‘Certainly Eric returned often enough to the north…but it never really felt like Morecambe was his home.’
A couple of years ago, while in Morecambe filming for the BBC series Comedy Map of Great Britain, I had the honour and pleasure of being taken on the official ‘Eric Morecambe Tour’. We visited all the significant sights from Eric’s youth. It was wonderful, though the strange thought hit me that the last time I did the tour was with Eric himself, decades before it even existed as a tourist walk. Back in 1968 or 1969, while staying with my grandparents, my father said he’d take me on a stroll down memory lane. He was very helpful, pointing out this and that significant building from his childhood. We even passed what had once been the cinema where he’d chucked fruit and veg down from the balcony onto bald-headed targets, and the address where he’d trundled off to for those music and dance lessons. Then there were the schools, the shops, and even the optician’s where he’d been eyetested for his first pair of glasses. What struck me at the time, but much more now decades later as I write
this book, is how dispassionate he was about it all. He didn’t dawdle lost in reminiscence. There was nothing rose-tinted about his memories: it was all quite brisk, almost as if he was explaining what had happened to someone else he had known incredibly well, but definitely not his own personal history.
Then suddenly it occurred to me that he was someone else back then, so the third-person approach to his childhood was quite comprehensible. John Eric Bartholomew had shed his identity to reveal the comic genius Eric Morecambe. And at the same time, and on that same walk, I came to notice how diluted his northern accent had become. He had more what writer-comedian Ben Elton calls his transatlantic accent, something both he and Ernie were especially fond of displaying in their musical numbers. His accent had become quite hard to place: certainly pure Lancastrian didn’t immediately spring to mind.
When I was a boy and Eric’s career was just starting to blossom, his northern tones—his birth signature—were very strong. ‘Grass’, ‘bath’, and ‘laugh’ had the same vowel sound as ‘ass’, and ‘look’, ‘book’, and ‘cook’ rhymed with the American way of saying ‘duke’. His parents would retain these pronunciations for the rest of their days (understandably, considering it was where they lived their whole lives), but I sensed with my father that he was a man of the planet, not a specific country, county, or town. In a way it gave him a sense of mystery, for while northern traits clung on in his accent, they were more evident in his delivery of a funny line than in everyday conversation. If anything, Ernie retained his Yorkshire accent much more than Eric did his Lancastrian one, though both had taken on that same transatlantic twang.
‘He once told me that he was very torn as a kid between loyalty to his mates…and loyalty to his mother’s dream.’
This was something I hadn’t given much thought to until writing about film legend Cary Grant. He had started life as Archibald Leach of Bristol, England. Yet if anyone ever changed his name and identity so completely it was Grant. And I soon discovered that to many Americans he was believed to be one of theirs. Except for the big Cary Grant followers, the majority assumed he was born and bred in America. And Eric adored Grant’s poise, style, chic. He was a personal friend of Grant’s and I can imagine how affected he would have been by this luminary of the film industry. Maybe some of it rubbed off on Eric, who
was often described as classy. Ernie once told me that when Eric looked in the mirror he saw Cary Grant. There is a logical link here.
Despite the happy memories—real or invented—depicted in the piece he penned on Morecambe, I know this to have been a difficult time for the young Eric. He once told me that he was very torn as a kid between loyalty to his mates, all of them having childhood aspirations to become footballing legends like Tom Finney and Stanley Matthews, and loyalty to his mother’s dream of his getting a working act together and so improving his lot in life by following the showbiz path. He must have had shrewdness about him from an early age, for while he continued to push on his football—leading to the offer of a trial with a League club—he recognized the potentially greater longevity of a career in theatrical entertainment compared with one in football. One injury and that was it, and back then it was not a well-paid profession for even the top players, and he knew he was not good enough to be a top player.
But this is jumping the gun. The young Eric still had plenty of boyish mischief to burn off before the days of theatre and football really took a grip. And most of that energy was expended with his cousin George Trelfall, always known as ‘Sonny’.
The Bash Street Kids
‘No-one ever believes this, but my mother would have always verified it for me. My earliest recollection is of when I was nine months old.’
Michael Palin, in his published diaries The Python Years, describes my father perfectly. Palin is at a party at the BBC in 1972 which is full of showbiz celebrities, Eric among them. ‘Eric Morecambe is another one who never dropped his comic persona all evening,’ he writes. ‘If one talked to him, or if one heard him talking to anyone else, he was always doing a routine. He has a very disconcerting habit of suddenly shouting at the top of his voice at someone only a foot away.’ While Palin puts in print what is genuinely recognized but rarely remarked upon, I would just add that my father not dropping his comic persona and speaking loudly at close quarters was not reserved just for evenings out. It’s difficult to think of a time when he wasn’t ‘on’. Add that to the lifestyle of his chosen career, and really it’s no wonder he ended up seriously ill and leaving us so prematurely. Later in his book Palin mentions that he’d heard Eric loved his BBC TV series Ripping Yarns but would never be able to verify if that was true. Well, if you happen to read this Michael, it is true. Eric adored the series and often I would sit down with him at the family home and we’d watch it.
Eric as this rather disconcerting, loud, and boisterous adult was not, it seems, so very different as a child. A little more refined in later years, perhaps, as we already know how as a boy he would misbehave at the local cinema.
