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Tom had an edge, even as a youngster in short trousers. He didn’t just sing a song; he performed it with verve and passion. In 1946, when Tommy was six, the Oscar-winning film The Jolson Story was released. The biopic, starring Larry Parks, told the life of the star who, from humble origins, became the most famous entertainer in the world. Fortunately, it glossed over the singer’s marital problems brought about by his inveterate womanising.
Tom was transfixed when he saw the film with his parents at the Cecil Cinema in Fothergill Street, Treforest. He recalled, ‘I thought Al Jolson was great, because he was a great entertainer.’ Back at the house in Laura Street, he would stand in front of a mirror and practise the famous Jolson gestures and hand movements, so he could impress his audience the next time he gave a performance in the lounge. He wanted to be like Jolson, because ‘he’s moving and singing.’
Performing in front of an audience for Tom was like swimming for other youngsters: after you have overcome an initial fear of the water, it becomes second nature. Tom wasn’t overawed when Uncle Edwin stood him on a chair to sing to a crowded pub or when his mother showed him off at the weekly meetings of the Treforest Women’s Guild, which met in a small hall at the top of Stow Hill, a short, lung-busting walk from home.
Little Tommy was, in fact, a big show-off. Looking back at his childhood self, Tom admitted, ‘It was my strength. A lot of boys in school were great rugby players or football players. But I was lucky that I had this voice. It gave me confidence.’ In that regard, Tom took after his vivacious mother. His cousin Margaret, who was very close to Tom growing up, used to tell him that he would always have another career if his voice ever gave out: ‘He has my auntie’s personality. She was a very natural woman and would be the life and soul of the party. Tom was the same. I told him he would make a marvellous stand-up comedian.’
The one member of clan Woodward who was a reluctant singer was his father. Tom recalled, ‘My father was a shy man. But he could sing if he had had enough beer.’ His mother had no such inhibitions, however, and would happily burst into song. Unfortunately, she couldn’t match her husband as a singer, although her son says she could just about hold a tune.
Tom’s universe was very small when he was growing up. He usually says he hails from Pontypridd, but he is a Treforest boy through and through. Until he left school, his entire life was acted out within a few hundred yards of his home, and even then his first job was only a five-minute stroll away. His mother’s sister, Auntie Lena, lived with her husband, Albert Jones, in adjoining Tower Street, so his first cousins were so close you could almost hear the kettle going on. His best friends, Brian Blackler and Dai Perry, were within shouting distance and he never had more than a ten-minute walk to school.
The boy was called Tommy at home and among family to avoid confusion with his father, but his school friends always knew him as Tom, or sometimes Woodsie. The local children would never have dreamed of referring to Tom senior as anything other than Mr Woodward. Proper respect for your elders was very important in this small, insulated mining community. One story in particular illustrates this. When both her children were of school age, Freda took a job in a local factory to bring in some much needed extra cash. One day she and her husband were queuing for the cinema when a boy shouted out to them, ‘Hello, Freda.’ Tom senior was enraged by the impertinence and wanted to know who he was. Freda said he was just a young lad who worked at the factory. Her husband was incandescent. ‘You’re not going to the factory any more,’ he insisted. ‘If they can’t call you Mrs Woodward, then you don’t work there!’
Freda never took another full-time job, but she was the woman local families called on when someone died. She would be asked to lay out the body, which involved dressing the deceased so they looked their best for the funeral. It was a sign of the regard in which she was held that she was trusted with such a significant task.
Tom was decidedly spoiled and, perhaps because he was indulged, he was slightly on the chubby side. His sister was six years older, so he was very much the little one in the family. Coincidentally, his mother was the youngest sibling, eleven years younger than Lena, and the baby of her family too. The Woodwards were relatively better off than many in the area, because they were a household of only four. Both Tom’s mother and father were one of six children, so there were lots of cousins living in Treforest. Lena and Albert alone had seven children.
As far as young Tom was concerned, it was entirely normal to grow up with such an extended family in close proximity. He loved it and has always stressed that family is of paramount importance to him. It would come as no surprise to those who knew him well that his immediate family would later live within five minutes of him in Los Angeles or that he made sure his cousins were always welcome there.
Tom enjoyed a traditional and idyllic childhood, despite the dismal landscape of an impoverished area. The house in Laura Street was an end of terrace and bigger than some of the others in the street. Freda liked the decoration to be bright and colourful – a cheerful place for her family. ‘It was a beautiful home,’ recalls Cousin Margaret. ‘Auntie Freda was very house-proud but she would always give you a welcome.’ Like so many housewives then, she would invariably have a pie or a tray of Welsh cakes baking in the oven of her kitchen on the lower ground floor and the smell would waft enticingly up the stairs.
