Margaret Griffiths was at work in the local authority offices in Merthyr Tydfil on 21 October 1966 when the first reports came from the Taff Valley below. A National Coal Board waste tip on the hill above Aberfan, the pit village where the 18-year-old lived, had collapsed. Over 100,000 tons of black sludge had come down the hillside, obliterating houses and the village’s brick and slate primary school. It was 9.15 am, lessons had just begun.
Shock turned to dismay when the full extent of the disaster emerged. 116 children, mainly between seven and 10, had died as well as 28 adults, five of whom were teachers. It was horror beyond belief, but a new documentary, Aberfan: the Village That Fought Back, reveals that the disaster, which could have been prevented if the National Coal Board (NCB) acted on warnings about springs under tip seven, was only the beginning of the village’s travails. There were six more possibly unstable tips above Aberfan, and the NCB refused to remove them.
One of the leaders of that fight was Margaret Griffiths’s father, Tom Price. He had helped at the temporary mortuary in the village’s Bethania Chapel, where stunned parents were sent to identify the bodies of their children. The experience left him determined to prevent such a thing happening again.
“I remember peeping through the window,” Griffiths says of the days immediately after the disaster, when television crews and newspaper journalists descended on the village. “There would be a cameraman on the path and my father would be standing on our step, Woodbine in hand, giving an interview. He had seen the most terrible suffering of the parents. And when, after the disaster, there was a refusal to remove the tips, it just raised this passion in him that things should be changed.”
In 1967, an official inquiry found the NCB culpable, stating that Aberfan was “a terrifying tale of bungling ineptitude”. Yet both NCB Chairman Lord Robens and Welsh Secretary George Thomas appeared to dismiss the villagers’ concerns about another disaster. It was because of such attitudes that the women of the village forced their way into Thomas’s offices in Cardiff, where they dumped a sack of coal spoil. Griffiths describes “righteous anger” at the callous treatment of families (initially the NCB offered £50 to each bereaved household). “There was a distinct lack of compassion for these mothers,” she says. “It was about money.”
As the documentary makes starkly clear, Aberfan was a terrible event that caused unimaginable suffering but it was also, in the end, a victory for the community. “That’s why we should remember what happened,” says Griffiths. “So that lessons are learnt and passed on to future generations. When communities get together and persevere they can overcome injustice and they can make a difference. The people of Aberfan were of one heart and one mind, and they achieved a great result.”
'It absolutely floored me'
Aberfan still haunts its survivors, says Alex Jones
Nobody can mention the word Aberfan without you thinking, sadly, of the tragedy that occurred there, so it’s always in the background. But I can’t remember being told about it in school. Maybe it was just too horrific and schools didn’t feel they could share it with their students.
I was very lucky, the people I talked to seemed comfortable enough to tell me what had happened. You try and remain stoic because it’s somebody else’s story. The people in front of me were in their late 60s, early 70s, but when they went back to the morning of the disaster, they were schoolchildren again. They looked so frightened. It’s staggering to hear quite how profound the effect has been and how it’s affected every facet of their lives.
You visited Aberfan Cemetery?
And you talked to Jeff Edwards, the last child to be taken out of the school wreckage alive...
Alex Jones: One Day in Aberfan is available from Sunday at 8pm on S4C and iPlayer
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