By the time Tom Jones drove home to South Wales that Sunday night, “It’s Not Unusual” had already gone to No. 1 in Britain and into the Top 10 in America. He had a new Jaguar. He had a new house in Shepperton, outside London. And when he walked through the door of his parents’ home, his mother was cutting sandwiches for his father to take down the coal mine.
Tom Jones was born Thomas John Woodward in 1940, in Treforest, near Pontypridd. His father, also named Thomas Woodward, was a coal miner in the Rhondda Valley, like his brothers. Fame had come fast for the son. The father was still working underground.
The Sunday Night He Tried to Stop Him
Tom Jones has told the story more than once, and the heart of it never changes. In his telling for the BBC series In My Own Words, he had spent that evening out with his father. When they got back, his mother was making the sandwiches. Tom asked his father where he was going. His father said he was going to work. He was on the night shift.
Tom told him he couldn’t go. His father’s reply was plain: he was a coal miner, and that was what he did. Tom pointed out that he was making a lot of money now.
His father answered with a question.
“Yeah, but how long is it going to last?”
In an earlier interview with the Daily Mirror in 2024, Tom Jones remembered the exchange a little more sharply. He told his father he wasn’t a miner anymore. His father said yes, he was. Tom explained that his records were selling and the money was coming in, and he got the same question back. Then Tom added a line that says more about his father than any description could:
“The pick and shovel he understood.”
Why It Mattered So Much to Tom
Tom Jones never went into the mines himself. As a boy he spent two years confined to bed with tuberculosis, and he has said doctors warned him that, with his lungs, the coal mine was out of the question. He also admitted he never wanted that life anyway. He wanted to be a pop singer.
His father had no such way out. Speaking to the BBC, Tom Jones said getting his father out of the coal mine was a big deal for him, because it was a dangerous job.
The House in Shepperton
Tom Jones did eventually move his parents out of Wales. He gave them the house on Manygate Lane in Shepperton, the first family home he had bought with his new money. The sources do not record exactly when his father worked his last shift, but the move took Thomas Woodward roughly 150 miles from the valleys he knew.
It did not suit him. According to the BBC, his father would sometimes become depressed and could not get out of bed. Everything Thomas and Freda Woodward had known was back in Pontypridd.
Thomas Woodward died in 1981.
The Answer to His Father’s Question
Tom Jones told this story at 85, for an In My Own Words episode that first aired on BBC One in October 2025. Part of it was filmed at that same Shepperton house.
His father had asked how long it was going to last. “It’s Not Unusual” came out in 1965. Sixty-one years later, Tom Jones is 86 and still touring. This fall, after a week in a Los Angeles hospital, he went back on stage at the Greek Theatre and told the crowd that the stage is where he belongs.