Morecambe and Wise (Text Only)

‘It’s a fantastic thing,’ said Ernie Wise, reflecting on the success of his partnership with Eric Morecambe, ‘because all we have done is adapt music-hall on to the television and make it acceptable.’11 It was, as an explanation, a simplification of a complex process, but it was, none the less, a revealing observation. Much of what came to be associated with Morecambe and Wise, in terms of gestures, phrases, attitudes and even routines, had its roots firmly in the music-hall experiences of their youth. The sand dance performed by Morecambe and Wise and Glenda Jackson in their celebrated ‘Cleopatra’ sketch was a homage to the great eccentric dancers Wilson, Keppel and Betty. The cod-vent act, performed by Eric Morecambe with dummies of varying shapes and sizes, owed much to Sandy Powell’s earlier version (POWELL: ‘How are you?’ DUMMY: ‘Aying gerry yell chrankchyew!’ POWELL: ‘He says he’s very well.’). Eric’s impromptu monologues (‘They were married at Hoo-Flung-Wotnot/But they had no children sweet/He was fifty and fat/She was fatter than that/So n’ere the twain will meet – boom boom!’) were borrowed from Billy Bennett. The regular bits of comic business involving the plush golden ‘tabs’ – tableaux curtains – such as Eric’s ‘mad throttler’ mime, had been inherited from innumerable half-forgotten old comics who once worked the halls. The direct address to the audience – ‘What do you think of the show so far?’ – harked back to a bygone era of a more intimate brand of popular entertainment.

The world of Morecambe and Wise – even after the former had decamped to Harpenden and the latter to Peterborough – remained the comic world of the traditional Northern humorist. This world was peopled by sad-faced, snail-paced, put-upon pedants like Robb Wilton’s fire chief (‘Oh, yes, oh aye, it’s a pretty big fire … should be, by now … oh, and I say, Arnold – Arnold – take the dog with you, it’ll be a run for him. He hasn’t been out lately … Oh, good gracious me, what’s the matter with the engine?’12), tactless busybodies like Norman Evans’ Auntie Doleful (‘You what? You’re feeling a lot better? Ah, well, you never know – I mean, there was Mrs White – it were nobbut last Thursday, you know – she was doin’ nicely, just like you are, you know – and all of a sudden she started off with spasms round the heart – she went off like a flash of lightning on Friday. They’re burying her today.’13), inveterate gossips like Evans’ Fanny Fairbottom (‘That woman at number seven? Is she? Gerraway! Well, I’m not surprised. Not really. She’s asked for it … I knew what she was as soon as I saw her … And that coalman. I wouldn’t put it past him, either … Not since he shouted “Whoa” to his horse from her bedroom window …’14) and spiky geriatrics like Frank Randle’s permanently louche octogenarian (‘I’m as full of vim as a butcher’s dog – I’m as lively as a cricket. Why I’ll take anybody on of me age and weight, dead or alive.’15).

This was a world where harsh reality intruded rudely into the most rhapsodic of disquisitions, forever dragging idle dreamers like Les Dawson’s Walter Mittyish ex-Hoover salesman back down to earth:

Last evening, I was sitting at the bottom of my garden, smoking a reflective cheroot, when I chanced to look up at the night sky. As I gazed, I marvelled at the myriad of stars glistening like pieces of quicksilver cast carelessly on to black velvet. In awe, I watched the waxen moon ride like an amber chariot across the zenith of the heavens, towards the ebony void of infinite space, wherein the tethered bulks of Jupiter and Mars hung forever festooned in their orbital majesty. And as I stared in wonderment, I thought to myself... I must put a roof on this outside lavatory.16

This was a world in which marriage was regarded as two becoming one with forty years to determine which one it was. Al Read’s many vivid scenes featuring the desperately active wife and the deviously slothful husband captured the struggle memorably:

WIFEAre you going to cut that grass or are you waiting till it comes in the hall?HUSBANDEr, what d’you mean, love?WIFEThat garden’s a disgrace! You don’t seem to have any interest in it at all. First time the neighbours see you with a pair of shears in your hand they’ll swear you’re out for bother! And shift your feet – I’ve asked you to fill that coal bucket twice and you’ve cracked on you’ve not heard me! What we weren’t going to have in that garden – hanging baskets, a lily pond and goodness knows what! And what have we got? An air-raid shelter full of water and a tin hat with a daisy in it!HUSBANDNow, what time have I –WIFEFinds time next door! He’s made some beautiful shapes out of his privets – love birds and all sorts. I wouldn’t care, but he always does our hedge up to the gate. The only time I got you to do his, you went and cut the tail off his peacock!HUSBANDWell, I gave it ’im back!17

