it was thirty feet high and destroying everything in its path. From that moment the name of Aberfan has been synonymous with tragedy beyond comprehension.
It crushed part of the school and some tiny houses alongside like a ton of concrete dropping on a matchbox. And what that foul mixture of black waste did not flatten it filled – classrooms choked with the stuff until the building was covered and the school became a tomb. The moment the terrible news reached them, hundreds of miners had abandoned the coalface at the colliery which had created that monstrous tip and raced to the surface. And there they were when I arrived, their faces still black – save for the streaks of white from the sweat and the tears as they dug and prayed and wept. Most of them were digging for their own children.
Every so often someone would scream for silence and we would all stand frozen. Was that the cry of a child we had heard coming from deep below us? Sometimes it was and some were saved. I saw a burly policeman, his helmet comically lopsided, carrying a little girl in his arms, her legs dangling down, her shoes missing. She was a skinny little thing, no more than nine years old. Thank God she was alive. The men dug all day and all night and all the next day. They dug until there were no more faint cries, no more hope, but still they kept going. They were digging now for bodies.
I watched through the hours and days that followed as the tiny coffins mounted up in the little chapel. There is nothing so poignant as the sight of a child’s coffin. By the end of it there were 116 of them. One hundred and sixteen dead children and twenty-eight adults.
When the miners finally stopped digging they went home to weep, to mourn, to relive the nightmare. To cherish the children who were spared. And later to show their anger at the criminal stupidity and venality of the officials and politicians who had allowed it to happen.
Never was anger more justified. The National Coal Board who ran the mines had – from a mixture of deceit and cowardice and fear of retribution – tried to claim that the tragedy was an act of God. It was not. It was an act of negligence by man. Criminal negligence. The politician responsible for the NCB, Lord Robens, a blustering lying bully of a man, had gone on television to say that the cause of the disaster was the water from a natural spring which had been pouring into the centre of the tip and produced the water bomb that finally exploded with such devastating results. The spring, said Robens, was completely unknown. That was just one of his lies. Not only was it known, its presence was marked on local maps and the older miners knew exactly where it was and what the danger was and they had been saying so for years. They were ignored. Mercifully, they had put their fears in writing and the letters, written by the miners and ignored by the NCB, were eventually produced at the inquiry into the disaster so the truth could be revealed for the world to see.
I was twenty-three when Aberfan happened. I have been back many times over the years and talked to the dwindling handful of bereaved parents and to the few children in the school who survived the disaster. And every time I wonder how they were able to recover from their grief and the nightmare of that terrible morning. But ‘recover’ is the wrong word. As so many have told me, you don’t get over it … you just have to live with it. What is the alternative? To that, there is no answer.
What we owe the people of Aberfan
Today, 20 October 2016
When I drove here from Cardiff fifty years ago, the hills on either side of the valley were scarred with tips. Black and ugly and threatening. Now, as I look back down the valley from this cemetery, they’re gone. Bulldozed away or covered with grass and trees. The mining valleys of South Wales are green again. The river that flows beneath me was also black and dead. And now it’s clean and children can play and fish in its shallows. And the men of these valleys, unlike their fathers, do not end their day’s work with lungs full of coal dust. I never met a miner who said he wanted his son to follow him down the pit. The nations owed miners a debt of gratitude for the wealth they helped create over the centuries. The mines have gone, of course, but our generation owes something different to the people of Aberfan. Respect for the courage and dignity they have shown for fifty years in dealing with unimaginable grief. But more than that. The children in these graves were betrayed by the men in power decades ago who refused to listen to their fathers when they warned them their little school faced a mortal danger. If Aberfan stands for anything today, apart from unbearable grief, it stands as a reminder for every journalist in the land of this: authority must always be challenged.
3
I was still in my early twenties when I was offered a job by the BBC. I remember feeling terribly pleased with myself. I was going to be based in Liverpool, the most exciting beat in Britain for a reporter in those days, with the Beatles and the Cavern club at one end of the news scale and dock strikes at the other. I was to work out of Castle Chambers, an office building in the heart of the city where the north-west Representative of the BBC was based. The Representative (I can never think of him without the capital letter) was a dapper little fellow called Reg. But only to his closest friends. To young pond life like me he was Major H. R. V. Jordan (Retd), JP, BA (Hons) and he was a very grand figure indeed.
Reg had an extremely large office with a well-stocked cocktail cabinet and two elegant young secretaries. Not one, you will note, but two. Their duties, it is accurate to say, were less than onerous. Reg graced the office a couple of times a week to sign a few letters, and occasionally drove up the coast to Blackpool for lunch with ‘my friend, the mayor of Blackpool’ in his large plum-coloured Jaguar and white cotton driving gloves before returning to his home in The Wirral.
Perhaps Reg’s relationship with His Honour and one or two other municipal worthies in the north-west was, as he insisted, invaluable to the well-being of the BBC. Whether it repaid the considerable sum forked out by the unwitting licence payer is debatable. And he was not alone. There were many of them here and abroad. Our Representative in the United States, where I was later sent to open a television news bureau, had a far grander suite of offices in New York and an apartment in the UN Plaza with stunning views over the East River that would not have disgraced the residence of a Saudi prince.
They were still building the Anglican cathedral in Liverpool when I arrived, the largest religious building in Britain, and the longest cathedral in the world. One of my first assignments was to make a film about its construction. It was a massive project, started some years before I was born. I interviewed one of the stonemasons who had been working on it all his life. Young as I was, and trying to make my way in the exciting world of journalism, I pitied the poor chap. Rooted to one place, always following the same boring routine. There I was, dashing everywhere, never knowing what I might be doing from one day to the next, master of my own timetable and destiny (news editor permitting). And here was this man, turning up at the same time, day after day, week after week, chipping out more stone blocks to lay on the other stone blocks he’d chipped out the day before and so on ad infinitum.
‘Don’t you get bored?’ I asked him.
‘Why should I?’
‘Well, all you’re doing is laying one stone on another year after year.’
‘No, I’m not,’ he said. ‘I’m building a cathedral. What will you leave behind when you die?’
It was a fair point. Broadcasting disappears into the ether, leaving little trace behind. Those who ply the trade leave no lasting monument. My stonemason was still building his cathedral when I left. By the time it was finished, in 1978, I had become a foreign correspondent.
The wireless in our house had always been tuned to the BBC Home Service and when I was a young teenager I listened to From Our Own Correspondent with
