The Aberfan Disaster: The Day the Mountain Came Down

[00:00:01] [SPEAKER_03] It's Friday the 21st of October 1966 and it was the last day before half-term. Lessons began as usual. Chairs scraped across the floors, books were taken out of backpacks and voices of teachers settling the class filled the corridors. But high up on Aberfan, hidden beneath the October fog, workers starting their day suddenly felt the ground beneath their feet shift. Without warning, a wall of black coal waste began hurtling down the mountainside.

[00:00:30] [SPEAKER_03] Oh my god. Aberfan lost 116 of its children. Adam, this story is often told through broad accounts, facts, ordnance surveys and testimony. But what's missing are the voices of those who lived through it. Today I'm going to tell you their story. Jesus.

[00:01:22] [SPEAKER_03] Welcome to another episode of The Compendium, an assembly of fascinating things. A weekly variety podcast that gives you just enough information

[00:01:29] [SPEAKER_01] to stand your ground at any social gathering. We explore strange true stories from the worlds of true crime, dark history, scandals, mysteries and remarkable people. I'm Kyle Risi, your ringmaster for this week's episode. And I'm Adam Cox, the chiropractor for all of our retired contortionists. Very good. Free healthcare unless we're charging them. No, it's not free. And yeah, all of our contortionists, you know, they do a great job in the circus.

[00:01:56] [SPEAKER_01] But you know, they've got back problems, Kyle. Yeah, they're aging. Aging out. Yeah, so I'm there making sure that they can still move at a age of 35.

[00:02:04] [SPEAKER_03] I like that we are a compassionate employer. It shows that we're a, I don't know, we're not just all about the money. Yeah, don't look at the interest payments. The interest payments, you mean the premiums? Yeah. Guys, a quick bit of housekeeping before we get started. If you enjoy the show and you want to show us that you like what we do, then make sure to follow The Compendium. We are on all the apps so there is no excuse.

[00:02:27] [SPEAKER_01] And while you're at it, please leave us a cheeky review. It really helps other people find the show, which in effect keeps these studio lights on. So we do love reading them all, whether they're on Spotify or whether they're on our own website. Spotify would be a comment though, wouldn't it? Well then come to our website, thecompendiumpodcast.com.

[00:02:45] [SPEAKER_03] No, I want it on Spotify or Apple, because then it's official, as long as it's nice. Because I can't remove them if they're nasty. Nasty hateful listeners. Adam, that is enough of the housekeeping, because today on The Compendium, we are diving into an assembly that didn't happen, ignored warnings and lives that deserved better.

[00:03:05] [SPEAKER_01] So you put the enunciation on assembly. So I feel like that's a clue.

[00:03:11] [SPEAKER_03] It is a clue. And it's a heartbreaking detail about today's story. Today's story, it is a disaster. But the true scale of the horror for me wasn't really apparent until I started really digging into the details. And so I ended up completely rewriting the episode, because to tell the story through ordnance survey maps and tribunals is to risk kind of losing sight of the individuals at the very heart of today's story.

[00:03:35] [SPEAKER_03] And that is something that a lot of the synopsis kind of missed out, because this year, Adam, marks 60 years since today's story actually took place. And so in memory of what happened, I wanted to kind of frame this episode through a few of the people who actually experienced it and what actually happened to them. Because, of course, our listeners clicking onto this, they'll know exactly what this episode is. But, of course, I'd like to tease it out for you.

[00:03:59] [SPEAKER_03] Adam, on the morning of Friday, the 21st of October, 1966, 10-year-old Janet Brown told her mother, Marilyn, that she was not going to school. Janet had already tried to pull the shtick the previous evening, and Marilyn understood why. It was, after all, the last day of term, and Janet was desperate to begin her week off a few hours early. But Marilyn was having none of it. Janet was categorically going to school. Have you been in that situation?

[00:04:27] [SPEAKER_03] I don't think you have ever been in that situation. You're quite a compliant child.

[00:04:33] [SPEAKER_01] Yeah, I don't think I was really allowed to skive school.

[00:04:36] [SPEAKER_03] Well, it's going to be a bit of a thing that is going to cause a lot of guilt for Marilyn. Because after more protests and more tears, Marilyn gently ushered Janet to the front door and watched her walk begrudgingly up the terrace-lined street that they lived on. It had rained almost nonstop for three weeks, and although the skies had cleared overnight, a thick blanket of fog had drifted over the village.

[00:05:01] [SPEAKER_03] It was so thick that by the time Janet turned to give her mother one final scowl, Marilyn had already disappeared into it. After seeing her off, Marilyn shut the front door and was just relieved to finally sit down with a cup of tea and get her day started. However, elsewhere in the village, not everyone shared Janet's disdain for going to school. Brothers Alan and Phil Thomas were wharfing down their breakfast while their sister looked on in disgust.

[00:05:27] [SPEAKER_03] Meanwhile, six doors down, Alan and Phil's seven-year-old cousin, Karen Thomas, were sent off to knock for the boys so they could all walk to school together. Karen's mother tried standing at the front door hoping to give a bit of a wave to her sister-in-law. But just one door down, Karen had already disappeared into a thick fog, and so she too shut the door and began her mourning. A few minutes later, Alan, Phil and Karen set off to school together.

[00:05:53] [SPEAKER_03] At the end of their road, 12-year-old Alan split off towards the senior school while Phil and Karen carried on towards Pantglas Junior School. By 8.59, 240 children had gathered in the courtyard, and at 9 a.m. sharp, headteacher Mrs. Jennings rang the bell and finally the last day of term was underway. How are you feeling, Adam? I feel on edge. Do you feel something ominous has come in? I do, yeah.

