21st October 1966. One of a number of coal tips high up on the rain-soaked ridge above the village of Aberfan in the Merthyr Valley, that with National Coal Board sanction had been built up into small conical mountains over the years - and made especially dangerous in this case by spreading over a spring - suddenly gave up the fight against gravity and spewed downhill like a black mudslide, demolishing everything in its path. At first only the hillside was smothered. But then, with a roar, it reached the junior school in the village, punched it, and obliterated it. Inside had been the young children of the village and their teachers. Not many survived. 144 were killed, 116 of them children.
The whole nation saw the aftermath on TV. Not colour TV in 1966, but then colour would have softened the impact. The tragedy was starker in black and white. I watched, unable to do anything else. I wasn't alone. It was awful. There had been a number of bad coal-mining accidents in recent years. This one was different, in that it killed not miners but their children. It was utterly shocking.
Researching this post, which was originally intended to be just a footnote to my Guardian/Six Bells post, I discovered a BBC News website story that seemed to be based on archive film footage on the day of the disaster, showing the emergency services and sundry local volunteers grimly digging into the scene of destruction; the local men, women, teenagers and babies looking on helplessly with gaunt, anguished faces; uncomprehending, shocked, numbed. With very few children under eleven among them.
It was a media circus, of course. And you can see how intrusive the camera was in this sequence of pictures. Thirty-odd screen shots I captured from that old film, showing moments that I thought caught the scene best. I haven't done more than crop away the BBC heading, which on a phone results in a long, letterbox-shaped picture. No other editing.
I personally think the cameraman went too close up, intruded too much. Two of the pictures (taken in quick succession) show a middle-aged miner, still wearing his hard hat, turning towards the lens with a dangerous and accusing look on his face. I can't blame him one bit.
There's an S4C programme you can access on the BBC iPlayer, made in 2016, on the fiftieth anniversary of the disaster. It's in Welsh, but the language is no barrier whatever.
This is the link: https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p049b9dz/aberfan-yr-ymchwiliad. 'Yr ymchwiliad' means 'the investigation'.
Wikipedia has an article on the whole disaster, including the later public inquiry, and relates dreadful stories of NCB meanness and insensitivity towards the bereft families, such as raiding the charitable fund (started to help the families, built up from eager public donations) to pay for removing the remaining coal tips above the village (the NCB's own tips); refusing to pay for the children's gravestones; offering paltry compensation to the families where a child was killed (£50 was the initial offer) and then only after asking 'how close' the parents had been to their dead child; and completely ignoring the ongoing needs of the traumatised surviving children and their parents. Which all reveals the attitude of authority in a different age. It's required reading. Here's the link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aberfan_disaster.
I did wonder why the two media links were available at this present time. It may be because the collapsed coal tip that caused so much harm belonged to the Merthyr Vale colliery, which closed thirty years ago in August 1989. A kind of anniversary then.
I'd intended to visit the modern Aberfan in the course of my Valleys afternoon last September, but I ran out of time to do it proper justice. I did not want to rush. So this is something for my next visit to the area.
