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Chapter 4

MORECAMBE & WISE

Ernie: You’re making us look like a cheap music hall act.

Eric: Well, we are a cheap music hall act.

IN NORMAL CIRCUMSTANCES, Eric and Ernie’s successful debut might have been enough to set them up as a promising new double act, but the war that had brought them together now pulled them apart. By 1942, the travails of staging a touring show in wartime finally proved impossible, and less than a year after their first turn together, Youth Takes A Bow took its final bow. Eric and Ernie were both keen to carry on, but they were still only sixteen, and even without a war on, the transition from child stars to grown up pros was always going to be tough. Such an arduous proposition was too much even for the ever resourceful Sadie. She returned to Morecambe, and her eternally patient husband. Eric went with her. He clocked on at the local razor blade factory, where he proved to be every bit as useless as he had been back at school. His weekly wage was just seventeen and six – barely more than he used to earn for a couple of spots at a local working men’s club when he was a kid. For a lad who’d been on a fiver a week, it was a pretty steep comedown, but he wouldn’t have been the first child star (or the last) who failed to make the grade. As he toiled ten hours a day, for a few pennies an hour, Eric could have been forgiven for thinking that was that.

Ernie, meanwhile, had travelled down to London, where he found the sort of digs aspiring showmen usually only find in Hollywood movies – lodging with a family of Japanese acrobats. However he had less luck finding work. The Blitz had taken its toll on London’s variety theatres, and having obtained no bookings whatsoever, he was forced to return home to Yorkshire, where the only opening he could find was a supporting role on the local coal round. After three months, he could bear no more. Desperate for a change of scene, and a change of occupation, he went to stay with Eric, to try and get some gigs together in Morecambe. With no local bookings to speak of, Sadie finally relented and accompanied Eric and Ernie to London. There, in 1943, thanks to her tireless hustling, they secured a position in a show called Strike A New Note at ten quid each a week. They probably could have held out for more, but it was still a lot better than delivering coal or making razor blades. Yet there was one creative hitch. The producer, George Black, didn’t want them to do a double act. In that case, said Ernie, they weren’t interested. In that case, replied Black, they could understudy his second string comic, Alec Pleon. Eric and Ernie could still be bossed around when it came to money, but when it came to the act itself, they already had exceptional self belief.

As it happened, Ernie’s negotiating triumph was a pretty hollow victory. Pleon, recollected Ernie ruefully, turned out to be the fittest man in show business, and Eric and Ernie were reduced to the role of ‘glorified chorus boys.’¹ Yet a walk on part in a successful show is a lot better than a leading role in a flop, and Strike A New Note was such a big hit that even these chorus boys could bask in its reflected glory. The star of the show was Sid Field, a superb Brummie comic who was still relatively unknown down south. Strike A New Note made Field’s name in London. Visiting Americans like Clark Gable and James Stewart came along to see him, and even dropped in backstage. Eric and Ernie were still a long way from Hollywood, but now a little bit of Hollywood had come to them. The experience did wonders for their self esteem, whetting their appetite for stardom and bolstered their belief that they might really make it after all. The BBC broadcast a version of the show, followed by a series, Youth Must Have Its Swing. After a couple of false starts, it seemed Eric and Ernie were on their way.

Yet just as they were getting going again, Hitler intervened once more. Ernie was called up, and chose to enlist in the Merchant Navy. It was either that or the Army, or going down the mines. Ernie had hoped to see the world. Instead he was lumbered with the mundane task of ferrying coal from Newcastle to Battersea Power Station. As Eric said, ‘the nearest he got to action was seeing a knife fight in Gateshead.’² However anything more glamorous would have taken him overseas for months at a time, and might quite conceivably have got him killed. Instead, during his frequent spells of shore leave between these dreary but relatively brief voyages, Ernie was able to keep his hand in as a solo entertainer in the halls. Fate, in its roundabout way, had smiled on Eric and Ernie, but it would still be a while before they worked together again.

Since Eric was six months younger than Ernie, it was another six months before he was called up. He stayed on in Strike A New Note until it closed, then joined ENSA, the Entertainments National Service Association (or Every Night Something Awful, as it was affectionately known) but in the summer of 1944, he turned eighteen, and was sent down the mines as a ‘Bevin Boy’.³ As an alternative to armed conscription, the chances of being shot at were pretty slim, but that was just about all it had going for it. For a fit young man, it would have been purgatory. For Eric, it was hell.

Eric in panto.

