And that seemed to me to be the end of everything really, when she’d gone.” Ray Lee, now 90, lost his daughter Anne on 21 October 1966. It was the day her primary school, along with several surrounding houses, in Aberfan was engulfed by an estimated 100,000 tonnes of slurry from one of the colliery spoil tips that overshadowed the Welsh mining village. Anne was one of 116 children killed, alongside 28 adults.
Gaynor Madgwick (nee Minett) was in the same school and was the same age as Anne when the disaster struck, but she was catapulted back to the far wall by the initial impact and, although severely injured, survived. Her grandfather dug her out. When she asked her father that evening, in hospital, where her brother and sister were, he told her they had both gone to heaven.
Marlene Gerlach remembers screaming and screaming for her three children across the unrecognisable school site. The guilt has never left her. Aberfan: The Village That Fought Back devotes the first quarter of its run time to these stories.
Even when the focus of a programme is slightly elsewhere – and this hour-long film attends to the underacknowledged aftermath and the sickening behaviour of the National Coal Board and the government of the day – it must be done. It remains unthinkable, inhumane not to. The suffering lives on and so does the duty to bear witness to it.
It also throws into even starker relief the astonishing, appalling reactions of the NCB and the ministers, including and especially the secretary of state for Wales, George Thomas, who failed to stand up to the board and its chairman Sir Alf Robens, whose contemptuous attitude towards the village and its unfathomable grief was evident from day one, the Friday, when he went ahead with his installation ceremony as the first chancellor of the new University of Surrey instead of travelling immediately to Wales. He got there on Saturday evening instead. From the foot alone we may infer the anti-Hercules.
The waste heap had been built on top of several springs that made it inherently unstable. The coal board denied knowledge of them, saying they had been covered long before they took over responsibility for the tips. The tribunal that was set up to inquire into the causes of the tragedy found evidence that the NCB knew that this and other tips around the village were, in contravention of all guidelines, built over multiple water sources, and in its report detailed many other failings in the “terrifying tale of bungling ineptitude”.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
