My dad couldn’t believe his luck. The girl he’d been chasing for months – talented, ambitious, a beauty queen – finally agreed to marry him.
‘Well,’ my grandmother told him, ‘she isn’t doing it for your money, or your good looks.’
The whole country, and the world of comedy, can thank their stars for that bit of luck. Because if Joan Bartlett had turned down Eric Morecambe in 1952, it’s likely his double act with Ernie Wise would not have survived – and they could never have become the best-loved comic duo in TV history.
My late mum became my dad’s rock, the stability he desperately needed. Her calm, steady influence and constant care enabled him to devote every waking moment to being a comedy genius.
Joan, centre, in the 1951 Miss Kent beauty competition, was 24 when she met Eric and she was starting to make her way in showbiz
Eric and Joan met at the Empire Theatre (now the Festival Theatre) in Edinburgh, when Eric and Ernie were in their mid-20s, a little-known comedy act in the middle of the bill
Joan didn’t come from a showbiz background. Her father was an Army medical officer in Burma, and she grew up in a hill town there
Eric was driven, unpredictable, scatterbrained, highly strung and erratic: all the qualities that made him a uniquely brilliant comedian also left him struggling to look after himself from day to day
Joan devoted her life to his career and the family they raised together – Gary, his sister Gail and their adopted brother Steven
Eric and Joan having a drink and chatting to talk show host Michael Parkinson at a Variety Club lunch
He was driven, unpredictable, scatterbrained, highly strung and erratic: all the qualities that made him a uniquely brilliant comedian also left him struggling to look after himself from day to day.
She devoted her life to his career and the family they raised together – me, my sister Gail, and our adopted brother Steven. Dad’s death, 40 years ago this month, left mum bereft for years but she rebuilt her life by devoting herself to charity, as a founder president of the Lady Taverners and a senior figure in Save The Children.
When she died in March, aged 97, we were heartbroken but also very proud of everything she achieved.
My parents met at the Empire Theatre (now the Festival Theatre) in Edinburgh, when Eric and Ernie were in their mid-20s, a little-known comedy act in the middle of the bill.
Morecambe and Wise had been working together for more than a decade when my father proposed to my mother, and Ernie was relieved to have her support
The Morecambe and Wise success story happened slowly. Joan had great faith in their talent, but the early years were hard
Joan poses with Eric’s statue on the promenade of his home town of Morecambe, Lancashire, in 1999
Eric’s son Gary’s book, Forever In The Sunshine: The story Of Morecambe And Wise As Only Family Can Tell It, is published by Sphere
Joan was 24 and 5ft 11in, a former Miss Kent and now starting to make her way in showbiz – dancing, singing, playing the stooge to the stand-up comics, doing whatever live theatre demanded. The way Eric always told it, ‘It was a Monday morning band-call [a musical rehearsal], and this beautiful woman glided up to the piano. I thought, ‘I’m going to marry you.’
He told her as much… and she wasn’t impressed. In fact, she thought he was a nuisance, though once she realised he and Ernie were comedians, not part of the orchestra, she recognised at once how brilliantly funny they both were. But that didn’t mean she wanted to date the tall one with the glasses.
Eric persisted. It was romantic: he pulled stunts like hiding behind the counter in a shop, then popping up when Joan came in, and announcing, ‘You are going to marry me, you know.’ She could see that he was lonely – life on the road can feel oddly isolated – and that he was itching to fall in love.
In the end, she agreed to go for a coffee with him, and then to the cinema… and then to the altar.
‘He was a difficult man to say No to,’ she used to say, rolling her eyes.
All her life she remembered those days fondly. About 12 years ago, I took her back to Edinburgh, with her protesting that she was ‘an old woman’ and that she’d forgotten her courtship. But as soon as we arrived at the theatre, she was pointing out to me all the secrets, the place where Eric and other people used to stand outside and smoke between stage calls, and all those little memories.
She didn’t come from a showbiz background. Her father was an Army medical officer in Burma, and mum grew up in a hill town there. When World War II broke out, she was sent to England with her mother. She always described London, with its smogs and overcast skies, as being a world with the colour drained out, after Burma.
When my grandfather joined them, he and mum ran a pub in Canterbury called the Bull Inn. But mum had her own ambitions, and was crowned Miss Margate and Miss Kent as well as working as a model.
She was just getting a taste for the stage when she met my dad. Marriage and having a family was regarded as a full-time job for any woman in the 1950s, but the real reason she gave up her theatre career was simply that her husband was even more time-consuming.
These days, he’d probably be diagnosed with ADHD. He could never sit still for a moment: I’m the same, but he was a hundred times more intense. We used to joke that he couldn’t get through a meal without getting distracted and dashing off to do something else.
Morecambe and Wise had been working together for more than a decade when my father proposed to my mother, and I know that Ernie was relieved to have her support. He was wearing himself out, having to do all the organising for both of them.
But if he’d left the business side to my dad, like buying the railway tickets on tour and booking the digs, they would have ended up hitch-hiking between theatres or sleeping on park benches. My father simply wasn’t capable of doing those tasks. Ernie understood, and tolerated it because there wasn’t a funnier man on the planet.
His own mum Sadie knew it too. She treated Ernie as her surrogate son, but she was well aware that all the responsibility fell on his shoulders. Eric had been an exhausting handful ever since he could walk.
Once, at her wits’ end, Sadie tied him to the garden gate while she nipped out, using a long scarf as a rope. Dad was about five years old at the time. When she came back, he’d escaped. She found him down the street, on a building site, putting on a song-and-dance routine for the brickies.
Sadie saw he was a natural performer. She also realised he’d be miserable doing anything else. ‘I didn’t want him tied to a whistle like his dad had been,’ she used to say, meaning that working factory hours would be unbearable for him.
