Bonnie Tyler was carried into Swansea Minster on Monday to the sound of one of her own songs, past a crowd that cheered and called out thank you as the coffin passed.
About a thousand people were outside St Mary’s before the service began, some in deck chairs, watching on a big screen. Her family followed the hearse in two coaches, her brother Paul Hopkins among them.
The white coffin was designed by the family to say something about her life. A microphone and a treble clef are engraved on each side. At the head is the cross she wore, made by jeweller Spencer Morgan. At the foot, a pair of wings, taken from the embroidery on one of her stage jackets.
Flowers on the side of the hearse spelled out Bonnie. She came in to If I Sing You a Love Song and It’s a Heartache.
A life told in three parts
Reverend Canon Justin Davies led the service and gave the eulogy in three parts, beginning on 8 June 1951, when a daughter was born to Elsie and Glyndwr Hopkins and the house filled with her mother’s operatic voice.
Her father had tuberculosis when she started school in 1954, and Davies said she never forgot saying goodbye at the gates with both of them upset. She had the illness herself, and it left scars on her lungs. That she went on to sing for 50 years, he said, was a miracle.
She left school on a Friday in 1967 and was working in a cash and carry by the Monday. She spent years singing into a hairbrush in front of the mirror, then entered a competition at a rugby club, came second, and won a pound singing Mary Hopkin’s Those Were The Days.
“She was hooked,” Davies said. “The rest, as they say, is history.”
In 1969 she met Robert in the Townsman and fell in love on the spot. They got engaged in 1972 and he went to Tokyo for eight months to train for the Olympics, and they wrote to each other every day without fail. Summers were spent at Caswell with snacks and a notebook, the best time she ever had. They married at St John’s Church in Skewen.
The man who heard her in a Swansea club
Only Men Aloud sang Bridge Over Troubled Water. James Murray read Psalm 23, and the congregation sang How Great Thou Art.
Roger Bell, the talent scout who found her, called her a global iconic superstar. He had come from Swansea to London to see a friend and ended up at the Townsman, where a girl was singing on stage. He listened for a while and liked what he heard.
He told his boss Ronnie Scott he had heard a singer who might suit one of his new songs. A couple of weeks later she was on a train to Paddington to record the demo, her mother, brother and sister waving madly from beside the track at Skewen as she went past.
Bell came back to Swansea in 1979 to work for Gaynor and Robert and stayed 47 years. “I would not change a thing,” he said. “Gaynor was one of a kind, you always knew where you stood with her. She said it like it was.”
She trusted him with everything, he said, except one thing. In 52 years she never let him see her without her eyelashes done, once shutting the door on him and telling him to come back when she was ready.
After more than half a century of hearing her sing, he said, that voice still gave him goosebumps. “My friend, I am going to miss her.”
Her tour manager Matthew Davies said he had been asked to keep it short, and wondered how anyone could celebrate a life that big in under ten minutes. They met nearly 40 years ago in north London, when she was nervous about what they were setting out on.
“Little did I know at the time that she was to become the biggest part of my life for the next 39 years,” he said. She played six inhabited continents and all four hemispheres, and would have played Antarctica if anyone could have arranged it.
Total Eclipse, and then Calon Lân
Only Men Aloud, who first sang with her in 1983, performed Total Eclipse of the Heart.
“To all who have loved Gaynor and all she loved, may they be able to grieve now,” Davies said, before leading the Lord’s Prayer. A choir sang Calon Lân.
“To love someone is to risk the pain of parting,” he told the congregation. “Not to love is never to have lived. The grief that so many now experience is the honouring of that love.”
The coffin was raised to Those Were The Days, the song that won her a pound at a rugby club, and Making Love Out of Nothing at All.
Outside, her husband Robert Sullivan waved to the crowds as he left, visibly upset. “We love you Bonnie,” they shouted back.
The cortege then set off for Skewen, where people had already lined the streets, before a private family service.
Her family asked for donations to Noah’s Ark Children’s Hospital for Wales and Cerebral Palsy Cymru instead of flowers. In the order of service they described her as a warm, generous artist whose music touched generations and still fills dance floors and karaoke booths around the world.
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