staring each other in the face.
Despite the affection that flowed between them during the forty five years that followed, Eric and Ernie’s first encounter was hardly love at first sight. Ernie was already an established name. Eric was still a beginner. Ernie was on seven quid a week, compared with Eric’s fiver. Far from greeting him as a kindred spirit, Eric thought Ernie was a bit of a bighead (although, as one of Britain’s best known child stars, he actually had quite a lot to be bigheaded about). The first time Ernie caught Eric’s act was when he saw him audition for Jack Hylton. The first time Eric caught Ernie’s act was on the radio, performing with his hero, Arthur Askey. Ernie was fifteen and had already graduated to long trousers. Eric was still fourteen and still wore shorts that showed off his knobbly knees. Eric’s jokes about Ernie’s modest height and his short fat hairy legs had their origins in a time when Ernie towered over Eric, and the only short fat hairy legs on show were Eric’s.
Although Eric and Ernie were now in the same show, they still carried on performing separately, and things probably would have stayed that way if it they hadn’t ended up sharing the same room – and often the same bed. In those days, travelling entertainers were expected to sort out their own accommodation – and extraordinary as it may seem today, child entertainers were no different. Eric lodged with Sadie, but Ernie had to find his own digs. That he ended up with Eric and Sadie, rather than on his own, was largely the result of a little international dispute called World War Two.
At first, Adolf Hitler’s impact on Youth Takes A Bow was confined to the odd air raid, but by the time the show reached Oxford in 1940, hostilities were in full swing. The town was full of troops, soldiers had snapped up virtually every bed, and Ernie found himself traipsing the darkened streets, without anywhere to spend the night. He called at every guest house he could find, until he arrived at the house were Eric and Sadie were lodging. The landlady told him they were fully booked, but Sadie took pity on him and invited him in to share Eric’s bed. It was an arrangement they would repeat countless times on tour, and countless times on TV. From then on, Sadie took Ernie under her protective wing, treating him like an adoptive son.
Hitler also played his part in uniting Eric and Ernie as performers. When the boys reached Coventry, they found the city flattened by the Luftwaffe, and though the theatre was still standing, accommodation was so scarce throughout this devastated city that they had to lodge in Birmingham and travel into Coventry every day by train. Confined to a railway carriage for hours on end, their banter and tomfoolery became more and more frenetic, until a frazzled Sadie suggested they channel their energies into something more profitable than mere horseplay. ‘Try and do a double act,’ she told them. ‘All you need are a few fresh jokes and a song.’6 Eric and Ernie loved the idea, and although there was nothing fresh about the jokes they used (or reused, to be more accurate) right from the start, they enjoyed a special rapport, and a rare ability to make the stalest chestnuts crackle. They still did their solo spots every night, but they practised their double act every day – even buying a tape recorder, so they could polish their joint routines.
In 1941, Eric and Ernie finally persuaded Hylton to let them try out together in front of a paying public. They made their debut as a double act at the Liverpool Empire, and when the company travelled on to Scotland, Hylton was sufficiently impressed to retain this new turn in the show. There was only one problem. Michie thought Bartholomew & Wise was too much of a mouthful. Hylton had already persuaded Ernie to change his surname. Now it was Eric’s turn to find another name. Michie suggested Barlow or Bartlett (the maiden name, as it turned out, of Eric’s future wife) but Eric didn’t like the sound of either. Thankfully, one of the show’s adult entertainers came to the rescue, an American called Bert Hicks. Hicks recalled a showbiz friend back home who’d used his home town as a stage name, and so Bartholomew & Wiseman were reborn as Morecambe & Wise.
Eric with harmonica player Arthur Tolcher. Years later, Tolcher would become one of Eric and Ernie’s most celebrated sidekicks, as ‘Not Now Arthur’ in the Morecambe & Wise Show.
Eric stepping out with mystery companion. Where is she now?
Eric’s first music hall routine.
Ernie: You’re making us look like a cheap music hall act.
Eric: Well, we are a cheap music hall act.
IN NORMAL CIRCUMSTANCES, Eric and Ernie’s successful debut might have been enough to set them up as a promising new double act, but the war that had brought them together now pulled them apart. By 1942, the travails of staging a touring show in wartime finally proved impossible, and less than a year after their first turn together, Youth Takes A Bow took its final bow. Eric and Ernie were both keen to carry on, but they were still only sixteen, and even without a war on, the transition from child stars to grown up pros was always going to be tough. Such an arduous proposition was too much even for the ever resourceful Sadie. She returned to Morecambe, and her eternally patient husband. Eric went with her. He clocked on at the local razor blade factory, where he proved to be every bit as useless as he had been back at school. His weekly wage was just seventeen and six – barely more than he used to earn for a couple of spots at a local working men’s club when he was a kid. For a lad who’d been on a fiver a week, it was a pretty steep comedown, but he wouldn’t have been the first child star (or the last) who failed to make the grade. As he toiled ten hours a day, for a few pennies an hour, Eric could have been forgiven for thinking that was that.
Ernie, meanwhile, had travelled down to London, where he found the sort of digs aspiring showmen usually only find in Hollywood movies – lodging with a family of Japanese acrobats. However he had less luck finding work. The Blitz had taken its toll on London’s variety theatres, and having obtained no bookings whatsoever, he was forced to return home to Yorkshire, where the only opening he could find was a supporting role on the local coal round. After three months, he could bear no more. Desperate for a change of scene, and a change of occupation, he went to stay with Eric, to try and get some gigs together in Morecambe. With no local bookings to speak of, Sadie finally relented and accompanied Eric and Ernie to London. There, in 1943, thanks
