Morecambe and Wise (Text Only). Graham McCann
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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.
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.