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
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