The Murphy Family:
I told you I started researching how my family came to be here, (from Ireland). Well I heard three stories, my great, great Grandfather used to be a groom for one of the landed gentry and they were looking after a famous horse. It died, one story was that they eat it; another was that they lost it to the gypsy's gambling and the other was that they were running it in illegal races and it broke a leg. They had to escape Ireland. How they got over here they were used as living ballast on the ships, they used people instead of chippings to weight down the boat. They would get to the mud flats at Newport or Cardiff and throw all the living ballast out, that is why the Irish were called Mud Crawlers. They crawled over the mud to the docks. They still find bones even now.
The secret room was on Davids Street. The building used to be pub or a club and the back room backed onto Stanley Street. During the war all the cellars were turned into air raid shelters, they opened the back room and found another secret room behind it. In there was a set of armour and a sea chest. I don't know what happened to it I must have been 12 or 13.