When Aberfan was engulfed by coal waste 60 years ago, on 21st October, 1966, John Humphrys was the first reporter on the scene. Listen here.
It’s the oldest cliché in the book. Some disasters are so great that we will always remember exactly where we were when we heard of them. The assassination of President Kennedy. The 9/11 attacks. Aberfan.
On 21st October 1966, aged 23, I was in the newsroom of Television Wales and the West in Cardiff for the last on that list. The youngest kid on the block, trying to learn how to be a television reporter. I was scanning the Press Association telex machine and saw a story about some coal waste sliding down the hill in one of the mining valleys where I used to work for the local paper.
I knew the village well. The father of my closest friend was a miner in the colliery and I often stayed with him.
I also knew there was an infants’ school at the bottom of the hill. So I suggested to the boss that I should drive up there to take a look. He pointed out quite rightly that waste tips were notoriously unstable and bits were always sliding off but he reluctantly agreed.
I had driven only a mile or two when I started feeling uneasy. In those days, most of the houses lining the valleys were miners’ cottages. This morning, the miners’ wives were standing on their doorsteps staring up the valley, many of them looking very worried.
After a few more miles, I had to abandon my car. The police had closed the road. The officer suggested I turn round and go back to Cardiff. I soon wished I had.
I realise that that’s an odd thing for a trainee journalist to feel. Every reporter spends half his life chasing stories and dreaming of the big one that will make his name. And, as the world was about to learn, they didn’t come bigger than Aberfan. And perhaps it did make my name because, of course, I did not turn back.
Instead, I abandoned my car and, half an hour later, I was standing in the village pub using its phone to describe to television audiences around the world a scene the sheer horror of which I could not even begin to comprehend. How could anyone?
A huge chunk of the tip, made of waste dug out of the village colliery, had slid down the hillside, crushing everything in its path. Roughly 100,000 tons of deadly liquefied waste.
So many questions. The most obvious: why didn’t everyone get out of its way when they heard the roar it was making? The answer: it was going too fast. Much too fast. There was no time to escape. The family in their farm at the foot of the hill had heard it coming but too late. They tried to run away but were engulfed. They all died.
Even the miners at the coalface in the village colliery thousands of feet below ground heard it. One described it as sounding like an express train roaring through the village above their heads. They, of course, knew exactly what had happened. They had created the damned thing, after all.
And – much more importantly – the teachers and children in Pantglas Junior School at the bottom of the hill heard it. But again, it was too late. Much too late.
By the time I arrived, every mother in the village was there. Most were holding on to one another for support. All of them were staring in the same direction at a scene they could not have imagined in their worst nightmare. Most were sobbing. Some were standing silently. Some seemed to be praying. Others were clinging tightly to the babies in their arms, pressing them against their chests.
They were watching their husbands digging with picks and shovels through the massive mound of waste that had crushed their children’s school like a boulder dropping on a cardboard box. They could not use heavy digging equipment for fear that it might crush whatever lay beneath – whatever had not already been crushed beyond hope.
There was another reason. The noise of the machinery would have drowned out the sound that every man and woman was praying to hear. The sound of a small child crying out for help. Perhaps their own child.
The faces of most of the men with the picks and shovels were black, coated with the dust from the coal that, such a short time ago, they’d been digging from the colliery that had created that murderous tip. Most had white streaks running below their eyes. Not sweat but tears.
I had been down this very mine some months earlier. I wanted to write an article that might give readers who knew nothing about mining some sense of what a miner had to endure. I failed miserably. I lasted a few hours and never went down another. And all I had done was join a group of them at the start of their shift.
Just getting to the coalface was frightening enough. The cage to carry you a couple of thousand feet below ground dropped at stomach-churning speed and you were bombarded with a million tiny bits of very hard rock and coal. And then you had to walk to the face, trying (in my case) not to look up at the ceiling of your tunnel and imagine the countless tons of rock waiting to crush you.
Then you reached the coalface. I had tried to imagine being a miner and spending the next eight hours drilling and hammering into the rock, breathing in the tiny specks you know are coating your lungs and will probably cause you an early and painful death. But my imagination wasn’t up to the task.
In all my years in the valleys, I never once spoke to the wife of a miner who did not swear she would never allow her sons to become miners. How could she have imagined that this merciless industry had other ways to steal her most precious gifts?