[00:06:21] [SPEAKER_03] Adam, the day normally started with morning assembly. But Ms. Jennings decided to postpone this until the end of the school day to allow the children to say goodbye to their teachers with hugs and high fives. But Ms. Jennings also planned to use this time to remind the children not to play on the railway, not to go near the river, or towards the mine tips high up on Munneth Merfer. Munneth means just the mountain. It's a Welsh term for mountain.

[00:06:48] [SPEAKER_01] Oh, so in Wales.

[00:06:49] [SPEAKER_03] We're in Wales, yes. So Adam, against their usual routine, the children went straight into their classrooms. The sounds of scraping chairs, teachers settling down the classes, commotions and books coming out of bags started filling the corridors. Meanwhile, 500 meters above the village on that very same mountain, Gwen Brown and his team were starting to work on the waste tip number seven.

[00:07:13] [SPEAKER_03] This is where Merthyr Vale Colliery routinely dumped waste that was being extracted deep inside the local coal mine. That morning, Gwen's team had been dealing with a very heavy iron railway track used to move waste trams towards the edge of the tip. Overnight, Adam, the ground beneath them had sunk by around three meters, twisting the rail and leaving a section of the track hanging down into the crater.

[00:07:41] [SPEAKER_03] It was pretty urgent because those heavy rails were also connected to the track that Gwen's tipping crane operated on. And there was a risk that as it collapsed further, they could potentially drag the crane down into the crater with them. Gwen tried calling management for instructions on what to do, but there was no longer a working telephone line at the tip. The copper wiring connecting it to the mine had been stolen many times in the past. And so the messenger was sent down the mountainside in person.

[00:08:11] [SPEAKER_03] However, while they waited, by 9am, the crater had almost doubled in size. Management still hadn't responded. And so at a loss as what to do, Gwen and his team decided to take a tea break, expecting a very rough day ahead of them repairing the rail. However, Adam, while they were on their break at around 9.11am, Gwen felt a sudden shift beneath his feet.

[00:08:36] [SPEAKER_03] He says the ground felt like it was moving upwards, but then suddenly it dipped. Then Gwen and his team watched in horror as 110,000 tons of coal waste transformed into an enormous wave of liquefied slurry and began tearing down the mountainside at 50 miles per hour. Down in the village, what sounded like a fighter jet ripping through the sky started to grab people's attention.

[00:09:05] [SPEAKER_03] Many people, Adam, instinctively just looked up out of their windows, but the fog meant there was nothing to see. The sound roared onwards and people expected it to come overhead any second. But then suddenly the ground shook as a wave smashed into the village. As it did, it engulfed 18 houses and crashed through the back of Pentglass Junior School, burying everything in its path in 30 meters of slurry. Wow.

[00:09:34] [SPEAKER_03] Adam, that morning, 144 people were killed. Adam, today on the compendium, I'm going to tell you about the Aberfan disaster of 1966. Have you heard of this story before?

[00:09:48] [SPEAKER_01] I have, yes. I think I've either seen documentaries or I've seen it dramatized in the past.

[00:09:55] [SPEAKER_03] The Crown would probably be the one that comes to mind where it was one of the great tests of Queen Elizabeth II.

[00:10:00] [SPEAKER_01] Yeah, I think it was that, but I'm sure I've seen it in something else, but maybe not. But yeah, it was pretty much a tragedy. I forgot that it was about like the coal. I thought it was just like a mudslide or something like that.

[00:10:12] [SPEAKER_03] Yeah. It's a horrific story, Adam. It has been suggested on the Patreon quite a few times, but I've never really been sure how to physically tell it. But the documentary that made me stop my tracks was a BBC documentary called Surviving Abafan, which tells the story through many of the survivors' experiences.

[00:10:29] [SPEAKER_03] And that's where the horror of what actually happened really landed for me, because very often the story is told through what went wrong, corporate greed, ordinance maps and signs that they should have been aware of. But it's really the experiences of the people that really made this such a harrowing story. And Adam, the thing is, though, the disaster didn't end when the slurry stopped moving.

[00:10:54] [SPEAKER_03] It continued through nightmares, through survivor guilt and the empty spaces left by children who never came home on that last day of term.

[00:11:03] [SPEAKER_01] Yeah. And obviously you started with that story with Janet and the guilt that the mother's going to be feeling, because I'm guessing Janet is going to be one of the victims here.

[00:11:12] [SPEAKER_03] That's right. And I think that is one of the few details that I'm talking about when I talk about how horrific the story is, because you don't get to hear those accounts of those parents, right? When they talk about, well, that day Janet clearly did not want to go to school. Do you know what I mean?

[00:11:29] [SPEAKER_01] And yeah. And I mean, what parent would know what was going to happen? Right. So you're just thinking, no, you need to go to school. You're doing the right thing. But if only that mother had just gone, all right, fine. I'll let you have the day off.

[00:11:42] [SPEAKER_03] And when you have a tragedy like this that affects the entire community, of course, you don't want to be going around reminding people that your child had survived. And so actually what was really disturbing to hear is that some of the survivors were encouraged not to talk openly about the fact that they had survived. And you've got to think about, well, how does that help with your recovery? And like this came from a place of compassion. But for me, like I said, if you can't talk about it, how do you heal?

[00:12:10] [SPEAKER_03] And actually, that's partly why Abafan struggled to heal. This year marks 60 years since that disaster, which sounds like a long time. But Adam, it really isn't. Many of those children could still be alive today. Many of the survivors are. And those children who died would have had careers, would have had families, would have had children of their own.

