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If it had not been for his mother’s forcefulness, it seems doubtful that Eric would ever have become a professional entertainer. In later years he would certainly appear eager to seize any opportunity to express the opinion that Sadie had been a hard taskmistress – sometimes too hard – and a few of the jokes he would make at her expense seemed to carry just a hint of bitterness beneath the surface playfulness:

ERIC	Ah, that’s me mother’s favourite song, that. If she was out there in the audience tonight there’d be tears in her eyes.
ERNIE	Why?
ERIC	She can’t stand me.

Deep down, however, there were genuine feelings of respect and, in time, gratitude. As much as he adored his father, Eric knew that ‘the reason no one ever had a bad thing to say about him is because he never put himself in a position where he had to rock the boat, where he had to be judged’,⁵⁴ whereas Sadie would sometimes be prepared to come into conflict with her son – and, for that matter, anyone else – if she believed that she had his best interests at heart.

‘The truth’, reflected Gary Morecambe, his son, ‘was that he would have achieved much less in his life without her constant support. Since this was perfectly well understood between them, the gibes were a ritualistic repartee of their relationship.’⁵⁵ Joan, Morecambe’s widow, agreed: ‘They’d always row. Always. Never in a vicious sense, not like that, but they would never see eye to eye, so you always used to know that they were going to clash over something or other. You’d know it was ticking away somewhere in between them, ready to explode at any minute.’⁵⁶

Eric may well have found performing a ‘chore’, and he may well have felt ‘a right Charlie’ in his comical costumes, but he knew that his ‘mother’s motives were the highest’. As he watched her cut out every reference to him in the local newspapers and paste them carefully into her album, he came to appreciate the fact that, for all their occasional disagreements, she clearly was devoted to him.⁵⁷ It is also unlikely, said Gary Morecambe, that Sadie, had she known just how uncomfortable performing was making her son feel, would have persisted with her plans: ‘She genuinely believed he adored performing, and was unaware of his real feelings … Had Eric displayed abject misery, then she would not have pushed at all.’⁵⁸

As it was, Sadie continued to push and to push. She entered her son in a swift succession of local talent competitions, and he did well enough to win several of them, attracting as a consequence his first reviews in the local press:

MORECAMBE BOY FIRST

A show within a show was staged at the Arcadian Theatre on Saturday night when the final of the talent-spotting competition took place.

The standard of local talent was surprisingly high and the audience enjoyed it immensely. It was only after considerable difficulty that Peter Bernard, one of the artistes in the Variety show, was able to select the three winners, who were chosen by the applause the audience gave them.

First prize was won by the Morecambe boy, Eric Bartholomew, whose singing of ‘I’m Not All There’ really got the crowd going.⁵⁹

One day early in 1939, after a number of minor successes, a relatively major opportunity presented itself. Sadie came across an advertisement for a talent contest to be held at the Kingsway Cinema down in Hoylake, near Birkenhead. ‘In those days’, Eric would recall, ‘to me, going to Hoylake was like going to Australia.’⁶⁰ This, however, was no ordinary contest: organised by a music weekly, Melody Maker, this was the Lancashire and Cheshire area heat of a national ‘search-for-talenť competition, and the prize for whoever came first was an audition before the important impresario Jack Hylton. Sadie travelled with Eric, and Melody Maker carried a report on the final in its next issue:

There were a hundred competitors in the area and the ten finalists appeared at the Kingsway Cinema, Hoylake, a week ago. Eric Bartholomew put over a brilliant comedy act which caused the audience to roar with laughter. In an interview, he said, ‘My ambition is to become a comedian. My hero is George Formby.’⁶¹

Eric was less than thrilled, to say the least, to discover that his prize amounted to nothing more than yet another audition. He found auditions nerve-wracking affairs at the best of times, and this one, in the presence of the well-known band leader and showman Jack Hylton, struck him as more of a punishment than a prize. Sadie, of course, was delighted. They were instructed to travel to Manchester, where Hylton’s latest touring show was next due to visit. This, Sadie reminded her apprehensive son, would be the opportunity that they had both been working so hard for. It would also be, unbeknownst to either of them, the first, fleeting, opportunity for Eric Bartholomew to set eyes upon the boy who would eventually become his partner, one Ernest Wiseman.

