Morecambe and Wise (Text Only). Graham McCann
href="#ulink_d3b127e0-91a0-55ff-9b54-7335bc81bba7">CHAPTER IV
It was fate – I happened to pull the Christmas cracker and Ernie was in it.
ERIC MORECAMBE
We’re a real Hollywood film, us – all the drama, the comedy.
ERNIE WISE
When Eric met Ernie, it was the former who found himself nursing feelings of envy towards the latter. Watching from the shadowy wings of the Swansea Empire, Eric was left in no doubt as to who was now the star of the show: Ernie. It was Ernie, the newcomer, Ernie, whose reputation as ‘The Jack Buchanan of Tomorrow’, ‘The Young Max Miller’ and ‘Britain’s own Mickey Rooney’ had preceded him,1 Ernie, taller – at that stage – than Eric and, indeed, better paid than Eric, who was now the real star of Youth Takes a Bow. As this supremely self-assured young man glided through his polished act, his immaculate made-to-measure suit accentuating each crisply competent step and gesture, Eric, standing silently to one side with arms tightly folded, could only think to himself: ‘Bighead.’2
Just two short months ago it had all been very different. After the worryingly long silence that had followed his audition for Jack Hylton in Manchester, Eric – in the company of Sadie, his chaperone – had been invited to join the cast of Youth Takes a Bow as one of Bryan Michie’s Discoveries. He made his debut at the Nottingham Empire, and, on a salary of £5 per week plus travelling expenses, the future seemed bright. He grew rapidly in confidence, attracted a fair number of complimentary notices and won the respect of the other members of the cast. Then, however, the rumours began: Ernie Wise, it was whispered, was about to join the show. Ernie Wise overshadowed them all. They had all heard him on the wireless exchanging comic repartee with the likes of Arthur Askey and Richard Murdoch; they had all read about his triumphant performances on the West End stage; and they all knew that he was regarded in the business as Jack Hylton’s ‘golden boy’. When, therefore, he bounded on to the train at Crewe, his thick, shiny hair flopping over his forehead, his expensive-looking overcoat flapping loosely as he moved, he became – without any discernible effort on his part – instantly the centre of attention, and Eric, like many of the other boys in the carriage, was more than a little jealous.
It did not help, of course, that Ernie, almost as soon as he arrived, had taken to calling Eric ‘sonny’; nor did it help that Ernie, at the age of fifteen, was no longer required to go to school; and it certainly did not help that the combination of his greater height, more adult-looking clothes (long trousers, in contrast to Eric’s baggy shorts), superior wage (£2 per week more than Eric’s), fame and freedom from parental interference in his affairs caused him to appear, in Eric’s anxious eyes, a far more attractive proposition to the girls in the company. It must have seemed to Eric as though everything that he had begun to achieve over the past few weeks was now set to be eclipsed in an instant by the presence of this noisy bundle of energy and dreams.
Eric’s mother, however, knew better. Sadie saw straight through Ernie’s bravado and understood that, underneath, he was actually an insecure and forlorn little boy, far younger emotionally than he seemed, still struggling to repress the sadness he felt over his father’s broken spirit and only just beginning to settle into a peripatetic existence on the road. She observed him, to start with, from a distance, watching admiringly as he took complete responsibility for all of his travel and accommodation arrangements, sent the usual proportion of his weekly wage back home to his parents and, of course, banked the majority of the remainder. For all of his private problems, he never seemed, to the casual spectator, anything less than the very model of a self-reliant young professional, solid and sure-footed, but in reality he craved – perhaps more strongly than even Sadie had suspected – the very kind of support and security from which the vast majority of his contemporaries in the company were contriving to escape.
The only place where he felt genuinely sure of his worth was up on a stage in front of an audience. He knew that when he was up there he was good; he knew that audiences liked him. The rest of the company – adults and juveniles alike – admired him, too. Youth Takes a Bow was the second half of a two-part Variety show. The first half – usually billed as Secrets of the BBC – featured adult professional acts (such as Alice and Rosie Lloyd, sisters of the well-known music-hall star Marie Lloyd, and comedians Archie Glen, Dicky ‘large lumps’ Hassett and the double-act George Moon and Dick Bentley), while the second half was devoted to such young performers as Eric and Ernie, the singer Mary Naylor, the acrobat Jean Bamforth and the harmonica player Arthur Tolcher (who, thirty years later, would make regular, but comically curtailed, appearances on The Morecambe & Wise Show). Ernie Wise brought a certain amount of precious West End glamour to the latter part of the bill.
Although Eric, as the tour went on, grew to like Ernie as a person as well as to respect him as a performer, there was no obvious suggestion that their fast-blossoming friendship was likely to lead in the near future to the formation of an on-stage partnership. Eric was a comic, whereas Ernie was more of a song-and-dance man. Eric was appearing as the gormless little boy in the home-made comedy outfit, Ernie was playing the sharp-suited boulevardier – they seemed set on separate courses, pursuing different goals. Six months would go by until a combination of wartime exigencies and unexpected good fortune conspired to draw Ernie closer to Eric, and both of them nearer to the invention of a double-act.
At some point early in 1940, the cast arrived in Oxford for a show at the New Theatre, and, as usual, all of the individual performers dispersed to check in at their temporary accommodation. Ernie, however, had, for the first time, failed to book ahead, and, in a town that was packed full of troops, he had no choice but to trudge through the streets in search of a vacancy. Time and again he knocked on a door only to be informed that all rooms were occupied. Darkness fell, the temperature dropped, and Ernie was still wandering the streets on his own. It was well after ten o’clock at night that a cold and desolate Ernie Wise was found by a fellow member of the cast, a singer called Doreen Stevens.
Taking pity on him, she decided – even though her own room was waiting for her in another part of the town – to accompany him until they found somewhere for him to rest. After numerous disappointments, they reached yet another guest house and knocked on the door. ‘This is little Ernie Wise,’ said Doreen to the landlady. ‘Have you got any room in your house?’ Before the landlady could finish telling her that the house was fully booked for the whole week, Sadie Bartholomew’s distinctive voice could be heard from the top of the stairs: ‘Is it our Ernie?’3 Hurrying down to the door, with Eric following on behind her at a rather more leisurely pace, she announced that Ernie must come inside immediately and that he would be welcome to sleep with Eric in his bed. The next morning, as the three of them had their breakfast, Sadie suggested that Ernie – in order to avoid something similar to the traumatic experience of the previous evening ever happening again – might like to travel with them in future and leave all of the accommodation arrangements to her. He agreed, without the slightest hesitation, and, from that moment on, the three of them were virtually inseparable.
Ernie Wise did not just come to be treated by the Bartholomews as one of the family; he also came to rival Eric in Sadie’s affections. They clearly saw in each other a kindred spirit. ‘Ernie,’ Sadie would recall, ‘was gentle and shy, and sincere’:
Eric used to call him Lilywhite. ‘Look at Lilywhite, he never puts a foot wrong,’ he would say. He was right. Ernie never did wrong. Not that he was prim or prissy, or goody-goody, which is a person who just acts good but is really not good inside. Ernie was just naturally good, naturally truthful, fair and honest. We toured and lived together for years. I know Ernie.4
Ernie, in turn, saw in Sadie the same kind of enthusiasm and drive that he had once associated with his father. He felt that she, like him, possessed ‘a tungsten carbide core of solid ambition’,5 and he came to trust her implicitly.
According to Joan Morecambe, Sadie became a kind of second mother to Ernie:
I