The Northern music-hall favoured the comedy of recognition, inclusive rather than exclusive in its attitude. ‘The traditional northern comic gets great sympathy,’ remarked James Casey (a writer and producer of radio comedy for the BBC’s North Region). ‘The southern comics didn’t get sympathy – they were smart, they would basically tell you how they topped somebody … The northern comedian [in contrast] would tell you how he was made a fool of.’18

At the centre of this world stood – a little unsurely at times – the great comic from Stockton-on-Tees, Jimmy James, a lugubrious and vaguely melancholic figure with gimlet eyes and protruding, cushiony lips. He usually found himself sandwiched between two prize idiots – Hutton Conyers on one side, Bretton Woods on the other. ‘Are you puttin’ it around that I’m barmy?’ one of them would ask him. ‘Why?’ James would reply. ‘Did you want to keep it a secret?’ Playfully indulgent, he would listen politely to his companions as they talked their way deeper into the depths of illogicality, rambling on about keeping man-eating lions in shoe-boxes and receiving sentimental gifts from South African trips. Sometimes he would interpose the odd supportive observation (‘Oh, well … they’re nice people, the Nyasas. I’ll bet they gave you something.’), or register a mild sense of surprise (‘Pardon?’), while pursuing a policy of divide and rule by encouraging the idiot on one side to think that the real idiot was on the other side (‘Dial 999 – somebody must be looking for him! … Go and get two coffees – I’ll try and keep him talking.’19).

These triangular conversations would be revived on television in the seventies whenever a special guest would wander on to the stage to join Morecambe and Wise, with the guest on one side, Ernie on the other, and Eric, always running things, in the middle:

ERIC(looking up at Vanessa Redgrave) Good lord! Are you on a box or (glancing down at Ernie) is he standing in a hole?ERNIEEric – Miss Redgrave …ERIC(kissing her hand) Vanilla, how are you?REDGRAVEVanessa.ERICOh? (kisses hand again) Tastes like vanilla. We had your dad on one of our shows, you know.REDGRAVEHe’s never forgotten it.ERNIEThey never do.ERICVery talented man, your dad. The way he played those spoons up and down his legs! Fantastic! Dessert spoons as well – they can be painful if you miss …

‘Whenever you hear me using any of your dad’s material,’ Eric Morecambe told Jimmy James’s son, ‘there are two reasons. One is because it’s a kind of tribute, and the other is because it’s very funny. But mostly’, he added, ‘it’s because it’s very funny.’20 All of the other old routines were drawn on for very much the same reason: they still seemed very funny.

‘Look at that,’ Robb Wilton is reputed to have said, watching from the wings as an acrobatic troupe clambered up on to each other’s shoulders, balanced themselves on chairs that were in turn balanced on tall poles and then spun themselves around at a dizzying speed. ‘All that’, muttered Wilton, shaking his head incredulously, ‘just because the buggers are too lazy to learn a comic song.’21 The same sly irreverence, the same effortless timing, the same sharp response to someone else’s airs and graces, could be found, all those years later, in Eric Morecambe’s remorseless teasing of Ernie Wise’s pretensions to being part of something altogether grander than a mere cheap music-hall act.

Early on in their shared career, when their prospects seemed bleak, Ernie Wise was heard to complain: ‘We’re Northern … You can’t win if you’re Northern.’22 He could not, as far as the future of Morecambe and Wise was concerned, have been more wrong.

CHAPTER II

Morecambe before Wise

I’m an enigma, a one-off.

ERIC MORECAMBE

Eric Morecambe was fond of informing people that he had taken his name from the place of his birth: Eric. His real name, in fact, was John Eric Bartholomew, and the actual place of his birth was the small North Lancashire seaside town of Morecambe.1

He came, as he often said, from an ordinary working-class family.2 His father, George Bartholomew, had worked as a labourer for the Morecambe and Heysham Corporation since leaving school at the age of fourteen. His mother, Sarah (‘Sadie’) Elizabeth Bartholomew (née Robinson), had worked as a cotton weaver and later as a waitress, but she was often obliged to take on a variety of part-time jobs in order to supplement a very modest family income.