CHAPTER III
Wise before Morecambe

Good evening ladies and gentlemen and welcome to the show.

ERNIE WISE

The past would never die for Ernie Wise. It would thrive in his mind throughout all the years of arduous struggle and subsequent success, and, even deep into advanced middle-age, his reference points would remain the same: ‘Hollywood’, for him, would always be the Hollywood of the ‘Golden Age’ of the thirties and forties, and ‘Yorkshire’ would always be the Yorkshire of cloth caps, coal, parkin and pies, and ‘celebrity’ would always be a relative state to be measured against the extraordinary renown of the luminous idols of youth.

The memories, far from fading, seemed to grow more vivid with each passing year, with every cherished moment, retrieved in the mind, appearing more detailed and less doubtful than before, gleaming sharply with the over-polished clarity of a rare and precious piece of crystal. The following, for example, is his adult recollection of a weekly routine from some forty or so years before:

Breakfast was usually bread and dripping, and that went for tea when, occasionally, there might also be a boiled egg. The big meal was dinner, at midday, for which my mother usually made a stew in a saucepan as large as a wash-basin with perhaps fifteen or sixteen large dumplings. We ate a lot of rice pudding – she would put a pint of milk into a pudding and bake it in the oven with a grating of nutmeg and a flavouring of vanilla. Does that make your mouth water? It does mine.

Sunday dinner was the meal of the week. It began with a huge, hot Yorkshire pudding which you ate with steaming gravy. Then came the meat, veg and potatoes, and finally probably a caramel custard.

Monday was washday. Mother rose at six and went to the outhouse where she lit a fire under her copper boiler and in it she boiled the clothes in soapy water. The wash would be done by eight o’clock. It was pegged out to dry, then ironed with a heavy flat iron that had to be heated from time to time on the range.¹

Whereas Eric Morecambe, looking back on his childhood, might have thought it sufficient to mention in passing that his mother cooked her stew in a large saucepan, Ernie Wise was always the more likely one of the two to pause and recall more precisely the dimensions of the container and the number of the dumplings; and whereas Morecambe, when reminiscing, tended to jump impatiently from one powerful idea to the next (which is, in a way, how a comic thinks), Wise tended to proceed methodically, showing a very disciplined attention to detail (which is, in a way, how a straight-man thinks).

There is something rather poignant about the way in which Wise recounted events with such jealous exactitude, sounding at times as if his readiness to savour every lost sound, smell, taste and touch was more for his own benefit than it was for that of his audience – a private, belated reward, perhaps, for a hard-working man who had missed more than he cared to admit of a childhood compressed and consumed by the demands of a life lived solely in showbusiness.

The fact of the matter was that Ernie Wise – or, to call him by his real name, Ernest Wiseman – was singled out for stardom long before anyone – outside of Sadie’s initially small but enthusiastic coterie – had even heard of a performer called Eric Bartholomew. Unlike his future partner, he had, from a very early age, worked deliberately and impatiently in pursuit of such recognition. ‘I’ve been ambitious all my life,’ he acknowledged. ‘I was a pusher from the beginning. It’s always been push, push, push.’² There was to be nothing remotely labyrinthine about his route to fame: it would stretch out before him straight and laser-sharp, unimpeded by childish distractions of any kind.

He was born in Leeds on 27 November 1925 at the local maternity hospital. His father, Harry, was a railway signal and lamp man. His mother, Connie, had worked originally as a box-loom weaver in Pudsey. Their marriage was – like that of the Bartholomews – an alliance of contrasting personalities. Harry – a thin, wiry, warmhearted and outgoing man – came from a very poor family. His father had died when he was just fourteen years of age, and his mother was blind. At the age of sixteen he had pretended to be older than he actually was in order to join the Army, and he went on to win the Military Medal during the 1914—18 war for saving his sergeant’s life. He was a generally optimistic, gregarious kind of character, hopelessly impractical when it came to financial matters but always prepared to lift the mood of any social gathering with an impromptu song and dance. Connie, in contrast, was a rather shy and somewhat religious young woman³ who came from a relatively ‘well-to-do’ working-class family, and, as far as the abstruse yet important intra-class distinctions of the time were concerned, was considered to be ‘a highly respectable young lady’.⁴

