FIRST PERSON: Church missionary and former policeman Rev Victor Owens

"MY MUM is from Ireland and married my dad, who was a Welsh soldier in Ireland at the time and that’s where I was born.

We moved back when I was two years old and I grew up in Ebbw Vale, my dad was a steel worker and it was very different days with a lot of industry around here.

As I was growing up we would go back to Ireland every year for a holiday and to visit grandparents near Belfast.

I went to Willowtown Secondary Modern in Ebbw Vale, but was never academic and in school the only thing I ever wanted to do was be a policeman, which was not like me as I was very shy and the last person you would expect to become a policeman.

When I was leaving school, Gwent Police were taking cadets from school before being a policeman, so that’s what I did when I turned 17.

All my friends went to work at Ebbw Vale steelworks just like my dad and he couldn’t understand why I didn’t want to go there.

But it was a total shock to me when I did become one as the police was very different to how it is now.

All the policeman were ex-army, former boxers or rugby players and were a rough and tough bunch of people. It was run like the military, you couldn’t have beards or short sleeves, there was rarely a day that they would allow to roll your sleeves up.

It was an eye opener.

I used to live in Hilltop by Ebbw Vale, which I thought was quite a nice area but being in the police I found it was one of the roughest estates going.

During that time I met Liz who worked in the Tredegar Post Office and I used to pop in after work and create conversation, we came from similar backgrounds as her dad worked for the coal board,

It took a while getting used to being a policeman, wearing the uniform and coming into contact with people at the station who were neighbours or people I knew quite well was a real cultural shock.

Once I had done my training I was stationed in Pontypool, then a divisional headquarters. It was massive with eight cell blocks and stationed by 40 people, it was only 15 miles away but I did know anyone back in 1970 and it was like another world.

It was a rough place to be, a town where people liked to drink and liked to fight, so I had to change and get over my shyness.

I remember my first day well, there was no tear gas or steel batons, and they gave you a wooden truncheon and said ‘don’t you ever use it or you will be in trouble’. It was a culture where you had to learn to talk to people, it was very social policing.

I was also stationed in Blaenavon when some murders took place in 1970, which never got solved and that was quite a dark time then.

Whilst being in Pontypool for the majority of my service, me and Liz moved to Abersychan for 16 years after getting married and I was a community bobby, who sort of knew everybody.

Liz used to work at the Abersychan and Pentwyn post offices and we had four daughters so we were really involved in the community.

You had four police offices in shift rotations and there would be eight of us at the daily shift meetings. Sometimes we would finish at 6am and have to be back at 2pm, you would look round and just all of us would be knackered.

It was a vocational way of life, you used to always have two or three bobbies walking around the town. You worked as you walked, often for eight hours meeting people, apart from a 45-minute break back at the station.

I would know the area very thoroughly, all the businesses, shop keepers and back alleys but it changed in the eighties with time in motion studies.

I became a 'motorbike and scenes of crime' officer before being stationed in Caldicot for eight years and in the nineties moving to Newport.

In Garndiffaith throughout the eighties, where we regularly had people throwing petrol through the door and trying to set fire to the station, Caldicot was a bit of a holiday. It was going from a battle site to the countryside.

In Garndiffaith, if you asked people how they were doing they would say to mind your own business but in Caldicot they would stop and talked to you for half an hour. The two places are amazingly different.

I used to be the only guy working the night shift, on foot, and if you needed a car, you would step in the road, stop one and tell them to give you a lift somewhere.

As a policeman, it was a bit like a separate life, the fact that you are dealing with people you don’t know, having to go to serious crimes and accident scenes.

I would rarely tell Liz about my day as I would try and detach myself and deal with it in a professional way.

The worst incident was the young boy who fell down a shaft covered with water and died at the British, which was the talk of the schools and everywhere you went as it took us a week to find him.

I finished my 30 years in 2000, while back at Pontypool.

Through my last few years I had started pastoring as a lay minister at Christchurch in Cwmbran during my spare time and we looked at getting more involved after my retirement.

I never had a dream to travel, it was just about doing my 30 years and spending time with Liz and the girls.

But when I was 46, a friend invited us to Argentina were there was a big Christian revival, a church started with 12 and then went to 12,000. Being there was like a Damascus road experience which opened my eyes, I went from somebody who was just happy at home to realising that we ought to do something with our lives and gained a sense of purpose.

We looked for a permanent place to hold church and founded Mount Pleasant in 2006. It was almost the opposite of what we were looking for but it came with the old school rooms and at the time there was a big push for the town which was called ‘putting the heart back in Pontypool’, and they put floodlights in the ground which looked smart at night. But unfortunately they have since been turned off.

What we found at Mount Pleasant is that people were put off by the iron railings, stone steps, oak doors, they are almost afraid to come in.

We have people peek their head round and seem really surprised when they come in on the Wednesday coffee mornings and say that they feel ok here, which is always nice.

People like Shirley Valence and a number of choirs played here, different societies or the mayor would also do fundraising at the church. Then we would get Eskimos from Alaska or people from Argentina come here to us in Wales after visiting.

But the more we travelled the less time we had to do services here. Now we go to places like Indonesia for a month a year, as we have over the last decade.

What me and Liz have continued to try and do is change people’s perceptions of church. For five years we travelled extensively as missionaries.

Now we donate money for food and clothing to a church-run school near Buenos Aires and help with the poverty problems there, so we are still focused on community.