This is Aberfan, a small coal-mining village about eight kilometers south of Merthyr Tydfil in South Wales. And this was the Pantglas Junior School. In 1966, it was led by Headmistress Miss Mair Jones and the 10 teachers. There were 240 people. On Friday, the 21st of October that year at about 9:15 in the morning, just after the children had finished singing “All Things Bright and Beautiful” at the assembly and were heading for their classrooms, waste tip number seven of the local colliery collapsed. It’s been down off the mountain and engulfed the school and 20 houses and a farm. The timing could have been worst, have the children left the assembly hall just a few minutes later, the lost of life would have been great induced as the classrooms from the side of the building closest to the slide.
At the same time, 50 children heading for the school by bus from the nearby Mount Pleasant were fortunately held up by fog. The same fog initially hampered rescue if it’s considerately. But as up to 2000 volunteers, police, miners and other emergency workers dug practically for survivors. The extent of the tragedy soon became apparent. Only a few people were called from the rubble alive but 144 bodies were eventually recovered, 116 of them children mostly aged between seven and 10.
The main causes of death were found to be asphyxia, fractured skulls and multiple crush injuries. Five teachers were among the dead including the Deputy Headmaster, Mr. Beynon who was found clutching five children in his arms as if trying to protect them. Three of the dead in the farmlands hit by the coal waves and slurry and the pregnant woman immediately went into labor on hearing that her son was dead.
Just over a week after the disaster and after the last bodies have been recovered, the Queen and Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh visited Aberfan to pay their expense. A three-year-old girl presented the Queen with a prose in which it said “From the remaining children of Aberfan”. Witnesses reported the Queen being close to tears. One person who didn’t—to visit though was Lord Robens of Woldingham who at the time was chairman of the National Coal Board. He has then decided to attend the University of Surrey, accepting an appointment as chancellor. Robens and the NCB try to blame the disaster on the heavy rains that had fallen in the days before the tragedy, but a tribunal of inquiry thought differently. It found the NCB to be totally responsible due to ignorance, ineptitude and the failure of communication. But not a single NCB employee was set, demoted or even disciplined.
The slagheap had been built on a stream in the first place and its instability was known to mine’s management and routine workers but nothing had been done about it. The local Borough Council and the National Union of Mineworkers were basically completely exonerated. The most shocking of all on the orders of—later government, part of the massive relief fund coordinated by the mayor and collected from all over the world was appropriated to make the remaining slagheap to safe. Families of the unbelievable indignity of being means tested by the charities and donations after the closeness of their relationship with their dead child, compensation is to be rated accordingly.
The NCB tried to pay 50 pounds for each child but was ordered to pay 500. In 1997, Tony Blair’s new labour government paid back the 150,000 pounds that have been taken from the disaster fund, this somatic not inflation of course. The adjusted figure should have been in around of one and a half million pounds. But finally in February 2007, over 40 years after the horrific events of Aberfan, the sum of two million pounds was awarded to the village to help local stores and to secure the upkeep of the memorial garden and the cemetery.
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