Harry Wiseman met Connie Wright on a tram, when Harry, as he was making his way to the front of the carriage, tripped over Connie’s umbrella. It was, according to Ernie, love at first sight. The relationship, as it blossomed, did not, however, unite their respective families. Although Harry’s family was, it seems, enthusiastic about the prospect of marriage, Connie’s, in contrast, was most certainly not. Her father was, according to Ernie, ‘a dour man … hard, of the sort only Yorkshire breeds’,⁵ and Harry was far removed from the kind of future son-in-law he had envisaged. It was bad enough, reasoned Connie’s father, that Harry came from such a ‘common’ family, but his carefree attitude to money, he concluded, made him a disastrous choice as a husband.

Connie was eventually handed an ultimatum: marry Harry Wiseman, said her formidable father, and she would be ostracised by her own family. ‘I’ll make sure no worthless husband of yours gets a penny of my money,’ he announced. ‘You’re my favourite daughter, but you’ll get nowt from me.’⁶ She chose to go ahead and marry Harry, and, sure enough, she was shunned by her family. All that she was allowed to leave home with were her clothes and the upright piano she had bought from out of her savings.

Harry and Connie, once they had married, moved into a single room in lodgings at 6 Atlanta Street, Bramley in Leeds – the place where Ernie would spend the first few months of his life. As soon as they could afford to they left to rent a modest one-up, one-down house in Warder Street – also in Leeds. This was followed shortly after by another house in Kingsley, near Hemsworth, and then, at last, they settled in the end-of-terrace house that Ernie would come to look back on as being his first real home: 12 Station Terrace, a small but relatively pleasant railway cottage in East Ardsley, midway between Wakefield and Leeds. Ernie was their first child; he was followed by a brother, Gordon, and two sisters, Ann and Constance (another brother, Arthur, died of peritonitis at the age of two).

‘We were a happy family,’ Ernie would recall. ‘We always had shoes.’⁷ It was never, however, the most secure of upbringings. Harry was earning barely enough to sustain the whole family, and, although he handed over the majority of his salary at the end of each week to Connie, he still managed to fritter away what little he had left on alcohol and tobacco. Connie – doubtless with her estranged father’s words ringing loudly in her ears – was often exasperated by her husband’s inability to save what little money he had, and, as Ernie would recall, the house reverberated with the sound of all the endless rows about financial matters.

Connie did her best to keep things on an even keel. She had seven mouths to feed on a basic income of £2 per week, and, as a consequence, she was noted for her thriftiness. ‘“Save a little, spend a little and remember that your bank book is your best friend” was’, said Ernie, ‘one of the constant refrains of my childhood,’ leaving him with a lifelong ‘horror of debt and a steely determination to pay my own way’.⁸ In spite of such sobering moral lessons, Harry still somehow managed to contrive on countless occasions to stun Connie with his capriciousness. On one such occasion he decided – without informing Connie – that he urgently needed a ‘home cinematograph’ he had seen advertised in the local newspaper. It arrived with one film, which, in the absence of a screen, he proceeded to project, over and over again, on to the pantry wall. He never quite got round to buying a proper screen, nor did he ever quite get round to purchasing any more films, either.

One reason why Connie was prepared to tolerate such behaviour was the fact that, deep down, she had always valued his unforced charm and his ebullient sense of showmanship. Although she was never happier than when she had the time to sit at the piano and sing her favourite songs, she was, Ernie recalled, ‘temperamentally reluctant to perform in public’.⁹ The quixotic Harry, in contrast, was an instinctive performer, and talented enough (like his father before him) to take his amateur song and dance routines on to the local club circuit. Full of amusing stories, tried-and-tested jokes and familiar crowd-pleasing songs, Harry ‘would have made the perfect Butlin’s Redcoat’,¹⁰ and Connie, for all of her well-founded fears about their future, loved and admired – and perhaps even gently envied – that untamed and indomitable sense of fun.

She was not the only one who did. Ernie, from a very early age, was entranced by ‘this warm, immensely attractive man with a sunny personality and an optimistic disposition’.¹¹ If there is one word that appears more often than any other in the autobiography of Ernie Wise, then that word is ‘devoted’.¹² Beneath the bustling ambitiousness there was always a rare generosity of spirit about Ernie Wise, a genuine admiration of other performers. This uncommon yet thoroughly decent quality first became evident in the obvious enthusiasm that he showed for his father’s burgeoning stage career. He wanted to follow in his father’s footsteps – not to compete with him but rather to join him – help him – and share in his joyful escapism.

