplings. We ate a lot of rice pudding – she would put a pint of milk into a pudding and bake it in the oven with a grating of nutmeg and a flavouring of vanilla. Does that make your mouth water? It does mine.

Sunday dinner was the meal of the week. It began with a huge, hot Yorkshire pudding which you ate with steaming gravy. Then came the meat, veg and potatoes, and finally probably a caramel custard.

Monday was washday. Mother rose at six and went to the outhouse where she lit a fire under her copper boiler and in it she boiled the clothes in soapy water. The wash would be done by eight o’clock. It was pegged out to dry, then ironed with a heavy flat iron that had to be heated from time to time on the range.1

Whereas Eric Morecambe, looking back on his childhood, might have thought it sufficient to mention in passing that his mother cooked her stew in a large saucepan, Ernie Wise was always the more likely one of the two to pause and recall more precisely the dimensions of the container and the number of the dumplings; and whereas Morecambe, when reminiscing, tended to jump impatiently from one powerful idea to the next (which is, in a way, how a comic thinks), Wise tended to proceed methodically, showing a very disciplined attention to detail (which is, in a way, how a straight-man thinks).

There is something rather poignant about the way in which Wise recounted events with such jealous exactitude, sounding at times as if his readiness to savour every lost sound, smell, taste and touch was more for his own benefit than it was for that of his audience – a private, belated reward, perhaps, for a hard-working man who had missed more than he cared to admit of a childhood compressed and consumed by the demands of a life lived solely in showbusiness.

The fact of the matter was that Ernie Wise – or, to call him by his real name, Ernest Wiseman – was singled out for stardom long before anyone – outside of Sadie’s initially small but enthusiastic coterie – had even heard of a performer called Eric Bartholomew. Unlike his future partner, he had, from a very early age, worked deliberately and impatiently in pursuit of such recognition. ‘I’ve been ambitious all my life,’ he acknowledged. ‘I was a pusher from the beginning. It’s always been push, push, push.’2 There was to be nothing remotely labyrinthine about his route to fame: it would stretch out before him straight and laser-sharp, unimpeded by childish distractions of any kind.

He was born in Leeds on 27 November 1925 at the local maternity hospital. His father, Harry, was a railway signal and lamp man. His mother, Connie, had worked originally as a box-loom weaver in Pudsey. Their marriage was – like that of the Bartholomews – an alliance of contrasting personalities. Harry – a thin, wiry, warmhearted and outgoing man – came from a very poor family. His father had died when he was just fourteen years of age, and his mother was blind. At the age of sixteen he had pretended to be older than he actually was in order to join the Army, and he went on to win the Military Medal during the 1914—18 war for saving his sergeant’s life. He was a generally optimistic, gregarious kind of character, hopelessly impractical when it came to financial matters but always prepared to lift the mood of any social gathering with an impromptu song and dance. Connie, in contrast, was a rather shy and somewhat religious young woman3 who came from a relatively ‘well-to-do’ working-class family, and, as far as the abstruse yet important intra-class distinctions of the time were concerned, was considered to be ‘a highly respectable young lady’.4

Harry Wiseman met Connie Wright on a tram, when Harry, as he was making his way to the front of the carriage, tripped over Connie’s umbrella. It was, according to Ernie, love at first sight. The relationship, as it blossomed, did not, however, unite their respective families. Although Harry’s family was, it seems, enthusiastic about the prospect of marriage, Connie’s, in contrast, was most certainly not. Her father was, according to Ernie, ‘a dour man … hard, of the sort only Yorkshire breeds’,5 and Harry was far removed from the kind of future son-in-law he had envisaged. It was bad enough, reasoned Connie’s father, that Harry came from such a ‘common’ family, but his carefree attitude to money, he concluded, made him a disastrous choice as a husband.

Connie was eventually handed an ultimatum: marry Harry Wiseman, said her formidable father, and she would be ostracised by her own family. ‘I’ll make sure no worthless husband of yours gets a penny of my money,’ he announced. ‘You’re my favourite daughter, but you’ll get nowt from me.’6 She chose to go ahead and marry Harry, and, sure enough, she was shunned by her family. All that she was allowed to leave home with were her clothes and the upright piano she had bought from out of her savings.

Harry and Connie, once they had married, moved into a single room in lodgings at 6 Atlanta Street, Bramley in Leeds – the place where Ernie would spend the first few months of his life. As soon as they could afford to they left to rent a modest one-up, one-down house in Warder Street – also in Leeds. This was followed shortly after by another house in Kingsley, near Hemsworth, and then, at last, they settled in the end-of-terrace house that Ernie would come to look back on as being his first real home: 12 Station Terrace, a small but relatively pleasant railway cottage in East Ardsley, midway between Wakefield and Leeds. Ernie was their first child; he was followed by a brother, Gordon, and two sisters, Ann and Constance (another brother, Arthur, died of peritonitis at the age of two).

‘We were a happy family,’ Ernie would recall. ‘We always had shoes.’7 It was never, however, the most secure of upbringings. Harry was earning barely enough to sustain the whole family, and, although he handed over the majority of his salary at the end of each week to Connie, he still managed to fritter away what little he had left on alcohol and tobacco. Connie – doubtless with her estranged father’s words ringing loudly in her ears – was often exasperated by her husband’s inability to save what little money he had, and, as Ernie would recall, the house reverberated with the sound of all the endless rows about financial matters.

Connie did her best to keep things on an even keel. She had seven mouths to feed on a basic income of £2 per week, and, as a consequence, she was noted for her thriftiness. ‘“Save a little, spend a little and remember that your bank book is your best friend” was’, said Ernie, ‘one of the constant refrains of my childhood,’ leaving him with a lifelong ‘horror of debt and a steely determination to pay my own way’.8 In spite of such sobering moral lessons, Harry still somehow managed to contrive on countless occasions to stun Connie with his capriciousness. On one such occasion he decided – without informing Connie – that he urgently needed a ‘home cinematograph’ he had seen advertised in the local newspaper. It arrived with one film, which, in the absence of a screen, he proceeded to project, over and over again, on to the pantry wall. He never quite got round to buying a proper screen, nor did he ever quite get round to purchasing any more films, either.