You'll Miss Me When I'm Gone (6 page)

Wiggy added that my father would try to visit old familiar faces in the neighbourhood. ‘Mr Lee was one of them. Eric, now a big star, would stand awkwardly in his sitting room while Mr Lee would be in his armchair puffing on a pipe. After a while, Mr Lee said, “Eee—I don’t know what it is they find funny in thee, lad!”’

My father also returned to Morecambe when Wiggy was working on a building site. ‘One of the lads exclaimed, “Look! It’s Eric Morecambe down there. Would you believe it?” I smiled to myself and said,“Oh yes, so it is. Well, I think I’ll go down and have a crack with him and see how he is.”They looked at me flabbergasted—they had no idea of the connection. So I went down and said quietly, “Hi, Uncle Eric.”Your dad gave me a smile and then a big hug. The lads on the site couldn’t believe what they were seeing from above. Hilarious.’

I was reminded of a visit Eric made to Hest Bank in the early seventies. By now his parents were living in the village. He dropped in on a neighbour and purely by coincidence
The Morecambe and Wise Show
was on TV. ‘Oh great!’ said my father. ‘Do you mind if I watch it for a bit?’ The neighbour said that was fine and went to make them a cup of tea. At that point the neighbour’s son turned up with his mates and wandered into the sitting room to be confronted by the sight of Eric Morecambe sitting there in his house with a cup of tea in hand watching his own TV show. A surreal moment.

Wiggy made the interesting point that Eric used aspects of his northern upbringing in routines on
The Morecambe and Wise Show
. ‘I don’t know if everyone noticed it,’ he said, ‘but every now and then you would see a character and think,

“I know exactly who that’s supposed to be.” One character was the pigeon-keeper Eric pretended to be in a Thames TV show he and Ernie did. That was based on someone in Morecambe. So, too, the character he portrays walking across the back of the stage at the end of the show wearing a long coat, cloth cap, and carrying a big bag. These people existed,’ Wiggy assured me. ‘I
knew
these people.’

It seems Morecambe was a small world in many ways back then. After Eric and his parents left 43 Christie Avenue, where Eric had spent so many years of his childhood, to move to a new but still local address, Wiggy’s parents, Sonny and Ethel, moved in. If that isn’t keeping it in the family!

It was at Christie Avenue that Eric nearly died in an ‘accident’. ‘They were playing Cowboys and Indians,’ explained Wiggy. ‘Eric, being the youngest of the gang, got to be the fall guy, and was the one chosen to be lynched. My dad and others stood him on a dustbin with a rope around his neck. When they pushed him off and left him dangling, Auntie Sadie happened to glance out the window and rushed outside. She gave them a hard time for that. She went absolutely berserk, my dad told me years later. To be honest, Auntie Sadie used to scare me a bit. I think we were all a bit frightened of her.’

It seems the young Eric tried quite hard to keep up with his older mates. ‘All the young kids wore short trousers,’ Wiggy recalled. ‘But Eric got Sadie to cut a piece of cloth and make him some long ones so he could walk tall with the others.’

For me it was hard to appreciate what Morecambe had been like in those days. Wiggy described it as ‘a lively little place back then’, adding that, ‘It was the holiday package industry that started to kill it. But it’s coming back again now.’ And he’s right. There’s been a huge financial injection, particularly along the sea front. The Midland Hotel, the Art Deco pride of Morecambe, has been

completely renovated by the developer Urban Splash and opened in the summer of 2008. The Eric Morecambe Statue and the memorial area it occupies has apparently increased tourism to the area by nearly thirty per cent. There have been great efforts to invigorate the region’s wildlife and bird-watching attractions, the pier has gone, replaced by a modern stone jetty, and sand has been delivered by the ton to at last give Morecambe the kind of beach visitors to Blackpool have taken for granted for over a century of sea-bathing.

What captured my imagination was that in Morecambe there had been a community of children who played and learned together, swearing and daring one another on, struggling for rank and status, inventing elaborate games for which none of today’s technology was necessary; exploring their surroundings and waging mock battles with their rival peers. It was a time of dirty knees, torn pullovers, collarless shirts, leather shoes with soles worn paper-thin from years spent running down streets kicking cans and stones and one another. This was the hand-me-down era, when words like ‘fashion’ and ‘trends’ were the last words you would hear on most people’s lips. This was the New York Bronx world of outer Lancaster.

