Three Towns Commemorate their Favourite Sons
Tommy Cooper, Caerphilly, South Wales
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| Caerphilly CB |
When we visited in April 2009, Caerphilly looked a dismal town; shops were boarded up, paint was peeling, windows needed cleaning – those that were not broken – and many of the
people look pale and unwell. It gives me no pleasure to write this; I may be a
long exiled Welshman, but both sides of my family come from South Wales, as do
Lynne’s (her mother actually attended Caerphilly Grammar School), and it
remains a part of my somewhat complex concept of ‘home’. There are still many
pleasant and prosperous places in the region, but I fear that Caerphilly is
typical of too many towns struggling to adjust to the post-industrial world.
The centre is dominated by one of Britain’s largest Norman
castles. This should be a tourist attraction, and maybe it is, but
on a dank April day the castle looked as dark and forbidding as Gilbert
de Clare (see also Llantrisant and Castell Coch) could have hoped for when he began work in 1268.
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| Parc Dafydd Williams, Caerphilly |
On the plus side, there is a pleasant garden which the town kindly chose to name after me (all right, it’s some other bloke with the same
name, but it could have been). Nearby is a statue of Caerphilly’s favourite
son.
Tommy Cooper was born in Caerphilly in 1921, though the family moved to Devon when he was three. His connection with the town is slim, but Caerphilly needs all the straws it can clutch. The statue, the work of James Done, was unveiled by Sir Anthony Hopkins in 2008.
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| Tommy Cooper and Caerphilly Castle |
For those too young to remember, Tommy Cooper was a magician. Tall and ungainly with a fez stuck on his permanently dishevelled
head, he looked nothing like the standard magician – and his tricks went wrong.
From this simple premise he extracted humour which was sometimes simple,
sometimes complex but always hilarious. An innately funny man, he could make an
audience laugh by standing silent and motionless on stage, he was also a competent
magician. Occasionally his tricks went right, just to keep everybody off
balance.
He died on stage during a live televised show in 1984. At first, both the audience and stage crew thought the collapse was part of his act.
Sadly it was not. A one-off and a true original, he died far too young.
Eric Morecambe, Morecambe, Lancashire
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| Lancashire |
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| Morecambe |
I have written about Morecambe Bay before (Morecambe Bay and Sunderland Point) but not about the town. A station and harbour were built
beside the bay in 1846 and the town that grew up around them and absorbed the
fishing village of Poulton-le-Sands eventually adopted the name of the bay.
For a time Morecambe thrived, the railway bringing tens of thousands of holiday-makers each year, mainly from Yorkshire and southern Scotland.
In 2013, however, marketing Morecambe as a seaside resort seems a job for a hopeless optimist. With a beach of imported sand, and sea that only visits
for a couple of hours a day, the cool, damp climate is the least of its
disadvantages. Yet people still come here. The hinterland of north Lancashire
and southern Cumbria is countryside of rare beauty, but surely it is only those
who know no better - or can afford no better - that take a seaside holiday in
Morecambe. Maybe Morecambe has its charms, if so I have missed them – I would
be happy if anyone enlightened me.
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| The sea front at Morecambe |
While the town took its name from the bay, Eric Morecambe took his name from the town where he was born in 1926. John Eric Bartholomew,
as he was then, met Ernest Wiseman in 1940 and the double act of Bartholomew
and Wiseman was born. Separated for a while by national service, they reunited,
changed their names to Morecambe and Wise and the rest is history.
The Morecambe and Wise show was a Saturday prime time fixture for well over a decade and the Christmas special was compulsory viewing. With a
script that was not actually replete with jokes, Eric’s clowning and ad-libbing
regularly reduced my mother to a quivering heap. The quality of guests was
legendary, serious actors, like Judi Dench and Glenda Jackson, serious
musicians, like André Previn, and serious politicians, like Harold Wilson,
queued up to be the butt of their jokes.
Eric died in 1984, the month after Tommy Cooper. Like Cooper he died of a heart attack, but unlike Cooper he managed to finish his show
before collapsing backstage.
A statue of Eric Morecambe by sculptor Graham Ibbeson has pride of place on the town’s sea front. Before the Olympics the Queen did not do guests spots on other people’s shows, but she did came to Morecambe to unveil Eric’s statue in 1999.
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| Eric Morecambe on the Morecambe Sea Front |
Eric and Ernie brought the double act to such a pitch of perfection they effectively killed it. Humour does not always cross the
generations, but my mother was one of his greatest fans and my daughter can sometimes
be heard quoting him, though she was only three when he died.
Stan Laurel, Ulverston, Cumbria
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| Cumbria |
Traditionally a detached part of Lancashire, but since 1972 officially Cumbria, the Furness peninsula is a strange sort of place.
Travelling south, the Lake District hills flatten out into land scarred by
ancient glacial activity, riven by broad sandy estuaries and fringed by
desolate salt marshes. The unlovely industrial town of Barrow lies at the tip
of the peninsula while at the base is the small, neat market town of Ulverston.
County Square is hardly the focal point of the cluster of handsome old buildings that make up central Ulverston, but it does seem to be
considered the town centre.
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| County Square, Ulverston |
Stan Laurel was born Stanley Arthur Jefferson in Ulverston in 1886. He came from a theatrical family, went into the business straight from
school and joined Fred Karno’s troupe in 1910. In 1912 he toured America with the troupe (which also included Charlie
Chaplin) and decided to stay. He was already a well-established actor and film
director when he started working with Oliver Hardy in the late 1920s.
The statue of Stan and Ollie that stands outside Coronation Hall is, like that of Eric Morecambe, by Graham Ibbeson. It was unveiled by Ken
Dodd in 2009.
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| Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy outside Coronation Hall, Ulverston |
Ulverston also has a Laurel and Hardy museum, but it was closed for ‘major refurbishment’ when we visited – what did we expect on a cold
wet January morning? Laurel and Hardy were no doubt funny in their day, but I doubt modern audiences find
much to laugh at. That said, they were innovators in their field, they were the
first major double act in film history, and they were successful in both silent
and talking pictures, so they must have had something.
My mother met them when they were touring Britain in the late 1940s. They came to the Ideal Home exhibition and visited the stand where
she was demonstrating cookery techniques. Her verdict: ‘a pair of silly old fools.’
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