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,