A coal fire kept the house warm. Tom and the other boys in the neighbourhood used to enjoy helping when the coalman came round with a delivery. He would lift up a round, steel plate in the pavement and tip the coal in. The boys would then push the coal down the hole, so it would land in the room on the bottom floor known as the coal house.
Visitors always came to the back door, which was never locked. The house had no bathroom, but hanging on a hook outside was the small tin bath that Freda would fetch down every night and put in the scullery across the hall, ready to fill with hot water so her husband could scrub himself clean of the coal dust and grime every evening.
On Tom’s birth certificate, his father listed his occupation not as miner but as Assistant Colliery Repairer (below ground). The work was just as dirty, dark and forbidding as digging the seam. It was also hugely important, because it involved repairing the wooden joists that kept the tunnels from collapsing, preventing calamitous results.
The daily rituals in the Woodward home never changed and the roles that his mother and father had within the household had a profound effect on young Tom’s outlook on life and the development of a set of values that many would see as old fashioned. His father worked hard to provide for his family, and his wife was equally diligent in making sure his house was spotless, his children were clean and tidy and he was cared for from the moment she could hear the click of the garden gate announcing he was back. Tom observed, ‘Most of my values have been formed from that working-class environment. They were good people.’
Freda was always up first to light the fire, make breakfast, lay out Tom senior’s work clothes and prepare his packed lunch ready for his journey over the mountain to the colliery. He usually walked with Brian Blackler’s father, Cliff, and the many other miners from Treforest. While he spent the day with a pickaxe in his hand, Freda would make sure the children were safely at school before beginning her daily tasks of shopping, baking and cleaning. She took particular care in polishing the horse brasses that were dotted about the best room and were her pride and joy.
At the end of a strenuous day, a miner needed his hot meal. Freda always had her husband’s tea ready on the kitchen table for him to enjoy as soon as he had washed his hands. Tom and Sheila, hair brushed and tidy, were there to welcome their father home.
After he had eaten, he would take his bath. It was far too small for a grown man. Tom described his father’s routine: ‘He would have to kneel on the floor first of all and take his shirt off and wash his top half and when he had done that he would stand in the bath and wash his bottom half. And he would shout for my mother to come and scrub his back.’ Freda would wash his back with a flannel, unless they’d had a tiff and she wasn’t speaking to him, in which case she would send Tommy in to do it instead.
Sometimes Tom senior would pop out to the Wood Road Non-Political Club – known locally as ‘the Wood Road’ – for a beer with his friends, but on Saturdays he took Freda with him. It was a traditional working men’s club that tended to be all male during the week and more family oriented at the weekend.
Mr and Mrs Woodward always made a handsome, smartly turned-out couple. Freda looked glamorous with her blonde hair styled immaculately, and favoured beads to accessorise her dress. Her husband would wear a three-piece suit with a brightly coloured shirt and tie and pristine suede shoes. His son always appreciated his sharp dress sense and sought to emulate him when he became older.
At the club, Freda and the other wives sat together and gossiped while the men drank their beer at the other end of the room. Only one topic of conversation was banned – politics. That was why it was called the Non-Political Club. Sometimes there was singing. Freda’s tour de force was her version of the old favourite ‘Silver Dollar’, which she performed with great verve and humour. She relished the memorable first line ‘A man without a woman is like a ship without a sail’. Afterwards, they would usually finish the evening off at Lena and Albert’s, because Tom’s aunt had a piano, which she would play, making a late sing-song even jollier.
The piano was in much demand at Christmas time. Tom would join the other young children at his aunt’s at teatime for a lucky dip. Aunt Lena would buy a lot of little gifts and wrap them in preparation. The children would then draw numbers out of a hat to see which present they received – it was Santa’s lucky dip. As Margaret explained, ‘The money wasn’t there to be extravagant, but we never realised this, because our home was so nice. All of us would be there with the piano going. Tom said to me once that we never realised we were poor, because we were all together and it was absolutely lovely.’
Everyone in the village was in the same situation. Nobody had a car, but everything was so near that they walked everywhere. The children could easily get to the Cecil Cinema for a matinée. They had to pay just once and could stay all day – they could watch the feature as many times as they liked. Of course, if it were something the girls found scary, then Tom would make it his mission in life to race around or jump out and frighten them as much as possible on the way home. He could be a rascal, but he was never rough, especially with his younger cousins. ‘We were very close, I’ve got to be honest,’ said Margaret.
