Aberfan: 50 years since UK’s worst disaster

Fifty years ago, in the corridor of Pant Glas Junior School, seven-year-old Karen Thomas was standing with four classmates to pay her dinner money. Without warning, glass began pouring down the hall from the headmistress’ office. The dinner lady, Nansi, ‘jumped on top of us’, recalls Karen. ‘She took the full impact.’

At 9:15am, more than 1.4 million cubic feet of coal waste had suddenly slid down a nearby mountain and engulfed the small mining village of Aberfan, South Wales. The school was completely covered — Karen and her friends were buried alive. ‘We just couldn’t hear anyone else. It was just our voices and our screams.’ Eventually, a ‘glimmer of daylight’ appeared and they were pulled from the rubble.

They were among the lucky few; 116 children were killed in their classrooms, along with 28 adults. It was one of the worst disasters in modern British history.

The public response was immense. Around £1.75m was raised to help rebuild the community. Over 50,000 letters were sent to the families. On the day itself, roads to the village were gridlocked by people trying to join the rescue team.

But as the days passed by and the scale of the disaster became clear, grief turned to anger. The slagheap had built up over years of coal mining, prompting several complaints to the National Coal Board (NCB). Yet when its chairman Lord Robens arrived at the scene, he denied any responsibility. And when a tribunal finally pinned the blame firmly on the NCB, he was not punished — he even went on to chair a government health and safety committee.

‘Imagine such a thing today,’ wrote the newsreader Huw Edwards this week. ‘Those in charge of a public body found liable for a disaster on this scale would be justly denounced, vilified and prosecuted. There would be charges of corporate manslaughter.’ Instead, the Aberfan relief fund was forced to contribute to the clean-up cost. It was a ‘terrifying tale of bungling ineptitude’, concluded the official inquiry in 1967. So why was no one ever held to account?

Buried

Edwards is right, say some: it was another time. Lord Robens had friends in high places, including in Parliament. ‘Gullible and deferential’ newspapers rarely criticised authority figures. The Health and Safety Act was not passed for another eight years. If this happened today, the response would be very different.

It is more than that, say others. This was a deeply Welsh tragedy, intimately linked to other Welsh mining disasters and a defining moment for Welsh identity. But working class communities in Wales have long been ignored by Westminster — had it happened in Eton, argued the first ever Plaid Cymru MP, justice would have been served.