Tom Jones - The Life

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.’