You'll Miss Me When I'm Gone Page 7

  There’s been a lot in the news lately about the Bevin Boys. They appear to be getting belated recognition for their part in the war effort. As for Bunny, well, to find a Bevin Boy who had come across my father at that time would have been thrilling for me, but to meet one who had not only shared digs with him but also gone into the same profession after the war was genuinely remarkable.

  Curiously, just as I set about interviewing Gordon and Bunny, I received an email from someone called Andrew Baird who had managed to track me down. Andrew first met my father as opponents on the football pitch as kids. ‘Later, we met just after he was called up as a Bevin Boy,’ he recalled. ‘Based upon Eric’s experience of that, and the advice he gave me, I volunteered for the Royal Navy and went to sea as part of an Atlantic convoy. We were attacked by a German U-Boat and we lost at least one ship. When I relayed my experience to Eric after the war, I made it quite clear that this was the only trouble I experienced during my three years.’

  The years went by, but Andrew and Eric were destined to meet again. Eric became a director of Luton FC, and Andrew became the bank manager for Mansfield Town FC. ‘After the match we had a long, long chat,’ says Andrew. ‘We agreed to catch up at the return match if your dad was free to get up to it. Well, he was. He strode into the Directors’ lounge asking after me, only to be told by the Mansfield Chairman that I was now the banker for Manchester United FC. To be frank, I didn’t think Eric would’ve been free to make it to that return match. I felt guilty when I learned what had happened. I sent a letter to him care of Luton Town FC, but didn’t get a reply. I was not surprised!’

  Rest assured, Andrew, Eric would have fully understood, and the lack of a reply would have been a result of the letter not having been passed on to him.

  Back to Gordon and Bunny Jay and their memories of Eric during the war years. In 1943 the government had got in a bit of a panic after concluding that Britain was becoming very short of coal. Many of the young miners had either been called up to fight or had transferred to munitions factories where the pay was better. The then Minister for Labour, Ernest Bevin, proposed that a ballot be drawn up conscripting those boys with a certain letter after their name to go down the mines. The proposal was accepted, and these boys were for ever to be known as Bevin Boys.

  ‘The year was 1944,’ recalled Gordon Jay. ‘Your father and I would both have been eighteen years of age. I remember clearly the first time I saw him. He approached me as all of us new Bevin Boys gathered for our employment for the New Town Colliery, near Manchester. He was wearing a trilby hat and long coat. We sort of knew each other through show business—or at least we did after talking for a few minutes. I think we decided there and then to hang on to each other, because it was fairly evident that we were the only ones in entertainment.’

  And it is true that not only was Eric in entertainment at this time, but he had come straight from his full-time employment to help the war effort.

  ‘Being an entertainer then wasn’t like it is now. It was still considered, shall we say, unusual.’

  ‘I wasn’t due for call up until May 1944,’ said Eric in an interview with writer Dennis Holman back in 1972, ‘so in the meantime I got a job in ENSA [Entertainments National Service Association, set up in 1939 to provide entertainment for Britain’s armed forces during the Second World War] as straight man to a Blackpool comic named Gus Morris. Gus had won the Military Medal in World War I. He had been wounded by a burst of machine gun fire. He couldn’t bend his right knee, and his left he could bend only half way, and he had only one eye, but he was a very funny man and very kind to me.

  ‘I remember he and I were at St Helens. The following week we weren’t working, so I went home on the Saturday night after the show. On the Monday came a notice in the post for me to report to the labour exchange. I went down there and took my place in the queue.

  ‘“Bartholomew?”

  ‘“Yes.”

  ‘“Hullo, Eric, how are you?” said the man whom I knew.

  ‘“Fine,” I told him.

  ‘“Matter of fact, the doctor thinks so too. Your medical report says you’reA1, and you’re one of the chosen few who are going down the mines.”’

