Little Ern – partner who did not get his fair share

To fans of the late great Ernie Wise, the one with the ‘short, fat, hairy legs’ didn’t get the recognition he deserved. Sheena Hastings reports.

AS Ernie Wise’s biographer James Hogg says, there’s no better example of the disparity between how valued and loved Eric Morecambe and Ernie Wise respectively were by the public than the story of the statues that were erected in their memory.

The bronze statue of Eric Morecambe was unveiled by the Queen in 1999, and it was the centrepiece of a lottery-funded redevelopment of the comic’s home town in Lancashire. Ernie Wise, born in Bramley, Leeds, and mostly brought up in Morley to the south of the city, wasn’t honoured with a statue until 2010. Even then, the £38,000 price of a bronze figure proved too costly and the lottery fund application was refused. In the end a Yorkshire stone statue was carved for £8,000 by local artist Melanie Wilks, and Ernie’s widow Doreen was left to foot the bill as well as unveil the statue.

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The monument to one of Britain’s greatest funnymen stands near the now-defunct New Pavilion Theatre and the Railway pub in Morley, where Ernie’s railwayman father, Harry, used to take his son to clog dance for pennies. As Doreen says, just as Ernie’s achievements had been overshadowed by Eric’s in life, so in death he didn’t quite get the treatment he deserved. Of course in a sense it was Ernie’s curse that he was the straighter half of a partnership with one of the world’s most naturally funny men .

In 2004, Channel 4 asked more than 300 comedians, comedy writers, producers and directors on both sides of the Atlantic to name their all-time favourite comedians. In the top 10 were Laurel and Hardy, Reeves and Mortimer and Eric Morecambe – not Morecambe and Wise. “It does highlight a general ignorance about Ernie’s contribution to the partnership,” says British television grandee Michael Grade.

“It was Morecambe AND Wise, just as it was Laurel AND Hardy...Not that Ernie would have given two hoots, of course, but it was still wrong.”

Eric’s sunny, unassuming and unselfish nature enabled Eric’s more madcap and flamboyant talent to run free.

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There have been books about the pair, which again tend to focus largely on Eric, but the first authorised biography of Ernie Wise has been prompted by the notion than injustice has been done to the little man from Leeds. He was more than merely Eric’s straight man or some sort of afterthought, say its authors James Hogg and Robert Sellers.

As Des O’Connor told them: “Eric was such a dynamic personality and the spotlight was always more focused on him than Ernie, but I thought Ernie was very very important because Morecambe and Wise were a team, but as brilliant as Eric was and as loved as he was, he was always going to be more comfortable and assured just knowing that Ernie was there.”

The writers call on a starry cast of Ernie fans and showbusiness pundits to point out his technical brilliance as the foil and the stool pigeon, and the alleged author of the awful “plays what I wrote” of the Eddie Braben-concocted scripts in the Morecambe and Wise Show heyday.

You might have to be a real student of the art of comedy to appreciate fully the extent of Wise’s stagecraft, but there are other reasons to read the book. It gives not only a touching rendition of Ernie Wiseman’s rise from the Dickensian slums of Leeds to the formation of the double act with gauche and nervy Eric from Morecambe through to the stage of the London Palladium and Saturday night TV shows that attracted up to 28 million viewers, but also a beautifully painted picture of the dog-eat-dog world of variety theatre in the first few decades of the 20th century.

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Ernie was the oldest child of Connie and Harry Wiseman in a household where Connie made as much as she could of very little income and railwayman Harry, the handsome charmer and part-time song-and-gag man, always wasted some on beer and cigarettes.

From the age of six Ernie would pester his mother to teach him songs she played on her old upright piano, and when he first heard his boy singing The Sheikh of Araby Harry sensed that the little lad was a chip off the old block. He taught Ernie to tap dance and they were soon touring local clubs as Carson and Son.

Wearing a cut-down suit the boy joined in the risque jokes and banter and danced like a whirlwind in red wooden clogs as the punters threw pennies.

Ernie later recalled having “found my purpose in life” right there in the workingmen’s clubs of West Yorkshire – even though his school had something to say about the child sleeping on his desk in the morning.

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Harry pocketed the performance fee, giving most of it to Connie. Attempts by the local education authority to stop Harry from illegally taking his child out to work were ignored.

“He was working aged seven,” says Ernie’s widow Doreen. “Both his father and mother just regarded him as a workhorse.” The work ethic instilled at this tender age would never leave Ernie, who always worried about money and was for decades the provider for his parents and siblings.

He even became known as Ernie the Provider, to the extent that one year while he was still a boy the family were on the beach during a holiday in Cleethorpes, but Ernie had to leave the sands at 3pm to perform at the local theatre. He’d been booked in for the week to pay for the holiday.

Doreen likens Ernie’s experience to that of young cage fighters recently in the news.

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Luckily, after being left in London at 13 to fend for himself in theatrical digs, Ernie got together with Eric Morecambe and his formidable but doting mother Sadie, who watched out for Ernie as though he was her own.

“Ernie was supporting the whole family until his parents died,” says James Hogg. “It was blatant exploitation and Doreen was very bitter about it when she found out. For the rest of his life Ernie worried about money, mostly needlessly, and apart from a smart car or two and a nice house on the Thames, he rarely spent on himself.”

Much has been written about the relationship between the two comics who adored each other yet rarely socialised together. Ernie was the driving force, the business brain and tough negotiator, whose lead Eric was glad to follow.

“I felt I had to make up for a lot with Ernie,” says Doreen, who lost her husband 12 years ago. “He had his first ever birthday cake the first year we were married, when he was 28... At one point early on he wrote and told Eric he was breaking up the partnership, and that was due to pressure from his parents, who felt he would earn more alone as a song-and-dance man. Luckily, Eric didn’t take it seriously.

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“I’m very glad to see Ernie’s biography, as it explains his importance to Eric and their success, and the often mischievous and subtle way he had of performing. I hope people will read it and then watch the old programmes with new eyes. Dear Eric was always very generous about Ernie’s talent because he knew the truth, and he was his biggest fan.”

Little Ern! The Authorised Biography of Ernie Wise by Robert Sellers and James Hogg is published by Sidgwick and Jackson, £18.99. To order from the Yorkshire Post Bookshop call 0800 1053232 or go to www.yorkshirepostbookshop.co.uk