Remembering Aberfan

At 9.15am on the morning of this day in 1966 the small Welsh mining community of Aberfan was changed forever, and torn apart, when thousands of tons of waste from a coal tip poured down a hillside and engulfed a school and several homes, killing 144 people – 116 of them children.
The pupils at Pantglas Junior School  between the ages of seven and 10 were sitting down to their last lesson before half term, having returned to their classrooms after morning assembly.Within minutes, more than a hundred of them were dead - buried alive by an avalanche of coal waste that swept through their village.
Waste material from the nearby Merthyr Vale colliery – known as ‘spoil’ – had been deposited on the slopes of Mynydd Merthyr, a broad ridge of high ground above the village containing numerous underground springs, for around 50 years.Unusually heavy rain had caused the waterlogged spoil to come loose and run down the hillside at increasing speed.  In a matter of seconds, over 40,000 cubic metres of slurry smashed into the side of the school, filling classrooms with a wall of mud and rocks as deep as 10 metres in places.
Hundreds of villagers rushed to the scene, some mothers frantically clawing at the mud and waste with their bare hands in a desperate attempt to find any survivors. Miners from local collieries arrived in their droves to help dig through the rubble, but no survivor was recovered after 11am.
By the following day, 2,000 emergency service workers and volunteers were involved in the rescue operation, of whom many had worked continuously for over 24 hours; despite this, it was nearly a week before all the bodies were recovered.
Many believed at the time  that with nationalisation the uncaring, exploitative attitudes of the private mine owners  had been got rid off. Not only did the NCB act like a private corporation, despite the enormity of the disaster,  the chairman of the NCB Lord Robens in total arrogance chose to go ahead with his investiture as Chancellor of the University of Surrey rather than travel to Aberfan, and when he finally reached the site, he denied that anything could have been done to prevent the disaster. He told the press "natural unknown springs" had brought down the tip. Shamefully Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson refused Robens' resignation.
As this horror was felt around the world, ( people from all over world contributed £1.75 million to the disaster fund – an extraordinary amount of money in the 1960s), it became even more poignant as news emerged of previous warnings and previous slides that had been brushed aside. The National Coal Board (NCB) had been repeatedly been warned to move the slag heaps to a safer location, because they were also close to natural underwater springs. Did the NCB have the decency to acknowledge their blame, to bow their head in shame, like hell no, but we were to  learn sadly far too late that the NCB was ostensibly a capitalist organisation more concerned with profit than lives. The Davies tribunal by the government at the time at least recognised that :-
 " Blame  for the disaster rests upon  the National Coal Board. The legal liabilities of the National Coal Board to pay compensation for the  personal injury ( fatal or otherwise) and  damage to property is incontestable and uncontested." 
 Unbelievably, the Charity Commission opposed the plan for a flat rate of compensation to the bereaved families, instead suggesting that for payment to be made, parents should have to prove that they had been ‘close’ to their dead children, and were thus ‘likely to be suffering mentally’.
Meanwhile, Aberfan villagers lived in fear that tip no.4 and tip no.5 situated above tip no.7 might start to slide as well. The NCB refused to pay to remove them, and the Labour government wouldn’t make it pay. Instead the money was taken from the disaster fund – an act later described as unquestionably unlawful by charity law experts.
‘Like the Hillsborough victims,’ said Felicity Evans on Radio 4, ‘the people of Aberfan were let down by the very institutions that owed them a duty of care, and just like at Hillsborough those institutions sought to obstruct the search for truth and the solace it might provide.’
And, as with Hillsborough, justice was a long time coming. More than three decades later the Charity Commission apologised, and a Labour Government eventually paid back to the Disaster Fund the money taken from it in 1966 by the NCB.
Today we remember the people of Aberfan, their collective loss, a community that is still profoundly affected by this disaster. Sadly there is very  little to remind visitors of  this tragic disaster, just an abstract memorial garden in the village and the childrens section in the graveyard. The sores and wounds of this gross injustice, one that should never have happened, are forever stored in the collective feelings of the people of Wales. Lest we forget, the lessons of Aberfan, that still hold a profound relevance today. They touch on issues of public accountability, responsibility, competence and transparency. Aberfan was a man-made disaster. This is a fact that often needs underlining. There was nothing “natural” about it, nothing freakish about the geology of Aberfan, nothing uniquely unforeseeable about the deadly slide. It happened because of a mix of negligence, arrogance and incompetence for which no individual was punished or even held to account.
Leon Rosselson wrote the following  song ‘Palaces of Gold’ in response to news of the disaster at Aberfan. It appeared on his 1968 album A Laugh, a Song, and a Hand-Grenade:

 

If the sons of company directors,
And judges’ private daughters,
Had to got to school in a slum school,
Dumped by some joker in a damp back alley,
Had to herd into classrooms cramped with worry,
With a view onto slagheaps and stagnant pools,
Had to file through corridors grey with age,
And play in a crackpot concrete cage.

Buttons would be pressed,
Rules would be broken.
Strings would be pulled
And magic words spoken.
Invisible fingers would mould
Palaces of gold.

If prime ministers and advertising executives,
Royal personages and bank managers’ wives
Had to live out their lives in dank rooms,
Blinded by smoke and the foul air of sewers.
Rot on the walls and rats in the cellars,
In rows of dumb houses like mouldering tombs.
Had to bring up their children and watch them grow.

In a wasteland of dead streets where nothing will grow.

I’m not suggesting any kind of a plot,
Everyone knows there’s not,
But you unborn millions might like to be warned
That if you don’t want to be buried alive by slagheaps,
Pit-falls and damp walls and rat-traps and dead streets,
Arrange to be democratically born
The son of a company director
Or a judge’s fine and private daughter.

I end this post with a poem I wrote a few years ago

Cofiwch Aberfan/ Remember Aberfan

On October 21 1966

a ticking timebomb of slurry

left a community scarred

angels laughter forever lost

buried deep in the wounds of history

my nation mourns with anger 

bitterness and shame

after the spoils of injustice

drowned a community in coal

left generations in ruin

our tears keep on flowing

never ever  forgiving.