  Gordon Jay then took up the story from the arrival day: ‘We tried to get the powers that be to let us stay together in digs, rather than shared rooms on site with everyone else. But they weren’t having that. First thing we had to do’—he winced at the memory—‘was have a medical; about twenty of us. We had to strip bollock-naked and line up in front of the MO to be examined. We had lunch in the canteen where we were given a lecture on safety and different things, and we were told we were going down the pit the following afternoon. Afterwards the group broke up, and Eric and I were left hanging around there like a couple of pillocks. I think we were both born cowards and were fairly anxious about the whole set-up in any case. I mean, being an entertainer then wasn’t like it is now. It was still considered, shall we say, unusual. We were called over, eventually, and told that they’d decided we would be allowed to stay in digs

  after all, which was a relief. I think they got the point that as young entertainers we were accustomed to staying in digs as part of our work. Our new digs would be in Salford.’

  Their digs were fairly rudimentary, but Gordon doesn’t recall this with any rancour—it just was how it was back then. ‘We had one room with two iron bedsteads. Eric chose the bed by the window.’

  It would be some time later, when Eric was transferred to another mine, that his health rating went from A1 to C3, which, as Gordon pointed out to me, is pretty significant. ‘I think he was unlucky because he didn’t get the pit he wanted to go on to. ’This is true, and he ended up in one that, as Eric himself

  described, ‘had seams literally no more than two feet high’.

  ‘We did a month together in digs,’ continued Gordon. ‘That first day together was a bit frightening. There were a few ashen faces, ours amongst them. Eric and I sat next to each other while the talk went on. The health and safety officer—though I doubt that specific term was used back then—told us we were going down the mine for our first time that afternoon at two o’clock. What’s interesting is that they pointed out to us that they couldn’t force any of us to go down. But every day we refused to go down added a day to our training. Clever, really, because no one wanted to delay their stay in Manchester, so no one refused to go down.’

  So down they went, having been given an upbeat description which explained that the space was such that you could get eight double-decker buses down there, and there were huge air lamps floodlighting the place at all times. ‘And it really was the case,’ verified Gordon. ‘They were very smart, because they took us down to this surprisingly large open space in a cage lift, which moved much slower than you usually would go in one of those things. Soon everyone was down there in this large, well-lit space, and we were given a little explanation about everything, and then we went back up into the daylight. We must have been down there for all of twenty minutes.

  ‘The training then started. We had lectures in the morning, followed by P. E., then boxing. Your dad in boxing gloves and shorts is something I clearly can remember,’ chuckled Gordon. ‘And then it would be the pit again, though sometimes the timetable would change because of the large number of us that needed organizing.’

  Gordon explained that there was a life, albeit a small one, outside of the work. ‘On the third day,’ he said, ‘one of the management girls called us in to tell us they were going to have a social, and asked if we would be willing to do something for it—meaning a routine of some kind. Eric and I looked at each other and shrugged and said, yes, fine—we’ll do something. I had my tap shoes with me and some decent clothes and music, so we went away and had a chat about it. After a while Eric looked at me and said, “Do you really want to do this?” I smiled thinly and said, “Not really!” and that was that; we didn’t do it. We came up with some excuse the following day that we couldn’t find the venu
e.’

  ‘Eric I found always wanted to talk about his mum and dad. He clearly thought the world of them: he worshipped them.’

  As time went on, Gordon explains how the two of them would burn the midnight oil talking about what they would do when they got out of the mines and the war was over. ‘It was the only time we could really chat, because when we got to the pit each day we split up. He had a mining mate and I had a mining mate. The strange thing was, we never worked properly as such. We would go down the mines but just to learn things as a way of training for later on.

  ‘But during the hours when we were back on our beds in the digs, we’d chat. Eric I found always wanted to talk about his mum and dad. He clearly thought the world of them: he worshipped them. He was always pondering on what they would have been doing that day, and what they would have had to eat. And if Bunny’s and my mother visited, he was straight over to her making a fuss of her. We would walk along the street separately, because Eric would be with our mother, and he would change sides if necessary to make sure he was nearer the road so as to protect her. He was very gentlemanly.’

