Читать книгу Morecambe and Wise (Text Only) - Graham McCann - Страница 9

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

‘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:

ERIC	Ah, that’s me mother’s favourite song, that. If she was out there in the audience tonight there’d be tears in her eyes.
ERNIE	Why?
ERIC	She 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.