[00:12:30] [SPEAKER_03] So while it's important to explain what went wrong on the mountainside and who was responsible, I thought, especially in light of the anniversary, it would be more powerful to tell the story through some of the people who had actually lived through it. Because I think, honestly, that's where the real story actually is. And so, Adam, to understand the disaster, let's first understand just how intrinsic coal was to Abafan and the surrounding communities. Because until the 1860s, Abafan was more than just a few farming cottages beside the River Taff.

[00:12:59] [SPEAKER_03] During the Industrial Revolution, as coal was discovered across the valleys, Abafan was transformed into an important industrial hub. There was barely a family in Abafan that didn't have either a father, a brother, a husband or a neighbor working at the mine in some capacity. And one of those husbands was Gerald Tarr. Gerald and his wife Shirley lived on Moy Road, just on the edge of Abafan, right at the foot of the actual mountain where the coal waste was actually being stored.

[00:13:28] [SPEAKER_03] And at the mine, Gerald mostly worked underground digging coal. Like, depending on the dip that they were digging on any given day, he says you could easily spend like 90% of your day bent over.

[00:13:40] [SPEAKER_01] Yeah, that's, that would, I mean, I suffer just after half an hour.

[00:13:43] [SPEAKER_03] Yeah. Remember we talked about like, oh, that feeling of taking your bra off at the end of the night.

[00:13:48] [SPEAKER_01] Yes.

[00:13:48] [SPEAKER_03] You step out of their mine, you get to kind of stretch your back for the first time. That feeling of, A, the pain first of all.

[00:13:54] [SPEAKER_01] Yeah.

[00:13:54] [SPEAKER_03] But then that relief of like, oh, I can't finally stretch.

[00:13:56] [SPEAKER_01] The relief of the fact you got to do that every day.

[00:13:59] [SPEAKER_03] Every day. And like for so many of the men, working the mines wasn't their preferred work. But in rural South Wales, there weren't really that many alternatives. But at the same time, the pits paid really well. And for Gerald and Shirley, like it was especially handy because they were also planning on starting a family very soon. So it was good money for them. And the thing about coal mining is that it produces an extraordinary amount of waste. For every ton of coal brought up from underground, there's often like close to a ton of waste that has to go somewhere.

[00:14:29] [SPEAKER_03] But for years, it was simply just piled up on the valley floor near where the mine was actually situated. But when space ran out, taking it out of the valley literally became too expensive. Because during World War I, mines were already under increasing pressure to keep costs down. And suddenly, especially for Aberfan, shifting all of that waste out of the valley literally meant the difference between the mine making money and being forced to close.

[00:14:53] [SPEAKER_01] So it's just heaped up on the mountainside?

[00:14:56] [SPEAKER_03] At this point, it's in the valley floor. The mine isn't actually in the mountain. It's actually on the valley floor alongside the village. But because they have run out of space, the colliery now started to move the waste up onto the actual main mountain directly above Aberfan. So like at this point, this sounds like a classic corporate greed story. But closing the mine, remember that would have left hundreds of local families without an income.

[00:15:21] [SPEAKER_03] So combined with the NCB, that's the National Coal Board, wanting to obviously stay profitable and local families wanting a livelihood. This was, of course, a decision that made a lot of sense to everyone. I guess so.

[00:15:34] [SPEAKER_01] But then equally, why move it up? I guess there wasn't any space to put it, I don't know, somewhere else.

[00:15:40] [SPEAKER_03] Yeah, they've already kind of wasted all that space already. It's already been taken up by other mounds.

[00:15:44] [SPEAKER_01] Yeah. Okay, fine. Fair enough.

[00:15:46] [SPEAKER_03] So, I mean, it doesn't excuse what happened, but it certainly explains why the cheapest solution kept winning in this situation.

[00:15:53] [SPEAKER_01] Yeah, I get that. And I don't, I mean, this is the first kind of and only disaster like this in the UK that I'm aware of.

[00:15:59] [SPEAKER_03] Certainly the most memorable one.

[00:16:01] [SPEAKER_01] Yeah, I guess no one would have thought putting it up the mountain would cause a massive landslide.

[00:16:06] [SPEAKER_03] Exactly. Now, to get the coal waste onto the mountain, it was normally transported using mechanical aerial ropeways and a tram system before then being dumped into these enormous piles alongside the mountain ridge. This became basically standard practice in 1916. And by 1966, there were now seven massive coal tips lining the ridge of the mountain directly above Aberfan.

[00:16:28] [SPEAKER_03] Adam, each one of these waste tips contained anywhere between 300 and 390,000 metric tons of mining waste.

[00:16:37] [SPEAKER_01] I mean, I just said, yeah, I don't see an issue putting up the mountain, but when it's directly above the village, maybe they should have thought about it a bit more.

[00:16:46] [SPEAKER_03] Exactly. Like you might assume that somebody was obviously checking whether or not these waste piles were safe, right? But there was no proper system for inspecting any of them or their stability. Any checks were largely about machinery. Like when the cranes could no longer load more waste onto the pile, tipping was just moved to a new pile, basically. So it wasn't about safety at all. It was about can our machines handle the size of the voice tip now?

[00:17:10] [SPEAKER_01] Yeah. And come on, it's the UK. It rains.

[00:17:12] [SPEAKER_03] Yeah, exactly. That's the thing. But that's not to say that the National Coal Board were blind to the dangers because in 1944, tip number four suffered a major landslide after heavy rain. Oh, so isn't the first time? It's not. No, luckily nobody was hurt. But instead of triggering a proper investigation, they just moved tipping to tip number five. And once obviously that became too big for the machinery, tip number six was opened with tip number seven opening up in 1958.

[00:17:41] [SPEAKER_01] Okay, so actually they really should have learned from this.