Sometimes they played on the White Tips, or in summer walked to Ponty Baths, as it was called, and swam and splashed around in the enormous paddling pool that had been an attraction in Ynysangharad Park since the 1920s. Tom didn’t spend all his time with the girls, however. Most afternoons, after tea, he joined his pals to muck about or kick a ball in the old quarry behind Stow Hill. These days, health and safety officers would have a fit at the sight of so many small boys in short trousers scaling the sides and scrambling around in the earth and stone.
Even better was when they were allowed, in the holidays, to go and play and camp on the Feathery, the spectacular mountain behind Treforest. In the late forties and early fifties, children had to find amusements that didn’t revolve around television, computers and phones. Invariably, about ten of the younger boys from the Laura Street area would be together – all the usual suspects, including Tom, Brian, Dai and the Pitman brothers. The older boys would be on one side of the mountain, ignoring the youngsters. Brian recalls, ‘It was good fun in those days … Great times! We never slept – never slept all night.’
2
The Prisoner of Laura Street (#u62725f21-d8e7-52b8-9c54-a268af863b50)
Tom didn’t enjoy going to school. He was a poor student and, like most of his pals, couldn’t wait for the time to pass so he could leave and become a man. In later years, he was able to attribute his slow academic progress to dyslexia, but that diagnosis wasn’t readily available in the 1940s, and Tom was perceived variously as being disinterested or not very bright. Even the basics of reading, writing and arithmetic failed to inspire him.
He began in the local infants school before moving on to Treforest Primary School in Wood Road and then to the Central Secondary Modern School at the top of Stow Hill. He wasn’t much interested in playing football or rugby, like his friend Dai Perry, but he did enjoy watching boxing. He liked drawing, but his principal interest was singing. Surprisingly, he showed little desire to join a choir. He knew he was the best singer in the school, but he wasn’t a team player and, from an early age, was very much a solo artist in the making.
That inclination extended to traditional carol singing at Christmas, when a group of his friends called for him at the house and asked if he would join them. He responded, ‘No, I don’t think I will tonight,’ and let them carry on, before slipping out to sing by himself. ‘If I was singing with four or five fellas, they drowned you out. They would always cock it up. You couldn’t shine. And I made more money singing by myself.’
His family obviously knew about his talent as a singer, but his friends didn’t realise he was gifted until they heard him sing at school one Friday afternoon. The teacher told the class to entertain themselves for a while during a free period. Tom started drumming his fingers hard upon the desk – he was beating out the sound of galloping horses. Then he began, ‘An old cowpoke went riding out one dark and windy day.’
The melancholy song ‘Riders in the Sky’ had been written in 1948 by Stan Jones, a friend of the multi-Oscar-winning director John Ford, the master of the Western genre. Jones composed songs for some of the most famous Westerns of all time, including The Searchers and Rio Grande, both starring John Wayne. The hugely evocative ‘Riders’, one of his earliest compositions, became his most famous, mainly because it was covered by a string of singers that included Bing Crosby, Johnny Cash, Peggy Lee and Frankie Laine.
The lyrics are based on an old folk tale about a cowboy told to change his ways or end up damned and forever chasing a thundering herd of cattle across the endless skies. Tommy Woodward was less concerned about the moral of the story and more interested in the famous chorus of the song, which was tailor-made for a young boy with a big voice who loved Westerns: ‘Yi-pi-yi-ay, Yi-pi-yi-oh, ghost riders in the sky’. It was his party piece and he never tired of singing it. Fortunately, his classmates didn’t get bored of his rendition, which became a weekly favourite. For many, their abiding memory of school was of Tom Jones singing that song.
His preferred version of the classic was by bandleader Vaughn Monroe, whose rich, resonant baritone vocal suited the ethereal nature of the song. Tommy could only imitate it by cupping his hands together, covering his mouth and pretending he was in a cave. Monroe’s recording was called ‘Riders in the Sky (A Cowboy Legend)’ and was the most successful of all, reaching number one in the Billboard charts in the US in 1949. If you listened to the radio, you couldn’t fail to hear it. Later versions added the word ‘Ghost’ at the beginning of the title, but Tom always remained loyal to the original. He acknowledged the significance of the song when he recorded it as the rousing opening track of his 1967 album Green, Green Grass of Home.
