Aberfan

The disaster at Aberfan was the first national disaster that I remember. It was in October 1966 and, following heavy rain, one of the huge heaps of slurry which had been tipped above this South Wales mining village slid down onto the village school, killing over a hundred children.

I was at primary school at the time and it really affected us all. It was hard to think of so many children – children just like us - being killed.

Tonight I watched a documentary about it, which focused on the attempts of the villagers to get the Coal Board to accept responsibility for what had happened. The Coal Board said that nobody could possibly have known that there was a spring on the hillside under the slurry, which was what finally washed the slurry down the slope.

Some of the surviving children of Aberfan, now in their forties, remembered playing in that very spring, before more slurry was tipped on it, covering it up.

Harold Wilson, then Prime Minister, visited the village immediately after the disaster and said, in the heat of the moment, that the rest of the slurry tips which loomed over the village should be removed. Then, after a while, the Government decided that this was too expensive.

The village set up a committee to try to get the heaps removed. The Government kept saying no. Finally, after one negative meeting too many, they left the council buildings in Cardiff and returned bearing bags of slurry which they tipped over the floor. The Government changed their minds and removed the slurry tips – but charged the villagers £150,000 for doing it.

The money was taken from all the money collected to help rebuild Aberfan after the disaster – money flooded in from all over the world and I remember having a collection at the primary school I attended.

In 1997 Tony Blair, in an oh-so-generous gesture, gave the villagers their money back. Of course, £150,000 in 1966 would now be worth about one and a half million, so in 1997 it must have been worth quite a lot.

What did they give the villagers? A million? No, only their original £150,000. I voted Labour, Tony, and I hoped for the dawn of a new era after all that Thatcherism. But even in 1997 you were behaving like a bastard.

The money is being used for the upkeep of the children’s graves.

One boy who died had done a drawing the night before he was killed. It showed the village, and the school, and the slurry heaps above the village. At the top of the picture he had written “The End.”

When I was ten, and I heard of this disaster, I thought of the story of the Pied Piper of Hamelin, where all the children vanished into the mountain and were never seen again. That’s what happened in Aberfan.