They were one of the most enduring love stories in showbiz and were married for 59 years.

And despite the countless rumours of affairs and well-publicised infidelities throughout the decades, Tom Jones and his wife Melinda – known as Linda – stuck together to the very end.

The unusual love story of Tommy Woodward and Melinda Trenchard started in Treforest in the early ’50s when a young Tommy developed a crush on an elfin blonde girl at school when he was aged just 12.

In his autobiography published last year, Over The Top And Back , he tells of watching her walk up the hill to school and of her sometimes giving him a smile.

She was “a cut above me academically and a cut above me socially, too”, he noted.

Her family owned cinemas locally and Linda was in the A stream while Tom, an undiagnosed dyslexic, struggled in the C and D streams. He left school at 15 and they started dating.

The pair married in March 1957 when they were both just 16. Their only child, Mark, was born just a month later.

n the autobiography he recalls how he fell in love with her and then “never had that feeling for anyone else . . . I don’t think you can fall in love more than once”.

While Tom spent most of their married life jetting around the globe as a singing superstar, Linda, stayed out of the spotlight but the stories of his infidelities never went away.

Among the headlines were claims that he had sex with up to 250 groupies a year and among the well-known women he had affairs with were Mary Wilson of The Supremes and former Miss World Marjorie Wallace.

During the late ’80s he fathered a son, Jonathan, with model Katherine Berkery during a four-day fling.

But Linda never turned her back on her childhood sweetheart, even though she wasn’t at his side for some of the biggest moments of his career.

She wasn’t photographed with her famous husband for years and she wasn’t with him when he collected his knighthood from the Queen or when he performed his 65th birthday homecoming concert in June 2005 in Pontypridd – the town where they both grew up.

“She’s a shy person,” he is quoted as saying in Arise Sir Tom Jones. “She is reclusive. She doesn’t like that word, so I shouldn’t really use it, but she knows she has a depression problem if she doesn’t watch herself.

“But she talks about it and says it runs in her family. Her father was a bit like that, apparently, and her grandmother. Sometimes she can’t go out, or doesn’t want to meet people.”

‘She’s an unbelievable woman’

But he said when the grandmother of two – who spent the last couple of decades of her life living with Tom in Los Angeles – was with her family she was content.

“When we are talking together you wouldn’t know. I was talking to her on the phone last night and she said, ‘How’s it going over there?’ and I said, ‘Great’ and she was, ‘Oh great’ and I thought to myself, if someone was talking to you on the phone they wouldn’t know you were reclusive. She doesn’t sound it. It’s just getting past that nervous thing she has with many people, but she doesn’t have it with me.”

When promoting Over The Top And Back last autumn, he opened his heart about Linda’s brush with a near fatal colon disease several years earlier.

And he recalled how he told their son, Mark, at the time: “If your mother dies, I won’t be able to perform any more.”

He also talked more about her depression, saying: “I’ve realised she’s had depression since she was young.

“I don’t think she ever really enjoyed getting out and about, she as happy just being in the house.

“She has lost her spark though and doesn’t look like she did anymore – that’s okay though, neither do I.

“But when we talk on the phone we’re both young again.

“I look at an old picture of her which I carry around with me – it brings back wonderful memories and all that darkness leaves her when we talk.

“She’s an unbelievable woman and the most important thing in my life.”

In 2008 – 51 years after they tied the knot as teenagers – Tom wrote his first love song for Linda called The Road because he said all roads led back to his wife.

He said at the time: “Some people drift apart but my wife and I haven’t.

“We still have the same basic feelings and the same values and we are both Welsh, we come from the same place, so I can’t bull**** my wife.

“She won’t have it, which is great, I love that.”