‘Riders in the Sky’ was important to Tom not just because it was a song he performed so much as a child, but because it told a story. He observed, ‘I love songs that paint a picture.’ Many of Tom’s best-loved songs, such as ‘Delilah’ and ‘Green, Green Grass of Home’, are hugely descriptive and evocative. He wasn’t a fan of repetitive pop chants like ‘She Loves You’.
One of Tom’s favourite stories is about the time he sang the Lord’s Prayer in class, performing it not as a solemn church song, but as a negro spiritual. His teacher was so amazed that he was asked to sing it again in front of the whole school. Schooldays weren’t filled with too many highlights for Tommy Woodward, but that was one of them.
Tom had recently celebrated his twelfth birthday when he started complaining to his mother that he was feeling tired. The normally lively boy had no energy. It was difficult enough at the best of times to get him up for school, but Freda couldn’t help noticing how listless her son had become. Sensibly, she decided that a trip to the doctor was called for. A precautionary X-ray revealed that Tom had a dark shadow on his lung: he had tuberculosis. The only good thing about such upsetting news was that the condition had been diagnosed early.
TB, or ‘The Black Spot’ as they grimly called it in the mining communities of South Wales, was a killer. The disease, which usually affects the lungs, is caught through the air by coming into contact with an infected person coughing or sneezing bacteria near you. Wales had one of the highest rates for TB in Europe – hardly surprising in close-knit communities where nearly every miner coped with a cough all his life.
The Woodwards were touched by the disease, as so many families were. His father’s side of the family experienced several instances of TB during Tom’s lifetime. His cousin Marie died from the disease at the age of twenty-one. Her sister Valerie was also stricken, but survived after spending two years in Sully Hospital, near Penarth, which specialised in tuberculosis cases and where the fresh sea air helped young lungs to heal.
The first decision that had to be made was whether to send Tom away to rest and recuperate and break up the family or accept the difficult challenge of nursing him back to health at home. Even if victims of the wretched disease survived, they faced the prospect of being crippled for life.
Freda decided she wanted to nurse her boy back to health at home. His condition was extremely serious, but he wasn’t a sickly child by nature and the disease had been identified at an early stage. As a result, the chances of him making a complete recovery were good. He was infectious for only a short time, while the treatments he received fought the bacteria. During that period, he needed to be kept isolated from his friends, so he wouldn’t cough and spread the infection. There was no magic cure, however. He needed absolute rest and a long period of convalescence to rebuild his strength, which wasn’t easy for an active boy.
His mother decided he should be moved down to the middle floor of the house, to a bigger room where the coal fireplace could keep him warm when the days became chilly. He needed to have the windows open at all times, lowered only slightly when a bitter wind whistled down Laura Street.
After the initial elation of not having to go to school, life became pretty boring. He explained, ‘Bed was a novelty at first. I didn’t have to go to school, which was great, since I wasn’t a good student. But being forbidden to sing during the first year was a real drag!’ In his boredom, he would drive his poor mother to distraction by frequently banging on the floor with a stick to attract her attention in the kitchen on the floor below. She would drop everything to rush and see what he needed.
Freda did her best to amuse her son. Sometimes she would sing and dance around the room to cheer him up. She urged him to draw with a set of Indian inks she bought for him. When he was allowed to have visitors, she encouraged friends and family to see him.
Cousin Margaret, who was ten at the time, recalls, ‘We realised it was serious. We were up there visiting him most of the time. Auntie Freda would say, “Come up and keep him company.” We would tell him about school and what we were doing. We were never bored with Tom.
‘But we could never play cards. My mother wouldn’t have us playing cards. Auntie Freda was the same. Cards were like the devil in the house. We were chapel – only a man could play cards, not a woman.’ Tom, perhaps as a result of his mother’s disapproval, has never had any inclination to play cards and has always shown a strong dislike of any form of gambling.
From his bed, Tom could look out of the window and see all the way down the valley. He recalled, ‘As good as that view was, I’d grow restless. So my parents would routinely move the bed around the room to change the scenery for me.’ Freda was forever cutting out pictures of cowboys from magazines and sticking them to the wall, so he would have something fresh to look at. Margaret observes, ‘It was lovely, his bedroom.’
The lifesaver for Tom was when his parents rented a heavy, dark-brown radio for him. It was the sort of old-fashioned wireless you could imagine listening to when the declaration of war was announced. Tom loved it. His parents didn’t mind if he listened to it late at night, when the BBC played American music into the small hours – time didn’t matter when you were in bed for twenty-four hours a day. Pirate radio and Radio 1 had yet to change the musical taste of a nation. In 1952, ‘Rock Around the Clock’ was still two years away. Instead, Tom grew to love the records of Mahalia Jackson, the ‘Queen of Gospel’, an influence he carried with him throughout his career. He also discovered the music of Big Bill Broonzy, the acclaimed master of the Chicago blues, whom Eric Clapton once called his role model and both Keith Richards and Ronnie Wood of The Rolling Stones identify as a key figure in the development of their guitar-playing.
