Aberfan

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.

The Guardian

Back in late September I spent an afternoon touring the eastern Valleys of South Wales. The Valleys all run roughly north-south between high ridges that separate one valley from another, with the even higher Brecon Beacons at their head. This makes travel awkward, unless following the line of a particular valley. All the valleys once had a railway in them - sometimes two, one on each side of the valley - primarily to serve the many coal mines that once operated. Most of these railway lines have gone now, as have the coal mines. But the Valleys - now green again, but still black and industrial in the imagination - were a gritty reality in my youngest days and have always haunted me, for not knowing them properly. More than that; when we lived in South Wales - in a brighter, cleaner place on the coast - my Mum and Dad ignored them as if they didn't exist. I now feel my parents' attitude was wrong.

I need to make amends. I have already started, with visits to Blaenavon in 2013 - going down a mine there - and to Treorchy in 2015. But it will take a long time to somehow get below the surface of such a different culture. I am Welsh; but the the Valleys reproach me for not being nearly Welsh enough.

And there's more to it. I feel guilty. I could have gone to see the Valleys in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, but didn't. I kept away. I waited until the old industry had been smoothed over and landscaped and had become a tourist attraction. Until the towns had become full of Cardiff-bound commuters, not miners. Until I could go there and not be challenged. Until there was no risk.

***

No, we didn't live in the Valleys. We lived on the coast, at Barry. The sunny, breezy Glamorgan coast was a world away from the hemmed-in, damp and shadowy Valleys only twenty miles to the north. It strikes me as odd that, throughout my childhood, Mum and Dad never mentioned the Valleys, and we never went there as a family except for one occasion, described in my last post, when we visited Dad's father in Aberdare Sanatorium.

It was as if it were a no-go area - and in a sense it was. The Valleys communities existed because of coal and coal-mining and the kind of culture that implies. The people there looked askance at we coastal-dwellers with soft jobs and airy houses. Valleys people were by reputation close-knit, inward-looking, traditional, defensive, perhaps truculent, and their lives revolved around the mine, the union, the chapel, the club and the corner shop. A tough life, a rough life, and a dangerous life; a life lived with a great heart maybe, but not that many comforts. There may have been 'a welcome in the hillsides' according to the male voice choirs, but in reality the Valleys towns looked forbidding, and were no place for the casual or prying visitor. Nor the official.

Unless you had family in the Valleys, or your work took you there - Dad worked in Pontypridd tax office for a while - you would avoid the entire area. You'd be an unwanted intruder. During my childhood - in my childhood mind - the Valleys were a dark, menacing dream on the horizon: a troublesome, unhealthy place full of strife, and unwelcoming to outsiders. 

The Valleys were once pastoral, places to graze cattle and sheep and little else. They only became dingy, industrialised places because of coal. Welsh coal was superior, and production was prodigious. It peaked a hundred years ago, but coal-mining was still a major employer in the 1950s and 1960s, and coal-mining traditions good and bad persisted almost unchanged. It's all gone now, the pits demolished, landscaped, grassed over. Healing trees grow, and if the area hasn't quite returned to its bucolic roots, it certainly looks wholesome again. But everywhere - if you know what to look for - are the bridges, embankments, tunnels and stonework of former industrial activity. And the long lines of terraced houses in each valley speak of hard, dirty work and pittance wages.

I'm painting a very bleak picture of how it used to be. Those terraced houses and corner shops, those workmen's institutes and old chapels - many now closed, because the mine workers have vanished, and not many worship any more - are a testament to a heightened sense of community, and intense local loyalties - both of them potentially good things when the work that sustained those communities was dangerous, prone to taking lives, constantly creating widows and orphans. Welsh mining disasters somehow seemed crueller than the rest: South Wales had a particular reputation for hard-hearted profit-driven coal owners who didn't care two hoots about the safety of the workforce, nor the welfare of their families. The National Coal Board (the post-war nationalised body that now ran the mines) had a better approach, but a questionable record. When I was a child in the 1950s the Welsh miner's lot was still an unhappy one. They still had to cope with darkness and danger - underground explosions, roof collapses, poisonous gas fumes, and a lung disease caused by inhaling coal dust, called pneumoconiosis, which I heard about before I was eleven. It all sounded nightmarish; and my reaction, as a child, was to be afraid.

I didn't have the whole picture and I didn't understand. Sixty years on, I want to understand as much as I can. I think that the Valleys towns can teach me something about what happens when you put profits before people. And something about community, and the human spirit.

The Aberdare visit in 1959 hadn't left much of an impression on me, but in 1960 I went on a day trip to Treorchy (in the Rhondda valley) with Peter Jones, the little boy down the lane, and his father. They were going to visit Peter's grandmother, and took me along. We went by train from Barry. This time I had my eyes open.

