During her 70 years on the throne, Queen Elizabeth saw a massive amount of change in the world, and with that, some great tragedies. She lived through World War II, major terrorist attacks and enormous social change, but when asked what the late Queen failed at during her reign, her former private secretary didn’t hesitate to tell royal biographer Gyles Brandreth his thoughts.
In his book Elizabeth: An Intimate Portrait, Brandreth wrote that he once asked the late Lord Charteris, who worked with Queen Elizabeth between 1950 and 1977, if the monarch had “ever felt she had put a foot wrong.”
“He said, immediately, ‘Aberfan. She got that wrong and she knows it,’” Brandreth wrote. On October 21, 1966, a landslide of coal waste swept through the Welsh mining village of Aberfan, killing 116 children and 28 adults, most of them students and teachers at the local school. But instead of rushing to Wales soon after, the late Queen waited eight days to visit Aberfan.
Although Queen Elizabeth "expressed her anguish in a public statement" and sent Prince Philip and Princess Margaret's husband, Lord Snowdon, to Wales, she waited until October 29 to meet with survivors in the village herself.
It's a decision Lord Charteris, who died in 1999, told Brandreth was "a mistake" for the late Queen, "and one she regrets." He added that the delay showed one aspect of Queen Elizabeth's personality, telling Brandreth, "The scale of the tragedy called for an immediate response, but she is not a spontaneous person and she is not given to emotional gestures."
The incident was dramatized in an episode of The Crown, and Brandreth—who wrote that King Charles once told him the show was "ghastly"—said that one Aberfan survivor thought it didn't do the late Queen justice.
Jeff Edwards, the last child to be rescued alive after the disaster, said he felt The Crown "portrayed her very, very callously," per Brandreth. In the episode, Olivia Colman, playing Queen Elizabeth, says that she pretended to cry for the crowd and the press so as not to seem cold. Edwards met the late Queen on several occasions when she visited Aberfan in later years, and Brandreth wrote that the survivor said he "found her to be anything but unfeeling."
"After she had spent a few minutes alone at the remains of the school, it was the only time I saw her cry in public," Brian Hoey, who worked for the BBC at the time of the disaster, wrote in the Daily Mailin 2024.
Queen Elizabeth went on to visit Aberfan four times through her reign, unveiling a plaque at Ynysowen Community Primary School during her Diamond Jubilee tour in 2012. On October 21, Prince William will return to the school to unveil the Aberfan Memorial Tree, a new sculpture designed to mark the 60th anniversary of the tragedy.
He'll also join King Charles and Queen Camilla to visit the Aberfan Memorial Garden and the Aberfan and Merthyr Vale Community Centre to commemorate the anniversary, meeting with community members, bereaved parents, first responders and survivors, including Edwards.