Shirley Read online

  But life wasn’t the same in Splott. In the Bay everyone waved or stopped to chat, everybody knew everything about everybody else. And all the children looked the same. Shirley didn’t understand what her new life was all about, though her mother tried to explain. She had told the child truthfully that her father had gone away, nonetheless reassuring her that Henry was ‘a good man and he always loved you. He used to call you Sharon. He said that was the pet name for the Queen of Sheba.’

  Ifor Harry, a Welshman who was the Basseys’ neighbour in Portmanmoor Road, felt sure that the move did great harm to Shirley. Until the age of five, when she began at Moorland Road Junior School, the child had been oblivious to racial jibes. Then, when she went to her new school, for the first time in her life somebody called her ‘nigger’.

  The Bassey children were treated as foreigners in Splott, singled out and tormented because of the colour of their skin. One of her schoolmates remembered Shirley’s early days at Moorland Road school. ‘At first Shirley didn’t understand what the other kids meant when they called her names. When she did, she went for them. What a fighter she was. I hoped she’d learned it in Tiger Bay. Anyone who called her “darkie” or “nigger” got a real walloping from Shirley. In our infants class she became a real heroine.’

  Shirley and her sister Marina, walking hand-in-hand to school, were often stopped by jeering boys. Out of her front door would come Eliza Bassey and fly up the road, handbag at the ready to swing at the boys, swiping them around their heads and using language nobody would have guessed she even understood. Everyone who tormented her daughters got the same treatment.

  ‘I really admired Mrs Bassey, she was a remarkable lady,’ Ifor Harry recalled. ‘You see, it was an all-white school and we know that children can be cruel. Mrs Bassey tried her best, but I think it was a nasty shock to the little girl. I watched her grow up and I could tell. I do blame those first years in Splott. If ever I read of Shirley behaving badly, when she seems to be hard and not care, I think it all began when she had to learn to be tough and act as if no one could hurt her.’

  The steel-mill workers were not poor. Their wartime wages were good and their children, who went to Moorland Road school, too, were rather better dressed than the little Bassey girl. Nigerian seamen who knew Shirley’s father would call on the Basseys, bringing sweets and little presents for the children. They were all distressed at what had befallen the family. Eventually, one of these Nigerians, named Mr Mendi, became Mrs Bassey’s lodger, his rent a welcome supplement to her income.

  Mr Mendi, smartly dressed and well read, was a very different person to Henry Bassey, but when he’d been lodging with the family for some time, Shirley began to call him Dad. He would bring her wonderful presents back from his voyages – shoes, for example, which could only be bought in Wales with ration coupons. His gift of a pair of black patent strapped sandals led to an unhappy incident when a teacher told Shirley they were unsuitable footwear for school.

  ‘My dad brought these back from New York,’ growled Shirley. ‘I have to wear them ’cause I haven’t got any more.’

  Mrs Bassey and Mendi got along very well, and were soon recognised as a couple. In keeping with the local custom, everyone began to call her ‘Mrs Mendi’, and it was only a matter of time before that was what she officially became.

  Ifor Harry ran a barber shop in the front of his house at 128 Portmanmoor Road and remembered that, while cutting the customers’ hair, he often heard Shirley and her brother Henry singing next door. ‘They were always singing, those two. They had such good voices, and you know that in Wales we love good singers.’

  Although the younger Bassey children went to school in Splott, most of their friends were in Tiger Bay, and they made their way there at every opportunity. The Rainbow Club in Bute Street had been started as a charity for the poor children of Butetown (as it had been officially known), and going there was like going back home.

  Academically, Shirley didn’t shine at school. Some children are lucky in finding a gifted teacher who takes a special interest in them, but this didn’t happen to her. She’d had a bad start and she remained a rebel, ready to fight her way out of any situation.

  Margaret Baird, one of her classmates through both junior and secondary school at Moorland Road, admired Shirley but thought her rather more recklessly brave than sensible. On one occasion, a teacher was showing Shirley up in front of the class and the girl, who hated being teased, picked up an inkwell and poised it ready to throw at her tormentor. ‘If she had thrown it,’ commented Margaret, ‘she would certainly have been expelled. It was a very dangerous thing to do.’