[00:17:45] [SPEAKER_03] 100% yeah. And here's the thing. To the children of Aberfan, one man's waste was another man's treasure because the tips were perfect playgrounds. They were dangerous. They were secluded. They were literally irresistible. In the summers, the children often went up the mountain where they would dam some of the natural springs running through the area to make like crude swimming pools. And that's where they would spend most of their summers, which actually brings us, Adam, to tip number seven.

[00:18:12] [SPEAKER_03] Because when tip number seven opened, the NCB chose a site directly above a network of these natural underground springs and streams. Essentially, the site they picked was a permanently saturated marshy patch of land. So as the tip grew bigger and heavier, it started acting like an enormous plug to the water that was underneath. The water from the springs could no longer drain away properly.

[00:18:34] [SPEAKER_03] Its easiest escape, Adam, as you can imagine, was upwards into the actual waste itself, saturating the bottom few meters of this giant amount of coal waste.

[00:18:45] [SPEAKER_01] I see. And that's going to make it unstable.

[00:18:47] [SPEAKER_03] Exactly. After enough rainfall, the bottom layer essentially turns into a thick, slippery slurry that the rest of the tip was effectively sitting on. Got you. And the other thing about the warning signs is that tip number four wasn't the only one. With tip number seven being built on this marshland, there'd already been a very near miss. After a prolonged period of rain in November 1963, the peak of tip number seven broke off and slid down the mountainside.

[00:19:14] [SPEAKER_03] It ended up stopping just at its foot. And so nobody was hurt. But Adam, the black scar that this left down the mountainside was a very visible, very alarming reminder of just how lucky the village was.

[00:19:28] [SPEAKER_01] Yeah, because if only the tip came down, did no one go, well, the whole thing could have come down. Then what would have happened?

[00:19:34] [SPEAKER_03] Exactly. Adam, the thing is, though, the local councillor did complain to the National Coal Board about the slip. They were essentially told, however, that they kept making a fuss about safety, that the NCB would likely have no choice but to physically close the mine, which is awful, right? So this was a threat that many people didn't really want to test because it risked basically their livelihood.

[00:19:57] [SPEAKER_01] Yeah, I still feel negligent.

[00:19:59] [SPEAKER_03] It so does. But remember, at this point, there's no real regulations in place to check the safety of these. I don't even think it was standard practice for coal mines to be storing it up there. It was just the only option that Aberfan had, right? And when that was greenlit, it was during the war. And so, like, it just ended up that it just wasn't put right once the war was over and we came out of the depression from it.

[00:20:21] [SPEAKER_01] Yeah, people would just carry on as they were.

[00:20:24] [SPEAKER_03] But at the same time, even though people could see that this latest slip was troubling, remember, the mine staying open was the sole way that people put food on the table. So you can absolutely imagine how divided the rest of the village would be at this notion of, like, well, that's not tested because we don't want the mine to actually close. I can understand the human element there. Which, Adam, brings us back to 9 a.m. on Friday the 21st of October.

[00:20:49] [SPEAKER_03] At Pantglas Junior School, around 240 children were settling in to start their day. Along Moy Road, residents were all at different stages of their morning. Some had already left to work. Pensioners and stay-at-home moms, they were getting started with their days. And minors who had just finished their night shift were now heading upstairs to bed. At the school, at around 9.05, 8-year-old Jeff Edwards had just picked out a new book from a collection his teacher, Mr. Davies, kept on the windowsill at the back of the classroom.

[00:21:18] [SPEAKER_03] This week, he decided that he was going to go with The Adventures of Tintin. At the same time, in another part of the school, dinner lady Nancy Williams was going from classroom to classroom, calling students out to the corridor to collect their dinner money for that week. So it was that sort of thing that they did where you would get your dinner throughout the week, and at the end of the week, you're bringing your dinner money, and then a dinner lady would come along and collect it to kind of settle up the debts for that week. Especially more important this week because it's essentially the last day of term.

[00:22:17] [SPEAKER_03] Mm-hmm. Margaret, over at the senior school, had forgotten to give him his dinner money for the week. And so Robert asked if him and his best friend, Phil Thomas, could run over and collect it. So you can imagine what that must be like, right? As a kid, you've just been given a green card to just leg it out the school with your best mate.

[00:22:35] [SPEAKER_02] Mm-hmm.

[00:22:36] [SPEAKER_03] So expressions on their face like they've just struck gold. Phil and Robert, they leg it out of the classroom, only to slow way down to speak to a few kids sitting on the wall near the school gates. At this point, Adam, it is 9.15 a.m. And high up on the mountain, the ground beneath Gwen's feet has just suddenly slipped. It kickstarts an avalanche of liquefied waste hurtling down the mountain. Phil and Robert say they hear what sounded like a distant jet approaching overhead. Instinctively, they both look up to see if they could spot it.

[00:23:04] [SPEAKER_03] But of course, Adam, through the thick fog, there's literally nothing to see. Phil says that as the rumble got closer, it stopped sounding like it was overhead and literally started sounding like it was coming from within him. So that's like the ground literally shaking and vibrating.

[00:23:18] [SPEAKER_01] I was going to say, does he feel the vibrations within him?

[00:23:22] [SPEAKER_03] I think so, yeah.

[00:23:23] [SPEAKER_01] I can only imagine, does it feel a bit like an earthquake?

[00:23:26] [SPEAKER_03] Yeah, a lot of people thought it felt like an earthquake as well. Other people felt like it sounded like thunder.

[00:23:32] [SPEAKER_02] Mm-hmm.

[00:23:32] [SPEAKER_03] Then Phil says that suddenly it felt as if someone was actually pelting stones at them through the fog. Robert instinctively ran back towards the school. But Phil, for whatever reason, started running straight ahead up the road. A few meters away, in one of the houses lining Moy Road, Gerald Tarr was fast asleep after finishing his night shift at the mine. His wife Shirley, at this point, had already gone to work. And Gerald says that he was suddenly woken up by his dog Buster.