I caught a glimpse of that era when I returned to Christie Avenue to take a little look at the front of the house where Eric had lived, and the street where Eric had played football and set off to dance classes.

My father recorded in his own words how as a kid he would go fishing with his dad in Morecambe Bay. They would get up at daybreak and Eric would perch on the back of George’s bicycle as he pedalled them down to the sea front (just in front of where Eric’s statue now stands). And, as Wiggy told me, ‘Eric’s dad, George, made his own fish hooks. He would often fish in the big basin of deep water right next to the old bridge at Hest Bank. He was always going on about this huge pike he knew that lurked down there. “I had it on my line once, but it got away,” he would say. I don’t think he ever caught it.’

was taken. Patricia Gerrard, née Goodyear, remembers how her late husband, Frank, would take Eric fishing both as boy and man. Frank, who would eventually become chief director of a Morecambe trawling company, and Eric were old school friends. The trawlers are responsible for bringing in the famous Morecambe shrimps, along with various kinds of fish. ‘Eric was addicted to potted shrimps,’ recalled Patricia. ‘In the early years, when Eric was at the Winter Gardens, he wasn’t quite as famous nationally as he later became, but in Morecambe he was very well known. And Morecambe in those days was heaving with people, it was that busy, and they used to crowd to see Eric.’

Patricia recalls Eric visiting her and her husband at the trawlermen’s market. ‘They had to close the doors when he visited there, that many people were trying to get to him.’ I pictured my father’s reaction to the situation being, ‘They

were an angry mob who’d just seen my act!’ Patricia continued, ‘I walked up to him and he grabbed my arm and said to the others, “You haven’t met my wife, Patricia. The best catch of the season!” Later I started musing about what the future might hold. Eric looked at me and said in the voice of a weatherman, “Wet at night, warm and close, then later a little son!”

‘What my husband and Eric did back then was to hire a boat so they could do a day’s fishing and get away from the crowds. Apparently Eric was hilarious all the time. My husband tried to get the boat out and it drifted sideways and Eric teased, “Are you sure you know how to work this thing!”’

Patricia also told me about Eric and Frank as kids. ‘They were both into wildlife, including frogs, newts and insects: anything to do with the outdoors. There was an Auntie Harriet on my husband’s side who the boys visited occasionally. She always wore a big hat with a large brim around it. Eric would say, “I like the brooch on your hat, Aunt Harriet.” And the ‘brooch’ would start running around the brim. It would be a small frog, or something. She’d shriek and catch it and Eric and Frank would run outside and down the street in hysterics.’

Like Eric’s old school friend Betty Ford, Patricia would go to the Mickey Mouse Club. The dancing that would follow the Saturday morning film show I
find a strange concept to get my head around when nowadays we have access to so many forms of entertainment. Patricia remembered Betty being a superb dancer, and Betty herself told me that when Eric returned to Morecambe in the early seventies and bumped into her, he was surprised to find she hadn’t left the area. ‘He thought I’d have gone on to have an amazing dancing career around the world,’ she says, ‘but it was teaching that interested me.’

‘When he was a boy, Eric used to go to the dance school in Queen Street with Betty,’ Patricia said. ‘The Co-op was down there, and the late, great actress Thora Hird, then a young girl, but a couple of years older than Eric, would be in the window in a kiosk “selling fags”, as she put it. Eric would come down the street on the way to the dance school, and Thora would shout out to him and ask him how the dance lessons were going. They never really had the chance to become friends, possibly because of the age difference, but they were both more than aware of the other and destined for the same profession.’

Patricia remembered the dance school itself as being one floor in a building of floor upon floor. ‘In this dance school, Eric came on brilliantly because of Betty’s ability. That was a huge influence on him. Then Betty told me one day, “Guess what? Eric’s going to London, and he wants me to go with him!” I smiled and said, “You’d better be careful, then.” I mean, not many people went off to London like that back then. And Betty didn’t go with him, and Eric set off on what would become his career.

‘Betty and I reflected on those times years later. “Wasn’t that Eric Morecambe a laugh as a boy,” we’d say. And he was, because he would be so funny even when he was dancing with Betty at the Mickey Mouse Club.’