One of the few perks of this dismal job was that you could choose which mine you went down. Eric’s dad suggested Accrington, since they had relations there who could put him up. His Accrington relatives looked after him well enough, packing him off to work at half past five each morning with a cooked breakfast inside him, but as for the mine itself, he could scarcely have made a worse choice. This pit had been condemned twenty years before, and some of the seams were only two feet high. After less than a year, Eric was invalided out with heart trouble. It was a sinister foretaste of things to come.

Unfortunately, Eric was still well enough to return to the razor blade factory – but fortunately, Sadie came to the rescue once again. She’d heard about a travelling show called Lord John Sanger’s Circus & Variety. ‘Lord’ John’s brother, Edward Sanger, had worked on Youth Takes A Bow, and knew Eric already. Sadie encouraged Eric to get in touch. ‘As it happens,’ Edward told him, ‘we have just engaged a comic, but you can be his feed.’⁴ That comic, on £12 a week to Eric’s £10, was none other than Ernie Wise.

‘Even as the straight man, Eric got the big laughs,’⁵ said Ernie, and that wasn’t the only thing wrong with this sorry mongrel of a show. Like most showbiz flops, the actual concept was a good one – to take Variety entertainers to towns too small to have their own theatres, and combine these turns with circus acts, all under the same big top. In reality, it was the worst of both worlds – neither circus nor Variety, but something half-baked inbetween. Lord Sanger was no more aristocratic than Duke Ellington or Count Basie, and the ersatz nature of this enterprise was epitomised by his pet shop menagerie – no big cats, merely some performing dogs and pigeons, a couple of hamsters, a llama, a wallaby, a parrot and a donkey.

Unluckily for Eric and Ernie, one of the few ways in which Sanger’s show did resemble a proper circus was that everyone (apart from Sanger) was expected to muck in. The performers had to put up the big top, set out the seats and even sell the tickets – not that they sold that many. The big top held seven hundred, but on at least one occasion they ended up playing to single figures, and it came as no surprise when their pay was virtually cut in half. Ernie’s wages were reduced to £7, and Eric’s to £5 – exactly what they’d been earning in Youth Takes A Bow eight years before.

Eric and friend.

Offstage, if anything, things were even worse. Eric and Ernie were obliged to sleep in an old RAF trailer, wash in a canvas bucket, eat their meals around a camp fire and shit in a hole in the ground. For a pair who’d tasted the high life in two hit shows, it was yet another bitter comedown. Ernie, at least, met his future wife Doreen in the show, but for Eric there were no such romantic compensations. When Sanger finally called a halt, in 1947, Britain’s greatest double act went their separate ways once more.

They might have never met again if it hadn’t been for one of those improbable coincidences which seem completely implausible in fiction, but are actually a frequent feature of real life. Sadie and Eric had returned to London, to try and find an agent, and were walking down Regent Street when they bumped into Ernie. Ernie was also looking for work, and living in digs in Brixton. Sadie invited him to share their lodgings in Chiswick. ‘You too might as well be out of work together as separately,’⁶ she said. Throughout the forty odd years that followed, they would never work apart again.⁷

Today Chiswick is a bustling suburb, full of fashionable cafes and restaurants, where even the smallest terraced houses sell for half a million quid. However when Eric and Ernie lived here, it was a sleepy, rather scruffy place, on the very edge of London, an awfully long way from the bright lights of the West End and the smart theatres of Shaftesbury Avenue – what Eric regarded as the centre of the world. Not that they had much cause to go Up West, since their entire act still only stretched to ten minutes. ‘If the manager wanted twelve minutes then we did the same act only slower,’ said Ernie. ‘If we didn’t get any laughs, we could do it in six.’⁸ And during the fourteen months they spent here, they only got six weeks work. Sadie went back out to work as a char lady, but Eric and Ernie didn’t even think about getting day jobs. ‘We were variety artists,’ said Ernie. ‘We were pros. To consider anything else would have been heresy.’⁹ This uncompromising attitude sounds pretty arrogant in retrospect, especially when Sadie was out on her hands and knees, scrubbing other people’s floors. However you need a bit of arrogance to make it in show business, and Sadie knew better than anyone that a day job could easily become a job for life. Like many bright mothers who’ve been denied the chance to better themselves, she set about bettering her children. And to her eternal credit, she always treated Ernie like a second child.

Ernie, his fiancée Doreen, Erìc and Mystery Companion.

Eric puts a brave face on life under canvas, washing his own smalls while touring with Lord Sanger’s Variety circus.

Not much of a dressing room, but the best that Lord Sanger could provide.

