“A revealing drama that looks at the life of singer Dame Shirley Bassey. The film charts Bassey’s early career, from her humble roots to the start of her rise to stardom.”
However, what you really need to do is read John L. Williams superb biography. If you want to get to know the real Dame Shirley, from the early days in South Wales right through to the glory years and beyond, then John’s book is simply unmissable.
Miss Shirley Bassey has been in the public eye for so long now that it’s easy to lose sight of how extraordinary her story is. In 1954 Shirley was a 17 year-old, mixed-race single mother, working in a café and living in Splott, Cardiff. Ten years later she was singing Goldfinger!
It’s one of the most remarkable rags-to-riches stories in showbusiness, and the only reason it’s not better known is because Dame Shirley herself has never shown any inclination to trade on it.
Shirley’s mother, Eliza Jane, was a Yorkshirewoman who lived a wild life of her own. Shirley, born January 1937, was the last of her ten children. Her first two were white, born in Middlesbrough; but when the third, a little girl called Ella, turned out to be mixed race, Eliza was given a stark choice: give up the baby or get out of town. She chose the latter option, leaving her two white children behind – one with her mother, one with her first husband – and headed for Cardiff’s Tiger Bay, the leading multiracial community in 20s Britain. There she had another child with a sailor called Sam Johnson, before settling down with Nigerian merchant seaman Henry Bassey. The couple had six children together and lived above one of the disreputable clubs on Bute Street.
A year after Shirley’s birth a scandal rocked the family. Henry was found guilty of child sexual abuse and sent to prison. Eliza moved her family to another part of Cardiff, the area known as Splott. In school, the young Shirley endured a certain amount of racial namecalling but, in the aftermath of WWII, this was less of an issue to her than the family’s poverty: the Basseys barely scraped by on national assistance, living in a tiny terraced house with no indoor bathroom.
Shirley hated studying and left school at 14. She had one talent: an extraordinary voice. She sang all the time: at school, at work, at pubs and clubs. At 16, she was cast in a couple of touring revues, Memories Of Jolson and Hot From Harlem, in which she and a troupe of other mixed-race Cardiff girls were passed off as black Americans. In the early 50s, before mass Commonwealth immigration really got going, black people were mostly seen as a novelty rather than a threat.
Before long, Shirley dropped out of touring: she was pregnant. She wouldn’t name the father, but was determined to have her baby. She stayed with her sister Ella in London, gave birth to her eldest daughter Sharon, and then went back to live with her mother, assuming her dreams of stardom were over. Six months later she was invited to perform for a week in Jersey. Her mother urged her to go. There, she met a manager, Mike Sullivan, who recognised a diamond in the rough. He trained and groomed her, and within a year she was headlining on the West End stage. From then on she barely looked back – hit records, Las Vegas, Royal Variety shows, more hit records, Morecambe and Wise, world tours, two husbands, diamonds, and diva tantrums – the rest really is history.
Not bad for a black girl from Tiger Bay, coming of age in the 1950s.
Did you see the Shirley Bassey biopic on the Beeb last night? Wonderful stuff!
