Shirley (3 page)

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 change my happiness for everything material Shirley has earned for herself.’

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.

The enamelware was packed the old-fashioned way, in boxes with lots of paper. Because she was young and it was a bit of fun, Shirley sometimes slipped her name and address into the parcel. Now and then, she received a reply: ‘I got your name in the chamber pot, Miss Bassey.’

Music blared out for most of the day in the packing shed. When it wasn’t music it was
The Archers
or
Workers’ Playtime
or
Welsh Rarebit
. The girls talked and laughed together, and there was plenty of teasing banter when the young men trundled in. Courtship began this way, and sometimes led to engagements and weddings. Many of the girls married boys from Curran’s.

Sometimes Shirley wondered when and whether something dramatic would happen to change her life, something better than going to Newport for a song contest. Here she
was, over fifteen and free to sing anywhere. She’d won many song contests, trekked to so many little towns around Cardiff at weekends, and won a certificate here or a medal there, but that wasn’t what she wanted. Singing in pubs and working men’s clubs had grown monotonous, though her first professional engagement had been in the Bomb and Dagger, on her own doorstep in Portmanmoor Road.

The venue, in reality was the Splott Social and Athletic Club, but it had been dubbed the Bomb and Dagger because the club had played host to radical left-wing speakers on a couple of occasions, and some wag stuck a label, ‘The Bomb and Dagger’, on the door. And on the front page of the
Daily Express
, as Lord Beaverbrook’s warning to his readers to beware of subversive left-wing elements, there was always a picture of a little chap in a wide-brimmed hat and cloak, carrying a bomb and dagger.

One Saturday night, Shirley and a few of her more rowdy friends stationed themselves outside the club and sang, until the manager came out and put a stop to it. However, he recognised Shirley from down the road, whom he’d heard had won a medal or two for her singing, and he subsequently asked her if she’d like to sing at one of their weekend nights when the members’ wives were invited.

This was how Shirley started doing the rounds of the clubs in Cardiff and its suburbs, and became well known to the locals. But her growing reputation on her home turf still only earned her a pound or two for her efforts, and, beneath the defiant smile, she was beginning to feel dissatisfaction at the thought that she might spend the rest of her life singing in pubs.

During this period, one of the girls at Curran’s said to
her, ‘You ought to sing on the radio yourself, Shirley. You know this programme
Welsh Rarebit
? They put on Welsh people who can sing. Why don’t you try and get an audition?’ The other factory girls embraced the idea with enthusiasm, alternately goading and persuading Shirley to try and get on the programme, made by BBC Wales and consisting of bits and pieces supplied by local talent.

Shirley knew a dare when she heard one and wasn’t one to ignore the challenge, which is how she found herself walking down a long corridor at the BBC offices in Cardiff in 1952, telling Wyn Calvin, the programme’s link man, ‘I’ve been singing in pubs since I was thirteen. If a bobby came in, the boys in the trio had to hide me and I crawled away on my hands and knees.’ Wyn Calvin had taken one look at Shirley waiting in Reception, and known exactly where she was from and what she was. She had Butetown, the docks, Tiger Bay written all over her. Her mother, he guessed accurately, was white, her father black, and they were poor. She was the first girl from Tiger Bay who’d applied for an audition and he was determined to help her all he could if she had any talent, because God knows, if anyone needed help, it was a girl from Tiger Bay.

Wyn Calvin escorted Shirley to the audition studio, introduced her to the pianist, checked the microphone position, and waited for the producer, Miss Mai Jones, to give the signal from the control box. Mai Jones was a highly respected senior producer. A gaunt, forty-ish blonde, she was serious about music and liked to surround herself with up and coming young musicians, many of whom, such as Geraint Evans and Harry Secombe, became luminaries in the entertainment field.