Interviewing him in 1982 I asked my father to recall some of his childhood memories. This wasn’t something he normally discussed at length, but I caught him on a good day when he was feeling somewhat sprightly in his tweed jacket and bow-tie, with an endless Havana cigar protruding from his mouth in a meerschaum holder—a kind of Lord Grade pose. The sun was shining through his office window on his portable typewriter, where all his work was keyhammered onto A4 for posterity, and that day he was well up to a bit of gentle reflection:
No-one ever believes this, but my mother would have always verified it for me. My earliest recollection is of when I was nine months old. I remember being put on the kitchen table in our home in Buxton Street, to be wrapped in a coat and long scarf before being taken out in my pushchair. I can also remember that the roof of that house had caved in, and that was why we were the first on the list to be moved to Christie Avenue by the council.
I only know as far back as my great-grandfather on my Dad’s side, who brought his family to Lancashire from what was then Westmorland, but is now Cumbria. So we have been Lancastrians for approximately a hundred and fifty years or so. By coincidence, my grandparents on my mother’s side were also from Westmorland, but came down some years afterwards.
I remember making an inkwell at school during woodwork lessons—we didn’t call them carpentry lessons in those days, you know. I could have been no older than seven or eight. This inkwell that I proudly presented to my parents was in fact just a plain lump of wood with a hole skewered in the middle. You couldn’t have put any ink in it. It was terrible! But my mother thought it was brilliant. ‘Oh lovely, Eric,’ she said when I gave it to her. Then she called my Dad. ‘Look, George. Come and see what our Eric has made.’ She actually kept it, along with many similar items, throughout her lifetime.
I remember once going with the family on a picnic to Hest Bank [on the edge of Morecambe]. I was ten at the time but
I really remember it as though it was this morning. I would have to wear a blazer suit if I was going to look my best. That was short blue flannel trousers and a blue flannel jacket. We were standing at the bus stop waiting to go home when a thunderstorm started and it poured with rain. The whole of my suit seemed to become spongelike, soaking up the rain as it fell. I began wiping the rain from my face and hands and legs with my jacket sleeves, but it wasn’t just rain—it was blue dye pouring out of my suit. By the time I got home I was blue from head to foot.
I often have a chuckle to myself when I recollect some of my father’s endeavours. There was a time when I was a boy when I would sit and watch him catch starlings. He used a dustbin lid and a stick with a piece of string connected to it. Then he would put a lump of bread under the lid and use the stick to support it. When the starling went to have a nibble, he would pull the string and trap the poor little thing. He would catch between ten and twenty of these birds, kill them, then give them to my Auntie Maggie to bake in a pie. She needed about twenty, because when you pluck a starling you’re not looking at too much flesh. I once had an airgun as a lad and he borrowed it to shoot a seagull off our neighbour’s roof. He hit it cleanly enough, but it toppled straight down their chimney pot and into the fireplace round which the family were gathered at the time. That must have given them some shock.
I can recall walking with my mother by the river that weaves its way through Hest Bank. I was fifteen, and she turned to me and said, ‘Now one day you’ll be a big star, as long you don’t get big-headed. But when you are a big star, you will buy me a house in Hest Bank, won’t you?’
I nodded dumbly, and said, ‘Yes, Mam; I’ll buy you a house out here.’
Many years later, in the latter part of the sixties, whenever I saw her she would say, ‘Well you are a big star, and now where’s my house you promised me at Hest Bank?’ And eventually I bought her a home in Hest Bank.
Before and during these times remembered from his childhood days, my father was being his lively self, usually in the company of his biggest mate and cousin, George ‘Sonny’ Trelfall.
‘Seeing Eric go off to dance class meant we all gave him a hard time…but it was the right thing for him without a doubt.’
Like Eric, Sonny was a bundle of fun, mischief, humour, and constant laughter. Recently I was speaking with Sonny’s son, Michael (known to all as Wiggy—nicknames were seemingly obligatory in the Trelfall family), who is now sixty. Born, bred, and still living in Morecambe, he’s someone I’ve known all my life but never discussed the early days with very much. But talking to him now I learned that when Eric first decided to embark on a career in entertainment he approached Sonny to see if he wanted to form a double act with him. ‘But my dad,’ said Wiggy, totally unfazed by the notion of what might have been, ‘couldn’t really be bothered, you know. I mean, he thought it sounded like very hard work—all a bit tiring. And it wasn’t his thing. It wasn’t really anyone’s thing back then if you were a bloke. My dad went into the Army instead at that time.’ This was echoed by Alan Hodgson, who went to the same school as Eric but knew him more through being a neighbour and great friend of his cousin Sonny. ‘There’s nothing more cruel than kids,’ he explained, ‘and seeing Eric go off to dance class meant we all gave him a hard time. I don’t know how he did it. But it was the right thing for him without a doubt, considering the rest of his career.’ This was said with genuine honesty, something I would find in great supply on my research trip to Morecambe. Those still living who knew my father have such respect for what he achieved. There was never an ounce of envy or affectation shown to me.
Wiggy gave me a picture of my father that implied there were two Erics—the kid doing dance class and the kid who kicked a ball around and was one of the lads from the Christie Avenue estate. ‘Uncle Eric and my dad were never bad as such, but they were always up to mischief,’ he said. ‘They’d take Auntie Sadie’s jam pots, empty them out, go back to the shop and claim the refund on the jars.
‘But my dad was thrilled for Uncle Eric,’ Wiggy went on in his strong Lancashire accent. ‘He always thought he had it in him. And when Uncle Eric visited they would get together and laugh and laugh. All his life my dad would make your dad laugh.’
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.’
Eric also made other visits to the area, Wiggy told me. ’He would sometimes come and watch Morecambe play at Christie Park. He’d be wearing a long coat and a deerstalker. You couldn’t recognize him, which is just what he wanted. But I’d go up to him anyway and say, “Hi, Uncle Eric,” and he’d put a finger to his lips. “Shh!” he’d go. “I want to watch the match without being noticed. Don’t give me away.”’
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