Here is the first in a series of extracts from the autobiography of former Torfaen MP Paul Murphy.

I ALMOST DIDN’T MAKE IT. I was due to enter this world in the early months of 1949, but actually arrived on 25 November 1948, at Cefn Ila Nursing Home, Llanbadoc, near Usk, in the county of Monmouthshire.

Originally a moderately-sized country house, Cefn I a had once been the home of Edward Trelawny, the adventurer and friend of Shelley and Byron, and was subsequently owned by a French marquis whose family had fled revolutionary times. It had been acquired by Pontypool Hospital, and developed after World War Two as a maternity home.

I was a brand new NHS baby, but not a very healthy one. I weighed only about three pounds, and was not expected to live – I had to be given an emergency baptism by the Catholic parish priest of Usk, and my god¬mother was the hospital’s chief nurse, Matron Lyons, who happened to be a Catholic. I never met her, and have often wondered what became of my spiritual and religious mentor.

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I remained in the hospital until Christmas, when my parents took me home to number eight, Broad Street, in the village of Abersychan, in the county’s industrial Eastern Valley, some eight miles from rural Llanbadoc. My father, like most people in those days, had no car, but willingly walked the 16-mile round journey to visit my mother every day she was in Cefn Ila. The hospital continued to serve the local community until it closed in 1973. Indeed, my own birth was not the last occasion when my parents would be grateful for the hospital’s care.

The building burnt down, less than a fortnight after the closure. Its name survived, though, in the Cefn Ila Unit, a maternity ward that was set up at the County Hospital, Griffithstown, south of Pontypool, before being controversially moved once again to the Royal Gwent Hospital in Newport. One of my first campaigns as an MP was to try to prevent the move from Griffithstown to Newport but, unfortunately, it failed.

Abersychan (the mouth of the Sychan) continued to be my home until I was well into my teenage years. The village is approximately two miles north of Pontypool and four miles south of Blaenavon.

Archdeacon Coxe, whose book about his travels in Monmouthshire was published in 1801, described the Eastern Valley as both rural and industrial. The valley (today known as Torfaen) had changed dramatically by the time my relatives arrived, more than two decades later. At the top of the valley, Blaenavon had its great ironworks, while Pontypool, in the middle, was the centre of tinplate making and the place where the Hanburys were the local squires. Abersychan lay between the two towns and was, until the opening of the British Ironworks in 1827, still a collection of small hamlets.

In the 1830s and 1840s, the population exploded. The Irish came to find employment in the ironworks, while others flocked from Somerset and Gloucestershire, and other parts of Wales. The valley was a Welsh Klondike. Until the 1860s most people spoke Welsh and they went to the Welsh-speaking chapels at Pisgah, Noddfa and Siloh. English soon took over, and “English” chapels were built in the village. Anglicans had St Thomas’s church in Talywain – opened by Bishop Copleston of Llandaff in 1832. The Irish, having previously worshipped in the club-room of a public house, got their church in 1863. As the writer of a book on the Franciscans in nineteenth-century Monmouthshire put it: the disadvantages of [the previous] arrangement were manifold, one being that every Irishman who attended Mass thought it his bounden duty to patronise the publican who allowed the use of the room by drinking unlimited beer on its premises as soon as he could gain admittance on the Sunday evening.

Collieries followed the iron works and, inevitably, strikes and unrest were triggered by the terrible working conditions in these industries. In 1839, Abersychan Chartists took part in the march on Newport – one source reckoning that nearly 1,500 men in the village were Chartist supporters. Abersychan even had its Female Patriotic Association. Although the insurrection was a failure, the radical and trade union move¬ment had started.

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New pits were opened and most of the villagers – although the village they lived in was now really a town – relied on the mining industry for their income.

Abersychan – with a population at its peak of well over 20,000, far more than today – had its own urban district council until 1935, when it merged with the much smaller Pontypool and Panteg council to form the Pontypool urban district council.

When I arrived on the scene in 1948, Abersychan was a thriving and vibrant community. With few people owning cars in the village, two flourishing shopping centres had sprung up, in High Street and Station Street. Most men – including many in my own family – were colliers, and the whole village shut down for the annual two-week miners’ holiday (traditionally the last week in July and the first in August).

In hindsight, it was not a pretty place. There were slag tips from both iron working and the pits, but these were partially countered by the wonderful Lasgarn wood, which was on the eastern side of the valley. This was a marvellous place to walk and play in, and Abersychan children also had their own park in the middle of the village. This was adjacent to the local Co-op slaughterhouse, and one of my early memories is of watching the condemned sheep and pigs going to their deaths, and blood running down High Street.

Today, by contrast, Abersychan is a very attractive village, home to many commuters. The slag heaps have gone, along with hundreds of 19th-century cottages, and the chapels are not so numerous. But to me, it’s still the home of my family and has kept a special place in my soul.

My father was a coal-miner at the local Blaenserchan Colliery, and my mother worked in her father’s greengrocery shop in the village. My father, Ronald, was born in July 1919, and came from Irish–Welsh roots, while my mother, Marjorie, born later in January 1928, had an English–Welsh background.

My father was the youngest of seven children. The eldest, Jerry, born in the 1890s, became a soldier in the South Wales Borderers, served in the Great War and in India, but later died from malaria. Next was Dan, who moved to Dagenham to work in the Ford factory there; the next, Jack, never married and remained a miner all his life, while the three sisters Doreen, Mary and Anne all found husbands and stayed in the local area. Their father, Jeremiah, who had been born as long ago as 1875, had married Ann Whelan from Nantyglo. Jeremiah was a collier all his life, and she was an ironworker’s daughter from Monmouthshire’s Western Valley, whose father had been killed in the old Nantyglo ironworks. She never learned to read or write, smoked a clay pipe secretly upstairs, and in her youth worked in the mines, sorting coal on the surface. As well as giving birth to the couple’s surviving children, she had apparently suffered one miscarriage in her front parlour. I only vaguely remember her, as a kindly and little old woman, who died in 1952 from pneumonia.

Paul Murphy: Peacemaker is available now in book shops as well as Amazon for £25.