When he reached the age of six or seven Ernie began to ask his mother to teach him some popular songs, such as ‘The Sheikh of Araby’, which he would then dutifully memorise and proceed to rehearse interminably. One evening, after Harry had finished his tea, Connie instructed him to get up from the table and go into the other room. ‘Ernest’, she said conspiratorially, ‘has something to show you.’¹³ When he opened the door to the living-room he was confronted by the unexpected sight of his diminutive son, complete with an old towel tied around the top of his head, rocking purposefully from side to side in a well-rehearsed way while singing of strange and exotic foreign climes. ‘I will never forget the reaction I got,’ Ernie would recall. ‘He was so bowled over, so excited and thrilled that his eldest son had taken after him and had a spark of talent that there were tears in his eyes.’¹⁴

Harry, from that point on, determined to teach his son everything he knew about performing. Tap-dancing lessons came first: Connie would play something on the piano while Harry watched their son practise three basic steps on the cold and hard kitchen floor. Songs and short comic routines followed on in the same methodical fashion. It is not entirely clear whether Harry, to begin with, saw in Ernie another potential child star in the making or merely a brief but charming effusion of juvenescent exuberance, but we do know that he wasted little time in drafting his son into his own act. Ernie, at the tender age of seven, joined Harry as part of a novelty double-act called, initially, Carson and Kid.

There is something quite remarkable, perhaps even Proustian, about Ernie’s typically detailed recollection of those first days on the stage, something almost reverential about the slow and precise route he charted through the rich minutiae hidden within the prosaic experience of playing the working men’s clubs:

[There would be] a big room with usually a long bar running along one side and a stage, the room filled with marble-topped, cast-iron tables, chairs and against the wall, benches. There’d be a snooker room and a place where you played darts. There’d be fruit machines. There’d be beer and sandwiches, pies, potato crisps, pickles and bottles of tomato sauce, the whole place crowded for the concert with working-class people dressed in their Sunday best. The men wore blue serge suits, white shirts with detachable, boned collars and patterned ties fastened to the shirt front by a clip, pocket handkerchiefs to match, black shoes and short hair slicked down. The women and girls wore homemade dresses, their hair in tight curls still smelling faintly of heated tongs, and the bolder, unmarried ones wore make-up. There’d be a scattering of children running about, getting in the way of waiters in white coats and long white aprons carrying trays laden with drinks, mainly beer; if they were paid with a note, you’d see them holding it in their teeth till they had produced the correct change. In the middle of it all there’d be the concert secretary at a table near the stage ringing his official bell and saying, ‘Now give order for the next act on the bill which is going to be, ladies and gentlemen – CARSON AND KID!’¹⁵

Ernie’s principal stage outfit in those days consisted of a black bowler hat with the brim cut off, a cut-down dinner jacket with a white carnation pinned to the left lapel, a white wing-collar shirt, a black bow tie, thin black-and-grey-striped trousers and little red clogs. His other occasional, more flamboyant, costumes included what might best be described as a kind of plaid Charlie Chaplin – complete with false moustache – and, made out of what looked suspiciously like the very same material, a most eye-catching little number that flared out wildly at the shoulders and thighs to form an elaborate butterfly shape. The songs that father and son sang together included ‘It Happened on the Beach at Bah Bali’ and ‘Walking in a Winter Wonderland’, while Ernie’s solo repertoire included ‘I’m Knee Deep in Daisies’ and ‘Let’s Have a Tiddly at the Milk Bar’:

Let’s have a tiddly at the Milk Bar.

Let’s make a night of it tonight.

Let’s have a tiddly at the Milk Bar.

Let’s paint the town a lovely white.

You buy a half pint, I’ll buy a half pint.

We’ll try to drink a pint somehow.

Let’s have a tiddly at the Milk Bar.

And drink to the dear old cow.¹⁶

The act was usually broken up into two single spots and a double: Harry would come on first and perform an abbreviated version of his old routine, then Ernie would appear and perform his own solo routine (lasting five or six minutes) and then, for the second half of the show, father would join son for a double-act.

