HarperCollinsPublishers
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk
First published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2015
FIRST EDITION
© Sean Smith 2015
Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers 2015
Cover photographs © johnwrightphoto.com
Sean Smith asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
Find out about HarperCollins and the environment at
www.harpercollins.co.uk/green
Source ISBN: 9780008104450
Ebook Edition © March 2015 ISBN: 9780008104528
Version: 2015-07-10
Even as a small boy, it was always about the voice. Tom calls it his ‘God-given gift’. Freda Woodward believed her son was musical as a baby when she held him in her arms: ‘As soon as music came on the radio, he would start to move like a jelly. And if you left him in his cot, he would make musical sounds at the top of his voice. I remember thinking, “What’s eating this boy?”’
Tom’s first memory of impressing his mother was when he was a blond, curly-haired five-year-old and she heard him singing the popular wartime novelty song ‘Mairzy Doats’. She asked him to sing it again, and when he had finished, she told him, ‘You’ve got a lovely voice.’ That parental approval was all the encouragement Tom needed to believe that he would be a singer one day. ‘I had this voice and the love of it. So any chance I could get, I wanted to get up and sing.’
Tommy Woodward liked an audience as a little lad. His first cousins, Jean and the twins Ada and Margaret, would come over to his parents’ house on Laura Street for a concert. There would just be time to have a fight with Margaret, which Tommy usually started by trying to stick a spider down the back of her neck, before it was showtime. His doting mother Freda knew the routine, because he used to pester her almost daily to announce him dramatically, in a proper show business fashion.
‘I would be cleaning the lounge and there was a deep windowsill and Tom would get up there and pull the drapes over and he would say, “Mum, call me out now.” And I would say, “Wait a minute now, because I’m busy.” And he would say, “No, call me out now.” So I would say, “Tommy Woodward, he will be out next” and he would jump out and start to sing. Well, I knew there was some talent there. He was never shy.’
Margaret remembers the concerts well. ‘He would be up in auntie’s window, pretending that he was on stage then. And we would all have to clap. He was always very talented, but none of us children were allowed to be shy.’
The Woodwards were originally from Cornwall, but moved to the small village of Treforest overlooking Pontypridd at the end of the nineteenth century, drawn by the prospect of finding work in the mines that were thriving at the time. Thousands of families poured in to transform the landscape of South Wales. Row upon row of small terraced houses were built for the ‘immigrants’ who created the mining communities for which the Valleys became famous. Tom’s father, Thomas John Woodward senior, was the first of his family to be born in Wales.
It is a huge simplification to describe these areas as poor, deprived or underprivileged. Working down the mines was considered a good job and, more importantly, it provided a regular wage. Being a miner was exceptionally hard work, but Tom’s dad was proud to follow in the footsteps of his father and two elder brothers. He earned his first wage at the age of fourteen, when he went down Cwm Colliery in Beddau, three miles across the mountain from Treforest.