This was music to stir the imagination of a twelve-year-old boy in Treforest. These wonderful performers helped shape his destiny and Tom never forgot the effect they had on him. He included Mahalia’s uplifting recording of the traditional American hymn ‘The Old Rugged Cross’ and Big Bill’s protest song ‘Black, Brown and White’ among his Desert Island Discs in a programme broadcast shortly after his seventieth birthday in 2010. Tom had heard the song ‘The Old Rugged Cross’ many times, because it was a favourite of Welsh choirs and was often sung at funerals and formal occasions. Tom had never heard it sung like this, however, and he was keen to try out the style.
After a year confined to his room, Tom had shown enough improvement to be allowed to get up for two hours a day. He still couldn’t go out, but was well enough to stand by the front door and wave to his friends as they walked up the hill to the quarry or the White Tips to play or gathered around the gas lamp-post as darkness fell to laugh and chat. Tom was frustrated and jealous. ‘I promised myself that when I could walk to that lamp-post, I’d never complain about anything again.’
Once he was stronger, Tom was allowed to resume singing. When he turned thirteen, his parents rented a black-and-white TV set in time to enjoy the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II. Tom was able to watch the performances of popular artists of the fifties, like the snappily dressed Frankie Vaughan. Ever since he’d first seen Al Jolson on screen, Tom was a magpie when it came to imitating other entertainers. He would absorb a hand gesture or a facial expression and file it away to use himself.
His parents also bought him a guitar, on which he could strum a few basic chords as rudimentary backing. Freda never forgot his delight when he saw the parcel wrapped up at the bottom of his bed: ‘There was happiness! To see Tom smile was all I wanted.’ Through the open window of his second-floor bedroom, he would serenade the neighbourhood. It was like a scene from the period drama Call the Midwife, as the mums in the street would pause their chores to listen to young Tommy Woodward sing.
Just imagine if The X Factor had existed back then. Tom’s would have been the ultimate sob story – young boy stricken with TB raises himself from his sickbed to ‘nail’ ‘Riders in the Sky’. There wouldn’t have been a dry eye on the judging panel.
Brian Blackler remembers visiting his friend, who was sitting up in bed singing ‘Riders in the Sky’ and other songs he had picked up from the radio, including ‘That Old Black Magic’. Artists from Marilyn Monroe to Frank Sinatra had recorded the song, but the version that had caught Tom’s ear was by Billy Daniels. Nobody sang the standard like the great black singer and Tom was struck by his unique phrasing. He decided he wanted to sing it that way too.
Eventually, after two long years, the fourteen-year-old Tom was considered well enough to venture into the outside world once more. Holidays during his childhood – as for most mining families – tended to consist of a day trip to Barry Island, but this time his parents thought he deserved a proper summer treat. Brian Blackler remembers the boys had borrowed bicycles and, as they were riding, Tom shouted over, ‘I’m going now to Porthcawl for a week. Do you fancy coming down?’ Brian, who was one of eight children and had never had a proper holiday either, jumped at the chance, and joined the Woodward family in a caravan by the seaside in the popular resort some thirty miles west of Cardiff. There wasn’t much to do other than muck about on the dunes or ‘freeze your balls off’ in the water – it was always cold in Porthcawl. Tom found a place to sing though: the back of an old lorry by the beach, where he could entertain other holidaymakers.
The holiday was a positive outcome at the end of his two-year sentence in Laura Street. The resumption of school wasn’t particularly welcome, however. A teacher had come in from time to time to help the patient with his lessons, but Tom’s heart had never been in it. For his age, Tom was well behind and hadn’t mastered the most basic elements of education. His handwriting and spelling were hopeless – not that he cared much. After all, he had met the girl who would be the love of his life.
3
A Teenager in Love (#u62725f21-d8e7-52b8-9c54-a268af863b50)
Being laid up in bed with tuberculosis isn’t an ideal situation for a lad struggling through adolescence. Tommy could only gaze out of his ‘prison’ window in frustration and watch the local schoolgirls laughing and gossiping in the street below. One in particular grabbed his attention – Melinda Trenchard was the prettiest girl in the neighbourhood.