They had, in terms of background, much in common with each other. Both came from large families: George had seven brothers and three sisters, Sadie three sisters and two brothers. George had grown up in Morecambe, Sadie in nearby Lancaster. Both had known considerable hardship, and both – each in their own distinctive ways – harboured hopes of a less onerous future.

As personalities, however, they were stark opposites. George, a tall, thin man with a long, narrow face, slightly protruding ears, sharp, attentive eyes and a hairstyle topped off by a Stan Laurel tuft, was by all accounts an even-tempered, warm, happy-go-lucky character who always gave the impression of being more concerned with enjoying what he had than with yearning for what he continued to lack. Sadie, a short, somewhat thick-set woman with dark curly hair, faintly quizzical grey eyes, full cheeks, a sharp wit and, if anything, an even sharper tongue, was a naturally intelligent, imaginative, doughty woman who, had she been born in more propitious times and more fortunate circumstances, might well have pursued an interesting and rewarding career of her own.

They had met at a dance at the Winter Gardens in Morecambe, but their respective reactions to the occasion said much, in retrospect, about their subsequent relationship: whereas George had been sufficiently impressed by Sadie to consider the possibility of an open-ended series of dates, Sadie had decided, there and then, that George Bartholomew was the man she would marry. Sadie got her way. A relatively short time after, on 26 February 1921, they were married in nearby Accrington. Their first and only child, John Eric, was born – somewhat unexpectedly – at 12.30 p.m. on 14 May 1926 (‘If my father hadn’t been so shy I would have been two years older.’3) in the front living-room of a neighbour’s house at 42 Buxton Street, Morecambe.4 The Bartholomew family’s own house, at 48 Buxton Street, would be the house that Eric would come to think of as his first home, but he and his parents could not have stayed there for more than a few short months, because the building was by then in a state of terminal disrepair.

His first vivid memory, he would always say, was of the ceiling having fallen in: ‘I remember being lifted on to the kitchen table by my mother and having my coat pulled on and my scarf tied round my neck, and being taken out of the house.’5 He would have been no more than ten months old at the time.6 The unwelcome and unexpected period of disruption turned out, however, to have been something of a blessing in disguise, because the local Corporation relocated the family into a relatively new and reassuringly sturdy council house – ‘with three bedrooms and an outside loo’7 – at 43 Christie Avenue. A measure of stability and security for the Bartholomews had, at last, been achieved.

The next few years were, Eric would admit, ‘hazy’8 in his memory, but his mother likened her infant son to ‘a little doll with a head of blond curls’.9 He was, it seems, a rather precocious baby, beginning to walk at around nine or ten months old, and learning to speak soon after that. Sadie would always insist, sometimes over the top of her adult son’s meek objections, that he was a born performer:

We had a gramophone and he knew every record we possessed. It’s clear in my memory … He would come in and say, ‘What do you want playing?’ ‘Play me so and so,’ I’d say. He would go through the records, and though he couldn’t read, he would find the very one I had named, put it on, and start dancing to it.

Whenever we took him out to relatives, all he wanted to do was perform ... ‘I want to do my party piece. I want to sing and dance.’

‘Wait a minute, love,’ he would be told.

I remember one particular night when the pianist told him to wait, and he said, ‘All right, I’ll wait under the table.’ He must have been about three. From time to time he would announce, ‘I’m here, and I’m still waiting.’10

Eric could, Sadie recalled, be ‘quite a handful.’11 Both she and her husband had to remember never to leave their front door ajar; they knew that little Eric, had he ever glimpsed a chink of light through the narrowest of gaps, would have pushed the door wide open and wandered off down the street in search of adventure. Whenever Sadie needed to take him shopping with her she found that the only thing she could do to keep him still while she prepared for the trip was to tie him by his scarf to the door-knob and let him sit outside on the step. Even this, however, was sometimes not enough to hold him: on one occasion he managed to convince a passerby that he had tied himself – as part of some obscure prank – too tightly to the door, and needed the assistance of a kind-hearted individual to help him get free. An anxious Sadie tracked him down, eventually, to a damp and dirty building site some distance away at the bottom of Lancaster Road. She found him entertaining the workers by reciting nursery rhymes and performing such songs as ‘Blue Moon’ and ‘I’m Dancing with Tears in My Eyes’, and encouraging them to reward him by tossing coins into his strategically positioned tam-o’-shanter:

When I got there his little white suit was spattered with mud, his shoes and socks were caked where he had squelched through a really sticky patch, and his face was filthy. He saw me and announced to his audience, ‘I’d better go now, there’s me Mam.’

