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? |
| ERNIE | Eric – Miss Redgrave … |
| ERIC | (kissing her hand) Vanilla, how are you? |
| REDGRAVE | Vanessa. |
| ERIC | Oh? (kisses hand again) Tastes like vanilla. We had your dad on one of our shows, you know. |
| REDGRAVE | He’s never forgotten it. |
| ERNIE | They never do. |
| ERIC | Very 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.
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