Linda was the daughter of Bill and Vi Trenchard, who lived in Cliff Terrace, just a few hundred yards away from Laura Street across Wood Road. Her parents ran the County Cinema, near the railway station in Pontypridd, and were well known in the area. Vi was friendly with Tom’s mother, Freda, and, like her, was outgoing and popular.
As youngsters, Tom and Linda’s paths seldom crossed. Boys and girls played separately, unless they went to the same school. Linda, who is six months younger than Tom, went to a Catholic primary school, so he was only vaguely aware of who she was at that age. He noticed that she wore little crucifix earrings, like many of the local Catholic girls, but that was about all.
Tom first became aware of Linda properly, before he was struck down with TB, when she was playing marbles in the street with some friends. He recalled light-heartedly, ‘I must have been eleven. I walked down her street and she was bending down and playing marbles. I saw those great legs and all of a sudden I thought of her in a new light.’
He did pursue Linda, after a fashion, but it was more for a game of kiss chase than anything else. All the boys would chase the girls and if they were lucky enough to catch up with one, they had to give her a kiss. ‘My first proper kiss was with Linda and it was her first kiss too. Afterwards I had to run my wrists under cold water. I was an early starter.’ It was nothing more than a playground romance at this stage, although Tom has always been disarmingly frank and earthy about growing up: ‘I can remember the first time I got to know myself better – I thought I had broken it!’
When he was confined to his room, Linda was the girl he would watch out for most. He would quietly seethe when he saw her talking to the other boys, but he could do nothing about it. She never came to visit him, because, in those prim and proper days, girls who weren’t family didn’t visit boys in their homes. Linda, as Tom could see from his window, was maturing into a lovely teenager. Her old school friend Vimy Pitman observes, ‘She was very, very attractive. She was everybody’s cup of tea. She had a lovely figure and was the sweetest girl. She would never say anything nasty about anybody or get involved in arguments or anything. She really was a nice girl.’
When Tom emerged from Laura Street, he had changed. He was taller and broader and his hair had turned the colour of coal. Linda hadn’t seen him for two years. She recalled, ‘When we met up after he went back to school, I didn’t recognise him at first, but I was immediately attracted to him again.’
Tom was equally smitten. ‘I don’t know what the feeling was. All I knew was I had a feeling for this girl. She looked fantastic.’
It was a classic case of opposites attracting – good girl in the A stream meets a boy who couldn’t care less and was languishing in the Ds. Tom’s lack of interest in all things academic had become even more pronounced. He had fallen so far behind during his two years away from school that he saw little point in trying to catch up. Linda, on the other hand, was particularly accomplished at drawing and illustrating – an interest she might have had in common with Tom if he had stuck with it. Perhaps art was too closely associated with the boredom of TB, because music took over as soon as he was allowed to sing again.
The girls at school weren’t too bothered about Tom’s classroom credentials. Vimy acknowledges, ‘Lots of the girls, well, most of the girls, I suppose, found him very attractive. He seemed a bit rough to me, but he definitely had the charisma. He had a way with him – a swagger.’
Linda had no idea at first that he was a gifted singer. She hadn’t been present at any family sing-songs, nor had she heard him entertain classmates. Instead, she had to wait until his sister Sheila’s engagement party to hear him. She described it in a rare interview in the 1960s: ‘Tom’s mother and mine knew each other well, so it was quite natural that when his sister got engaged he should invite me to the party. It was there I first really heard him sing. He sang “Ghost Riders in the Sky” and accompanied himself by tapping his fingers on the table. I wish it had been recorded.’
The opportunities for teenage courtship in Treforest were few. Linda and Tom got together first of all at the local youth club. She recalled, ‘We were too young to say we were going together, but we always seemed to end up with each other.’ They would synchronise running errands for their mothers, just so they could walk to the local shops hand in hand.
Tom and Linda became an item almost without anybody noticing. It wasn’t a case of them going into class one day and announcing that they were going out. His cousin Margaret can’t remember a time when they weren’t together: ‘I used to think they were like Darby and Joan – like an old pair of slippers. They were always together, with their arms around each other. They were very loving.’
Many of her contemporaries have likened Linda to Doris Day, the epitome of movie-star niceness. Tom, on the other hand, had a touch of Marlon Brando about him, being more brooding than clean cut. But something clicked between them. Looking back on those days in 2006, Tom said, ‘Teenage love is great. It never really happens like that again. We were so wrapped up with one another then and we’ve never really lost that. We like one another’s company. We are friends, we laugh and we are natural with one another. That’s something you can’t learn. It’s either there or it’s not.’
