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