Eventually, as part of a redevelopment plan, the Co-op and the Royalty Theatre came down, and they built an Arndale Centre in its place. Eric was asked
to open it, which he did. ‘You should have seen the crowds,’ said Patricia. ‘Eric had to cut the ribbon with a giant pair of scissors, which was a funny sight straight off. Then he said,“This looks like a big house!”Then he pointed to the shining new escalators and said, “They’ve even got an escalator going to your bedroom!”’

Nora Longfield is another former school and dance class friend of my father’s who still lives in Morecambe. ‘I wasn’t in his class as he was younger than me,’ she told me. ‘I remember him there, of course, because we used to get on the bus for the same school but at different stops. Sometimes he would come and sit with me, and sometimes he wouldn’t, depending on how he felt.’

It was through the dance classes that Nora got to know my father, and looking back she described him as a comedian from the outset. ‘Wherever he was, whatever he was doing, he made you laugh. There was a gang of us who used to go to the Floral Hall together to the Saturday night dance. We’d dance together—ballroom-dance—and Eric couldn’t do it at all: he had two left feet.’ This I found interesting as his own father was an accomplished ballroom dancer. ‘The rest of his dancing, and what he was learning at dance classes, was unbelievable,’ Nora went on. ‘At school we couldn’t wait for him to do his bit for the Christmas Show, which was part of the festive celebrations. He would do his dance in top hat and tails with a cane. We all adored it and looked forward to it. Eric was the star of the production—always. His tap dancing was brilliant. Just because the ballroom dancing wasn’t his thing didn’t stop us dancing with him because we knew invariably he’d make us laugh. He’d always come out with something very, very funny and have us in fits. It was in his nature.

‘Later, when we all left school, we drifted apart and we never crossed paths again, although I always sensed he was someone who never forgot his roots. He came back more than people realized, because often we’d hear about it through someone, like my daughter, telling us they’d spotted him out and about.’

As I sat in Nora’s small but comfortable home at Hest Bank, a house and a world not unlike those of all my father’s contemporaries that I was privileged to meet on my visit, I couldn’t help but ask her if Eric’s remarkable rise to stardom had surprised her.

‘No, not at all,’ she answered at once. ‘It was almost obvious what was going to happen, as the talent was there from such a young age. It would have almost been stranger had it
not
happened. He took it in his stride. And his mother was a big part of his success; she pushed him, but he must have loved to do it really, or he wouldn’t have done it. For instance, those school performances: it should be remembered he volunteered for them.

‘But despite the passing years, you never forget someone like Eric. It’s just that you end up on different tracks in life. That’s just the way it is.’

‘My great mistake, until I was shown the error of my ways, was in always being in too much of a hurry. My mother’s name for me was perfect—Jifflearse. All I wanted was to take in as much as I could in as short a time as possible…’

E
ric’s father was one of the loveliest men you could wish to meet; one of those easy-going, uncomplicated sorts. George worked for the Corporation and his was a very different upbringing from that of his only child. By choosing, or being taken down, depending on how you view these things, his road to fame and fortune, Eric had to rock boats in the process of that journey. George never did, and I think Eric vaguely resented the fact that his father had been able to avoid any such confrontations in his life.

George came from a large family of some six brothers and two sisters, so he had probably learned much about sibling rivalry and pecking order and emerged from that experience perhaps a shade more grounded and tolerant than his own son would turn out. For the inner
peacefulness that George so clearly possessed never really rubbed off on Eric, who lacked tolerance and admitted as much himself. As Sadie and George’s only child, and as a talented lad on top of it all, Eric simply became accustomed to getting things his own way. This didn’t mean he grew up either difficult or selfish—he was simply intolerant of anything that might have jarred with him. And it accounts for his inability to see the grey areas of life—for him everything was either black or white, which was quite frustrating to live around. Not just for me as his son: I mean difficult for everyone close to him, including his parents and his friends, who had the earliest experience of this side of him.

Sadie was not as laid-back as George, but more tolerant than Eric. I recall her being the one in the middle who, while she had a gift for encouraging her son’s talent, was also able to sit back and quite comfortably share George’s less pressured pace of life. Sadie had no dreams of personal gain—ever. And, in her pivotal position in this family of three, she never lost her ability to both soothe and reprimand Eric, which she did until the day she died. Indeed the day she died she was still in control of both Eric and herself. She managed to wait for her son to return from work. He sat down and said a few brief words to her, then she sighed and that was it—gone!

Through visiting surviving relatives I have come to sense that her support and advice stretched far beyond the reach of her husband and son—that she actively advised others who went to her with a problem, particular if it was a financial problem as she was good with both money and figures.