  ‘I would meet up with Gordon and Eric with my mother at the weekends in Manchester,’ chipped in Bunny. ‘We would go to the cinema. I remember one film we saw was Eddie Cantor in Show Business.’

  I found this very interesting, because from the recollections of his early peers we have already seen that he would spend time watching films whenever he could, particularly at the Saturday morning club in Morecambe that he attended with his chums. And I also knew my father was an Eddie Cantor fan. When I was about six he bought me a Cantor LP, which I adored, and I would go to my local school talking about Eddie Cantor and others of that ilk, wondering why they hadn’t heard of him and could only talk about singers called Elvis Presley and the Beatles, of whom I knew just about zilch.

  ‘The rationing was on, of course, but the landlady fed us well,’ continued Gordon, recalling the digs he shared with Eric. ‘The arrangement was, she gave us a cooked breakfast, packed lunch, and a meal when we came in.’

  ‘We both sensed that if this was what was on offer, then we were going to do all right once we got back on the showbiz road again.’

  The first day came and they arrived at the pit to face the usual lecture from a health and safety officer (some things haven’t changed). ‘Then we were given a pep talk before we went down,’ said Gordon. ‘Then we had a lunch break and ate our sandwiches, which was always to be a choice of jam or fish paste. A staple diet for the next month. And your dad and me really weren’t into that as a diet. In the end we’d drop these sandwiches over someone’s fence near the bus stop and nip into a canteen.’

  Gordon also remembered other moments spent away from the pits. ‘We would go to various theatres, like the Salford Hippodrome, to watch what were without question pretty shoddy revues. They weren’t even “tits ‘n’ tinsel”—this was before those times. I’m not sure what your dad thought of it all. Although it possibly remained unspoken, I think we both sensed that if this was what was on offer, then we were going to do all right once we got back on the showbiz road again.’

  And the theatres and cinemas themselves?

  ‘Gone!’ said Gordon without a shred of doubt. ‘It was a different world.’

  What still remains are some of the public houses of that time, yet Gordon was quick to tell me, ‘I can’t remember a single occasion I went to the pub with your dad, which I find strange. We were all young and keen to get out to have our beers and fags and be a part of the adult scene. But your dad never did.’

  What Gordon said doesn’t strike me as totally surprising. My father once told me that he never even had alcohol in the house until he was in his late thirties. It was considered a luxury, or something the privileged classes would do—but not someone from his background. Also, he was never keen on going to pubs: partly this was because he was so recognizable, but as well as that he just didn’t particularly enjoy them. On top of that he had never been a beer drinker, which was the chosen drink of the working class. ‘When I reached my thirties and the M and W shows were starting to happen for us,’ he said, ‘then I started bringing drink home and we had a drinks cabinet and so on. But even then, it was probably limited to a whisky on a Saturday night.’

  When my family moved home in 1968, the drinks cabinet began to have more frequent use for my father, who never really had a major problem with alcohol yet seemed on occasion to be making up for its paucity in previous decades. My sister Gail later inherited the cabinet, but by then my father had a walk-in bar in the living room and it remains well stocked to this day. Indeed during a very recent examination I discovered many bottles of spirits still standing on shelves as he had left them anything from twenty-five to forty years ago.

  It was time to move on from the training colliery. ‘But Eric was disappointed because he didn’t get the colliery he wanted to move to,’ explained Gordon. ‘I was as pleased as punch because I got the one I wanted. I’m not sure what Eric’s next mine was like.’

  Awful! This I concluded long ago, on the basis that my father came out of the mines with a health rating of C3. He was sent home to his parents, spending the next six months recuperating and the rest of his life bemoaning his days as a Bevin Boy.