One reason for the distinctive appeal of Carson and Kid (or, as they were sometimes billed, ‘Bert Carson and his Little Wonder’ or, in honour of the local distillery, ‘The Two Tetleys’) was the incongruity of a boy of seven or eight taking part in cross-talk of an ‘adult’ nature. One joke, for example, had Ernie announce, ‘There were two fellahs passing by a pub, and one said to the other as he saw a trickle of water coming from under the door, “What’s that? White Horse?” “No,” said the man bending down to taste it. “Fox terrier.’”¹⁷ A second reason for their popularity may have been their readiness to mix light comedy with the occasional detour into maudlin music-hall territory. One successful routine, ‘Little Pal’, had Harry blacked-up to resemble Al Jolson and Ernie sitting on his knee; Harry would sing:

Little pal, if daddy goes away.

If some day you should be

On a new daddy’s knee

Don’t forget about me, little pal.

Ernie, looking up plaintively at his father, replied:

If some day I should be

On a new daddy’s knee

Don’t forget about me, little pal.¹⁸

To audiences with relatively fresh memories of the loss and disruption that accompanied, and followed, the 1914—18 war, such an unashamedly manipulative exercise in sentimentality went down very well indeed.

Carson and Kid usually had at least three engagements every week – once on a Saturday evening, once at Sunday lunchtime and once on Sunday evening – which amounted to fees totalling £3 10s., doubling the family income at a stroke. If, as Ernie later claimed,¹⁹ his parents expected him to grow up to join his father on the railways – first as a fireman, later as a driver – the success of his sudden entry into showbusiness, even if it was only at the humble level of the local working men’s club circuit, appears to have prompted them to start having second thoughts. The extra income, of course, was extremely welcome, but there was more to it than that: Ernie was clearly enjoying the experience, and, as Harry could testify, he was getting to be very good at it. ‘I loved it,’ he would remember. ‘I had found my purpose in life.’²⁰ There was none of the ambivalence exhibited by Eric Bartholomew in Ernie Wiseman’s attitude to showbusiness: ‘There is this incredible need to perform in front of people and I’ve had it since I was six years of age. This isn’t a job – it’s a way of life.’²¹

What the young Ernie Wiseman did have in common – unwittingly – with the young Eric Bartholomew, however, was an increasingly undistinguished school record. His nascent performing career was beginning to take its toll. The exciting but energy-sapping routine of Sunday evening shows followed by an often frenzied rush to catch the last bus home and then, a few hours later, the demoralising straggle to shake off the sleep and set off for school (two miles away in Thorpe) on Monday morning proved a punishing schedule. Ernie, predictably, started falling asleep during lessons. This resulted in a stern letter being sent to the Wisemans by the Leeds education authority, pointing out that exploiting juveniles was against the law and would have to stop immediately. Although the Wisemans were genuinely concerned about their son’s schoolwork, they knew that they could not do without the money he was helping to bring in, and they also appreciated the fact that he was by now in no mood to abandon the act. A not entirely satisfactory short-term solution was found: ‘We played a game of cat and mouse: if the authorities spotted us in Leeds we moved our activities to Wakefield and if, after a while, they rambled us in Wakefield we slipped quietly back to Leeds and Bradford. I’m sure in the end they turned a blind eye.’²²

The reputation of Bert Carson and His Little Wonder – as they had come to style themselves – continued to spread across the West Riding region, and the bookings began to multiply. In 1936, at the age of eleven, Ernie had the chance of securing what he would later describe as his ‘first real launch into mainstream performing’.²³ The local paper, the Bradford Telegraph and Argus, organised an annual week-long charity event at the Alhambra Theatre that went under what now seems the improbable name of the ‘Nignog Revue’. During the year, children who had joined the club could take part in a variety of Nignog activities, such as talent competitions and the local ‘pies and peas’. Ernie soon became a ‘devoted’ – that word again – member, and he found in the Revue’s organiser, a certain Mr Timperley, a man ‘absolutely devoted’ to producing first-rate children’s entertainment.²⁴ During the next two years Ernie played an important part in all of the Revues, and his self-confidence – which had never, in truth, seemed egregiously undernourished – grew immeasurably as a consequence of appearing on the stage of a great music-hall in front of two thousand people.

