but now, it seemed, as a solo performer. During his prolonged separation from Morecambe the idea of being part of a double-act had lost some of its appeal – perhaps because of a belief that, at eighteen, it was time to redeem a once promising but recently stalled career, and a solo act might prove more adaptable than a double-act in an increasingly competitive market-place.
Morecambe and Wise might never have reformed their partnership had not, yet again, another happy accident intervened. Sadie had taken Eric to London in order to assist him, once again, in his search for work.49 After finding a suitable base in theatrical digs owned and presided over by a Mrs Nell Duer at 13 Clifton Gardens, in Chiswick, they had started the onerous task of scouring all of the showbusiness papers and visiting innumerable agents in the hope of chancing upon an opening. One day, as they walked purposefully along Regent Street, Eric glanced across to see the familiar figure of Ernie Wise waving frantically from the other side of the street.50 When Sadie discovered that Ernie was staying in a rather insalubrious form of accommodation in Brixton, she invited him to move in with her and Eric: ‘You two might as well be out of work together as separately,’ she remarked.51
As it happened, Sadie soon found work for both of them in a peculiar hybrid of a show that went under the grandiose title of Lord John Sanger’s Circus & Variety. This particular combination of Circus and Variety had been popularised in the Victorian era by a colourful showman called ‘Lord’ George Sanger.52 George Sanger’s involvement had ended abruptly back in 1911 when his manservant – in an egregious fit of pique – battered him to death with a hatchet, but the tradition stretched on into the post-war years under the watchful eye of the similarly self-ennobled ‘Lord’ John. The reasoning behind the project was that provincial audiences, starved of top-class professional entertainment and lacking the grand music-halls of the big cities, would welcome the opportunity to sample the respective delights of Circus and Variety within the same makeshift arena. It seemed, as both Morecambe and Wise would later remark, a good idea at the time.
Sanger’s brother, Edward – who had known Morecambe and Wise since the days when he assisted Bryan Michie on Youth Takes a Bow – booked each of them separately for the tour. Wise was selected first – as a comic – on a wage of £12 per week. Morecambe, much to his and Sadie’s surprise, was selected as Wise’s ‘Wellma boy’ – the straight-man who starts with the self-assured line ‘Well, my boy, and what are you going to do tonight?’ only to be insulted by the irreverent comic – on a wage of £10 per week.53 It was, at least as far as Eric and Sadie were concerned, a less than satisfactory arrangement, but, as no alternative engagements were available and no money was coming in, there was nothing to do but to accept it.
The show travelled from place to place in a slow procession of converted RAF trailers, putting up the big top on village greens or in conveniently situated fields. On arrival, the performers themselves were obliged to set out seats for up to seven hundred people, put down the sawdust, set up the stage and help sell the tickets. Included on the bill were Speedy Yelding, ‘Britain’s Greatest Clown’; the singer Mollie Seddon, ‘A Thrill to Your Eyes, Ears & Heart’; Peter, ‘The Equine Marvel’; Evelyn’s Dogs & Pigeons; a quartet of dancers, ‘The Four Flashes’; Eric Morecambe and ‘England’s Mickey Rooney’, Ernie Wise. Each prospective member of the audience, as he or she pondered the 3s. 6d. that was the price of admission, was urged not to ’fail to visit the pets comer after the performance’.54
It did not go to plan. Audiences – when there were any – arrived expecting an event of Barnum and Bailey proportions, and were not at all pleased to discover that, far from a fierce menagerie of lions, tigers and elephants, the best that Sanger could offer them was one tired-looking donkey, a silent parrot, two chubby hamsters, a team of performing dogs, a shivering wallaby and a ring-tailed lemur. In between these so-called Circus acts the Variety performers, such as Morecambe and Wise, filled-in with, in their own words, ‘unfunny sketches and unfunny jokes’.55
Sanger himself lived and travelled in comfort, but his employees were not so fortunate. Each battered old trailer contained a canvas bucket as a make-shift sink and the artistes’ bathroom at each site consisted of a hole in the ground surrounded by a malodorous canvas screen. Meals were cooked over campfires and served on dented tin plates to be consumed under a nearby tree. Although both Morecambe and Wise came from relatively humble backgrounds, they enjoyed their creature comforts none the less and loathed this sharp taste of life on the road. Their lowest point came when they were obliged to perform in front of an audience made up of just six young boys, all of whom were seated right at the very back of the cavernous marquee in the cheapest of the seven hundred seats.
