50 Years: The Words and Poetry of Aberfan

50 years ago, on 21st October 1966 Wales came to a stop at 9:13am as a Merthyr coal tip piled on a mountain collapsed. 150,000 tonnes of coal waste slid down the mountain, smashing into a primary school and several houses.

This wasn’t coal, this was a thick slurry; Pantglas Junior school was buried, 116 children and 28 adults were dead. After 11am no survivors would be pulled from the wreckage. The morning started with thick fog, and drizzly rain, something we would call today ‘proper Welsh weather’, by lunchtime all over Wales people stared at the news in utter disbelief. A village had lost an entire generation, it seemed unthinkable, it still does, I write this with tears in my eyes and an ache in my throat.

This tragedy is engrained in the minds of every single person in Wales. Mining defines our nation, but it’s also the cause of some of our biggest tragedies. I am not old enough to remember the Aberfan disaster, but every child in Wales can envisage a Victorian primary school, nestled in the valley at the foot of a mountain full of miners because it’s what most of us remember from our childhood. Every child in Wales has cried tears for children dead long before we were born.

By the time I joined my own Victorian Primary school at the foot of another mountain a few miles across, the National Coal Board had been brought to justice, all slag heaps were removed or pinned, ensuring this would never happen again. However, I was an adult before I learned that, and so my abiding memory of Aberfan is being 8 years old, sitting in a school assembly and learning about the disaster, while fretfully eyeing the mountain from the long narrow windows.

When our headmaster told us the children were in assembly singing All Things Bright and Beautiful when the mountain slipped, it took everything I had to stay cross-legged sitting on the wooden floor. At the end of the assembly, we sung the very hymn, and to this day I can’t hear it without remembering the fear. I can’t even imagine what it must have been like for the children in Pantglas School that day.

Aberfan US
Aberfan UK

As with many disasters, it’s within literature, stories and writing that we remember the disaster today. Shortly afterwards a book of poetry written by children from all over the UK was released to raise money for the disaster. For Reading Addicts fan, Philip Meers wrote a poem for the book and it’s his photograph I include below today. This book is no longer in print, but you might spot it at a second hand bookshop, it’s well worth the investment.

One of the fullest accounts of the disaster comes from survivor Gaynor Madgwick, she was 8 when she was buried under the slag in a disaster that cost her all her friends and an entire generation of children. Aberfan: A Story of Survival, Love and Community in one of Britain’s Worst Disasters is a beautiful and full account of the disaster, combining her memories with the experiences of other people affected on that fateful day.

I’m also very fond of this poem, written in 1966 by local poet, Ron Cook.

Where was God that fateful day
At the place called Aberfan.
When the world stood still and the mountain
Moved through the folly of mortal man.
In the morning hush so cold and stark
And grey skys overhead.
When the mountain moved its awesome mass
To leave generations of dead.
Where was God the people cried
Their features grim and bleak.
Somewhere on their knees in prayer
And many could not speak.
The silence so still like something unreal
Hung on the morning air.
And people muttered in whisper tones
Oh God this isn’t fair.
The utter waste of childhood dreams
Of hope and aspirations.
A bitter lesson to be learnt for future generations

But where was God the people cried.
The reason none could say
For when the mountain moved its awesome mass.
God looked the other way.

Today marks 50 years since that fateful day, the quiet cemetery now holds funerals for those parents who are finally being buried with their children, and so I would ask you all to take a moment to think about the terrible day an entire village of children was wiped out in a sleepy South Wales valley.