You’ll Miss Me When I’m Gone: The life and work of Eric Morecambe. Gary Morecambe

       A letter from Eric to Michael Threlfall (a.k.a. ‘Wiggy’). Eric kept in touch with Sonny, his cousin and Michael’s father, throughout his life.

      And he’s right! I remember my father telling me as much. That shared camaraderie of childhood never goes away. Former school and dance class friend Betty Ford remembers it well. ‘I think Eric enjoyed talking about the old times and seeing familiar faces,’ she said. Betty recalls my father with genuine fondness. ‘He would just shuffle into school, his hands deep in his pockets, totally unconcerned that he might be late for lessons. He was moonlighting, of course—doing his showbiz stuff most evenings, so was always a bit tired. He was definitely quite slovenly in appearance. But he was a very popular lad at school. I wouldn’t say he was a cheerful personality, because he looked so tired in the mornings.’

      The co-ed system worked slightly differently back in the thirties, Betty explained. ‘It’s interesting to recall that back then the girls and boys were split up at school. We were literally segregated and I would talk to Eric through the railings. It was like a mixed school, but you weren’t really allowed to mix much, although you could in classes except for the last year, where it was boys—and girls-only classes. I think they didn’t want us to socialize with each other.’ With a smile she said, ‘It’s not like that now, of course. And they’ve brought the railings down.’

      And what of those very average school reports that brought his mother, Sadie, close to apoplexy? ‘Well, Eric certainly wasn’t academic,’ recalled Betty, with wonderful understatement. ‘He could be very lazy. But he got on all right, though. And he was mischievous, yet in a quiet sort of way, if you know what I mean.’ I certainly do know what she means: that quiet mischievousness never left him; indeed it is the best way one can describe his antics around the family and the home and his working persona as half of Morecambe and Wise. ‘But he wasn’t a loudmouth sort of lad,’ Betty added. ‘He kept to himself quite a bit.’

      And what about the teachers who must have felt very let down by my father’s lack of contribution to school life? ‘The teachers, in fact, thought a great deal about him,’ Betty told me. ‘I saw some of them a while after leaving school and they were all very fond of him.’

      I was interested to get a sense of what Eric’s success meant to these childhood friends. ‘We were all thrilled for him,’ said Betty, cautiously adding, ‘Of course, his mother did push him hard, though.’ It wouldn’t be the last time I would hear this during my visit to Lancashire.

      I was keen to learn a little more about Eric’s dancing lessons, which would go on to serve his career so well. On this subject Betty was a good starting point, considering she went to the Royal Ballet School and in later years started a chain of her own dance schools.

      ‘It was mostly through dancing that I got to know Eric,’ she said. ‘Eric went to Mrs Hunter’s dancing school, and I went to the Plaza School of Dancing. But we did dance together. We danced at the Mickey Mouse Club sometimes.’

      The Mickey Mouse Club, Betty explained, was a Saturday morning cinema club at the local Odeon, where kids paid sixpence to watch a movie—like a Flash Gordon feature starring Buster Crabbe—and then danced on the stage to music.

      ‘Me and Eric would sometimes leave together afterwards and go back to his house on Christie Avenue, because it backed on to the football ground. In those days, before all the stands were built, we could watch the Saturday home matches through his bedroom window.’

      Then Betty gave me an insight into Eric’s home town in the late thirties. ‘It was wartime, and Morecambe was full of RAF. So we used to go round doing shows at all these churches where they had clubs for the RAF personnel billeted in and around the town. Eric used to entertain them, too, but I remember him as a dancer and not a comedian, though it was more as a comedian that he did his entertaining even back then. This would have been about the time he met Ernie Wise.’

      Betty remembered inviting Eric to her birthday party at her house. ‘He tried to teach me how to wink, and I still can’t do it. We used to play this game where the girls are sitting on chairs with the boys behind, and whoever they want to kiss they wink at, and then they change places. It was my twelfth birthday, and I think why I remember it so well is that Eric brought me some perfume and a handkerchief.’

      It became clear to me that all these old school friends of my father’s that I was slowly getting to meet and interview for this book had remained in contact with one another. And that, as Betty pointed out, was mostly because they had stayed in the area. ‘But I didn’t see your father for years after he left,’ she said. ‘Then one day a relation of your father’s told me that he was coming to Morecambe and that he really wanted to see me. He turned up in his Rolls-Royce at my husband’s chemist shop. He stayed a couple of hours. He told me he hadn’t someone whom he could just call on to see for a cup of coffee.’