‘Aberfan was just a typical, quiet Welsh valley village, with a couple of streets that seemed to go on for ever’ – Margaret Griffiths

The morning of Friday 21 October 1966 began like any other in Aberfan. It was the last day before the half term holiday for the children of Pantglas Junior School. Children like Gaynor Minett were excited by the thought of a week off school. But then came a sound like thunder, growing louder and louder. Within seconds the world went black as a mountain of coal waste travelling at 80mph overwhelmed the school and neighbouring homes. A generation of children lost their lives that day at Pantglas Junior School, along with more than half their teachers and 23 other adults. The news flashed around the world, and Aberfan became a symbol of tragedy.

The cause of the disaster was the unstable tip that overshadowed the small village. This is where waste from the local Merthyr Vale colliery was tipped. There were actually seven waste pits; Tip 7 was the one that destroyed the school and neighbouring houses.

Suffer the little children

Above: images of Pantglas Junior School, October 1966, BBC

South Wales had mourned too many victims of mining disasters. While 1966 will forever be remembered for the Aberfan tragedy, 33 Welsh miners also died that year, while the previous year an explosion at Cambrian Colliery in the Rhondda claimed 31 lives. Yet Aberfan was different. Over the years, countless women stood vigil outside Welsh colliery gates, hoping against hope that their husband or son had survived a terrible disaster. At Aberfan, it was the miners (and mothers) who endured the agonising wait beside the ruined school. Many took part in the desperate rescue attempts, clawing at the rubble and filthy slurry to free survivors – and retrieve those pitifully small, lifeless bodies. The rubble and coal waste was lying up to 12 feet deep, and as solid as concrete in places. As night fell over Aberfan, the terrible toll was the loss of 116 children and 28 adults.

A TV reporter outside the school asked Ray Lee ‘Have you got anyone of your own in there?’ He replied, ‘My daughter’s in there at the moment. She went to school this morning.’ Sixty years later, Ray told the BBC, ‘I think there was hope in my mind they may find her.’ Sadly, that hope was in vain. After six decades, the raw loss is palpable as the still grieving father says the eight years of Ann’s life went ‘very very quickly’. Fighting back the tears, he declares ‘I loved the child, I loved her, I lost her, and that seems to have been the end of it, really, once she’d gone.’ A heartbreaking story that could have been repeated by all the grieving Aberfan parents.

One of the best-known child survivors was Gaynor Madgwick (née Minett). Her book Aberfan (published by Y Lolfa, 2016) is a powerful, poignant story. She remembers the shocking moment she heard that her siblings, Marylyn and Carl had died. ‘Dad said they’d both gone to heaven’. She added, ‘The concept [of going] to school that morning and within seconds you’ve lost your own. How the hell can an eight year old child go through that?’

Victims were taken to a temporary morgue at Aberfan’s Bethania chapel. That is where Gaynor’s parents learned the terrible truth.

A day of heroes

It’s hard to imagine the terrifying moment the mountain of slurry hit the school. In a split second, the school’s teachers and staff instinctively did everything they could to protect the children.

Nansi Williams was the dinner lady at Pantglas school. That morning, she was collecting a shilling (5p – worth around £1.30 in 2026) from pupils for their school dinner. As the disaster struck, she shielded five children, who were rescued alive from under her body. It’s thought she tried to rush them under a table for shelter. One of the pupils she saved, Paul Harries, spoke to the BBC for the first time in 2026. ‘She gave everything to give us a future, and she lost everything,’ he said.

Deputy head teacher David Beynon Beynon took the five nearest children into his arms and braced himself against a blackboard to try to protect them. Tragically he died alongside his whole class.

Mair Morgan, 84, is the last of the surviving teachers of Aberfan. Her classroom was in a separate building, and she led her pupils to safety past the devastation. She walked them down the steps, and as she saw frantic mothers racing towards them she followed her guiding mantra: ‘If you’re calm, they’re calm as well’. Her saddest duty was to identify the young victims of the tragedy. Sixty years on, she is still haunted by the memory of seeing one little girl’s face. ‘She had beautiful black curly hair,’ she said quietly. ‘Very sad times.’ (BBC, 2026.)

PE teacher Howell Williams helped save children by smashing a window to create an escape route. Years later, surviving pupil Gareth Jones recalled how the teachers who lived had contrasting ways of helping the remaining pupils cope with their traumatic memories. ‘The other teachers who survived – Hettie, Rennie and Mair – would sometimes see us upset and they would get sad too and give us a cwtch. Howell was different. He’d make you smile, say something funny, and that really helped too.’ Howell, who died in 2023 aged 82, later remembered bringing a pound note to school for the following night’s staff night out. Fate meant that that much anticipated event never happened.

Tragedy turns into 40 year scandal

As night fell over the ruined lives and buildings of Aberfan, BBC reporter Cliff Michelmore gave a strikingly bold yet accurate prediction:

‘Tonight is a night of absolute tragedy. I have a feeling that tomorrow will be a day of anger. The kind of angry voices people will raise is why are these slag heaps put right behind schools, right behind rows of houses?’