  ‘We never exchanged addresses,’ said Gordon. ‘You would do in this day and age, but with the war on it all somehow seemed less relevant. Nowadays, of course, you’d just exchange mobile numbers or email addresses. I don’t think my parents even had a telephone at home back then. So we more or less shook hands, and with a “Cheerio!” and “Good luck!” walked off in our separate directions.

  ‘I often wondered if the gang we were together with doing the mining era ever realized who this young lad became. Probably not. It’s not the most obvious connection, and he worked under a different name soon after the war.’

  Gordon wasn’t even sure himself how he made the connection between the young lad he had befriended in the pits and the comic icon Eric Morecambe. ‘It’s annoying, really. I can’t recall a definitive moment where I suddenly linked the two names. All these years on it just feels like it was something I’ve always known.’

  ‘My father came out of the mines with a health rating of C3. He spent the rest of his life bemoaning his days as a Bevin boy.’

  But that wasn’t to be the end of Gordon’s association with Eric. When finally they reunited, Eric Bartholomew had by now transmogrified into Britain’s leading comedian, Eric Morecambe.

  ‘This reunion was obviously many years later and in very different circumstances,’ reminisced Gordon. ‘Bunny and I of course followed their double act, as everyone in the business was at some point being compared to Eric and Ernie.’

  ‘Strangely enough,’ said Bunny, ‘we got to know almost all the other double acts really well, except for Eric and Ernie.’

  ‘Particularly Jimmy Jewell and Ben Warriss,’ said Gordon. ‘They were the tops post-war, and then Eric and Ernie slowly took over.

  ‘We saw [Morecambe and Wise] at the Lyceum in Sheffield in the mid-fifties. They would have been on a Stan Stennett bill, I imagine. Then in 1961 we were in Bradford with Tommy Cooper doing Puss in Boots. Business was crap because there was an outbreak of smallpox, so hardly anyone was venturing outside their front door.

  ‘Tommy became a good mate, but was completely nuts even back then. He wasn’t supping in those days—not until after the show! At the same time, Eric and Ernie were performing at the Grand, Leeds, with David Whitfield in Sleeping Beauty. It was the big, big production that had prior to this been at the London Palladium with Bruce Forsyth and Ted Hockeridge. Tommy said, “I think we should all go over to Leeds to see the lads.”’ (This is easy to imagine as Eric and Ernie shared a lifelong friendship with the great comedian of the nonmagical trick.) ‘“You can pick me up and drive us there,” said Tommy, who I should mention would affectionately call me “My favourite long-nosed git”.

  ‘Me and Bunny got chatting with t
hem after the show, and we realized neither of us had a matinée the following day, so we suggested they came over to Bradford for lunch. But the point of all this is that I still hadn’t told your father that I was the lad from the Bevin Boy days!

  ‘Everyone in the business was at some point being compared to Eric and Ernie.’

  ‘I went to the hotel to collect Tommy the following morning, and he came down the stairs looking like the wrath of God. The bar must have closed late the previous night! Meantime Eric has arrived at the theatre and gone to the dressing room and is just looking at the props. Bunny and I were playing Hurdy and Gurdy in Puss in Boots, which Eric and Ernie had played some years before while working with Harry Secombe at Coventry. And we were just chatting when Eric said,“I’m sure I’ve seen you somewhere before.” So I let on where it was.’

  Bunny picked up the story, saying, ‘And I walked in to find the two of them in convulsions, and doing the reminiscing thing.’

  ‘Mind you, Eric had a go at me for not saying anything the day before,’ Gordon pointed out. ‘But you know, people can change and you don’t like to go blithering on. Also, you think they might have forgotten, and so you are avoiding that possibility. But we had a great time and talked about catching up another time soon, etc.—and we never saw each other again!’

  In parting, Gordon made a point of saying something that I’ve long said: ‘When you watch Morecambe and Wise now and you closely study Ernie, you