Things went from bad to worse. First, everyone was obliged to take a cut in their wages: Morecambe’s went down to £5 per week, Wise’s to £7. They were then forced into taking part in an increasingly embarrassing and exhausting succession of gimmicks, the last of which involved the marquee being converted into a booth through which the audience wandered while the company somehow managed to perform no fewer than seventy-three shows in three days. Finally, to the disappointment of no one except, perhaps, Sanger himself, the show came to a premature end in October 1947 at Nottingham’s Goose Fair. Morecambe and Wise, tired-eyed and chap-fallen, dragged themselves back to their old digs at Mrs Duer’s in Chiswick and pondered their immediate future.
It was, without doubt, a bleak time for both of them, but perhaps especially so for Ernie Wise, whose career had begun almost a decade before in such propitious circumstances. Mickey Rooney, by the tender age of twenty-two, had made over a hundred two-reel Hollywood comedies, been handed a special Academy Award and had married the very beautiful Ava Gardner, whereas Wise – supposedly Britain’s answer to America’s indefatigably spirited child star – was at the same age stuck in cramped digs in Chiswick, single, unemployed and in very grave danger, it seemed, of being forgotten. Sadie Bartholomew, by this time, had returned home to Morecambe, which left the two of them feeling even more insecure and uncertain. Sadie’s endless stream of sobering proverbs – such as ‘Marry a girl and your fourpenny pie will cost you eight pence’56 – continued to echo in their heads. Neither of them yet drank alcohol, nor did either of them have any time for any of the other recreational pursuits associated with their profession, and each tried as best he could (Wise with greater success than Morecambe) to save what money he possessed, but it was still a period of considerable anxiety.
Out-of-work Variety acts, they soon discovered, tended to converge on an unprepossessing Express Dairy café that was situated, in those days, near the Leicester Square tube station. Every morning the place would be packed with the usual mixture of young, old, ex- and would-be performers, each cupping their hands gratefully around hot mugs of tea and announcing loudly but unconvincingly that they had, or would soon have, or would definitely have for certain in a month or two, a marvellous job lined up for themselves. Overhearing these fanciful monologues, Morecambe and Wise noticed that agents seemed to be crucial figures in this profession, and, as a consequence, they made up their minds to find one for themselves as soon as possible.
One way to attract an agent, they were told, was to get oneself on to the bill of certain key Variety theatres – such as the Metropolitan on the Edgware Road, the Brixton Empress or the East Ham Palace – which functioned as shop windows for new talent, but, paradoxically, Morecambe and Wise found it hard to secure a booking at such places without the assistance of an agent: it was a vicious circle. Determined somehow to get noticed, and to improve their act in the process, they lowered their sights and started accepting anything: one-off club and pub nights, masonic dances, a very rough week at a rowdy venue near Barry Docks in Cardiff, the odd date with ENSA, the occasional day’s work at the Nuffield Centre (a club just off Piccadilly where ex- and current servicemen could perform), a short tour of the American army camps in Germany and even the occasional private party. The only bona fide Variety engagement they attracted during this depressingly barren period was for a week at the Palace, Walthamstow in March 1948, but even this modest success was diminished by the fact that because one of the other, more established acts was called Vic Wise and Nita Lane, Morecambe and Wise – to avoid causing any confusion – were billed as ‘Morecambe and Wisdom’.57
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