Villagers accused the National Coal Board (NCB) of murder. The NCB was the nationalised owner of Britain’s coal industry, and its chairman Lord Alf Robens’s actions and words in the days and months after the disaster appalled the people of Aberfan. Two days after the tragedy, he visited the stricken village, and declared the remaining waste tips safe and stable. Yet the spring that caused the catastrophe was still there.

Lord Robens lied repeatedly in an attempt to claim the spring was unknown, and hidden, and that the NCB couldn’t possibly have foreseen the tip sliding half a mile to devastate Aberfan. Yet as the inquiry tribunal report declared, the springs were marked on Ordnance Survey maps dating back before the first coal waste was tipped on Mynydd Merthyr (Merthyr Mountain) during the first world war. Indeed, the workers tipping the waste used to drink from the spring.

Even more damning was the fact 1966 wasn’t Aberfan’s first coal waste slide. In 1944, a large portion of Tip 4 slid 180 feet (over 500 metres), stopping within about 600 feet of the school. A second slide later that year was just as serious. The divisional engineer, Gareth Jones, gave a stark warning:

‘I would want to know why Tip 4 slipped. I would want to know what the soil was and the depth of the boulder clay, and possibly the water table in the area. I would not approve of tipping on that site unless the results of such an investigation were all favourable.’

Yet the coal company and the nationalised NCB learned nothing, and tipping continued – even on top of the slurry that had moved so ominously towards Aberfan twice in 1944. The local council however was worried, and in 1960, wrote to the NCB saying it ‘wished to discuss the potential danger of the above Tip. Concern has been expressed that the Tip could slide after heavy rainfall’. Once again, the NCB ignored well-founded fears. In July 1963, the council tried again in a letter that tragically anticipates the catastrophe that was to engulf Pantglas School:

Just four months later, Aberfan experienced a slide that came within 150 yards of the school. A tipping worker compared the noise to the roar of a jet engine, which is exactly how the acting head of Aberfan’s senior school described the sound of the 1966 disaster. Still the NCB did nothing. The stage was set for the darkest day imaginable.

The inquiry tribunal’s findings were damning:

‘Our strong and unanimous view is that the Aberfan disaster could and should have been prevented… The report which follows tells not of wickedness but of ignorance, ineptitude and a failure in communications. Ignorance on the part of those charged at all levels with the siting, control and daily management of tips; bungling ineptitude on the part of those who had the duty of supervising and directing them; and failure on the part of those having knowledge of the factors which affect tip safety to communicate that knowledge and to see that it was applied.’

The coal board offered £50 (about £1,300 in 2026; the sum was later raised to £500 per fatality) in compensation to bereaved parents. And that £50 was regardless of the number of children the parents had lost in the tragedy. It was about a month’s wages for a miner.

It gets worse: the British state steals from the relief fund

No one in Aberfan could possibly believe the NCB or the government’s promise that the tips that still loomed over the village were safe. The community began a campaign for them to be removed. The NCB’s Lord Robens tried to shift responsibility to the government, despite the fact the NCB was legally responsible. He made clear his contempt for the people of Aberfan: ‘Frankly, I don’t think they appreciate what is involved [in removing the tips]’. Robens showed little sign of emotion when visiting Aberfan, only revealing his discomfort by repeatedly scratching his ear and nose, and sweeping back his receding hairline with his hand while being interviewed. When asked whether the villagers accepted his reassurances about the safety of the pit, Robens’s reply was dripping with condescension and arrogance. ‘Well, they passed me a very hearty vote of thanks at the end of the meeting.’

Aberfan’s fears didn’t go away. In June 1968, the village was flooded as water from the mountain swept over the site of the school. The people had had enough: action was needed. A delegation travelled to the Welsh Office in Cardiff to meet the secretary of state, George Thomas. Emotions were running high, and a TV reporter amazingly asked the leader of the delegation, Tom Price, whether ‘this was just the emotionalism of the women?’ Mr Price confirmed the whole village felt the same way, and simply wanted the deadly tips removed for good. Thomas, a valleys man himself, later wrote to prime minister Harold Wilson to say, ‘I believe they have worked themselves into an irrational state of mind on this issue, but we have to contend with the intensity of their feelings whether they are logical or not’. It was a revealing comment: this Labour MP, supposedly a champion of the people, was a hypocrite whose brown nosing of the establishment secured him the speakership of the House of Commons in 1976, and a hereditary peerage in 1983. He died in 1997 just months after publication of government documents revealing his shameful part in the Aberfan scandal.

Eventually, Wilson’s Labour government agreed to remove the tips, but with a wicked condition. The state would take £150,000 from the relief fund to help fund the work, which began in 1969. (Equivalent to £2m in 2026.) It seems inconceivable that this could be justified under charity law, yet the Charity Commission did nothing to stop it happening. (Its contempt for the victims was displayed by its callous insistence that bereaved parents prove they had been close to their lost children before making any payment.) As one of the bereaved parents said, ‘My daughter didn’t die to help the NCB’, before sadly adding, ‘They had us over a barrel’. George Thomas, yet again, proved spineless – had he threatened to resign, Harold Wilson would surely have backed down. Meanwhile, the chief villain of the NCB, Lord Robens, was asked to chair a review of workplace health and safety. Talk about truth being stranger than satire…

Thirty years later another Labour government returned the £150,000 to the Aberfan fund, and just after the 40th anniversary the Welsh government gave £2m to cover the ravages of inflation since 1966. Justice had been done, but only after 40 years of anguish and sorrow.