Not everyone, however, was impressed by his success. His school, by this time, was East Ardsley Secondary School, a large, dark, Victorian building which Ernie had come to hate the sight of. He was never, he admitted, a model pupil – describing himself as ‘just plain dumb’.²⁵ He also found that his considerable reputation as a local performer only served to provoke some of his more mean-spirited teachers – and, indeed, some of his fellow pupils – to further acts of cruelty as he was routinely punished and humiliated for allowing his schoolwork to suffer. ‘Come up here, tap-dancer,’ one particularly malicious teacher would shout regularly at Ernie, his darkly sarcastic tone making the word ‘tap-dancer’ sound like quite the worst thing that a young Yorkshire boy could possibly be associated with, and then, on some pretext or other, the teacher would either smack him in front of the class or send him off to be caned. ‘Whatever he hoped to achieve by such public ridicule I do not know,’ Ernie would write, ‘but its effect was to turn me against the school and all it stood for and to alienate me from my classmates.’²⁶

Such treatment, understandably, only served to strengthen his resolve to pursue a career of some kind in showbusiness. On the stage, dressed up in a costume, Ernie Wiseman felt different, more important, more sure of who he was and what he was capable of: ‘Entertaining was a sort of personality prop which helped me to cover up a deep-rooted shyness and sense of inadequacy. Entertaining brought me out of myself … I was able to step out of my very private little world and be an entirely different person, a cheeky chappie.’²⁷

His stage persona was certainly bright and brash. There was something of the crowd-pleasing ebullience and somewhat dandified appearance of another Yorkshire comic singer of the time, Whit Cunliffe, in his carefree and cocksure performances. It helped him stand out from most of his contemporaries as a strong and seemingly nerveless entertainer with an unusually promising future ahead of him. That was certainly the impression he made on the impresario Bryan Michie when, in the autumn of 1938, he toured all over the North in search of new juvenile talent to showcase in a revue. Harry Wiseman had heard that Michie was holding auditions at the Leeds Empire, so he made sure that Ernie went along. Michie sat close to the front of the stalls, watching impassively as Ernie strode on to the stage, told a few jokes, sang one of his usual songs – ‘Knee-Deep in Daisies’ – and finished with his by now extremely competent quick-tempo clog dance. He left without hearing of any response – positive or negative – from Michie. Several months of silence passed, and Ernie, a little disheartened perhaps, returned to the old round of club dates and local talent competitions. Two things happened to lift his spirits again: first, he managed to make a brief appearance on a talent show in Leeds that was being broadcast by the BBC – an achievement that won him considerable respect among his friends and also, just as importantly, a fee of two guineas; and second, a letter finally arrived from London – not from Michie himself, but from his fellow impresario Jack Hylton. Hylton invited Ernie down to London for an audition. ‘There was,’ Ernie would recall, ‘great excitement in the house.’²⁸

The subsequent events followed each other at a breathless pace. Harry travelled with Ernie down to London by train on 6 January 1939.²⁹ On their arrival they went straight to the office of Jack Hylton, and the audition was held there and then. ‘He must have liked me,’ said Ernie, ‘because that same evening he put me in the show.’³⁰ The show in question was a West End revue called Band Waggon – adapted from the hugely successful BBC radio programme of the same name – and, in spite of Arthur Askey’s presence at the top of the bill, it was not doing anything like as well as had been expected. Hylton’s impetuous decision may have been prompted more by an urgent need to improve his ailing production than it was by the precocious talents of the young stranger in his office, but, whatever the reasons, it was a decision that later that night proved itself to be inspired: Ernie was the talking-point in all of the reviews. The following morning the Daily Express, for example, reported:

At 6.40 last night Ernest Wiseman, fair, perky-faced, quiffy-haired thirteen-year-old son of a parcels porter at Leeds Central Station, made his first professional appearance on the stage in Jack Hylton’s Band Waggon at Princes Theatre [now the Shaftesbury]. The moment he went on he became Ernie Wise. That in future will be his name. I believe you are going to hear it often …

Ernie, one-quarter Max Miller, one-quarter Sydney Howard, and the other half a mixture of all the comics who have ever amused you, wears a squashed-in billycock hat, striped black and grey City trousers (too small for him), a black frock coat with a pink carnation in the buttonhole, grey spats, and brown clogs.