Tom Jones - the Life (4 page)

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.

One option was ruled out right away. The Trenchards were a good Catholic family, so there was no question of an abortion, which, in any case, was still illegal in 1956. One solution, followed by many families, was for Linda to go away and ‘visit relatives’ for the later stages of her confinement, give birth and have the baby adopted. She could then return to Treforest refreshed and rested after a lovely ‘holiday’ and none of the neighbourhood gossips would be any the wiser.

A third possibility was that Linda could leave Treforest for a while, give birth and then hand the baby over to her aunt, who had no children, which would at least have kept the child within the family. None of these possibilities seemed ideal and the adults continued to try to reach an agreement. The whole time, Linda and Tom sat together, holding hands and whispering affectionately to one another.

Eventually, Freda noticed them. Tom recalled the moment, ‘My mother, God bless her, said, “Look at them. We’re trying to decide what’s going to happen and they’re oblivious to what’s going on. How can we get in the way of that?”’

Thomas senior asked his son what
he
wanted to do. Tom replied without hesitation: ‘I said, “I want to get married to Linda and she wants to get married to me.” My father just looked at me, it all went dead quiet for a moment, and then he said, “Go ahead.” I always loved him for it.’

It wasn’t quite as simple as that, though. Linda was not yet sixteen and was therefore too young to be married legally. They would have to wait until after her next birthday, on 14 January, and by that time there would be no hiding her condition. There was the wider family to convince that this was the right course of action as well. At least Tom’s mother and father weren’t hypocrites about their son’s situation: they, too, had married after Freda became pregnant – and that was in the 1930s. Tom’s cousin Margaret remembers her Auntie Freda telling her that Tom wanted to get married: ‘He wasn’t forced at all. Some parents might have done that, but he wanted to.’

Linda’s friends weren’t judgemental. While there was some inevitable gossip behind closed doors, Vimy Pitman recalls, ‘Everybody felt immensely sorry for her, because she was such a nice person. Nobody put her down. I didn’t know of any other pregnancy when we were that young. It was all so shocking. She was far too nice to say anything nasty about. You wouldn’t say, “Oh look, what has she been up to, then?”’

Any childhood dreams Linda may have had of a romantic wedding were put firmly behind her when, eight months pregnant, she and Tom made their way to the Pontypridd Register Office in Courthouse Street on 2 March 1957. At that time, it was still important to be married before giving birth, however late in the day.

Register offices haven’t changed much. It was an impersonal affair, with the cheery registrar, the master of ceremonies, seated behind a plain wooden table, while immediate family sat in rows on the facing chairs. Tom’s sister Sheila was there with her new husband, Ken Davies, who was one of the two main witnesses on the marriage certificate. Tom’s grandmother Ada, Aunt Lena and Uncle Albert, parents of the twins, were there and, of course, so were his parents, watching their teenage son grow up before their eyes. Linda’s parents were joined by some of her close relatives, including her aunt, Josie Powell, who was also a witness. Nobody realised then that Linda’s father, Bill, a quiet man like Tom senior, had only a short time left. He was battling tuberculosis – a grim reminder of how close to death Tom had come.

The ceremony was mercifully brief and the family retired to the Wood Road for a celebratory drink on the way home. It was very low key, but there were more pressing matters for the newlyweds to consider – where they were going to live and how they would provide for their child.

The living arrangements were easily sorted. Tom just packed his clothes and sauntered round to Linda’s, where the now Mr and Mrs Woodward were given the basement area of 3 Cliff Terrace as their first marital home. Linda’s parents and her younger sister Roslyn were on the floor above. Their living quarters were below the level of the street, so there wasn’t much natural light, but Linda set about making the place presentable. It was very basic, however, with no fridge, Hoover or phone. The old stove she had to cook on was something from the 1940s. Visitors would bang on the grill with a boot to attract their attention, although that was liable to set the dogs barking up and down the road.

Tom had taken on some extra shifts at the Polyglove factory to try to build up a nest egg to get them started as man and wife, but it soon became clear that he would have to look for something better paid. He started work as a general labourer at the British Coated Board and Paper Mills on the Treforest Industrial Estate.

Tom was just leaving on his bike to cycle to work for a night shift, when the ambulance drew up to take Linda to the maternity hospital in Cardiff. ‘I couldn’t even take a shift off when my wife went into hospital.’ Even if he hadn’t been working, this was the 1950s and long before prospective fathers were expected to hold their partner’s hand while she gave birth.

On his return from the mill the following morning, Tom dumped his bike on the pavement and excitedly rushed into the all-too-familiar phone box to ring the hospital. It was 11 April 1957 and Tommy Woodward, aged sixteen, was informed he was now the father of a baby boy.

Tom dashed to the hospital in Glossop Terrace. He can chuckle now about what he must have looked like. He told the 1991 TV documentary
The Voice Made Flesh
, ‘I walked to the hospital with a shopping bag, which I wouldn’t have been seen dead with the week before. I had this bloody Teddy suit on with a shopping bag. And I walked into the hospital and I saw Linda and my son and I came out of there and I thought, “Who can touch me now!”’

He took the bus home, but decided to stop along the way at one of his favourite dance halls to toast the birth. ‘I went into the toilet and one kid said, “Oh, we heard that you had to marry Linda Trenchard.” And I grabbed him by the throat and lifted him up, you know, on the wall and then people pulled me off. I was so “lifted” by the fact that I had a wife and little boy. It made me feel much stronger than I was a week before. It made me a man.’

