‘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…’
Eric’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.
‘Sadie was never shy when it came to pushing and promoting her own son.’
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.