Aberfan was just an early example of how powerful people get their way over the powerless. Yet looking back on those black and white 1960s interviews with the people of Aberfan I was struck but not surprised by their eloquence. (It’s no coincidence that the South Wales valleys produced so many outstanding orators and politicians, including Nye Bevan, Jim Griffiths and Neil Kinnock.) It was no reflection on their powers of persuasion that it took so long to get justice. Campaigners for the victims of the Hillsborough disaster endured a similar experience, long after the initial libel that they were a bunch of hooligans were shown to be a lie.

As we mark the 60th anniversary of that dark day, I wonder whether Aberfan holds a lesson for today’s troubled times. Today’s governments seem just as incapable of solving the problems that afflict the powerless. The people of Aberfan cried out for action, just as those struggling today do. Yet today’s headlines across the world show that many people in their frustration are prepared to turn against the path of decency and community solidarity that was so evident in Merthyr Vale in the 1960s. To adapt the words of one of the Aberfan campaigners, it’s time for action, not bluster and procrastination.

Aberfan: some family reflections

Both my parents got to know the South Wales valleys very well as reporters in the 1940s and 1950s. Dad (Bob Skinner) was the South Wales Argus reporter for the Rhymney Valley, while Mum was based in Pontypridd. As an early freelance television reporter, Dad experienced an ominous forerunner of the Aberfan tragedy at Blaina, Monmouthshire in 1954. The mountain of coal sludge towering over the small mining town was on the move after torrential rain. People living nearby had been evacuated and Bob had to interview one of them on the lower slope of the black slurry. As the cameraman set up, Dad faced a worried looking housewife. Dad takes up the story:

‘All went well until I found myself gradually being sucked down into the black morass beneath. Bravely I carried on, only to see my interviewee rapidly growing taller before my eyes. Down and down I went, until, truncated, I had to stop and be hauled to the surface by the producer and cameraman. A clever man, that cameraman. When the interview was screened on the news that night, no one could tell I was almost a dwarf.’ (Bob Skinner, Don’t Hold the Front Page, Graffeg, 2005.)

It’s yet more evidence that the NCB knew all about moving mountains long before 1966.

A glimpse of Aberfan

I first heard about Aberfan on a Lakeside School trip from Cardiff in 1972. We were travelling up to the Mountain Centre in the Brecon Beacons (Bannau Brycheiniog). As we made our way up the old A470 road past Aberfan, I heard friends and teachers talking about the disaster less than six years before. Later, in 1994, I passed the village on a bike ride along the Taff Trail, which passes within metres of the site of the ill-fated Pantglas school. (The modern A470 dual carriageway road hugs the mountain side through what was once that deadly tip.)

As I said earlier in this post, Aberfan stood out from Wales’s countless other mining tragedies. Britain’s worst ever mining disaster took place in 1913 less than 10 miles from Aberfan at Senghenydd. Over 400 men and boys died at Universal Colliery, just 12 years after 81 were killed there. Senghenydd was on Dad’s postwar reporting patch, and in the 1970s he used to enjoy driving us along the Aber valley from Caerphilly to Senghenydd, and then along the bumpy track over Mynydd Eglwysilan to Nelson. (This required an optimistic view of the capabilities of his Austin Princess car.)

A few miles away, Eglwysilan church’s graveyard was the last resting place of many of the victims of the Senghenydd disasters. In 1995, I visited that lonely hillside church, and assumed when I first spotted words ‘damwain yn nglofa Senghennydd’ (accident in Senghenydd colliery) on the gravestone shown above that it commemorated one of them. I should have noticed from the date (Rhagfyr – December – 1922) that this poor man lost his life in another, solo accident at that cursed location. (A roof fall.) So many families in Wales have mourned loved ones who paid the ultimate price of coal.

Aberfan: the tragic numbers

100,000 tonnes: the estimated weight of the waste that devastated the village

80mph: the estimated speed of the slurry when it hit Aberfan

116: children killed, including 109 at Pantglas Junior School

5: teachers killed

23 other adults killed

1: school destroyed; another school damaged

18 houses destroyed

Note for non-Welsh readers

Aberfan is pronounced Abervan – the Welsh single ‘f’ is equivalent to a ‘v’ in English. Aber means the place two waters join, and in this case refers to the place the Fan stream joins the river Taff.

Note on sources

I have drawn heavily on the BBC’s very moving 60th anniversary documentary, Aberfan: the Village that Fought Back, available in Britain on BBC iPlayer. I also drew on the detailed, damning report of the tribunal inquiry, chaired by Lord Justice Edmund Davies. Finally, I highly recommend Gaynor Madgwick’s book Aberfan (Y Lolfa), a deeply moving survivor’s account that also documents Aberfan’s fight for justice.