Despite that feeling of masculine bravado, Tom’s situation was far from promising. He was a teenage father of one with no prospects. To a certain extent, Tom’s life was following the norm for this part of South Wales: boys would leave school at fifteen, go down the mines or find a factory job and then look to marry and settle down. Circumstance may have dictated that Tom started a year or two earlier than most, but the majority of his school friends were married, with young families, while they were still teenagers.

Family life for Tom began with some grim news. Linda’s father had to go into hospital as his tuberculosis worsened. Bill Trenchard died from TB just six weeks after the birth of his grandson, Mark. He was forty-two. Linda tried to rally round her mother and younger sister, but she had to care for her baby. Tom did his best to be supportive and, for a short time at least, was very attentive to his young family. He went everywhere they went. Brian Blackler recalls that the first time he saw Mark Woodward was when Tom was walking on the Feathery with his little boy perched on his shoulders. He was clearly a proud new dad.

Tom’s routine began to follow a pattern remarkably similar to that of his father. During the week he worked hard, and on Friday nights enjoyed a beer with his mates at the Otley Arms in Treforest or the White Hart pub in the area between the village and Pontypridd known as The Tumble.

Brian also left the glove factory and started work at a local pit, the Maritime Colliery in Maesycoed, on the outskirts of Pontypridd, so Tom inevitably saw less of him as time passed. Tom still enjoyed the company of his old friends, but his best mate as the years went by remained Dai Perry. In Dai’s own words, they were like brothers, and they forged a lifelong bond, supping pints together and getting into scraps. It was a time when Tom’s nose was reshaped many times. He later complained to the renowned journalist Donald Zec, ‘I hate my horrible nose – it’s been worked over, bent sideways and patched up more than any other part of me. And always hit by a head – we liked to keep our hands nice and smooth like.’ His crooked teeth weren’t much better.

Generally speaking, Tom and Dai didn’t go looking for trouble. It had a habit of finding them, however, usually when one beer too many had been downed. On one memorable occasion, Tom was head-butted so hard, he ended up flying through the plate-glass door of a fish and chip shop.

The fight had been brewing for several days, after a row and a frank exchange of insults outside an Indian restaurant had resulted in Tom punching a man he described as a hooligan. The word went out in the days that followed that the man’s friends were looking for Tom to even the score. Dai warned him to be careful, but Tom was sure he could handle any trouble. He told Dai overconfidently, ‘He’s got no chance.’

Sure enough, the man – and his father – caught up with Tom as he ate some chips in the doorway of a Ponty takeaway. Tom has never been slow to tell the story of his comeuppance: ‘I told him, “Why don’t you run along?” Dai whispered to me, “Keep an eye on him,” but I didn’t care. I said, “Where do you want to go?” and while I was talking, he suddenly let me have it and I smashed right through the door into the fish and chip shop.’

He was still scrambling to his feet, ready to continue the fight, when the police arrived and moved everybody on. Tom, fuelled by the beer, followed the pair up to the Graig, where they lived, and jumped on them without even bothering to take his overcoat off. It was a big mistake, because there were two of them. That became three when the man’s mother charged out of their house, and four when his brother arrived as well. As Tom put it succinctly, ‘They beat the shit out of me.’ He still has the scar where one of them bit him on the finger.

Dai Perry looked on while his friend took a beating. Although he could have sorted things out for Tom, he did nothing because of an unwritten code of conduct: you couldn’t fight a woman or a much older man, especially if he was someone’s father. It was a question of respect, and Tom never held it against him.

On the streets of Pontypridd, the Teddy boy rules did not, for the most part, include the use of knives. Drugs weren’t a feature of the lifestyle either, and Tom never saw the point of narcotics. Instead, it was a macho culture of beer, Woodbines and the occasional brawl. Brian Blackler is adamant that Tom didn’t deserve his reputation as a ruffian: ‘He could look after himself, Tom, but he wasn’t a fighter. I think most of the boys were like that in them days. We wouldn’t get bullied, would we? I never liked a bully and I wouldn’t get bullied and Tom was the same.’

Despite not looking for trouble, there were many nights when Tom greeted his wife with a black eye or a fat lip after a night out. There must have been a lot of bullies in Pontypridd then. An evening rarely ended without some sort of punch-up between those Teds who were looking for trouble. If you went out to a dance hall in town, you needed eyes in the back of your head to keep watch for any menacing Ted sneaking up on you from behind. The British Legion in Rhydyfelin was so notoriously rough that it became widely known as the ‘Bucket of Blood’.

The history of that era reveals that there were some massive fights between rival gangs of Teds. But Keith Davies, who later played guitar alongside Tom, observes: ‘Sometimes I think the whole Ted thing is overcooked. It was just a way of life for everyone. Everybody was a Teddy boy. I wouldn’t say Tom was a tough Ted. He was aggressive on stage though.’

Tom, meanwhile, was promoted at work to a job as a machinist. As a result, he was earning more money, but alternate weeks he had to work a night shift from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. Even that small advancement was threatened by an overzealous trade unionist, who complained that he was too young to receive a man’s wage. Tom had to hold his tongue – and his fists – when some of the other staff tried to sabotage his machine so he would be out of favour with management. He began to hate his job.

Letting off steam with his mates was poor compensation for his general unhappiness at the way things had turned out for him. He was linked to some petty crime in the area, which gave Freda some sleepless nights, worried that the next knock on the door might be someone ready to arrest Tom. Mostly, though, it involved sneaking into the cinema without paying or nicking the occasional 45 from the record store.