Before Tom Jones sang for television audiences in America, he worked in a glove factory in Wales and sang in pubs at night. At 16, he married Linda Trenchard, the girl he had known as a neighbor. They married in 1957, the same year their son, Mark, was born. There was little money, and singing was something Tom did around the work that paid the bills. Their marriage would last 59 years, through the kind of fame that changes a person’s daily life and the betrayals that can make a shared life difficult to understand from the outside.
Born in Wales in 1940, the son of a coal miner, Tom had already spent a long stretch of childhood imagining a life beyond the one he knew. Tuberculosis kept him in bed for much of two years after he fell ill at 12. The radio gave him voices to listen to and a world to picture beyond his room. By the time he and Linda were raising Mark, that boyhood ambition had become something he pursued wherever he could find an audience. A night singing in a pub was a chance to see what his voice could do in front of strangers.
When manager Gordon Mills heard him sing, those local performances began to lead somewhere bigger. In 1965, “It’s Not Unusual” reached No. 1 in Britain, and the voice Linda had known before it could support a family suddenly seemed to be everywhere. American fame followed, along with his own television show and appearances with stars such as Elvis Presley and Frank Sinatra. Crowds made a spectacle of his heartthrob image, sometimes throwing underwear onto the stage. For the teenage couple who had started out in a small Welsh home, the distance between those early days and the life Tom now led was hard to imagine.
Fame also brought a part of their marriage that can’t be left out of the story. Tom was unfaithful, and his affairs became part of the public account of their life together. The fact that they stayed married tells us how long their commitment lasted; it tells us far less about what the years cost Linda or how she understood the choices she made. Much of the story has been told through Tom’s recollections. Linda had her own experience of those decades, including the years of raising a son and building a home while the man she married became someone strangers felt they knew.
When Linda died of lung cancer in 2016 at 75, Tom lost the person who had known him across all those versions of his life. She had been there when he worked days and sang nights, before a hit record gave people all over the world a reason to remember his name. By then, the couple had shared nearly six decades of family history. So much of what one person remembers about a long marriage lives in the other person, too. Losing them can mean losing the only person who remembers certain days quite the way you do.
Tom continued to perform after Linda’s death, and “It’s Not Unusual” could still bring a crowd to life in a matter of seconds. For listeners, the opening notes might recall a dance floor or a record they played when they were young. For the man singing it, the song also belonged to the years when everything changed for him and his family. It came along after the wedding, after Mark was born, and after years of fitting music around a factory job. However many times he would sing it, Linda had known him before there was any reason to expect the world would sing along. That’s the most moving part of their long, complicated story: she knew the boy from Wales before anyone knew what would become of him.