  Sports were a different matter. Shirley was very good at games, especially baseball – not the American kind, but the Welsh version where a soft leather ball is used. Down in this part of Wales there was a little pocket of good baseball and Shirley was part of it. Perhaps the fact that a star of Welsh baseball, Jim Sullivan, had been born near the Basseys in Dowlais Cottages might have spurred her on.

  As a little girl Shirley, no matter how well she sang, was always drawn to dancing and tried hard to shine at it. The original Rainbow Club was housed in empty shop premises in Bute Street, and Shirley began going there as a skinny seven-year-old. It served as a social club, and the kids played games as well as entertaining each other with song and dance. Most of them were little show-offs and they loved it. Everyone agreed that, for one so young, Shirley had a marvellous voice, but her dancing was less well received. ‘Forget the dancing,’ said the lady who ran the club. ‘When you sing, Shirley, you’re better than anyone else.’ In the end, Shirley had to accept that in Tiger Bay she had best concentrate on singing. Nonetheless, in later years, Bernard Hall, Shirley’s friend, sometime road manager and fervent admirer, who was a leading professional show dancer, said that Shirley was an incomparable ballroom dancer and an absolute delight as a partner. However, because she refused to bow to the strict disciplines that dance requires, the constant exercise and rehearsal, she was never able to turn professional.

  In due course the Rainbow Club moved from the shop to better premises at the top of Bute Street where it became a worthwhile charity for the underprivileged children of Tiger Bay. At the new Rainbow Club, the kids had a real stage for their shows and competitions and made keen use of it. Television had not yet arrived, and most of the kids had their eye on show business, films or the stage. Some of their parents, including the piano-teaching mother of Louise Benjamin, had gone to London years previously to appear in the Paul Robeson film, Sanders of the River. All the locals went to see the movie and watch ‘Uncle’ Willy Needham leaping about in a loincloth. Tiger Bay was fair game for any film with an exotic background that needed a shoal of colourful extras. (‘We have everything here, take your pick.’) The rich pickings for movie companies didn’t fade with the years, and one of the more famous films serviced by the locals was The Inn of the Sixth Happiness in which Ingrid Bergman strode through the hills of Wales, which stood in for China, accompanied by about a hundred toddlers from Liverpool and Tiger Bay.

  Shirley Bassey’s career started the hard way. Her schoolmate Margaret Baird recalled how, at the age of thirteen, she began singing in dockland pubs and clubs. ‘It could be tough. They threw things if they didn’t like you and the applause was rare. And even if they did like you they didn’t clap, they just didn’t throw anything.’ But her young schoolmates thought she was great. Another schoolmate was Doreen Bendey, whose father fitted up a microphone in the Bentley’s front room where Shirley and Doreen used to practise harmonising together.

  At thirteen, Shirley began earning the odd pound as a vocalist with a trio – piano, guitar and saxophone – formed by three local boys. By then, she knew all the words of every popular song through listening to radio and records. If she’d been caught singing in pubs at her age, she would have been in trouble, and the boys were assiduous in watching the door for a passing policeman, whereupon their teenage vocalist would swiftly crawl out of sigh
t.

  There was no shortage of natural talent in Tiger Bay. A group of girls got together, taught themselves to dance and to sing in harmony and, calling themselves the Bay Girls, performed for charity at the Rainbow Club. Not surprisingly, Shirley became a Bay Girl, and it was this association that eventually led to an audition in London and her first professional show.

  Throughout her school years, she longed for the day she would turn fifteen and be legally free to earn money. The occasional ten bob or a pound earned under the counter went no way to satisfying her hunger for new clothes. She hated the hand-me-downs from her sisters, the shrunken jerseys and the shoes that needed paper stuffed into the toes to keep them on. It was doubly humiliating in the company of her schoolmates who were well turned out in smart pleated skirts and blouses and cardigans.

