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
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