One of the builders said, ‘That little lad’s a wonderful entertainer.’

‘I’ll entertain him when I get him home,’ I said.

‘Oh,’ said Eric, ‘that means I will have to have my bottom slapped, won’t I, Mum?’

‘You’ve never spoken a truer word.’

‘Well, folks,’ said Eric to his audience, ‘I’ll have to be going. Goodbye everybody. See you tomorrow.’12

It was, in spite of the usual kind of deprivations and occasional crises experienced by all working-class families of the period, a happy childhood. ‘I have wonderful memories of both my mother and father,’ Eric would later remark, ‘absolutely fantastic memories, and I think of them a lot and with great happiness.’13 The gentle, easy-going George, his family always said, would start whistling contentedly to himself ‘from the moment his feet touched the ground each morning’.14 He took great pleasure in spending time with his son watching football matches (often at the modest little ground of Morecambe FC; sometimes, as an occasional treat, thirty miles away at Deepdale, the altogether more impressive stadium of Preston North End). George would also take Eric fishing, or picking mushrooms in the fields around their home, and sometimes for long and rambling walks around the town reminiscing about his own childhood days and telling elaborate, funny stories that frequently concealed unexpected twists in their tail. Sadie, Eric remembered, had less time to spare – understandably – for casual outings, but whenever her work brought her into contact with any aspect of the entertainment world she would make a point of bringing him along for a tantalising glimpse behind the scenes. When an opportunity did present itself for a family excursion of some kind or another it was always made the most of. A photograph dating from 1932, for example, pictures what appears to be the end of a very enjoyable afternoon out in the sun, with George, Sadie and Eric sitting down close together on the grass, their makeshift tent standing behind them, all smiling broadly and each with a ukulele in their hands.

Although Eric was an only child he did not want for the companionship of friends of his own age. He was well liked by most of the other children in the area. He joined in all the chaotic games of football with the other boys in the park at the back of Christie Avenue, and accompanied several of his friends on their regular visits to Halfway House – the local sweet shop. On most weekends, he queued with his cousin ‘Sonny’ Threlfall outside the Palladium cinema – known affectionately as ‘The Ranch’ – to see the latest movies (Westerns were his favourite) and, during relatively uneventful moments, fire peashooters at bald-headed men in the rows below.

Morecambe – like most English seaside resorts – was a place of stark, seasonal contrasts: cold, dull and quiet in the winter months; warm, bright and noisy in the summer months. Eric, looking back on his childhood, would describe his memories of his home town as ‘serene and ageless. They emerge vivid and sharp. Happy and bright, not dull and ugly.’15 One of the clearest images was of seeing his parents share the ‘supreme joy’ of sitting together and ‘watching the Turneresque sunset over Morecambe Bay’.16

The town, in those days, was often referred to formally as part of a broader area – ‘Morecambe and Heysham’. Morecambe, as Eric would take pleasure in pointing out, ‘was a double act long before I met Ernie’.17 Spring, as far as Eric was concerned, was the season that marked the town’s sudden re-awakening, and summer the enchanting time when the town ‘became a different place’.18 As the temperature began to rise and the sun started to shine, the town moved rapidly from being a rather insular and unobtrusive Lancashire town to become a lively centre for recreation, a welcoming place that boasted all kinds of entertainment.

Morecambe – the ‘Naples of the North’, a ‘smaller Blackpool’19 – was at this time in the process of creeping gentrification. The process culminated in the early thirties with the establishment of the art deco Midland Hotel, an ambitiously lavish new high-style building on the seaward side of the promenade that soon attracted the likes of David Niven, Mrs Wallis Simpson and Noël Coward. In the summer, as the holiday season began and strangers flocked to the town from all directions, it was, said Eric, ‘like being brought up to date; finding out what was going on in the world. You never saw many cars in those days, yet August brought a veritable motorcade of Austin Sevens and Morris Eights driven by the “well-to-do” paying their £3 a week, full board at the town’s desirable residences.’20

