Aberfan South Wales

Aberfan cemetery must be one of the saddest places in Wales and I wondered about posting this, but it is an important piece of South Wales heritage. Growing up in a mining village, you could not go through school without a visit.

At 9:15 on the morning of Friday, 21 October 1966, after several days of heavy rain, the colliery waste tip above Aberfan village gave way and 150,000 cubic metres of water-saturated debris broke away and slid downhill. The landslide slammed into the northern side of the Pantglas Junior School and part of the separate senior school, demolishing most of the structures and filling the classrooms on the north side with thick mud and rubble up to 10 metres. 116 of the dead were children between the ages of 7 and 10 and are commemorated by the joined arches in the cemetery. There were bigger disasters in the difficult South Wales coal face (Senghenydd Colliery, 439 dead in 1913) but Aberfan is the one that casts the longest shadow

The behaviour of the National Coal Board was appalling before and after the tragedy. It refused to allow Coal Board funds to be used for the removal of the remaining tips above Aberfan, instead appropriating a substantial sum from the public disaster relief fund to pay for the work. My uncle was trained in mine rescue work and rushed (with hundreds of other miners) to Aberfan when the news broke, to aid the relief. For this he was docked three days’ pay for unauthorised absence.