Aberfan

[User]

 

[Bromptonaut]

I was six years old at time. It was Friday a start of October half term and as was family habit then we were driving from home in Leeds to a farm guesthouse near Keswick, Dad always had car radio on and we were listening to BBC Radio News & newsreel on the Home Service. Memory is of death toll incrementing with each successive report, as was case nearly forty years later with the Tsunami around Boxing Day 2004.

Secondary memory is of being very uneasy around the quarry spoil around Honister while walking or parked up on same holiday.

 

[ufkacbln]

I think it was one of the first times that a disaster actually connected

To an 8 year old, most were fairly irrelevant and had no meaning

In this case it was children of my age, who died doing something I was doing every day and hence was something that struck a chord

 

[Winnershsaint]

I think it was one of the first times that a disaster actually connected

To an 8 year old, most were fairly irrelevant and had no meaning

In this case it was children of my age, who died doing something I was doing every day and hence was something that struck a chord

Quite Cunobelin, I was few weeks short of my ninth birthday. Old enough to comprehend that something had happened to kids my age and to be haunted by the black and white TV images of the aftermath. Seeing them again a few days ago just brought shivers down the spine.
The only other memory I have of something bad happening as a child was seeing my mum, a former amateur racing cyclist, in tears as we watched the early evening news footage of the tragic events on Ventoux the year after.

 

[slowmotion]

At my school we were allowed to buy a limited ration of sweets with our pocket money. The headmaster suggested that we could return our sweets to the school shop if we wished, and that he would send the equivalent value to the Aberfan fund. I think we all did.

 

[User482]

There was a programme about it on BBC1 last night, well worth checking out on Iplayer.

I knew the circumstances of the tragedy fairly well, having studied it in some detail at Uni, but pictures of graves, mourning parents and the callous indifference of the NCB make it rather more real than dusty discussions of geomorphology and hydrology. It was also somewhat heartening to learn about the dogged determination of Lord Ackner, and finally, the return in 1997 of compensation taken by the Labour government to pay for the removal of spoil.

 

[Accy cyclist]

I couldn't let the day go by without mentioning it. That terrible day 50 years ago when 144 children and adults lost their lives. I was 5 years old at the time but i remember the BBC news flash coming on the telly, telling of the tragedy. Our infant school had a collection for the survivors.
http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/aberfan-disaster-50-years-shows-9088872

 

[twentysix by twentyfive]

Shocking tragedy I remember well.

Thankfully "lessons were learned" and all slag heaps were "re-engineered" iirc

 

[Katherine]

It's still shocking 50 years later.

 

[ColinJ]

It's still shocking 50 years later.

It IS! I remember my parents having the TV news on that evening and trying to take it all in.

I can't believe that anybody ever thought it was safe to pile huge mountains of coal waste right next to a village. People talk about 'Health & Safety gone mad' but that disaster is a chilling reminder of why H&S is so important!

 

[steve50]

I was eight years of age at the time and remember it well, a tragic day for all concerned.

 

[mjr]

Our infant school had a collection for the survivors.

It's still shocking. It's also a scandal that it took until 2007 to get the proceeds of some of the donations that were unlawfully kept by the UK government for decades, when the Welsh government finally paid back an amount approaching the lost interest (although it was not calculated as such).

 

[S-Express]

I can't believe that anybody ever thought it was safe to pile huge mountains of coal waste right next to a village. People talk about 'Health & Safety gone mad' but that disaster is a chilling reminder of why H&S is so important!

The coal tip was significantly higher than the permitted maximum height under the NCB's own guidelines. It's well worth reading up on Lord Robens and the abject arrogance with which he handled the aftermath of the disaster including raiding the appeal fund to help pay for removal of the tip - something which was illegal under charity law even then, but nobody in government did anything about it. The biggest irony of all is that he went on to chair a commission on workplace health and safety. Unsurprisingly (given the utter w@nker that Robens apparently was), the report recommended employer self-regulation. Today, you couldn't make this kind of stuff up.

 

[Sixmile]

I was reading a bit about this today and it is truly shocking that not only it happened but it was allowed to happen. Then I see that 'Lord' Robens was the chairperson of the committee who devised the 1974 H&S at work act. The fact that the man went to receive an honour (Chancellor of the University of Surrey) that day instead of responding immediately to the disaster says a lot. Also seemingly the families had problems obtaining any of the disaster relief money for simple things like the headstones but instead the money was used to remove the remaining tips as the National Coal Board refused to do so. Interesting, the grass that grew over the tips has to this day never went as green as the original hills, but instead stayed a sickly yellow.

It's impossible to imagine the pain those families went through and still deal with. We never think that our kids will go to school and never come home again.

 

[Pale Rider]

As a newcomer to the north east about 20 years ago I had never seen a slag heap.

The scale of some of them takes some grasping, when grassed over they look like small hills, which they are.

Millions of tons of slag was shifted to create a country park on the former Herrington colliery site outside Sunderland.

The landscape was literally transformed.