Treorchy was a shock. It was drab. It was grim. The little town was mired in coal dust. I'm absolutely sure that the old lady had no vacuum cleaner, and relied on a brush and pan. But she had given up. So the coal dust from the wet street outside had spread inwards from the front door, to become embedded in the mats and carpets inside the gloomy interior, staining them dark and making them gritty to walk upon. It didn't help that her heating (and cooking) was done on an old-fashioned cast iron range, black and smoky, fed from a coal scuttle, with bits of grey ash on the floor in front of it. I remember also a sticky tablecloth, rickety chairs that creaked and sagged, and cracked cups that I didn't want to drink out of. (I was too polite to refuse) In contrast, my parents' house in Barry was spick and span - nothing like this. I was a fastidious child, and found it disturbing. I must have struggled not to show how I felt. (Though politeness would have saved me)

Pensioner poverty in a Valleys town. I didn't like it. I never forgot it. It confirmed everything I'd imagined about life in the Valleys. I had a better idea why Mum and Dad treated the Valleys as if they didn't exist.

But I went back in 2015, some fifty-five years later - see my posts Rugby Club Men on 2nd November 2015 and Treorchy on 24th November 2015. The fearsome grime was gone. I explored the town with adult eyes. Despite the late-year, late-afternoon coldness and dampness, I saw how it could be a warm and familiar place to the people who lived and worked there. Not my kind of place, to be sure. But at least I could deal with it, get it into my mind, and start to comprehend it as a real town, and not a bad dream from long ago.

***

I had several objectives for my late September visit this year. One of them was The Guardian, at Six Bells near Abertillery. It was some kind of monument. I hadn't seen a picture of it, but I knew it was a giant figure. At first it was hard to spot against the modern greenery of the valley sides.

Was that it, that dark speck against the trees? I consulted the map to see how to get to it. I ended up in a nearly-new car park, next to a nearly-new Further Education complex - another Valleys Regeneration project.

A good path led along the valley bottom towards a distant figure that still looked small. But it got a whole lot larger as I approached.

It was a tall, muscular, bare-torsoed miner, standing upright with arms and palms spread out. The gesture with the arms might be the preliminary to an embrace; equally the figure might be warning anyone approaching to come no closer - to keep them from danger. This was The Guardian.

I walked around the base. The red-orange band showed the names of the forty-five men who died in the 1960 Six Bells mining disaster. The monument was built on the site of the mine, closed in 1988. I had the place to myself and read the names slowly. They were all local men.

Forty-five fathers, forty-five widows, and dozens of bereft children. 

Nearby were information panels about the 1960 disaster.

The photos speak for themselves. All I will say was that I felt very flimsy, a mere tourist coming to gawp. An accident of birth had kept me out of this, away from all the danger and tragedy. At least I had made the effort to be here. But it felt like a pilgrimage without any easy absolution or blessing. You may be sure that I was very thoughtful as I drove on to my next objective that afternoon.

On impulse, I turned off the road at Llanhilleth, a couple of miles to the south. One of the forty-five men killed, Roy Morgan, aged 44, had lived in Llanhilleth. His son, Colin Morgan, aged 22, who lived in Six Bells, had also been killed. It was a small place with long parallel streets, huddled into the valley bottom. 

How typical of a little mining village in the Valleys! The old Miner's Institute was still open, functioning as a general community centre now. 

It was mid-afternoon on a Sunday; the café was closed. On another day, I would have gone in and had a bite, and then look at the local history exhibition. I'm sure there would have been one. 

Many of these Miner's or Workmen's Institutes have not survived, and have become derelict. Here's one I saw not long afterwards, on my way over to Pontypridd, at Abertridwr.  

It would have served not only Abertridwr but Senghenydd just up the road. Senghenydd was the site of the worst South Wales mining disaster ever, when 440 men died in 1913. That had followed an earlier disaster in 1901, when 81 men perished. You can hardly imagine the consequences for the community in this little dead-end valley. 

And not very far away to the north-west, in the Merthyr valley, was the scene of yet another mining disaster, though not underground this time, and the victims were little children: Aberfan. Next post.

Grandparents

Most women I know, including some of my girl friends, have had children, and are in fact old enough to have grandchildren also.

What an institution grandparenthood seems! How modern society relies on grandparents, most obviously as childcarers, so that their grown-up children can go to work or have a night off. This seems to have become the expected thing. But any element of compulsion is supposed to be mitigated by the grandparents deriving great pleasure from the children placed in their hands. And for many grandparents, that must be true. I well remember a conversation many years back with an elderly North Downs farmer, who got positively misty-eyed as he described his favourite grandson. That child touched his old heart, and made him tender. Many elderly people perk up and get fresh life in the company of young children - indeed, I think it has become a recognised therapy in some residential homes.

That said, I also know that some grandparents are not so keen on the duties expected of them, and may go to some lengths to avoid getting lumbered. I'd say they are in the minority, but they certainly exist. I would think they are broadly of my own generation: the ones who retired early, and were able to savour the delights of ample leisure while they were still reasonably young and active. They might well resent having their freedom encroached upon by the requests - demands - of working sons and daughters. Are the sons and daughters being unreasonable, or the grandparents selfish? Is this tension between the generations a necessary consequence of modern living? Or is there - and always has been - something 'natural' about the older generations stepping in, and nobody of that older generation should ever seek to dodge out of it?