On the sands, littered with sleepy bodies slouched deep in deckchairs and mazy formations of energetic boys and girls, the regular daily entertainment was provided by ‘the Nigger Minstrels’ – ‘then undeterred’, Eric would later note, ‘by the racial overtones of their titles’.21 They would sometimes hold talent contests, and Eric, whenever possible, would enter them – winning on at least three occasions (after his last success, he recalled, ‘They found out I was a local boy and stopped me from entering.’22). Summer also brought with it the prospect of a chance sighting of a visiting celebrity, and Eric was particularly excited one year to see ‘the magnificent’ portly British movie star Sydney Howard23 – fresh from appearing in Shipyard Sally (1939) alongside Gracie Fields – strolling sedately along the pier. The season always ended with the relatively modest but rather beautiful illuminations, a final few visits to the ‘fairyland’ of Happy Mount Park and the first chill winds that accompanied the holidaymakers’ ‘final glimpse of annual escape’.24

‘I was proud’, Eric would say, ‘to know that people came to my town for a holiday. It always seemed a pity that they couldn’t stop the whole year round [because] in those golden growing up years, there was a sort of magic about Morecambe. It had a lot to offer and I took it.’25 The one place in town, however, where it seems that he usually took rather less than was being offered him was the classroom: ‘I wasn’t just hopeless in class,’ he said. ‘I was terrible.’26 This was, typically, something of an exaggeration – he was far from being a slow-witted young boy, and there is some evidence to suggest that he showed a reasonable aptitude for certain subjects,27 but, nevertheless, school was never a place that would ever be able to command his full attention.

He attended two schools in Morecambe: Lancaster Road Junior and then, with markedly less frequency and enthusiasm, Euston Road Senior. He was, to begin with, happy enough to set off there each morning – particularly because Sadie allowed him to take with him a bag of his favourite confection – ‘cocoa dip’, a mixture of cocoa powder and sugar: ‘The idea was to have the bag open in my coat pocket and keep dipping a wet finger into the mixture ... at regular intervals on the way to school. It was like nectar.’28

In time, however, a combination of boredom and, increasingly, absenteeism ensured that the standard of his work declined alarmingly: ‘I spent most of my time’, he later confessed, ‘in the school lavatory smoking anything I could ignite.’29 Sadie, who had hoped that her son would do well enough to go to a grammar school, was too attentive a mother to have remained unaware of the problem for very long, but, when the school reports started to underline just how poorly he was faring, she felt shocked and angry.

One report in particular, which arrived at the Bartholomew house early in April 1936, announced curtly that the nine-year-old Eric was forty-fifth out of forty-nine pupils (although, judging from his marks, it is not at all clear how he managed to come ahead of the other four). A teacher’s scribbled addendum – ‘He was absent most of the exams’ – pointed out an obvious contributory factor.30 Sadie (it appears that George left such responsibilities to her) wrote back to the school immediately, declaring on the back of the same sheet: ‘I am disgusted with this report, and I would be obliged if you would make him do more homework,’ adding, menacingly as far as Eric was concerned, ‘I would see he did it here.’31 She, typically, was determined that her son should arrest his dizzying decline as speedily as possible and then – she hoped – start to improve. After visiting his school and talking to several of his teachers, however, Sadie was, eventually, forced to accept the fact that he was never going to achieve the academic success she had dreamed of. ‘Mrs Bartholomew,’ said the headmaster, ‘I’ve been teaching boys for thirty years. Take my advice. It would be a complete waste of time [to expect any improvement].’ She had offered to pay for further tuition but was told, ‘It would be money down the drain.’32

This rejection only seemed to spur Sadie on in her search for a suitable career for Eric. It surprised no one who knew her that she reacted to the undeniably deep disappointment of this setback in such a remarkably spirited and positive manner. Her most passionate wish was for her son to grow up to five a better and more rewarding life than either she or her husband had known, and, even if that wish did not seem likely to be realised through academic achievement, she was not prepared to abandon it. Eric’s widow, Joan – who would in later years come to know Sadie extremely well – stressed how committed she was to her son’s betterment:

She really was a good woman. She was hard, yes, in some ways, but she had to be a hard woman in that kind of harsh environment. She wasn’t the sort of pushy ‘stage mother’ that some people have portrayed her as being. She didn’t keep pushing Eric because she wanted fame and fortune through her child. She was much too fair and too intelligent for that to be her motive. Everything she did, she did for Eric’s sake. Just after Eric was born, George had had a terrible accident playing football, he’d broken his leg, and they’d wanted to amputate it, the breaks were so severe. He’d refused, and luckily his leg was OK, but it was something like two years before he was able to work again – and all through that time Sadie went out to work while George stayed at home with Eric, and she really had to work to keep them all going. That was the great strength these people had, and Sadie was not just strong but also, in so many ways, so shrewd and far-seeing.33