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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.
“When the news came through, we were all just shocked,” she recalls. “I have a vague memory of getting home and the roads all being blocked. It was chaos.” In Aberfan, Griffiths found hundreds of local people clambering over Pantglas Junior School removing rubble by hand as coal miners dug in the setting slurry for survivors. “I took a tray of drinks down to the disaster site and it was horrendous, like a war zone,” she says. “It was a terrible sight.”
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.
“This happened 60 years ago,” says documentary director Ceri Isfryn. “But the echoes of authority not taking responsibility and treating people appallingly in the light of awful tragedies means there is a sad relevance today. The documentary is also about those communities showing extraordinary resilience and strength, coming together despite the adversity they’ve gone through; fighting for what is right.”
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.”
Price was one of the founders of Aberfan and Merthyr Vale Tip Removal Committee. Footage from the time shows just how effective he was at campaigning. Now, six decades later, his daughter is seeing much of that footage for the first time. “It was amazing for me to watch the film of my dad,” Griffiths says. “I found making the film quite emotional. Lots of things that were deep inside me came to the surface.”
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.”
Griffiths’ father and the Committee won in the end. The tips were taken down in 1969, though, remarkably, the government insisted the charitable relief fund set up after the disaster (which had attracted donations from around the world) contribute the then immense figure of £150,000 towards the cost. The UK government finally repaid this money in 1997, the Welsh government adding £1.5 million in 2007.
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
Growing up in Wales, what was your association with Aberfan?
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.
What was your experience going to Aberfan for this documentary?
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.
I also met one lady, now in her 90s, from the Salvation Army, whose job had been to speak to the parents who’d lost children.
You visited Aberfan Cemetery?
I don’t know whether it was tougher being a mum myself, but it’s the saddest thing I’ve ever seen. It absolutely floored me.
And you talked to Jeff Edwards, the last child to be taken out of the school wreckage alive...
There’s a photograph of Jeff when he’s seven years old with bright blond hair, being pulled out of the rubble, and that picture tells a thousand stories. Later in life, he came back to Aberfan and worked so hard to try and restore a sense of community in the area. MH
Alex Jones: One Day in Aberfan is available from Sunday at 8pm on S4C and iPlayer