Yet still there was hope. Might the next cry a parent heard come from the lips of their own daughter or son?
Some were blessed. We saw one little girl handed by a rescuer to a burly policeman who carried her tenderly away, his helmet comically lopsided, her skinny little legs dangling down. She was unconscious but she was breathing. That one image has stayed with me for 60 years. The image that signalled hope. There was precious little of that commodity on that terrible morning.
It was simply not possible for us onlookers even to begin to imagine the torment of every mother watching. How could any of them rejoice for the mother of that little girl when each of them knew that her own child was still buried beneath that obscene mound?
There were a few more cries in the endless hours that followed. A few more tiny survivors. But not many. When the tip began its deadly slide, there were 240 children, aged from seven to ten, in the school. Of those, 116 were killed. There were also 28 dead adults, mostly teachers. Some of them died heroes. The rescuers found two each with her arms wrapped round a child.
Perhaps every tragedy has its heroes. In many ways, the mothers whose children survived deserve that description even though they were spared the ultimate horror. In the weeks and months that followed, I spoke to many who kept their children at home to spare the bereaved parents the pain of seeing them in the street and being reminded of what they had lost.
Aberfan had its villains, too, because this was a tragedy that should never have happened.
It was not an unforeseeable act of nature, like an earthquake. The great tip was created not by nature but by men.
And its location was determined not by the men who worked beneath the ground digging out the coal waste but by their bosses, who sat at desks in London. The men who controlled the National Coal Board. Above all, their boss, the NCB chairman Lord Robens (1910-99).
Where was he on the day of the greatest human tragedy even this dangerous industry could have envisaged? And the following day, when all hope of miraculous rescues had disappeared? Where indeed.
Even the Queen saw fit to pay her respects in person and did her best to comfort the bereaved mothers. But not his lordship. Robens had more important matters to attend to than standing in solidarity and sympathy with parents whose lives had been shattered. Let alone, God forbid, accepting responsibility.
As the tiny coffins mounted up in the village chapel, Robens was on his way to Guildford to accept the great honour of becoming the Chancellor of the new Surrey University.
And the charges against Robens and his NCB were far graver than a seeming indifference to unimaginable sorrow.
It was they who had made the crucial and ultimately catastrophic decision as to where the tip was to be sited. And Robens knew that.
Nobody knew more about the topography of a mining valley than the men who spent their lives working deep beneath its soil and studying the nature of the hills lining its sides.
They knew where it was safe to dump mountains of waste and where it was risky. And they knew the site chosen for the newest tip was very risky because of the springs beneath it. Those springs were capable of rising to the surface after heavy rains and turning solid waste into murderous slurry.
The miners showed me letters they had written to Robens and his cronies long before the disaster, warning of exactly that. Letters that were ignored. The miners knew the dangers and every morning in wet weather they would climb the hill to check it out. That’s why, 60 years ago, they ran screaming down the hill to warn the village of what they had seen. But the slurry was faster than them.
Robens and the NCB eventually got their come-uppance. An inquiry was held and sat for 76 days – the longest inquiry of its type in British history. It took evidence from 136 witnesses and 2,500,000 words of testimony. It was not until day 49 that an NCB witness conceded that tip safety arrangements had been inadequate.
It took another three weeks for anyone from the NCB to concede that the instability of Tip 7 could have been foreseen, and that this had been known within the NCB ‘even before the formal sittings of the inquiry had started’.
No one summed up better the desperate attempts by the disgraced Robens and the government minister doing his damnedest to protect him than the legendary Labour MP Leo Abse: ‘When I saw what I regarded as the graceless pavane danced by Lord Robens and the Minister, as the Chairman of the Coal Board coyly offered his resignation and, equally coyly, the Minister rejected the offer, I thought that it was a disgraceful spectacle.’
Of course journalists – even naive youngsters like the young Humphrys – have a responsibility to be impartial. It was my first test and I failed miserably. As I watched Robens being torn apart in the witness box it was all I could do to stop punching the air and shouting, ‘Yes!’
And when I’d run out of the hearing and leapt into my car to get to the news studio, I reversed so fast out of my parking space that I smashed into another car. I’m ashamed to say I didn’t even stop.
And now? Sixty years later? Have we learned anything?
The tips have vanished from the valleys – so let us at least give thanks for that. And our readiness to challenge authority? I leave you to judge.
John Humphrys presented the Today programme, 1987-2019
