Cardiff remembered: Some of the greatest Welsh women are from Cardiff

Shirley Bassey signing autographs. September, 1957.Image: Media Wales.

Written by Brian Lee

In 2017 the prolific Welsh author Terry Breverton published his 100 Greatest Welsh Women and at least five of them came from Cardiff.

These are Tessie O’Shea, Shirley Bassey, Gillian Clarke Tanni Grey-Thompson and Dr Gwyneth Lewis.

The first named, ”Two-Ton Tessie” as she was billed, was born in Plantagenet Street, Riverside, in 1914 and we learn that aged six she took piano and elocution lessons.

The ukulele became her trademark and, after winning talent contests for singing and tap dancing, she topped theatre bills across the country.

Later she became a regular on BBC TV’s The Good Old Days, and we learn that “Noel Coward especially wrote songs for her and she performed the show-stopper London, winning the prestigious Tony award as best supporting actress”.

She starred on Broadway several times and we are told that “the ebullient, high kicking, cart-wheeling 17st blonde singer was the toast of Broadway appearing on the major TV chat shows” and that she also won an Emmy for her part in a television version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

Tessie died in Leesburg, Florida, in 1995 and the South Wales Echo reported that “she was to Cardiff what Gracie Fields was to Lancaster”.

Shirley Bassey, the girl from Tiger Bay, was born at 182 Bute Street in 1937 and is billed as “International Diva, Singer Of Three James Bond Themes, Best Female Singer In The Last 50 Years” and I for one wouldn’t disagree with that description.

The youngest of six sisters and one brother, her father was a ship’s fireman from West Africa, we are told.

Her career took off in the mid 1950s and she reached the Top 10 with the Banana Boat Song in early 1957.

Nelson Riddle “helped her break the States, and she headlined shows in New York and Las Vegas”.

Awarded France’s top honour, the Legion d’Honneur in 1999, she has been recognised with awards in many parts of the world, and in a poll in Wales on Sunday in 1994 she was voted “The Sexiest Woman of the 20th Century”.

Nearly four pages are devoted to Gillian Clarke, the National Poet of Wales, who was born in our beloved Cardiff in June 1937.

She, we learn, ”lives with her second husband, an architect in Talgarreg near Llandysul, on an 18-acre small-holding run according to conservation principles”.

The author informs us that she has been regarded as one of the most important contemporary British poets. She was appointed Capital Poet for Cardiff 2005-6 and has travelled as a poet to the former Soviet Union and Yugoslavia and has lectured in India, Bangladesh, Mexico, Canada, Europe and the US.

As for Baroness Carys Davina “Tanni” Grey-Thompson DBE, best known to Echo readers as the world’s most successful Paralympian, she was born in the Heath district of Cardiff in 1969.

She left school in Cardiff to study in Loughborough where we are told she took a politics degree.

She trained really hard and won gold in Atlanta in 1992 and was voted Welsh Sports Personality of the Year some three times!

She was also awarded an OBE for her services to sport and during her athletics career won a total of 16 Paralympic medals, including 11 golds, broke more than 30 world records and she won the London Marathon six times between 1992 and 2002.

Dr. Gwyneth Lewis FRSL was born into a Welsh-speaking family in Cardiff in November 1959 and she started writing poetry when she was just seven. She has published many books of poetry in Welsh and English and is a winner of the Welsh Arts Council Book Of The Year Prize.

After leaving the BBC in 2001 she was awarded a £75,000 grant by NESTA to carry out research and to sail to ports that were linked historically with the inhabitants of her native city Cardiff.

The author informs us that “Gwyneth Lewis’s mark on the landscape of Welsh poetry since the first publication of her first collection written in Cymraeg in 1977 is best evidenced on the impressive frontage of the Wales Millennium Centre. Six foot letters form verse in Welsh and English (what she calls her ‘mother’ and ‘step mother’ tongues respectively and indicate the stature she occupies in the poetry communities of those languages, and beyond”.

The huge lettering reads: “Creu Gwir  fel Gwydr o Ffwrnais Awen / In these Stones Horizons Sing. Creating truth, like glass from inspiration’s furnace, and the lettering is formed by windows in the upstairs bar areas and is internally illuminated at night.

It was in 2005 that she was elected Honorary Fellow of Cardiff University, the same year she was made the first National Poet of Wales.

Terry Breverton is the author of many books on Wales and what he doesn’t know about his birthplace wouldn’t be worth knowing.

100 Greatest Welsh Women is published by Glyndwr Publishing, priced £15.99.

Meanwhile, with regard my piece recently on Cardiff’s New Theatre I forgot to mention the late Stan Stennett who was well known to New Theatre goers.

I still remember his Billy Bonzo pantomimes with great affection.

Stan was a regular reader of my column, and my proud boast is that I once trod the boards with him if only for a few minutes at St David’s Hall when he invited me to take part in his afternoon show.

His autobiography Fully Booked, published by Vertical Editions in 2010, is a great read.

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