  Years later, Shirley Bassey gave a radio interview in Australia in which the humiliation she had suffered through poverty was expressed. ‘I always buy too many clothes nowadays,’ she confessed to a Sydney radio audience. ‘I buy shoes and coats and hats, not because I need them but because I swore to myself that one day I’d never wear other people’s cast-offs ever again. Everything I wear has to be brand-new.’

  In 1951, Shirley was a fourteen-year-old with no decent clothes and no money. It was a tough time for teenagers in Wales. Although the war had been over for five years, rationing was still in force, and without sufficient clothing coupons a girl could buy very little. Shirley was the only one of the Bassey offspring too young to earn her own money. Sixteen-year-old Marina had already been working at Curran’s factory for over a year, and Henry, her only brother and the sibling to whom she was closest, was out working in a local factory.

  Henry was a talented boy with a good voice. Neighbours recall him singing as he pegged out the washing in the back yard, and when he was still around, he and Shirley harmonised together for hours on end. The room in which they sang was virtually bare of furniture but for Henry’s record player and a piece of worn carpet, and lit by a solitary bulb which dangled from the ceiling on a long piece of flex. Some time later, when Shirley was beginning to win public recognition, Henry invited a local journalist to see these unpromising surroundings where his sister practised her singing.

  ‘Where’s the furniture?’ asked the newspaperman. Henry, amused by the question, replied, ‘You don’t need furniture to sing.’

  In 1956, when Shirley’s second record had just been released, another local journalist wrote, ‘This Cardiff girl has the mysterious stuff of which stars are made. She has a style of her own, but do I hear, in “Born to Sing the Blues”, a slight trace of Frankie Laine here and there?’

  He was right. Sitting on the worn piece of carpet under the harsh light bulb, Shirley and Henry used to harmonise to Frankie Laine records. One of their favourite duets was sung to his recording of ‘Girl in the Wood’. And they harmonised not only to Frankie Laine, but to Billy Eckstine, Sarah Vaughan, Lena Home, Judy Garland and Johnny Mathis, all there in the pile of records that Henry used to buy. If there was indeed a flavour of these stars in Shirley’s early renditions, it was hardly surprising since this was how she taught herself. She couldn’t pay for lessons during her teenage years, and fell back on copying the greats of her time.

  Michael Sullivan, Shirley’s first manager, pushed her to develop her own individual style, but she still loved listening to records. Wherever she travelled, her portable record player went with her, and when she was already a star, orchestra leader Kenny Clayton was surprised when she directed him to listen to a Mathis recording in order to get her desired key for his accompaniment. Sorting out keys was not a skill that Shirley had any intention of acquiring – what was good enough for Mathis was good enough for her.

  Talking of her childhood in an interview, Shirley recalled that, when younger, she didn’t seem too popular with her older sisters. She always seemed to be underfoot when they didn’t want her around. Then, one night, one of her sisters, quite unexpectedly, took her to a Billy Eckstine concert at the Cardiff New Theatre. ‘It must have been fate,’ she said, for joining the throng of autograph seekers at the stage door afterwards, and seeing the ecstatic reception Eckstine got from his fans when he emerged, made a deep impression on her. She began to realise that singing, which to her was as natural as breathing, could make people feel important.

  This thought was a revelation. After all, she, like Billy Eckstine, could sing, too. ‘I had never been interested in show business until that point,’ she said. A few days later, Henry came home with a recording of Judy Garland’s signature tune, ‘Somewhere Over the Rainbow’ which they played over and over again until they could sing along with Judy. In that same interview, Shirley was paid the highest of compliments when the reporter suggested that, ‘You may be the nearest thing to Judy Garland still going.’

  Shirley’s appreciation of the greats, and her perception of their rewards – fame, adulation, money – ignited the single-minded determination which has characterised her career. When she started out professionally, in two slightly tacky Joe Collins revues, one of the caustic comments made by her fellow performers was, ‘Who does she think she is? The star?’ Right from the beginning, Shirley Bassey knew where she was going: somewhere where she’d be important and the centre of attention, just like Billy Eckstine and Judy Garland, and her sisters would never again shout at her, ‘Have you been messing with my lipstick?’, because she’d have her own.