Her closeness to George was complemented by their differences in some unarranged, unspoken yet mutually understood way, so that harmony would always reign despite whatever the external influences of any given day. They loved each other enormously. Sadie was devoted to George, though she could sound tough on him at times, and George subservient to her every need and whim, and quite content that it should be that way. What they and their son shared as a family was a wonderful sense of humour.

George, who met Sadie at a dance at Morecambe’sWinter Gardens Theatre, never stopped dancing until late in life. He would religiously attend ballroom

dances with a dance partner, which never concerned Sadie, who wasn’t particular interested in ballroom dancing. But George, I recently learned, would also sometimes get involved in local talent competitions, just like his son.

‘There was a building, the Old Tower Ballroom near the Town Hall,’ Patricia Gerrard told me. ‘Your grandfather, George, was a very good whistler.’ I hardly needed reminding of the fact—he hardly ever
stopped
whistling. ‘Eric thought he and his dad should enter a whistling competition that was on at the Ballroom. Eric and George had a great relationship, and they would tease each other. Anyway, in the end George decided to go it alone because he was the whistler of the family. He won first prize. George was thrilled, and Sadie was even more thrilled and had a party. Eric was a little perplexed, really. It was
his
job to win talent contests, and just beforehand he’d told his dad, “Oh, you haven’t got a chance of winning.”’

My own memories of Sadie are all positive, but my father always told me that Sadie was far softer on her grandchildren—my sister and I—than ever she was on him. And I can believe that because it is tougher to be the parent in the driving seat than the grandparent in the passenger seat. Even when Eric was in his forties, I can recall Sadie always having the last word with him—and he’d listen. I never once saw him get truly angry or even argumentative with her, because all she needed to do was raise the level of her voice a touch and he’d

melt into silence. Yet this suggests some kind of matriarchal nightmare figure, which Sadie plainly was not. She was an amusing, bright, quick-witted woman

—a great raconteur with many bizarre songs and stories to entertain her doting grandchildren. But, as Eric put it, ‘She was no mug!’ He also told me that without his mother’s total confidence in his talent and her determination to see him achieve as much as he could with it, he would not have amounted to anything. ‘I’d be working behind the counter at the local grocer’s now,’ he told me. ‘Not that I’m knocking it,’ he added thoughtfully, ‘but it ain’t the same as being a top comedian.’

In my own mother’s view, ‘Sadie was a very determined lady. She always knew what she wanted. She knew what she thought was right and what she thought was wrong, and you weren’t going to make her waver. Although tremendously content with her life, in a way she was in the wrong environment

because she was very clever but with no place to express this cleverness.’

My sister, Gail, agreed with this assessment. ‘She was someone who would read and read and read. When you consider her circumstances she was surprisingly self-educated.’

Sadie was never shy when it came to pushing and promoting her own son. It is important to emphasize that she was never in the game of trying to score points off Eric’s own successes, this being the pastime of many mums of the era who flaunted their ‘talented’ child. Sadie genuinely wanted the best for her only child for
his
sake. She was wide-seeing and wanted him to have at least the chance to improve his lot in life.

Joyce Blacow, née Bennett, another lady who remembers Eric from both school and dance classes, found Sadie a little daunting. ‘First of all,’ she explains, ‘my own mother wouldn’t let me speak to Eric, or any of the “rough” boys of the Christie estate. It was a snob thing. This was silly, really, because we were both
at the Lancaster Road School. But I used to speak to Eric,’ she recalled with a smile, ‘because I liked him.’

And Eric liked her, it seemed, as down the years on his occasional excursions to his childhood roots, Joyce would only have to ring and Eric would go over and meet up with her and her husband. I find this particularly interesting about my father: while he was not so bothered about the town and the familiar places of his young days, he was fond of the one-time school chums who had peopled that past. And this remained true throughout his life: where he lived or visited—whether it was Harpenden, Portugal, Florida, or other places—was far less relevant to him than the people he encountered there.

