You’ll Miss Me When I’m Gone: The life and work of Eric Morecambe. Gary Morecambe
that had not just given rise to its greatest son, but had lent its name to him as a vehicle for his success. I also sensed that the longer he spent away from the county of his birth—which, excepting the occasional holidays, was most of the time as our family was based in the south—the more uncertain he felt about it whenever he returned. It was a little like he wasn’t sure how to behave, because there were so many friends and family who knew Eric Morecambe before comedy did.
‘Certainly Eric returned often enough to the north…but it never really felt like Morecambe was his home.’
A couple of years ago, while in Morecambe filming for the BBC series Comedy Map of Great Britain, I had the honour and pleasure of being taken on the official ‘Eric Morecambe Tour’. We visited all the significant sights from Eric’s youth. It was wonderful, though the strange thought hit me that the last time I did the tour was with Eric himself, decades before it even existed as a tourist walk. Back in 1968 or 1969, while staying with my grandparents, my father said he’d take me on a stroll down memory lane. He was very helpful, pointing out this and that significant building from his childhood. We even passed what had once been the cinema where he’d chucked fruit and veg down from the balcony onto bald-headed targets, and the address where he’d trundled off to for those music and dance lessons. Then there were the schools, the shops, and even the optician’s where he’d been eyetested for his first pair of glasses. What struck me at the time, but much more now decades later as I write
this book, is how dispassionate he was about it all. He didn’t dawdle lost in reminiscence. There was nothing rose-tinted about his memories: it was all quite brisk, almost as if he was explaining what had happened to someone else he had known incredibly well, but definitely not his own personal history.
Then suddenly it occurred to me that he was someone else back then, so the third-person approach to his childhood was quite comprehensible. John Eric Bartholomew had shed his identity to reveal the comic genius Eric Morecambe. And at the same time, and on that same walk, I came to notice how diluted his northern accent had become. He had more what writer-comedian Ben Elton calls his transatlantic accent, something both he and Ernie were especially fond of displaying in their musical numbers. His accent had become quite hard to place: certainly pure Lancastrian didn’t immediately spring to mind.
When I was a boy and Eric’s career was just starting to blossom, his northern tones—his birth signature—were very strong. ‘Grass’, ‘bath’, and ‘laugh’ had the same vowel sound as ‘ass’, and ‘look’, ‘book’, and ‘cook’ rhymed with the American way of saying ‘duke’. His parents would retain these pronunciations for the rest of their days (understandably, considering it was where they lived their whole lives), but I sensed with my father that he was a man of the planet, not a specific country, county, or town. In a way it gave him a sense of mystery, for while northern traits clung on in his accent, they were more evident in his delivery of a funny line than in everyday conversation. If anything, Ernie retained his Yorkshire accent much more than Eric did his Lancastrian one, though both had taken on that same transatlantic twang.
‘He once told me that he was very torn as a kid between loyalty to his mates…and loyalty to his mother’s dream.’
This was something I hadn’t given much thought to until writing about film legend Cary Grant. He had started life as Archibald Leach of Bristol, England. Yet if anyone ever changed his name and identity so completely it was Grant. And I soon discovered that to many Americans he was believed to be one of theirs. Except for the big Cary Grant followers, the majority assumed he was born and bred in America. And Eric adored Grant’s poise, style, chic. He was a personal friend of Grant’s and I can imagine how affected he would have been by this luminary of the film industry. Maybe some of it rubbed off on Eric, who
was often described as classy. Ernie once told me that when Eric looked in the mirror he saw Cary Grant. There is a logical link here.
Despite the happy memories—real or invented—depicted in the piece he penned on Morecambe, I know this to have been a difficult time for the young Eric. He once told me that he was very torn as a kid between loyalty to his mates, all of them having childhood aspirations to become footballing legends like Tom Finney and Stanley Matthews, and loyalty to his mother’s dream of his getting a working act together and so improving his lot in life by following the showbiz path. He must have had shrewdness about him from an early age, for while he continued to push on his football—leading to the offer of a trial with a League club—he recognized the potentially greater longevity of a career in theatrical entertainment compared with one in football. One injury and that was it, and back then it was not a well-paid profession for even the top players, and he knew he was not good enough to be a top player.
But this is jumping the gun. The young Eric still had plenty of boyish mischief to burn off before the days of theatre and football really took a grip. And most of that energy was expended with his cousin George Trelfall, always known as ‘Sonny’.
‘No-one ever believes this, but my mother would have always verified it for me. My earliest recollection is of when I was nine months old.’
Michael Palin, in his published diaries The Python Years, describes my father perfectly. Palin is at a party at the BBC in 1972 which is full of showbiz celebrities, Eric among them. ‘Eric Morecambe is another one who never dropped his comic persona all evening,’ he writes. ‘If one talked to him, or if one heard him talking to anyone else, he was always doing a routine. He has a very disconcerting habit of suddenly shouting at the top of his voice at someone only a foot away.’ While Palin puts in print what is genuinely recognized but rarely remarked upon, I would just add that my father not dropping his comic persona and speaking loudly at close quarters was not reserved just for evenings out. It’s difficult to think of a time when he wasn’t ‘on’. Add that to the lifestyle of his chosen career, and really it’s no wonder he ended up seriously ill and leaving us so prematurely. Later in his book Palin mentions that he’d heard Eric loved his BBC TV series Ripping Yarns but would never be able to verify if that was true. Well, if you happen to read this Michael, it is true. Eric adored the series and often I would sit down with him at the family home and we’d watch it.
Eric as this rather disconcerting, loud, and boisterous adult was not, it seems, so very different as a child. A little more refined in later years, perhaps, as we already know how as a boy he would misbehave at the local cinema.
Interviewing him in 1982 I asked my father to recall some of his childhood memories. This wasn’t something he normally discussed at length, but I caught him on a good day when he was feeling somewhat sprightly in his tweed jacket and bow-tie, with an endless Havana cigar protruding from his mouth in a meerschaum holder—a kind of Lord Grade pose. The sun was shining through his office window on his portable typewriter, where all his work was keyhammered onto A4 for posterity, and that day he was well up to a bit of gentle reflection:
No-one ever believes this, but my mother would have always verified it for me. My earliest recollection is of when I was nine months old. I remember being put on the kitchen table in our home in Buxton Street, to be wrapped in a coat and long scarf before being taken out in my pushchair. I can also remember that the roof of that house had caved in, and that was why we were the first on the list to be moved to Christie Avenue by the council.
I only know as far back as my great-grandfather on my Dad’s side, who brought his family to Lancashire from what was then Westmorland, but is now Cumbria. So we have been Lancastrians for approximately a hundred and fifty years or so. By coincidence, my grandparents on my mother’s side were also from Westmorland, but came down some years afterwards.
I remember making an inkwell at school during woodwork lessons—we didn’t call them carpentry