Yet even with Sadie’s charring, and Ernie’s rapidly dwindling bank book, they often couldn’t pay their rent for months on end. That they weren’t flung out onto the street, and forced to find more gainful employment, was entirely due to their benevolent landlady, Mrs Eleanor Duer. Her boarding house, at 13 Clifton Gardens, may not have looked like much from the outside, but she had an illustrious history of accommodating theatricals, and she was uncommonly sympathetic when these fledgling comics pleaded for a bit more time to pay. Among her many showbiz guests were Wilson, Kepple & Betty, who did a wonderfully silly Egyptian sand dance that was a legend in the old music halls. Years later, Eric and Ernie would perform a spoof tribute of this classic act on television. In a way, it was also a tribute to Nell Duer.

They finally got their big break through Vivian Van Damm’s (in)famous Windmill Theatre, though truth be told, Van Damm (akaVD) could hardly have done less to help. The forerunner of Soho strip clubs like Paul Raymond’s Revuebar, the Windmill was permitted to show women in various states of undress, so long as they didn’t move. The result was a series of surreal (and often downright silly) nude tableaux, in a variety of implausible (and implausibly flimsy) costumes. To fill the gaps between scene changes, punters were treated to a succession of front of curtain turns by a series of (fully clothed) comedians. All in all, it was a typically British blue revue – coy, furtive, and promising far more than it delivered.

Today the Windmill is renowned as the birthplace of a generation of great comics, but VD actually turned down almost as many future stars as he hired. True, he booked Dick Emery, Jimmy Edwards and Nicholas Parsons, but he rejected Roy Castle, Norman Wisdom and Benny Hill. And even though he hired three of the Goons (Michael Bentine, Harry Secombe and Peter Sellers) he turned down the funniest Goon of all, Spike Milligan. ‘Van Damm was not one of the world’s great judges of comedy,’ reflects Parsons. ‘It is ironic to think that such a man should have been running a theatre whose reputation is now based on all the famous comedians who worked there.’¹⁰ Well, the Windmill may be famous for its comedians now, but that certainly wasn’t what made it famous at the time. Apart from their purely practical role, as a sort of walking talking intermission, Windmill comics performed much the same function as the articles in top shelf magazines.

Eric and Ernie never were a top shelf act, and they felt ill at ease in these salacious surroundings. Theirs was always a family show, and although the Windmill was terribly tame by modern standards, without a family audience they were lost. They were booked to play six shows a day for one week – and if things worked out, five weeks to follow. After dying six times a day for the first three days, VD told them he was letting them go, in favour of another double act called Hank & Scott. Most young comics would have slunk off with their tails between their legs, but Eric and Ernie had the humility and foresight to ask Van Damm a favour. Would he please put an advert in The Stage, announcing they were leaving the Windmill due to prior commitments, and of their own accord? VD agreed, and Eric and Ernie went away and wrote to twenty agents, inviting them to see the show.

At this early stage in their career, Ernie was still a bigger draw than Eric (they couldn’t even spell his name right) as their uneven billing on this poster shows. Bandleader Billy Cotton was the father of Bill Cotton Junior, the TV executive who later gave Eric & Ernie their own BBC show.

Proper billing by now (and proper spelling too). Frank Pope was Eric & Ernie’s first proper agent, and the promoter who really cemented their reputation in the halls. Pope became a close friend, and was even godfather to Eric’s son, Gary. Yet unlike a lot of other Variety acts, Eric and Ernie quickly recognised the vast potential of television, and when they saw that live Variety was dying, they decided, with regret, that they had no choice but to leave Pope for another agent who could get them TV work, the legendary Billy Marsh.

Eric took this photo of his friend and colleague, Harry Secombe.

No one came to see them the next day, and no one turned up the day after, but on their last day at the Windmill, one of the agents they’d written to finally arrived. They had to buy him a ticket (VD wouldn’t give them a comp) but it was a good investment. This agent got them a spot in another nude show called Fig Leaves & Apple Sauce at the Clapham Grand in South London, and though they stiffed in the first half with their established set, they went back on in the second half with some hastily written new material and brought the house down. Offers flooded in and before the year was out they found their first regular agent, Frank Pope, who booked the all important Moss Empire circuit, with two dozen big venues around the country and the London Palladium at its peak. After more than a decade in the business, Morecambe & Wise were a proper variety act at last.

In the end, it had been a close run thing, and the show that put them on the right track had very nearly finished them. Years later, Eric and Ernie were still sufficiently mindful of this narrow escape to refuse Van Damm’s request to put their names on his self aggrandising roll of honour. Yet at least they could console themselves that they hadn’t been fired to make way for a couple of no hopers. The double act that Van Damm preferred, Hank & Scott, consisted of a pianist called Derek Scott and a comedian called Tony Hancock. Maybe VD wasn’t quite so bad at spotting comic talent after all.