Things soon became more serious. If it was dry, they would walk for hours in the hills above the village. If it was raining – and it rained a lot in the Valleys – they would shelter in the old red phone box at the end of Laura Street. Fortunately, it was a fine day when they decided to make love for the first time. Tom was fifteen and Linda was fourteen when they found a secluded spot in a field overlooking the village. Tom said simply, ‘It was very special.’
Tom’s devotion to his girlfriend was clear from his reluctance to brag about her to his mates. He didn’t provide them with a blow-by-blow account, and flatly denied they had done the deed. It was all right to indulge in some swaggering talk with the lads about sex, but he wouldn’t talk about his sweetheart. As Vimy Pitman perceptively observes, ‘Linda was sacred.’
Tom had only a year of school left after recovering from TB. As well as Linda and singing, his other interest when he resumed his education was smoking Woodbines. He would join the boys and pop into the shop opposite the school gates, where they would buy one fag for a penny. Brian Blackler recalls, ‘Then we would go up the White Tips and smoke it and die on the way home. You think you are big when you have a fag in your mouth when you are a young kid.’
Tom left school at fifteen, as did practically everyone in Treforest. You had to be at the grammar school in Pontypridd to stay on and take A levels. Tom had no qualifications, but one thing had already been established: he wouldn’t follow his father down the mines. Even before his brush with TB had ruled it out, his parents wanted a different life for their son. Margaret observed, ‘He was brought up that he wasn’t going down the mines. Uncle Tom would never have agreed to that.’
In any case, Tom belonged to the first generation of Welsh sons who weren’t expected to follow in their fathers’ dusty footsteps. Instead, he found his first job as an apprentice glove cutter at the Polyglove factory in the Broadway, the main road between Treforest and Pontypridd.
His friend Brian joined him there when he, too, left school. Brian recalled, ‘We just used to shift some gloves. That was about it and a machine would do the rest.’ It was hot, dull and repetitive, and all for thirty-eight shillings a week in old money. Tom admitted that he hated it – not least because the cutting room was men only. The female staff were in another part of the factory, dealing with sales, packaging and retail.
At least he was earning just enough money to indulge his interest in records, clothes and beer. Far more important than work was the emergence of rock ’n’ roll, with the release of the film Blackboard Jungle and the impact of the theme tune ‘Rock Around the Clock’ by Bill Haley and His Comets. The song, with its hugely catchy, danceable melody, played over both the opening and closing credits. The film transformed a minor hit into a sensation. ‘Rock Around the Clock’ was everywhere.
The song was released at the start of 1955 and made some waves in the UK before the movie came out in March. It re-entered the charts in November 1955 and marched all the way up to number one. Bill Haley was no Elvis though. He was already thirty, on the chubby side and just as likely to be performing an old country and western song as anything cutting edge. His music was much more influential than the man himself.
Tom first heard the song blaring from the radio that was constantly playing at the factory to keep the workforce entertained as they faced the daily grind: ‘All of a sudden this “Rock Around the Clock” came on and I thought, “This is jumping out of the radio”.’ His workmates were less impressed and failed to understand what he found so exciting about it. An exasperated Tom told them to ‘just bloody listen to it’.
At least Tom’s enthusiasm for the new music gave him a head start when it came to the two Christmas parties he attended during his time at the factory. All the staff had the opportunity to mix together, but the men tended to stand around drinking, while the girls wanted to dance. Tom had a big advantage, ‘I was the only one who could jive. I was like a kid in a candy store.’
Tom’s ability on the dance floor had been finely tuned by Linda when they went out dancing on the weekend. She had left school a few months after her boyfriend, and she found a job in Pontypridd, working as an assistant in a draper’s shop, where one of her tasks was looking after the window display.
By this time, Tom had embraced the new Teddy boy culture that was sweeping the country and Linda was happy to wear the uniform of the girlfriend. Becoming a Teddy boy was part of growing up for many young men who left school at fifteen and wanted to announce to the world that they had arrived. This was nothing like the gang culture of today, although it helped if you could handle yourself in a fight.
Teddy boys weren’t a natural product of rock ’n’ roll. The famous attire had been around for several years, ever since fashion leaders in Savile Row, London, had tried to reintroduce the Edwardian style to affluent upper- and middle-class young men after the end of the Second World War.
Gradually the uniform filtered down to working-class youths. They were known as working-class Edwardians until the Daily Express printed a story in September 1953 with a headline shortening Edwardian to Teddy and the term ‘Teddy boy’ passed into mainstream usage. The fashion lost its appeal to the middle classes when that happened, so the famous suits could be picked up for bargain prices on second-hand market stalls.