She knew as well that, if he didn’t do something he loved, he’d end up doing nothing at all. ‘He was bone idle,’ she complained, and there was truth in that even though, by the time I was born in 1956, he was a complete workaholic. Being a workaholic is a kind of laziness, I think, because you don’t have to do anything except your job.
So Sadie was delighted to let Ernie take on the job of chaperoning her son, and Ernie in turn was more than ready to hand over the role to my mum. Their marriage also prompted Ernie to wed his own girlfriend, Doreen.
It’s been suggested by one biographer that Joan and Doreen disliked each other. That’s completely untrue. They were just very different characters, with little in common except Morecambe and Wise. For a start, one was a mother and the other knew from the outset that she didn’t want children.
But this didn’t mean there was any animosity between the two women. In fact, in later life, especially after Ernie died in 1999, they saw quite a lot of each other at both charity functions and Morecambe and Wise events.
I’m not sure why people would expect Mrs M and Mrs W to be automatically best friends, in and out of each other’s houses. Eric and Ernie weren’t, though they loved each other like brothers. They didn’t live in each other’s pockets, because that would become intolerable. For the sake of the partnership, they kept their family lives separate.
At home, Mum organised everything. I’ve always thought of her as the engine room, keeping our family in motion, all the cogs going round. That was her personality, and she did it because she loved my father. This was what she signed up for – she knew what marrying him was going to mean.
Though she had no official title, she was effectively his manager and his personal assistant, as well as his dresser and his cook. She laid out his clothes, and made sure he was fed, equipped with everything he needed and ready on time when the chauffeur arrived to take him to the studio.
She didn’t go with him. He wouldn’t have wanted her behind the scenes – he didn’t want to think about anything outside of Morecambe and Wise, or have anyone puncturing that little world of him, Ernie, the producer Johnny Ammonds and the writer Eddie Braben. But she was in the audience for every recording .
She also answered all his fan mail, often sitting up past midnight at the typewriter, preparing the daily stack of letters for him to sign for fans.
Whatever happened, she stayed calm. When Dad was getting excited, she refused to join in. That was the only effective way to bring him back down to earth. Ernie was the same, always relaxed – he liked everyone to be happy, perhaps because his parents fought so fiercely when he was growing up. That was a tough childhood and he worked hard to ensure he never had to live through anything like it again.
The Morecambe and Wise success story happened slowly. Mum had great faith in their talent, but the early years were hard. Variety theatre was dying and breaking into television was nearly impossible. Both my mother and Doreen Wise had total belief in their husbands, and by the early 1960s they were beginning to see that paying off.
Ten years later, Eric and Ernie were with the BBC, making the series and Christmas specials that are still family favourites today. Dad knew they were doing their best work, but I’m certain he had no idea those shows would still be festive favourites 50 years later, drawing big primetime audiences.
Success came at a heavy cost to his health. He had his first heart attack in 1968, aged 42, and a heart bypass ten years later. He never switched off, even on holiday – I remember him one summer in Portugal, trying to perform a prototype of the Tom Jones routine for us, when all we wanted to do was swim in the pool. How I wish I could recapture that moment now.
Mum encouraged him to unwind, first of all by playing golf and then by going fishing. That did help him, sitting by the water all day, thinking about nothing instead of constantly performing.
We never talked about his heart issues. By his mid-50s, he would get breathless just going up the stairs, but somehow we convinced ourselves that it was normal. He’d been a star for so long, it stood to reason he was an old man – even though Mum, just a year his junior, was still youthful and energetic.
He blamed the months he spent during the war as a Bevin Boy down the mines for his dodgy chest. He once told me that he used to smoke ‘anything I could ignite’ from the age of 12: ‘I only went to school to smoke behind the bike sheds.’ As a concession to his doctors, he switched from cigarettes to a pipe after his first heart attack, and was promptly named Pipesmoker of the Year.
Mum didn’t smoke, and she barely drank alcohol. But she didn’t want to nag him. And though we knew how unhealthy tobacco was, he seemed immortal. The night he died, after doing a one-man show in Tewkesbury as a favour to his friend Stan Stennett who ran the theatre, the shock for all of us was indescribable.
The disbelief on Ernie’s face when I saw him at the funeral – I don’t think he was ever the same again. For Mum it was devastating, because she lost her husband and her biggest role in life… looking after Eric Morecambe.
It was nearly five years before she began to emerge from mourning. And then she reinvented herself, helping to raise so many millions for charity that she was awarded the OBE in 2015. Even at the age of 90, she would be fundraising for the local hospice, handing out leaflets and doing charity work.
That revived her. She could be connected to the showbiz world, attending functions and dinners, being elegant and brilliant.
She died on her 97th birthday. It was strangely unexpected – my sister and I went round to see her, and there were balloons on the door, and a banner that said Happy Birthday Joan. We opened her cards, and though she was very frail she knew us and was able to talk a little.
And then she closed her eyes, as if she was going to take a nap, and she was gone.
Dad would be glad her end was so peaceful. He always put her on a pedestal, amazed that she agreed to marry him. All through his career, she was the woman who brought him sunshine.
Forever In The Sunshine: The Story Of Morecambe And Wise As Only Family Can Tell It, by Gary Morecambe, is published by Sphere
The BBC is marking the anniversary of Eric Morecambe’s death with a series of shows:
Saturday, May 25, BBC2:
6:10pm The Morecambe & Wise Show 1970 : The Lost Tape
6:55pm The Perfect Morecambe & Wise – Episode 2
Tuesday May 28, BBC4:
8:30pm The Perfect Morecambe & Wise – Episode 9
9pm My Hero – Miranda Hart on Eric Morecambe
