a week. They probably could have held out for more, but it was still a lot better than delivering coal or making razor blades. Yet there was one creative hitch. The producer, George Black, didn’t want them to do a double act. In that case, said Ernie, they weren’t interested. In that case, replied Black, they could understudy his second string comic, Alec Pleon. Eric and Ernie could still be bossed around when it came to money, but when it came to the act itself, they already had exceptional self belief.
As it happened, Ernie’s negotiating triumph was a pretty hollow victory. Pleon, recollected Ernie ruefully, turned out to be the fittest man in show business, and Eric and Ernie were reduced to the role of ‘glorified chorus boys.’1 Yet a walk on part in a successful show is a lot better than a leading role in a flop, and Strike A New Note was such a big hit that even these chorus boys could bask in its reflected glory. The star of the show was Sid Field, a superb Brummie comic who was still relatively unknown down south. Strike A New Note made Field’s name in London. Visiting Americans like Clark Gable and James Stewart came along to see him, and even dropped in backstage. Eric and Ernie were still a long way from Hollywood, but now a little bit of Hollywood had come to them. The experience did wonders for their self esteem, whetting their appetite for stardom and bolstered their belief that they might really make it after all. The BBC broadcast a version of the show, followed by a series, Youth Must Have Its Swing. After a couple of false starts, it seemed Eric and Ernie were on their way.
Yet just as they were getting going again, Hitler intervened once more. Ernie was called up, and chose to enlist in the Merchant Navy. It was either that or the Army, or going down the mines. Ernie had hoped to see the world. Instead he was lumbered with the mundane task of ferrying coal from Newcastle to Battersea Power Station. As Eric said, ‘the nearest he got to action was seeing a knife fight in Gateshead.’2 However anything more glamorous would have taken him overseas for months at a time, and might quite conceivably have got him killed. Instead, during his frequent spells of shore leave between these dreary but relatively brief voyages, Ernie was able to keep his hand in as a solo entertainer in the halls. Fate, in its roundabout way, had smiled on Eric and Ernie, but it would still be a while before they worked together again.
Since Eric was six months younger than Ernie, it was another six months before he was called up. He stayed on in Strike A New Note until it closed, then joined ENSA, the Entertainments National Service Association (or Every Night Something Awful, as it was affectionately known) but in the summer of 1944, he turned eighteen, and was sent down the mines as a ‘Bevin Boy’.3 As an alternative to armed conscription, the chances of being shot at were pretty slim, but that was just about all it had going for it. For a fit young man, it would have been purgatory. For Eric, it was hell.
Eric in panto.
One of the few perks of this dismal job was that you could choose which mine you went down. Eric’s dad suggested Accrington, since they had relations there who could put him up. His Accrington relatives looked after him well enough, packing him off to work at half past five each morning with a cooked breakfast inside him, but as for the mine itself, he could scarcely have made a worse choice. This pit had been condemned twenty years before, and some of the seams were only two feet high. After less than a year, Eric was invalided out with heart trouble. It was a sinister foretaste of things to come.
Unfortunately, Eric was still well enough to return to the razor blade factory – but fortunately, Sadie came to the rescue once again. She’d heard about a travelling show called Lord John Sanger’s Circus & Variety. ‘Lord’ John’s brother, Edward Sanger, had worked on Youth Takes A Bow, and knew Eric already. Sadie encouraged Eric to get in touch. ‘As it happens,’ Edward told him, ‘we have just engaged a comic, but you can be his feed.’4 That comic, on £12 a week to Eric’s £10, was none other than Ernie Wise.
‘Even as the straight man, Eric got the big laughs,’5 said Ernie, and that wasn’t the only thing wrong with this sorry mongrel of a show. Like most showbiz flops, the actual concept was a good one – to take Variety entertainers to towns too small to have their own theatres, and combine these turns with circus acts, all under the same big top. In reality, it was the worst of both worlds – neither circus nor Variety, but something half-baked inbetween. Lord Sanger was no more aristocratic than Duke Ellington or Count Basie, and the ersatz nature of this enterprise was epitomised by his pet shop menagerie – no big cats, merely some performing dogs and pigeons, a couple of hamsters, a llama, a wallaby, a parrot and a donkey.
Unluckily for Eric and Ernie, one of the few ways in which Sanger’s show did resemble a proper circus was that everyone (apart from Sanger) was expected to muck in. The performers had to put up the big top, set out the seats and even sell the tickets – not that they sold that many. The big top held seven hundred, but on at least one occasion they ended up playing to single figures, and it came as no surprise when their pay was virtually cut in half. Ernie’s wages were reduced to £7, and Eric’s to £5 – exactly what they’d been earning in Youth Takes A Bow eight years before.
Eric and friend.
Offstage, if anything, things were even worse. Eric and Ernie were obliged to sleep in an old RAF trailer, wash in a canvas bucket, eat their meals around a camp fire and shit in a hole in the ground. For a pair who’d tasted the high life in two hit shows, it was yet another bitter comedown. Ernie, at least, met his future wife Doreen in the show, but for Eric there were no such romantic compensations. When Sanger finally called a halt, in 1947, Britain’s greatest double act went their separate ways once more.
They might have never met again if it hadn’t been for one of those improbable coincidences which seem completely implausible in fiction, but are actually a frequent feature of real life. Sadie and Eric had returned to London, to try and find an agent, and were walking down Regent Street when they bumped into Ernie. Ernie was also looking for work, and living in digs in Brixton. Sadie invited him to share their lodgings in Chiswick. ‘You too might as well be out of work together as separately,’6 she said. Throughout the forty odd years that followed, they would never work apart again.7
Today Chiswick is a bustling suburb, full of fashionable cafes and restaurants, where even the smallest terraced houses sell for half a million quid. However when Eric and Ernie lived here, it was a sleepy, rather scruffy place, on the very edge of London, an awfully long way from the bright lights of the West End and the smart theatres of Shaftesbury Avenue – what Eric regarded as the centre of the world. Not that they had much cause to go Up West, since their entire act still only stretched to ten minutes. ‘If the manager wanted twelve minutes then we did the same act only slower,’ said Ernie. ‘If we didn’t get any laughs, we could do it in six.’8 And during the fourteen months they spent here, they only got six weeks work. Sadie went back out to work as a char lady, but Eric and Ernie didn’t even think about getting day jobs. ‘We were variety artists,’ said Ernie. ‘We were pros. To consider anything else would have been heresy.’9 This uncompromising attitude sounds pretty arrogant in retrospect, especially when Sadie was out on her hands and knees, scrubbing other people’s floors. However you need a bit of arrogance to make it in show business, and Sadie knew better than anyone that a day job could