[00:24:00] [SPEAKER_03] And he says that when he came around, Buster's paws were kind of raised up in the air, almost as if he was begging for something. Gerald assumes that Buster was just scared by the sound of a jet that was passing overhead. And then he kind of reached out to kind of offer him a cuddle. In that moment, the ceiling above his head just opened up to the sky.

[00:24:16] [SPEAKER_01] So what, the roof just come off?

[00:24:18] [SPEAKER_03] The roof just got swiped off.

[00:24:20] [SPEAKER_01] And how far away is his house from the school? It's directly across the street. So at this point then, the school must have been submerged. And then if it's taking off his house, the roof of his house, wow.

[00:24:33] [SPEAKER_03] He says then suddenly the entire back wall of his house collapsed on him, burying him and Buster beneath it. Gerald immediately loses consciousness. Meanwhile, as Phil was running away from the noise, the stones that he thought were being pelted at him started turning into literal rocks. And then suddenly one of them struck him in the head and Phil is knocked unconscious in the street.

[00:24:57] [SPEAKER_01] Wow. So not only is that like this big landslide, you've got all these rocks flying everywhere, almost like it's hailing.

[00:25:05] [SPEAKER_03] And the thing is that they can't even see what it is.

[00:25:08] [SPEAKER_01] Yeah, that's the weird. I think this fog is really just a bad time to have thick fog, right?

[00:25:14] [SPEAKER_03] Back inside the school, the children also started hearing the same rumbling sound. Again, like I said, some of them thought it was thunder. Other, others thought again that it was this jet passing over. The instinct again was just to look out the back windows. But again, the fog meant that there was nothing there to see. But then suddenly through the fog, this wall of blackness started to emerge. Jeff Edwards says that he saw Mr. Davis's expression and that literally told him everything that he needed to know. Adam, this was bad.

[00:25:41] [SPEAKER_03] Mr. Davis started screaming for the children to get under the desks. But just as the kids were able to react, the wall of slurry crashed through the back of the school. Literally through the walls, they began collapsing inwards into the school, packing them tight with literally thousands and thousands of tons of coal waste. Just packed them in.

[00:26:00] [SPEAKER_01] The fact that we know some of these expressions, clearly some of these people survive. Yeah, that's it. But they are very deep, I'm guessing, within this.

[00:26:09] [SPEAKER_03] Yeah. Meanwhile, Karen Thomas, who was still in the corridor with Nancy Williams and four other students, says that she remembers glass exploding inwards into the corridor as the walls literally started closing in on them. She says in that moment, Nancy instinctively threw herself between the walls and the children. Nancy basically took the full brunt of the force as the walls dragged themselves towards them. God.

[00:26:34] [SPEAKER_03] Across the hall, towards the front of the school, Mrs. Hetty Williams, obviously her class hears the noise. They felt kind of the entire building shake. All she could do was steady herself on her feet. And she was like, yeah, it felt like an earthquake. But then it was just silence. After a couple moments, Hetty then went to look out of the corridor. But when she opened the door, it was almost completely compact with this coal waste right up to the ceiling with the corridors and walls and rubble just up against the classroom.

[00:27:03] [SPEAKER_01] Just a quick question. So I know what we're kind of dealing with here. Coal waste. Because all I can think of is kind of like a mud or really thick kind of material. Is that right?

[00:27:14] [SPEAKER_03] Yeah. It depends how saturated it is with water. So we know that a lot of the coal waste that came tumbling down that mountain, the bottom few meters of it, still thousands of tons of it, would have turned into like a slurry. But the coal waste that would have been dislodged from the top, that would have been like grit and sand, like a sand consistency. But anywhere from like sand up until big rocks, it was anything that the coal mine couldn't process. But what is consistent is how black it is. It's essentially coal waste. Yeah.

[00:27:43] [SPEAKER_03] But the problem is now that it had hit, Hetty Williams' class were completely trapped, right? When they opened up that door, the corridor is completely compact. In that moment, of course, Hetty doesn't want to alarm the kids. So her instincts actually, Adam, is really clever. She tries to make it sound like something they really understood. She tells everyone that this is just a fire drill and that everyone should just line up behind her in single file. So you've got all these kids that have just heard this massive like crash and this earthquake that are now just getting up in single file and lining up behind her.

[00:28:12] [SPEAKER_03] Luckily, they're all OK. And so as Hetty is looking through the door, she's kind of like scraping away some of the coal waste. And there's a sort of gap in the corridor that she thinks that she might be able to squeeze through to get out of the school. And Adam, she is right. She tells the kids to stay close and then she guides 25 of her students down the corridor and eventually they manage to get outside of the school. And of course, the sad thing is, is that Karen Thomas was in a class, but she is still trapped in the corridor with four other students and Nancy.

[00:28:43] [SPEAKER_03] So she's unaccounted for. Hetty says that once all the children had safely been let out, she turned around and saw the entire back of the western side of the school had been completely engulfed in 30 feet. Of coal waste.

[00:28:57] [SPEAKER_01] I can't picture that. Do you know what I mean? Like I'm trying to imagine what that might look like. It must just feel like almost the end of the world kind of feeling.

[00:29:06] [SPEAKER_03] When you look at some of the images, they are crazy. You can climb up onto this mound and essentially you are two stories up and you're looking down into the building. So it's like a big massive ramp, but it's all just engulfed in the school.

[00:29:20] [SPEAKER_01] Yeah. And wow, what a smart teacher just to remain calm like that because I don't think I could sort of think.

[00:29:26] [SPEAKER_03] Yeah, she is amazing.

