room in the Shaftesbury Hotel (‘it boasted a courtesy light in the loo’33), Harry read through all of the newspaper reports of his son’s extraordinary achievement. Quickly, he came to the realisation that he would no longer be needed as either a co-performer or mentor. He had cried with pride the previous evening as he sat through the show, but now, in spite of receiving an offer from Jack Hylton to stay on as a kind of personal assistant to Ernie, he made up his mind to go back home to Yorkshire at the end of the following week.
Jack Hylton, in his absence, became, in effect, a surrogate father to Ernie, taking control of his career, his image and, for a time, his financial concerns. Ernest Wiseman became, on Hylton’s advice, Ernie Wise (easier to remember, he reasoned), and he was awarded a five-year contract that started at £6 per week (twice as much as Harry was earning at the time). Hylton moved him into a flat above the Fifty-Fifty, an Italian restaurant in St Martin’s Lane, and found him a chaperone in the form of a Mrs Rodway, a woman who had considerable experience in looking after juvenile performers.
Harry and Connie did begin to benefit financially from their son’s dramatic success – Mrs Rodway, on Ernie’s insistence, sent at least £3 home each week before banking the rest (Ernie kept the bank book) – but, in his absence, it was a bitter-sweet experience. Years later, after Harry had died, Connie confided to her son that going back home alone had been ‘the breaking of him’.34 He had tried, for a while, to keep the act going with other young performers, but his heart was not in it and he gave up performing altogether. His health began to decline, and, with all of the extra money coming in each week from London, he virtually stopped working altogether.
Ernie, busy settling into a new routine and novel surroundings down South, was, it seems, entirely unaware of his father’s feelings. Everything was new and exciting and glamorous to the newly named Ernie Wise, West End star, and he threw himself into his new life ‘with all the ignorance and insouciance of the thirteen-year-old that I was’.35 Although he was never quite the stolid and adamantine character that the public persona sometimes would suggest, the self-assured manner in which he coped with his sudden change of fortune was undeniably striking for one so young. One journalist who interviewed him immediately after his début in the show was understandably taken aback when Ernie, responding to a question concerning who would be looking after him during his time in London, answered coolly: ‘Nobody. Why should they?’36
‘Ernie’, commented Arthur Askey, ‘was rather like a young Hylton then and I think that is one reason Jack liked him so much. He looked on him almost as a son.’37 Hylton, a down-to-earth Lancastrian, made every effort to see that Ernie’s progress was not overly hindered by feelings of homesickness. After noting, for example, that the Italian food from the restaurant was not agreeing with Ernie’s East Ardsley appetite, Hylton invited him into his office to share meals of pork pie (made specially for him in Bolton) or cold tripe. Ernie respected him greatly, and was particularly impressed by his habit of keeping several thick rolls of banknotes stuffed inside his bulging pockets. Here, he thought, was a man worth listening to.
‘It was Jack Hylton who shaped my stage persona,’ he would say. ‘He knocked the raw edges off my act.’38 The brown clogs were replaced with smart black tap shoes; the battered bowler hat was abandoned in favour of a new straw boater; and the odd, ill-fitting coat and striped trousers gave way to a sophisticated-looking bespoke white dinner jacket and black trousers. It represented a very deliberate and radical change of image: he now resembled more a cosmopolitan song-and-dance man than a parochial Northern comic, ‘more Maurice Chevalier than Max Miller’.39 Hylton planned to promote Ernie Wise as ‘an altogether slicker product’ than before, a ‘boulevardier’ who performed like ‘an adult before his time’ (even if, as a consequence, that meant, as Wise would later reflect, that he remained ‘a child without a childhood’).40
It was a sobering contradiction: while on stage Ernie Wise seemed to mature at a rapid rate, off stage and deep down there was something oddly immature about him. He noticed the difference himself when, after Band Waggon had finally bowed to public indifference and folded, he joined Jack Hylton and his band on a tour of the halls. The law required Wise to continue attending school while he travelled, and it was during his brief – sometimes just single-day – visits to the schools at each venue that he was struck by how much more worldly-wise other boys of his age appeared to be: ‘Their knowledge of sex, of smoking, of swearing and so on left me completely puzzled and made me feel like a very much younger brother learning the facts of life from his elders.’41 Although he was delighted to have the opportunity to perform professionally, there was, perhaps, some lingering sense of regret at the life he had been forced to overlook: ‘I led a very confined life, sheltered from ordinary boyhood influences and rigorously shielded by adults themselves from the raw adult world outside the theatre.’42
He also found himself feeling just a little unsettled when, in the spring of 1939, he came across another juvenile performer, even younger than himself, whose ability to make people laugh caused him to wonder to himself if he might soon have a serious rival to contend with. When Eric Bartholomew went with his mother to the Manchester cinema for his audition before Jack Hylton, he was oblivious to the fact that among the audience, casting an ‘experienced’ eye over the new acts, was Hylton’s thirteen-year-old protégé, Ernie Wise. Wise, however, was extremely impressed by this unknown comic – as, indeed, was everyone else among Hylton’s entourage: ‘So much so that the boys in the band turned round to me and said (only half-joking!), “Bye, then, Ernie. Things won’t be the same with this new lad around, but I dare say we’ll soon get used to him. What are you going to do now?”’43 Eric and Sadie, after receiving the not entirely reassuring news from Hylton that he would ‘let you know’, returned home to Morecambe without discovering just how popular the act had been, but Ernie, now sitting a little less comfortably than before in the darkness of the auditorium, knew exactly what had happened: ‘I had a lot of push in those days … but I have to admit my self-esteem took a bit of a knock from Eric even though we never said a word to each other.’44
For the moment, however, Ernie Wise remained, without much doubt, the country’s pre-eminent child star. He continued to tour with Jack Hylton, and, when war broke out in September and the theatres closed down, he was invited to stay with Hylton and his wife and two daughters at Villa Daheim, the impresario’s country house in Angmering-on-Sea in Sussex. Hylton and his wife had a chauffeur, a German cook, a German maid and a nanny. Arthur Askey was a near-neighbour, as was George Black – another powerful West End impresario. Wise was given pocket money, substantial meals, a generous supply of sweets and was generally treated like one of the family. Surrounded by the self-conscious grandeur of a self-made man, as well as the bright appeal of an upmarket holiday resort that nestled snugly between Bognor Regis and Worthing, Ernie Wise would have been forgiven for wanting to stay as long as possible: ‘For a young lad from East Ardsley’, he recalled, ‘it could have been Hawaii.’45 After a while, however, he became homesick, and so, with Hylton’s blessing, he made his way back North to his parents’ new home in Leeds.46
His return only served, in a cruel way, to help him to sever most of the remaining emotional ties that had pulled him back there in the first place. He was shocked to see his father, now showing the physical effects of rheumatoid arthritis, looking so much older, and he was profoundly saddened by the greeting he received from him: ‘Why did you come home?’ his father asked him. ‘You had it made.’47 It suddenly seemed a mistake to have left Villa Daheim. Without the prospect of resurrecting the old father–son act, and without any enthusiasm for the odd solo spot in venues he had long since grown out of, he felt, at the age of fourteen, a burden: ‘I was, after all, just another mouth to feed, and hadn’t Mum said often enough to Dad, “When there’s no money in the house, love flies out the window”?’48
After working for a few difficult months as a coalman’s labourer, he was very relieved to receive a telegram from Bryan Michie, inviting him down to the Swansea Empire to join the touring version of Youth Takes a Bow. It was the opportunity – and the excuse – that he had been waiting for. He left immediately, desperate to resume his career in entertainment. He would never go home again.