  In the summer of 1951 Shirley’s class from Moorland Road school went to Porthcawl Camp for a week’s holiday. A group of girls from Albany Road school, more or less the same age, went too. The Albany Road girls considered themselves a cut above the Moorland Road girls, and were rather snooty.

  It was a good holiday nevertheless, though there wasn’t much to do in the evenings. Someone might play the piano and the girls danced together, but everyone was a little bored until the night when Shirley Bassey got up on the small stage and sang. Her harmonising chum, Doreen Bentley, recalled that ‘Shirley was dynamite. She was only fourteen, but that night she told us what love was all about.’ The girls, young and impressionable, were just longing to grow up, fall in love, and find out what they were missing. ‘Shirley sang, and she really put her heart into it,’ Doreen said. ‘“Over the Rainbow” was the song she sang first, which was one we used to sing together in my front room, but that night Shirley’s lovely voice told us what we were waiting for. It gave us promises and dreams.

  ‘The girls from Albany Road school were a bit toffee-nosed compared to us, but everyone fell in love with Shirley that night. She absolutely took us by storm. The applause was deafening. The rest of that week was great, we had lovely evenings. Shirley could be a great organiser if she thought people liked her and she took us all in hand.’

  Doreen Bentley has also told how ‘Years later I was at one of her concerts, one of these huge affairs with more than a thousand people, and I had exactly the same feeling all over again. The audience were showering Shirley with their love. And I thought that even then, when she was fourteen, Shirley must have felt our love. So this is how Shirley gets her fix, I thought. This is how she gets all the love she needs.’ It was an acute observation.

  Shirley’s last term at school ended just before Christmas of 1951. She would turn fifteen a couple of weeks or so later, on 8 January 1952. One of her classmates, Jeanette Cockley, recalled how Shirley ‘went into every classroom and sang “This is My Mother’s Day”. That was the last time I saw her. I knew she went off to London with the Bay Girls, and I did hear that one of these girls was killed.’

  All Shirley Bassey’s friends and contemporaries from her schooldays have related their memories without envy, and with a certain sadness, as if they knew that someone, somewhere had failed Shirley, and that she paid dearly for everything she achieved. One of the girls from Moorland Road has related how, ‘When I see her on television I cry and think how lucky I am to live in this small house in this little corner of Wales. I wouldn’t ch
ange my happiness for everything material Shirley has earned for herself.’

  2

  CAN’T STOP SINGING

  ONCE SHIRLEY BASSEY left school and became a working girl, life was a lot more fun. Her first job was at Curran’s factory in Tiger Bay. Curran’s was the workplace of large numbers of men, and all of them were aware of Shirley Bassey. ‘What’s she got?’ wondered the other girls in the packing shed. ‘Why do these silly buggers moon over her?’

  On the surface, it was an understandable reaction for, to all outward appearances, she was just another ordinary working-class teenager striving to be ‘grown-up’. She was pretty, but her looks only hinted at the striking style and glamour that was to become one of her trademarks.

  To the young men at Curran’s, however, she had that most powerful of qualities, sex appeal. She could positively radiate sex appeal, seeming to switch it on at will when certain men appeared with another load of saucepans to be packed. And she could sing; she could sing all day while parcelling chamber pots, and she was the centre of attention. It was a far cry from the misery of school, despite the fact that when the girls sang along with Music While You Work, Shirley’s voice was invariably the loudest and would cause the manager to come in and yell, ‘Bassey! Pipe down!’

  Curran’s Enamelware factory was situated in a mean back street of Tiger Bay, where the sun seldom shone and gloomy shadows were cast over the factory buildings. The side of the Curran’s building that faced on to the street was long and low, with a pointed roof that somewhat resembled a Methodist chapel. Two square windows provided the only exit for the fumes. Round the back were the workshops where the machines were manned, machines which dipped the pans into cream enamel and finished them off with a green edging. When they were dry, brawny men would wheel them into the packing shed where the girls were stationed.