[00:29:27] [SPEAKER_01] And to have, I guess, the confidence to go, right, this is the window. Because how do you know there's not going to be more to follow or when the right time is? You've got to risk it, right?

[00:29:36] [SPEAKER_03] You have to. The corridor could collapse in on you, but she managed to find a little kind of gap. So it did depend where you were in the school. They were kind of closer towards the eastern side of the school. So that was the least affected part of it. But if you were a classroom further down towards the west, even on the front, you would have been completely trapped. And that's the thing as well. It's the blackness of the coal as well. It is just so black that when you see images of it, and I appreciate that they're all black and white photographs, it just looks like it's nothing.

[00:30:05] [SPEAKER_03] It's almost like it's a black hole that's just consumed because it's absorbing all the light. So you can't see anything. Adam, in the aftermath, the coal waste had completely swallowed up 18 houses and the entire back and western side of the Pentaglass Junior School. At this point, there's just no way of knowing exactly where all the children in the school physically were or whether or not any of them were still alive. When Phil Thomas wakes up, Adam, for him, it is completely dark.

[00:30:31] [SPEAKER_03] After he'd been knocked unconscious, a slab of wall had fallen down on top of him and he ended up being buried. But he also couldn't move at all. So he's not in a predictable place. He's not inside the school where rescue workers are going to be like, well, they're all inside the school. He is completely detached from the school. He ran out of the school and he's now just buried under this random bit of the street where is anyone ever going to look there?

[00:30:55] [SPEAKER_01] I guess so. Is this a house wall or?

[00:30:58] [SPEAKER_03] A house wall has fallen on him by the sounds of it.

[00:31:00] [SPEAKER_01] I mean, you'd think that they would, but probably not the priority.

[00:31:03] [SPEAKER_03] Yeah, they're going to be looking where they believe that people are dwelling, right? In bedrooms, in front rooms, in kitchens, etc. Not in this random section on the side of someone's front garden. Yeah. It's really heartbreaking because he says that when he regained consciousness, the only thing that he could think to do was call out for his mum. Yeah. Inside the school, Karen Thomas remembers how deafening the silence was after the noise. She was still pinned and trapped beneath Nancy at this point. She says that the kids started calling out to Nancy, but she didn't respond.

[00:31:30] [SPEAKER_03] Karen managed to kind of wiggle out one of her hands to reach a few strands of Nancy's hair to try and pull it to see if she can get her to wake up. And that is when they knew that Nancy was dead. All four of the kids were basically trapped under her body. God. In Jeff's classroom, he did manage to get under a desk just in time, which most definitely saved his life. But Adam, he was pinned beneath his desk and so he was unable to move. And just inches away from his face was the face of one of his classmates.

[00:32:00] [SPEAKER_03] Adam, she'd been crushed to death and Jeff was just inches away from her face. And that's how he stayed.

[00:32:05] [SPEAKER_01] And how old are these kids again?

[00:32:08] [SPEAKER_03] So they're a mixture from very small. So a lot of the younger kids were on the front of the school. Mm hmm. Jeff was eight years old.

[00:32:20] [SPEAKER_01] I mean, that's still, I mean, our class all these is, you know, so young that this is so traumatic and scary for them.

[00:32:26] [SPEAKER_03] The other classrooms at the front of the school had, like I said, largely escaped the full impact. But just like Hetty's class, they also were trapped. Remember, like I said, if you were kind of towards the western side of that corridor, there would be no way out. There wouldn't be in a gap for you. So teachers, obviously, they just started doing what they could to break through the doors, to find any kind of possible route out. So it's mostly the classrooms towards the eastern side of the building, where people were able to squeeze along the corridors to reach the assembly hall, where they were able to escape.

[00:32:55] [SPEAKER_03] And that is one of the most awful things about the story. If the school had held their morning assembly as they usually did every day, the vast majority of children, potentially all of them, may have survived.

[00:33:08] [SPEAKER_01] That's one of those things, like, yeah, in hindsight.

[00:33:12] [SPEAKER_03] Yeah, that's right. In total, 110 children and four teachers, mostly younger students from the classrooms towards the front of the school, all managed to get out in the end. But that did leave 116 other kids pretty much unaccounted for at this moment in time.

[00:33:26] [SPEAKER_01] Half the school.

[00:33:27] [SPEAKER_03] Half the school, yeah. And so, Adam, of course, a rescue effort begins. The impact was heard all around the village. And almost immediately, residents started coming out to see what was happening. One woman later said that when she and the others first arrived, everyone just assumed that everyone had gotten out, because there were some students out in the front of the school, right? Which you would think that, right? Like, your mind doesn't instantly jump to the worst, does it? It was only when someone told them that half the school was still in there, that panic really starts to kind of erupt through the village.

[00:33:54] [SPEAKER_03] Obviously, emergency services, they were called around about 9.25 a.m., including the fire brigade, ambulances, and police. But obviously, facing what they were about to face, they didn't have what they needed. Like, they needed diggers. And so, a call was placed to the NCB Miners Rescue Service and told to send all the men they could down to Moy Road. And at this point, none of them even knew why they were being sent there. They had no clue.

[00:34:20] [SPEAKER_01] And so, they didn't hear what had happened? Yeah. Or, like, the vibrations?

[00:34:24] [SPEAKER_03] I guess no one really understood what they were walking into. A lot of people remember, they thought that the sound they heard overhead was just a jet, right? Yeah. Even when it was coming down on them, people still thought it was just a jet. So, people who maybe weren't necessarily alarmed by it, they probably would have just let the sound pass and gone, oh, a jet flew past, right? And, like, even the fire brigade, when they were called, they thought they were just responding to an initial report of a collapsed house. The gravity of what they were facing wasn't realised until after they arrived,

[00:34:52] [SPEAKER_03] when they saw that literally 18 houses were just gone.