It's hard for me to say. I can easily see why some grandparents would find it frustrating to look after a fractious child for hours on end (and no doubt the family pet also) when they'd rather be on holiday, or seeing their friends, or following their interests, or learning new skills - generally enjoying a rewarding social life, with no commitments except those they choose themselves. I'm all for a rewarding life - I'll be voting for the Holiday Playtime Party in the upcoming General Election - and so I'm not unsympathetic towards grandparents who nimbly sidestep childcare duties.

Well, I have no children, and therefore no grandchildren: I can be a detached observer. Nor am I ever inclined to do the conventional thing, or adopt the conventional attitude. So for me there's no 'of course' when the question of 'grandparental duty' is raised. Indeed, I feel that after many years of hard slog at some humdrum job, all grandparents deserve a life, and are not to be regarded as an automatic source of free childcare, nor convenient dog walkers.

Even so, as I am not myself a grandparent, I recognise that I must be completely blind to the role's satisfactions, and ignorant about the difference a grandparent can make. In short, I don't get it.

I certainly don't know what it's like to be a grandchild. It may well be that if, as a child, I'd had two sets of lovely grandparents, and a wonderful relationship with each, then I might now see much more clearly what is inspiring about grandparents.

Unfortunately both Mum's parents were off the scene before I was born. Her father walked out, moved away, and was never seen again. Rumour hath it that eventually he had another family in London. Mum's mother was a strong-willed woman, and coped with desertion, but died of diabetes. So poor Mum had no parental help and advice when she had me, the first-born.

Dad hardly fared better. His mother died of tuberculosis when he was only two.

His father didn't want to look after him, and paid strangers to do so, visiting his little son for a short while only now and then. The man was never quite off the scene, but he and Dad never become close. Dad's father lived into old age, dying around 1960 when he must have been eighty. Dad stood by his father when he got very old and ill, and insisted that he come to live with us for a short while. According to my late Auntie Peg, Mum acquiesced but was resentful on Dad's behalf, because of all the childhood neglect and indifference Dad had suffered. But apart from a half-sister, Dad's only other family was his father; so perhaps it's natural and understandable that he did his best for him. And so Dad's father became the only grandparent I ever met.

Our acquaintance was brief, a matter of months I think. I never got to know him at all well. I never called him 'Grandad' or thought of him like that. He wasn't sweet, warm and cuddly. He was an old countryman, wizened, with rough habits and shabby clothing - and a bit gruff too. I was a little afraid of him. But he seemed to like me, and he gave me a present - a pair of battered old brass binoculars, which I immediately treasured. Even though they were optically poor, I used them to look at the red lightship out in the Bristol Channel, from the front bedroom window. Those binoculars were my first proper, 'grown-up' possession. My first gadget, you could say.

Dad's father had a chest complaint, and all too soon had to be admitted to Aberdare Sanatorium, up in the Valleys. I can just about remember a visit to Aberdare, by train from Barry, probably in 1959, when I would have been seven. I can't recall anything definite about that visit. I've an idea that Mum and I waited around while Dad went in to speak to his father. I never got to see him myself, so I have no deathbed memory of him. No day-to-day memory at all, really, apart from constant apprehension about encountering him in the gloom of our Barry house. (Afterwards Dad embarked on a programme of redecoration and reconstruction, knocking through the wall that had separated the middle and front downstairs rooms, which made the house much brighter) And that magic moment when, with gleaming eyes, he gave me those binoculars. He can't have been wholly bad. Perhaps, like me, he was simply very aware of his personal limitations, and couldn't cope with parenthood. But he could manage the gift of worn-out binoculars to a timid child he hardly knew.

Effectively, then, there were no grandparents in my young life.

I do, remarkably, have photos of three of them. This was Mum's mother, Eva Johanna Thomas (neé Carlson) in 1946 when fifty-two, at Mum and Dad's wedding:

She died two years later in 1948, four years before I was born.

This was Dad's mother, Eva Annie Dommett (previously Turner through her first marriage - she was a war widow - and born Broom) taken around 1920 when twenty-nine. 

Funny that she was called Eva too. I think I can see something of my own face in hers. She died in 1923, when Dad was still two, and twenty-nine years before I was born.

This was Dad's father William John Dommett in a photo taken around 1930, when he would have been fifty or so. That's somebody else's child with him - Dad would have been ten at the time. 

As I say, he died around 1960, when I was about eight, and we did not know each other for nearly long enough to establish a bond. 

I look at these photos, the only ones I have of these people, and wonder how it would have been if the mothers had survived into my own era. Would I have have had a happy relationship with them? With what ongoing, lifelong effect? I can only speculate.

I do wonder whether it's psychologically bad for you, not to have any grandparents in your life when young. Does it make a crucial difference? Do you lose out in some vital way? I'm pretty sure you never get to understand the special role and status that grandparents have in most families. On the basis of simple observation, it seems to me that grandparents are, in general, fondly loved and appreciated. And that the grandparent/grandchild relationship is special and profoundly important. 

With no personal experience of grandparents, it's just as well that I never became a grandmother. I would have made a poor job of it. Many would say it's a pity, though, missing out on one of life's Great Roles. It's too late now, of course, to worry about that.