Tom was a Treforest Ted. He wore all the gear: gaudy waistcoats, cowboy hats, bootlace ties, black suede crepe-soled shoes, known as brothel creepers, and, his pride and joy, a sky-blue suit, consisting of a long jacket with a velvet collar and narrow trousers. Local journalist Colin Macfarlane memorably described Tom in the 1950s: ‘He could be seen walking along the streets with his Teddy boy coat and trousers that were reckoned to be as narrow as the thinnest drainpipe in the village.’
Tom always fancied himself in his Teddy boy finery. The proprietor of Linda’s drapery shop wasn’t so impressed when this dandified vision came to call during working hours. Tom may have thought he was the height of fashion but, to others, Teddy boy was synonymous with young hooligan. Linda had to make sure he stayed out of sight at the back of the shop during working hours.
Linda, who was always smartly turned out, had a figure that looked good in anything, especially the pencil skirts that were fashionable in the mid-fifties. She also had a DA haircut, which was a polite shortening of the coarser ‘Duck’s Arse’, so called because it resembled the rear end of a duck. In the US, where it originated, the style was known as a ‘Duck’s Tail’ or a ‘Tony Curtis’, after the heart-throb actor who popularised it. The cut was short at the back and long and curled over in a quiff at the front. The general idea was to pile as much of your hair onto the top of your head as you could, using slabs of hair gel to hold it in place. Tom had one as well, lovingly teased and shaped by Linda.
The young women were more impressed with his efforts than the men. One of the lads recalls Tom’s image: ‘He looked like a dipstick. Always did when he was younger – a greasy-haired gypsy.’
Brian Blackler, whose Teddy-boy suit was silver, remembers: ‘We would go down to Cardiff and see the boys down there with their hair like Tony Curtis and we would come home and copy them. We all looked the same then.’
After the working week was over, Saturday was dance night. The Teds would meet up in a pub for a few bevvies to start off the evening. Tom and Dai, who was a year younger but didn’t look it because of his size, would generally be served, because they seemed older than they were. The girls, meanwhile, would usually congregate at someone’s house before making their way to that night’s chosen venue. ‘We girls never touched alcohol,’ confirms Vimy. They would make do with crisps and lemonade and wait for the boys to arrive. The Ranch in Pontypridd, St Luke’s Church in Porth and the Catholic hall on the Broadway were popular for a night of jiving – at least until 10.30, when they had to play the national anthem and finish for the night.
Boys and girls would put on their best clothes on a Sunday afternoon and meet up in the centre of Ponty for what was known locally as the Monkey Parade – a weekly ritual in which the young men were like peacocks trying to attract the best-looking female. They would pair off for an innocent stroll through town. If Tom were delayed for any reason on the Saturday or Sunday, none of the local lads would chat up Linda, because she was strictly off-limits. She was Tommy’s girl.
4
The Making of a Man (#u62725f21-d8e7-52b8-9c54-a268af863b50)
Another rainy day in the autumn of 1956 changed Tom’s life for ever. As usual, he and Linda were sheltering in the phone box at the end of Laura Street, when she plucked up the courage to give him some news. Tearfully, she told him they were expecting a baby in the spring. Tom was now sixteen and she was fifteen.
They hadn’t bothered with contraception. There was no family-planning clinic in Treforest in those days. Tom admitted that he didn’t care about precautions, because he knew ‘I loved this girl’. He hadn’t given it a second thought until it was too late. He described his shock, ‘I thought, “Oh my God, what is my mother going to say. Or my father, what is he going to say!” The initial thing was “I am in hot water.”’
Despite his youthful swagger, Tom was still living at home and young enough for his mum to give him a clip round the ear and tell him to get his hair cut, which she frequently did when she noticed it was longer than Linda’s. He had huge respect for his parents and didn’t want to disappoint them.
Tom was right to be nervous. He later confided in bass guitarist Vernon Hopkins that his father was very angry at the news that he was going to be a grandfather. He thrust a wad of notes into his son’s hand and told him to head off to Cardiff and join ‘the bloody merchant navy’. When everyone had calmed down, Freda and Tom senior called a family conference to decide what should be done.
The meeting to decide the teenagers’ future was held in the best room at Laura Street, which was usually reserved for special occasions. While, strictly speaking, this was a very special occasion, it wasn’t a celebration. Linda walked round with her parents, Bill and Vi, then settled in a corner of the room with Tom, as the two families tried to agree a plan of action.