[00:34:55] [SPEAKER_01] I think, as you said, like, how are they turning up at the school just not being equipped or know what to even do? Like, none of them have trained for this scenario.

[00:35:03] [SPEAKER_03] Sure, exactly. And it's not even what they're facing. It's also the state of the site as well. Like, two sections of an entire row of terraces had collapsed in on the people inside. But even beginning any kind of rescue was just a massive logistical challenge. Because Pentaglass School stood on one side of Moy Road, with the row of terraces directly opposite, right? When the slurry hit, it, of course, destroyed the houses on either side of the school, of course, impacting through the back of the school.

[00:35:32] [SPEAKER_03] But that debris reached up to 30 feet high. So there's no easy way for the trucks or the equipment to get into the actual site because the school had kind of, like, blocked a lot of it. The only option was for them to start digging at the edges of each site, which meant it was going to be a while before they could reach the houses in, like, the middle, like the nine houses either side. So that's all they could do. The rescue effort basically split into two, with teams working inwards from opposite ends of Moy Road.

[00:36:01] [SPEAKER_03] But by this point, literally everyone in the village was just doing everything they could to help. Some of the women formed, like, a line, picking up bricks one by one and then passing them down like this conveyor belt, stacking them away from the ruins. But Adam, when you then see images of this scale of this wreckage, and you realise that this one little picket line of a bunch of women just passing one brick to each other to get it out of the rubble site just makes you realise, like, how fruitless that was.

[00:36:31] [SPEAKER_03] Like, the scale of it, we're talking 110,000 tonnes of this rubble.

[00:36:36] [SPEAKER_01] It's people that just want to feel like they're doing something. And I imagine...

[00:36:39] [SPEAKER_03] Yeah, it's not even about that.

[00:36:40] [SPEAKER_01] It's not about wanting... You have to do something. Yeah, and perhaps initially you don't really know what's the best way to tackle this. But I imagine, like, it's the whole community. It's the town all pulling together at this moment in time. And in some ways that must be for those that are concerned about their children or whatever. In some ways that must be comforting that they're all in it trying to solve this. But I guess they're just trying not to think of the worst.

[00:37:05] [SPEAKER_03] Eventually the miners arrive. They climb up onto the coal mount towards the back of the school. And basically they start frantically digging anywhere that might lead them to an opening into the building. And Adam, it's a literal race against the clock. Because unless a child had somehow been trapped inside an air pocket, they were at serious risk of suffocating. But also, the impact had fractured two large water mains that were now sending thousands of gallons of water pouring into the debris. Turning it into a sloppy quicksand.

[00:37:33] [SPEAKER_01] God, it's always... It just always gets worse, doesn't it?

[00:37:36] [SPEAKER_03] By this point, of course, news had reached Phil's brother, Alan. Who was now running towards Pantaglass School to see if Phil was okay. But the burst water main had formed like a thick slurry of river traveling across the road. On the other side of that road, Alan sees his mum, who had come to obviously see what was happening. She's completely blocked from getting across the road. But when Alan tells her that he didn't know if Phil was okay, she doesn't hesitate. She just literally waged right through that river to reach him on the other end.

[00:38:05] [SPEAKER_03] And that's like mother's protective instinct, right? Like kicking in that moment.

[00:38:09] [SPEAKER_01] Yeah, like I don't think you think, right? You just do.

[00:38:11] [SPEAKER_03] No, you're like, my son's in danger. I need to find him. What neither of them knew, of course, is that Phil wasn't even in the school at that point. Phil is actually buried beneath a wall of debris that has obviously crashed down on top of him at the very edge of the actual site. And honestly, Adam, he is incredibly lucky to have fallen where he did. Because had he landed just a couple of feet further back, nobody would have had any reason to start pulling rubble from that particular spot, as we mentioned.

[00:38:38] [SPEAKER_03] The only reason anyone realized Phil was underneath it was because his feet were just barely poking out.

[00:38:43] [SPEAKER_01] Oh, wow. That's lucky.

[00:38:45] [SPEAKER_03] But of course, nobody could pull him out because he's firmly pinned under this wall. Even worse, Adam, the slurry river caused by the burst water mains was now pouring into the space around Phil.

[00:38:55] [SPEAKER_01] So it is a race against time to get him out.

[00:38:58] [SPEAKER_03] That's it. While the firefighters fought to lift the wall up, another firefighter was trying to fight to keep his head up above water. Eventually, it takes six people to lift the slab high enough for someone to pull Phil free.

[00:39:11] [SPEAKER_01] How high is the water at that point?

[00:39:14] [SPEAKER_03] It's not even about that. It's about where it's floating into, right? So if he's on a little bit of a slope, then it's going to go where the lowest point is. They say that if it was just a few minutes longer, he would have drowned. But had they not spotted him, he would have been gone, right? Yeah. Phil is actually one of the first people to be pulled alive from what looks like literally at this point an impossible rescue site. I cannot stress enough to just take a moment to just Google the wreckage site. It's just gargantuan.

[00:39:43] [SPEAKER_03] It's a huge site and it just makes you think, well, how is anyone going to survive this?

[00:39:48] [SPEAKER_01] But then pulling Phil out, does that give people hope and determination to go, right, we've got one, let's go again?

[00:39:55] [SPEAKER_03] 100%, especially as they start pulling more survivors. Every survivor that gets pulled out is a little bit of hope for the parents that are waiting. But Adam, the second there is someone dead that they pull out, what does that do to the parents that are waiting? So it's like this roller coaster of emotion that you're going through. It's heartbreaking. While all of this is happening, Gerald Tarr, whose house had obviously collapsed in on him, he regains consciousness. The only thing he could hear was basically the sound of rapids as water was rushing in on the site.

