the chance to better themselves, she set about bettering her children. And to her eternal credit, she always treated Ernie like a second child.
Ernie, his fiancée Doreen, Erìc and Mystery Companion.
Eric puts a brave face on life under canvas, washing his own smalls while touring with Lord Sanger’s Variety circus.
Not much of a dressing room, but the best that Lord Sanger could provide.
Yet even with Sadie’s charring, and Ernie’s rapidly dwindling bank book, they often couldn’t pay their rent for months on end. That they weren’t flung out onto the street, and forced to find more gainful employment, was entirely due to their benevolent landlady, Mrs Eleanor Duer. Her boarding house, at 13 Clifton Gardens, may not have looked like much from the outside, but she had an illustrious history of accommodating theatricals, and she was uncommonly sympathetic when these fledgling comics pleaded for a bit more time to pay. Among her many showbiz guests were Wilson, Kepple & Betty, who did a wonderfully silly Egyptian sand dance that was a legend in the old music halls. Years later, Eric and Ernie would perform a spoof tribute of this classic act on television. In a way, it was also a tribute to Nell Duer.
They finally got their big break through Vivian Van Damm’s (in)famous Windmill Theatre, though truth be told, Van Damm (akaVD) could hardly have done less to help. The forerunner of Soho strip clubs like Paul Raymond’s Revuebar, the Windmill was permitted to show women in various states of undress, so long as they didn’t move. The result was a series of surreal (and often downright silly) nude tableaux, in a variety of implausible (and implausibly flimsy) costumes. To fill the gaps between scene changes, punters were treated to a succession of front of curtain turns by a series of (fully clothed) comedians. All in all, it was a typically British blue revue – coy, furtive, and promising far more than it delivered.
Today the Windmill is renowned as the birthplace of a generation of great comics, but VD actually turned down almost as many future stars as he hired. True, he booked Dick Emery, Jimmy Edwards and Nicholas Parsons, but he rejected Roy Castle, Norman Wisdom and Benny Hill. And even though he hired three of the Goons (Michael Bentine, Harry Secombe and Peter Sellers) he turned down the funniest Goon of all, Spike Milligan. ‘Van Damm was not one of the world’s great judges of comedy,’ reflects Parsons. ‘It is ironic to think that such a man should have been running a theatre whose reputation is now based on all the famous comedians who worked there.’10 Well, the Windmill may be famous for its comedians now, but that certainly wasn’t what made it famous at the time. Apart from their purely practical role, as a sort of walking talking intermission, Windmill comics performed much the same function as the articles in top shelf magazines.
Eric and Ernie never were a top shelf act, and they felt ill at ease in these salacious surroundings. Theirs was always a family show, and although the Windmill was terribly tame by modern standards, without a family audience they were lost. They were booked to play six shows a day for one week – and if things worked out, five weeks to follow. After dying six times a day for the first three days, VD told them he was letting them go, in favour of another double act called Hank & Scott. Most young comics would have slunk off with their tails between their legs, but Eric and Ernie had the humility and foresight to ask Van Damm a favour. Would he please put an advert in The Stage, announcing they were leaving the Windmill due to prior commitments, and of their own accord? VD agreed, and Eric and Ernie went away and wrote to twenty agents, inviting them to see the show.
At this early stage in their career, Ernie was still a bigger draw than Eric (they couldn’t even spell his name right) as their uneven billing on this poster shows. Bandleader Billy Cotton was the father of Bill Cotton Junior, the TV executive who later gave Eric & Ernie their own BBC show.
Proper billing by now (and proper spelling too). Frank Pope was Eric & Ernie’s first proper agent, and the promoter who really cemented their reputation in the halls. Pope became a close friend, and was even godfather to Eric’s son, Gary. Yet unlike a lot of other Variety acts, Eric and Ernie quickly recognised the vast potential of television, and when they saw that live Variety was dying, they decided, with regret, that they had no choice but to leave Pope for another agent who could get them TV work, the legendary Billy Marsh.
Eric took this photo of his friend and colleague, Harry Secombe.
No one came to see them the next day, and no one turned up the day after, but on their last day at the Windmill, one of the agents they’d written to finally arrived. They had to buy him a ticket (VD wouldn’t give them a comp) but it was a good investment. This agent got them a spot in another nude show called Fig Leaves & Apple Sauce at the Clapham Grand in South London, and though they stiffed in the first half with their established set, they went back on in the second half with some hastily written new material and brought the house down. Offers flooded in and before the year was out they found their first regular agent, Frank Pope, who booked the all important Moss Empire circuit, with two dozen big venues around the country and the London Palladium at its peak. After more than a decade in the business, Morecambe & Wise were a proper variety act at last.
In the end, it had been a close run thing, and the show that put them on the right track had very nearly finished them. Years later, Eric and Ernie were still sufficiently mindful of this narrow escape to refuse Van Damm’s request to put their names on his self aggrandising roll of honour. Yet at least they could console themselves that they hadn’t been fired to make way for a couple of no hopers. The double act that Van Damm preferred, Hank & Scott, consisted of a pianist called Derek Scott and a comedian called Tony Hancock. Maybe VD wasn’t quite so bad at spotting comic talent after all.
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