 |  | |
 John Humphrys
"It crushed part of the school and some tiny terraced houses along side like concrete dropping on a matchbox."
Forty years ago I drove along this same road through the Merthyr valley towards Aberfan. The little terraced houses lining the valley in those days were miners cottages. almost all of them and as I drove past women were out on their doorsteps gazing up the valley towards aberfan. They sensed that something bad had happened none us had any idea how bad. It had been two hours earlier just after quarter past nine when a group of workmen were sent to the top of the big tip number seven that loomed above Aberfan. There had been ominous signs that it had been sinking more than usual. A deep depression had formed within the tip like the crater in a volcano. As the men watched the waste rise into the depression it formed itself into a lethal tidal wave of slurry and roared down the hillside, gathering speed and height until it was thirty feet high destroying everything in it's path. It crushed part of the school and some tiny terraced houses along side like concrete dropping on a matchbox. And what that filthy mixture didn't flatten it filled, classrooms choked with the stuff until the building was covered and the school became a tomb. The moment the awful news reached them the miners abandoned the coalface of the colliery which had created that monstrous tip and raced to the surface and there they were when I arrived their faces still black save for the streaks of white from the sweat and the tears as they dug and prayed and wept. They were digging of course for their own children. Every so often someone would scream out for silence and we'd all stand frozen. Was that the cry of a child we'd heard coming from deep below us? Sometimes it was. And some were saved. I saw a policeman carrying a little girl in his arms, her legs dangling down, her shoes missing. She was a skinny little thing no more than nine years old. Thank God she was alive. The men dug all that day and all night and all the next day. They dug until there were no more faint cries, no more hope. But still they kept going. Now they were digging for bodies. I watched over the hours and days that followed as the tiny coffins mounted up in the chapel. There is nothing so poingnant as the sight of a child's coffin. By the end of it there were 116 of them. A 116 dead children, 28 dead adults. They're buried here all together in this cemetery looking down on the village. The sight of so many children's graves in one spot, a generation of children, still has the power forty years on to move to tears and to anger. The NCB and it's chairman, Lord Robens had tried to claim that this tragedy was an act of God. It was not. It was the result of negligence by man. It should not have happened. There will be no more Aberfans. The mines have gone and so have the tips they created. You will find some, still, who mourn the end of mining era and the rich culture that it spawned but I never met a miner who wanted his son to follow him down the pit. And as you walk passed these graves, Paul aged nine, Clive aged eleven and Philip his brother also aged nine and so and so on you know the price of coal forty years ago was too high.
 Back to Reports Homepage
| | | | |
| | | | | |
 | |
| |
|