Joyce remembers Eric mostly from dancing class. ‘But his mother, Sadie, I felt was awfully hard on him,’ she recalled. ‘She made Eric do what she wanted him to do. She used to stand there overlooking proceedings. Can you imagine this young lad being brought into the all-girl dance school at the bottom of Queen Street in Morecambe, and he’d have to make his entrance with his mother hovering for some time in the background? At least he had separate lessons from our group, which was something, but it wasn’t very nice for Eric, who was such a lovely young lad; he really was. All us girls in the class felt sorry for him, because you could tell he personally wasn’t the least bothered about being there. But his mother was
very
determined that he made a better life for himself. And of course,’ she added, ‘who is to say she wasn’t right long-term? It served him as training for his later career in show business.’

My mother obviously got to know my father’s parents very well over the years. ‘Sadie loved it whenever Eric visited,’ she said. ‘But the problem was, Sadie would never let you get to bed at night. She would keep us up half the night just talking, and in the end—particularly next day—we’d be absolutely

exhausted. And what she was doing was repeating the same stories over and over again. It was the stories of Eric’s whole life from childhood through the touring years. Eventually Eric would give in through tiredness and say, “That’s it, I’m off to bed.” George would go to bed too. I was too soft. Somehow I allowed her to keep making us endless cups of tea through the night as we carried on with the same stories. The amazing thing was how she would still manage to be up bright and early the following morning as if nothing had happened.’

I know from my personal experience that however repetitive Sadie was she was a gifted speaker who could easily entice you into her world. ‘She knew how to tell a story,’ agreed my mother, Joan. ‘This must partly be where Eric got the gift from.’

Joan’s relationship with Sadie and George began when she first became serious with Eric. ‘I don’t know why, but Sadie was in awe of the fact that my parents owned a hotel in Margate. Eric and I got engaged, which she was thrilled about, and we had the notice put in the local Morecambe paper. Then, a few weeks later, we decided to announce that we were getting married. “We’ve only just announced the engagement,” Sadie said. It was almost as if we were forced into getting married, but we weren’t at all. It was more about Eric’s

work. He had a few days off in December, so we went for it. Plus the fact my mother and family were really obliging and offered us the hotel, which made it all possible.

‘Sadie was filled with horror at going to Margate for the wedding and meeting everyone. People didn’t travel nearly so much back then, and she also had a slight inferiority complex about it. It was about my family being southerners. That was out of the northern working-class realm in which they existed: the social divide, as it was seen to be. But then within a couple of hours of being down there they loved it and they got along perfectly with my family.’

George enjoyed himself too, but of course George enjoyed most things that made Sadie happy. ‘Both Sadie and George loved Westerns,’ my mother explained. ‘And I think George liked to see a bit of the Hollywood star in himself.’

I remember him as tall, slim and good-looking, with a thin, Ronald Cole-man-style moustache. ‘It was the likes of John Wayne, Gary Cooper, Glen Ford who influenced them,’ said Joan. ‘These film characters were almost real for Sadie and George. And George modelled himself a little bit on them.’ I find this fascinating, considering George was relatively indifferent when it came to his own son’s later stardom.

‘Sadie and I in so many ways were so different, and lived in such a completely different world,’ said my mother, ‘and yet she came to rely so much on me as a friend. She relied on me to give her all the news on our lives, because she could never get much sense out of Eric, who was a typical young man—very impatient and not bothered about lengthy discussions on the state of everything.’

I certainly recognized, even as a kid, that my grandparents were not sophisticated people—they didn’t need to be. But Eric’s path in life meant that he
did
need to be, and I had trouble trying to equate his humble background with his starry present.

Watching a programme on David Beckham I felt such empathy on my father’s behalf. In Beckham’s case, he was the boy-made-good Londoner, who in a relatively short time had become a multi-millionaire sports star whose features would adorn myriad magazines, papers, and merchandise. In his earliest of interviews the wide-eyed lad still talked and behaved in a rough, artless way natural to his upbringing. But, fifteen years on, listen to him now. Look at his deportment and the calm, intelligent way he handles the media. And I believe Eric, if in a less intense way, went through something very similar.

My mother explained to me how little Sadie and George wanted to travel away from Morecambe. ‘The only time they loved it was when we did the summer seasons and they would be dropped off at our rented house by their friends and neighbours, Madge and Tom Shaw.’

I heard quite a bit about Madge and Tom from various people still living in Morecambe, and eventually caught up with their son, John, who kindly lent me some photos for this book which are published here for the first time.

As Eric’s career progressed, Sadie and George would become less involved with his everyday life. That would become my mother’s domain—and it would soon embrace another young entertainment hopeful: a certain Ernest Wiseman.