Iain McLean - Aberfan: Government and Disaster

ABERFAN

Government and Disaster

The research is outstanding ... the investigation is substantial, balanced and authoritative ... this is certainly the definitive book on the subject ... Meticulous.

Definitive ... authoritative ... anyone who wants to understand the process of government and its obsession with secrecy should read this book.

Ron Davies, Secretary of State for Wales 1997-1998

Intelligent and moving.

Planet

ABERFAN

Government and Disaster

Iain McLean and Martin Johnes

Published in Wales by Welsh Academic Press, an imprint of

Ashley Drake Publishing Ltd

PO Box 733

Cardiff

CF14 7ZY

www.welsh-academic-press.wales

First edition (Aberfan - Government and Disasters) - published 2000

Second, revised and updated, edition (Aberfan - Government and Disaster) - published 2019

ISBN

Paperback: 978-1-86057-0336

eBook: 978-1-86057-1459

Ashley Drake Publishing Ltd 2019

Text Iain McLean and Martin Johnes 2019

The right of Iain McLean and Martin Johnes to be identified as the authors of this work has been asserted in accordance with the

Copyright Design and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior permission of the publishers.

Every effort has been made to contact copyright holders. However, the publishers will be glad to rectify in future editions any inadvertent omissions brought to their attention.

Ashley Drake Publishing Ltd hereby exclude all liability to the extent permitted by law for any errors or omissions in this book and for any loss, damage or expense (whether direct or indirect) suffered by a third party relying on any information contained in this book.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data.

A CIP catalogue for this book is available from the British Library.

Typeset by Prepress Plus, India (www.prepressplus.in)

Cover design by Welsh Books Council, Aberystwyth

Cover image Media Wales

Contents

Ir rhai a garwn, ac yn galarwn ou colli

To those we love, and miss so very much

Foreword

We were very pleased to be asked by Iain McLean and Martin Johnes to contribute a few words to this important new work, Aberfan: Government and Disasters. Professor McLean has aided the cause of the bereaved of Aberfan and Merthyr Vale previously through several newspaper articles, which led to the reparation by the Government of 150,000 taken after the disaster from charity funds to clear the tip. This book is a meticulous examination of the documents and media reports relating to the disaster and, as such, is a landmark as the first serious lengthy academic treatment of Aberfan. Professor McLean and Dr Johnes have conducted their research with sensitivity and sympathy, and remained committed to uncovering the truth throughout. Their findings are as shocking as they are illuminating, and are a lesson to this and future governments as to how disasters should be handled. The bereaved of Aberfan and Merthyr Vale hope that such gross mismanagement and injustice is never again meted out to this community in the most dire and unthinkable of circumstances.

H. Clifford Minett

Chairman of the Aberfan and Merthyr Vale Cemetery and Memorial Garden Committee.

September 2000

Introduction to the Second Edition

Of recent years the houses in the valleys and on the lower slopes are still further overshadowed by the huge coal-tips which are being piled on the breasts and upper slopes and which, besides making the landscape hideous, will in time endanger the very lives of those dwelling in the valleys below.

1917 Commission of Enquiry into Industrial Unrest; No. 7 Division, Wales and Monmouthshire, Cd 8668

This is a completely revised edition of Aberfan: Government and Disasters published by Welsh Academic Press in 2000. The first edition was widely cited and used extensively, among others by television programme makers who made hard-hitting documentaries on both the 40th and the 50th anniversaries of the disaster. The book had been out of print for some years, and we were delighted to be invited to revise and reissue it while memories of Aberfan have been freshly stirred by the events surrounding its 50th anniversary, on 21 October 2016.

The focus of this second edition has been tightened so that it is much more exclusively about Aberfan than the first edition, which is still available in libraries for people who want to read about our research and conclusions on other disasters. Some of its findings, including those about the Titanic disaster, were published separately.

The remainder of the Introduction is a revised and updated version of the Preface from the first edition.

If you are over 70, you probably remember exactly what you were doing on two days in the 1960s. One was 22 November 1963 when President Kennedy was assassinated. The other, also a Friday, was 21 October 1966, the day that 109 children were killed in their classrooms at Pantglas Junior School, Aberfan, near Merthyr Tydfil in south Wales, when a waste tip from Merthyr Vale Colliery slid down the mountain and engulfed their school. The total death toll was 144. Aberfan horrified the nation like no other British event since 1945, except the mass murder of schoolchildren in Dunblane in 1995.

On the evening of 21 October 1966, like the rest of the nation, one of us (IM) stood transfixed in front of the TV to hear Cliff Michelmore, in tears, saying, Never in my life have I seen anything like this. I hope I shall never ever see anything like it again. For years of course the miners have been used to ... disaster. Today for the first time in history the roll call was called in the street. It was the miners children. Like everybody else, I wanted to do something. I did not have the courage to go and dig, so I started to raise money. The funds I raised went with thousands of others to the Disaster Fund announced by the Mayor of Merthyr on the evening of the disaster. As related below, some of that money ended up by paying for the removal of the National Coal Boards dangerous tips from above Aberfan.

The thirtieth anniversary of the disaster not only brought renewed media attention; it also meant the opening of governmental papers under the UKs 30-year rule. These papers revealed new information, especially about the behaviour of the National Coal Board, the Ministry of Power, the Welsh Office and ministers in the Wilson government, in the aftermath of the disaster. Some of the injustices of the handling of Aberfan were widely known, or at least suspected, at the time. The new evidence confirmed and elaborated this knowledge.

This evidence led to an academic paper and a number of newspaper articles by IM. In August 1997, when Ron Davies, then Secretary of State for Wales, repaid the 150,000 taken from the Disaster Fund to help pay for the removal of the tips at Aberfan, he cited IM as one of the people who had influenced his decision. From this research sprang a grant from the British Academy (APN 6714) to preserve and catalogue the archives held by Merthyr Central Library. The results of that work can be found online at www.nuffield.ox.ac.uk/politics/aberfan/home.htm . This book builds on the foundations of that earlier work. Funded by a grant from the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC: grant no. R00022677), it revises some of the earlier conclusions, widens the scope of the study of the disaster and places it in the fuller and comparative context of developments since 1966.