"Welsh coal was paid for with the lives of children" Cofiwn Aberfan

"In the dark Welsh valley,
On the mountainside,
Lay the little children,
Close to where they died,
Their little lives are ended,
Before they reach their goal,
Tender little children,
Have paid the price for coal."

At 9.15 am on Friday, October 21, 1966, a waste tip above the mining village of Aberfan in the valleys of Wales in the UK began to slide down the mountainside, firstly destroying a farm cottage and killing all its occupants. It then approached Pantglas Junior School, where the children had only just returned to their classes after singing All Things Bright and Beautiful at their morning assembly.

The slide - containing over 150,000 tonnes of slurry - then engulfed the school and about 20 houses in the village, killing 144 people, including 116 school children and 28 adults.

Cofiwn Aberfan (We Will Remember Aberfan)

Workers up in the mountain had seen the slide start, but could not raise the alarm because their telephone cable had been stolen and down in the village, everybody heard the noise, but could see nothing, because of thick fog.

News of the tragedy travelled fast and hundreds of people stopped what they were doing and headed to Aberfan to try and help with the rescue. It was futile, as nobody was rescued alive after 11am and it was nearly a week before all the bodies were recovered.

On Mynydd Merthyr, directly above Aberfan, several tips containing millions of cubic metres of mining debris from the Merthyr Vale Colliery had been deposited over the years, onto highly porous sandstone that contained numerous underground springs. The NCB's area management had been made aware of the concerns regarding the tipping of spoil above the primary school, but these were largely ignored. In the days leading up to the disaster, there had been substantial bursts of heavy rain, which had caused 3–6 metres of subsidence on one of the tips. This then led to more than 150,000 cubic metres of debris breaking away and flowing downhill at high speed.

On 26th October 1966, a tribunal was appointed to inquire into the causes of and circumstances relating to the Aberfan disaster, which was chaired by Welsh barrister and Privy Councillor Lord Justice Edmund Davies.

The Tribunal's report found that

* The blame for the disaster rested entirely with the National Coal Board, and their "total absence of a tipping policy"

* Repeated warnings about the dangerous condition of the tip had been ignored.

* The tips had never been surveyed and were continuously being added to in a chaotic and unplanned manner. The disregard for the unstable geological conditions and the NCB's failure to act after previous smaller slides were found to have been major factors that contributed to the catastrophe.

Hundreds of men left the coal mines in the surrounding valleys, walking for miles and miles to help the rescue efforts.

The sheer devastating power of the wall of slurry as it tore through the building where young children sat in class is heart wrenching to this day.

Miraculously, some children survived. Seven-year-old Karen Thomas and four other children in the school hall were saved by their brave dinner lady, Nansi Williams, who sacrificed her life by diving on top of them to shield them from the slurry.

The others though, were not as fortunate. As the men worked - the hopes of rescue soon turned to a sombre realisation that all they could do was recover the lifeless bodies of the children.

It was a task that scarred many lives - with hundreds of men and women living with the horrific trauma for the rest of their days.

Entire generations of children have grown up in the surrounding towns and villages - each of us with a grandfather or father who was there that day or in the following days. Grown men that survived the horrors of war are often moved to tears at the memory of what they witnessed.

Stretchers sit on standby.

There are of course, many tales of unsung heroes of the disaster.

On 22 October 1966, the Midland Division of the Institute of Embalmers gathered, bow-tied and ball-gowned, in Nottingham, for the high point of the social calendar – the annual ladies’ night. The banquet was interrupted by a telegram requesting urgent help. In Aberfan, a Welsh village near Merthyr Tydfil, a 40-foot wall of coal waste had slid down a mountain at over 100mph and hit the Pantglas Junior School, killing 116 children and 28 adults.

Leaving their partners, the volunteer embalmers returned home to collect equipment, embalming fluid and coffins. Travelling through the night, they arrived in Aberfan to join colleagues from across the UK. Some had flown from Northern Ireland on a plane with the seats removed to accommodate stacks of child-size coffins. Billy Doggart was one of them, and it was he who co-ordinated their extraordinary efforts.

Some of the bodies recovered from the school were already wrapped in blankets and laid on the pews of the Bethania Chapel. Makeshift mortuary stations were quickly established. Working without electricity or running water, the embalmers took over from the police and performed their first task: cleaning the bodies for identification. The viscous slurry that had swallowed the school also covered the bodies. One embalmer, fresh from his honeymoon, told me that his first job was to remove a boy’s shirt and take it outside to the waiting parents. He had to hold it aloft and ask whose little boy had been wearing it. Usually in disaster situations such as plane crashes or explosions, identification is a big problem. Not so at Aberfan, where every parent was waiting outside, distraught and eagle-eyed for evidence of their child.

The tiny bodies were carried to the makeshift mortuary. With families desperate for any news about their children.

Queen Elizabeth visited the town in the wake of the disaster. It remains to this day one of the few displays of public emotion from the usually stoic monarch as she broke down in tears at the sheer tragedy.

Years later in a letter to the village, the Queen said how she was deeply affected by the disaster.

She said: I will remember my own visit with Prince Philip after the disaster and the posy I was given by a young girl which bore the heartbreaking inscription: "From the remaining children of Aberfan".

On Thursday, October 27 1966 - 81 of the children and their teachers were laid to rest at the Aberfan cemetery, on a steep hillside overlooking the site of the disaster.

The children were laid to rest in one of the largest mass graves of modern Britain.

Locals laid floral tributes in the shape of a giant cross.

Grieving families and locals lined the graves and roads for miles.

The Queen and Prince Philip attended the funeral to pay their respects.

In the aftermath of the Aberfan disaster, Her Majesty promised a bereaved parent she would be back to open the school when it was rebuilt.

And the monarch was true to her word, arriving at Ynysowen Community Primary School by helicopter as she continued her Diamond Jubilee tour of South Wales on April 27th, 2012.

A small stone statue stand over a grave.

The sheer scale of the memorial cemetery is hard to to take in. Each arch a grave, and in almost every grave, a child.

At the site of the Pantglas Junior School, there is now a memorial garden.

The remains of the original walls of the school can be seen, a poignant reminder of what stood before.