Shirley (2 page)

During the Twenties and Thirties, Henry Bassey was the tenant at 182 Bute Street. It would never have occurred to him to buy a house. He was not a good provider although he was, as they say in Nigeria, one of the ‘savvy’ kind. When he wasn’t stoking boilers at sea, he could always turn his hand to pocketing a bob or two by some
other means, sometimes renting a bed to a sailor who needed a roof over his head.

This was the world into which Shirley Veronica Bassey was born on 8 January 1937, the last of seven children, six of them girls. Her siblings, in descending order, were Gracie, Ella, Iris, the twins Eileen and Henry, and Marina. Shirley’s birth certificate names her father as Henry Bassey and her mother as Eliza Bassey, formerly Metcalfe.

The new baby came into a family where she would sleep three in a bed with two of her sisters, and be clothed in hand-me-downs that had been passed from sister to sister and were old and shabby by the time they got to her. Bella Freeman, whom Shirley knew as Auntie Bella and always remembered as having been kind to her, recalls how Eliza Bassey would visit with Shirley in tow. While the little girl played with Bella’s daughter, Iris, Mrs Bassey would sit in Bella’s front room, quiet and worn out. Bella ‘worried about that little girl, because when the time came for them to go I could see that little Shirley sometimes looked frightened. I knew that Shirley was very close to her mother, but it was as if there was something in their house that little Shirley didn’t like.’

Nobody can account for Bella Freeman’s impression of a child in fear. Certainly, the Basseys’ former next-door neighbour, Mr Wesley from Sierra Leone, recalled happy times in Henry’s household. ‘Henry was a man who loved a party and he liked to make something on the side. We called them dancing classes in those days, but they were a kind of street party where everyone paid their share, and if the party was held in your house you were paid for the
trouble. Each week or so, the dancing class moved from house to house and it was a good cheap way to have fun.’

Henry Bassey used to get the children to put rags over their feet and polish the old floorboards in the front room until they shone. If there was a piano handy the neighbours would carry it over the doorstep, then a couple of guitar players from the Ship and Pilot pub down by the harbour would arrive. Drinks would be lined up for sale, a jar of poteen from the Irish community, ouzo from the Greeks, wine from the Italians and the Spaniards, and the home-brewed ‘boozo’ of Africa.

When the party started, everyone was there: young girls, sailors from the ships in port, wives and husbands. Those husbands that didn’t dance played dice in the next room, while the older women looked after the babies and gossiped in a corner. The children would gather, the boys keeping a lookout for a nosy bobby, and little Shirley Bassey would crawl under the table, pull the chenille cloth down until she was hidden, and prepare to sing the night away. Shirley’s mother later said, ‘I think she got her singing from her father. He was always so fond of music. He never stopped playing gramophone records. Shirley used to sing with them as a tiny girl.’ Shirley’s sister Gracie always knew she was different, recalling that ‘She sang as soon as she could talk. The neighbours liked to listen to her.’

Eventually the little girl, who was too shy to come out from under the tablecloth, would fall asleep and be put to bed. From the time she was born Shirley heard the sound of music. After all, this was Wales, and in Tiger Bay in particular there was always music. Guitars and drums sounded from the Ship and Pilot pub, piano lessons could be heard
through the open windows of summer, and gospel singing and the Blues, Paul Robeson’s voice from radios and gramophones, and the sound of the little Bassey girl joining in.

Tiger Bay had its brothel for the sailors and when during the war, the need for its services increased, a couple more sprang up. The pretty girls with lovely clothes who worked in the original brothel were well-liked by the local children. The girls were free in handing out the sweets that the sailors brought them from foreign shores, and the kids called them all ‘auntie’. Now and then the police would raid the brothel and the horrified children would watch their ‘aunties’ being loaded into a Black Maria.

There were other, more conventional, places of amusement in Bute Street. At the Annexe, which rather resembled a mission hall, the Saturday night dances that were held for the young and the unmarried were often wild, and at the Old Vestry they had the sixpenny hops. But what the children of Tiger Bay loved best of all were those ‘dancing classes’ where they were put to polishing the dance floor.

Shirley Bassey was not yet three when trouble hit her family. Like most of the seamen who had jumped ship, Henry Bassey had never bothered to legalise his position and that and a more serious matter were the reasons he was deported back to Nigeria. After his departure the Council, for reasons best known to themselves, thought it better to move Eliza Bassey and her children out of Tiger Bay, and relocated them to a place bearing the unprepossessing name of Splott. The next suburb along the Cardiff coast, Splott was only a short bus ride from the top of Bute Street, but it
was a world away in every other respect. A steel town, whose inhabitants were very definitely white, the place had only a small quota of poor inhabitants, mainly Irish labourers who’d come to work in the mills.

Eliza Bassey was given a terraced house at 132 Portmanmoor Road – in the shadow of the giant Dowlais Steel Mills whose orange flames illuminated the night sky – and two pounds ten shillings a week National Assistance. It was a paltry sum, but food was cheap in those days. Farthings were still currency then and a small loaf of bread cost a halfpenny, while a shilling in the gas meter kept you warm in the winter. The two elder Bassey girls, Gracie and Ella, were out at work in Cardiff and their wages helped. And Tiger Bay did its best. Old Nora, who’d always been the best of neighbours in Bute Street, would come and help look after the younger children, other former neighbours contributed sheets and blankets to the household and, as they all reminded the Basseys, ‘You’re only a penny bus ride away.’

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 sight.