[00:40:25] [SPEAKER_03] Part of his bedroom door had crushed down on top of him and it kind of crushed his shoulder. Underneath it, he could hear rescue workers shouting down at him from above. And you remember someone yelling that if they couldn't get him out, that he was going to drown. Oh my God. And he talks about how he tried to claw at the door. He pulled so hard that he could feel his fingernails putting away from his fingers. So that's like desperation in that moment, right? Like knowing that this is a matter of life and death.

[00:40:49] [SPEAKER_01] Yeah. Does it work though?

[00:40:50] [SPEAKER_03] Well, eventually rescuers managed to reach Gerald. They managed to kind of fit a jack, which allows him to kind of raise the door just enough to kind of slip him out. As well as obviously a crushed shoulder. Gerald has a broken pelvis and he suffers like really severe head injuries. Adam, sadly, Buster doesn't make it. He died. But Adam, he's a fucking hero because if Buster hadn't woken him up, Gerald might not have even gotten out of bed, right? If that wall had fallen down on him, he may have died.

[00:41:19] [SPEAKER_01] Yeah. And I guess he was somewhat conscious when this all happened, right? That's right. Yeah.

[00:41:24] [SPEAKER_03] Back in the school, firefighters and miners were slowly inching their way into the buried classroom. Adam, they were effectively tunneling through these rooms. And while they were tunneling, they would routinely come up against like a piece of furniture, like a cabinet or a desk. But of course, you can't just start digging around it because that's just a complete waste of time. So they literally have to smash through the desk or the cabinet that's in their way to allow them to keep going.

[00:41:50] [SPEAKER_03] The harsh reality of that is that by not digging around it, they could be potentially missing someone else who is literally just there. Because either side of these tunnels that they're digging, there could be literally just a person inches away.

[00:42:04] [SPEAKER_00] Yeah.

[00:42:04] [SPEAKER_03] At this point, Jeff Edwards, he is still pinned under his desk. He's obviously face to face with his dead classmates. He starts to hear kind of voices inching closer and closer. And then suddenly he feels like a shovel cut through the slurry and hits him in the shoulder. This causes him to scream. But Adam, it alerts the diggers that he's physically there.

[00:42:25] [SPEAKER_01] I don't know, you must be kind of grateful in a way.

[00:42:27] [SPEAKER_03] Yeah, I'm happy with that. But it's awful to think because you've got to remember, there were kids that were unable to let anyone know that they were there, right? Some of them would have been deceased. So you can imagine like some of these miners would be literally hitting their shovel into an actual body that was on the other side. Or someone who was unable to scream. Some of the survivors actually describe the moment when the rescuers would break through and the light and fresh air would just start flooding in, describing it as like just something out of this world.

[00:42:55] [SPEAKER_03] Which I get, right? Especially if you've been buried under there for two hours.

[00:42:59] [SPEAKER_01] Is that how long at this point?

[00:43:00] [SPEAKER_03] Oh, Jeff Edwards was buried under for two hours. Some people were buried for as long as 10 hours. All day. Some of them people never even were found.

[00:43:09] [SPEAKER_01] I imagine just like, if you're trapped under this slurry, I imagine there's this warmth or whatever the heat building. I imagine it feeling quite stuffy and...

[00:43:17] [SPEAKER_03] Oh yeah, 100%. So you feel like a coolness of the air hitting your face.

[00:43:20] [SPEAKER_01] And that must be so welcoming, yeah.

[00:43:22] [SPEAKER_03] Jeff is rescued around about 11am after being buried for close to two hours. When anyone was pulled out of the rubble, they were then taken to like a triage area on the school playground where they could either get medical assistance or the bodies basically just processed, really, wrapped up in a sheet or a body bag. Which is awful. Like having the two things close together, right? The survivors and obviously the people who died. Eventually rescuers, Adam, they do reach Karen Thomas and the four other children that were trapped in the corridor.

[00:43:51] [SPEAKER_03] Remember, they were still trapped under Nancy Williams, the dinner lady. Karen sustained internal bleeding. And Adam, she's in a very bad way. Paramedics have to basically stabilize her body with bandages from literally her neck to her feet just to keep her still. And then she's taken to hospital via ambulance. At that point, Adam, I don't think she knows that Nancy was dead. She probably just thought that she was unconscious. Yeah.

[00:44:18] [SPEAKER_03] By 11am, news of obviously what had happened had spread nationally. Hundreds of people were now traveling to Aberfan to help emergency services from nearby towns, miners, from other colleagues, but also just ordinary members of the public were just volunteering their time to come down and just do anything they could. At around 11.30am, they'd finally managed to shut off the water from the two burst mains. By this point, Adam, the water had made like large parts of the site just dangerously unstable.

[00:44:45] [SPEAKER_03] The slurry had lost so much of its integrity that it was now turned into like a kind of soup. If there were any pockets beneath the desks or the cabinets where people were trapped or hiding, the water was now just flooding into that. Like it was just not stable enough. Finding survivors basically becomes harder and harder because of it's because A, they'd probably run out of oxygen or they'd end up being buried in the soup.

[00:45:09] [SPEAKER_01] I guess you just think if it wasn't for the water, would this have, I don't know, made it?

[00:45:14] [SPEAKER_03] So many circumstances that you would say if this hadn't happened, would things have ended differently?

[00:45:19] [SPEAKER_01] Yeah. The sequence of events for this to happen, I guess you just couldn't really predict it or yeah. Yeah.

[00:45:25] [SPEAKER_03] It's difficult to know what to say when we're going through this, but these are the actual lived realities of some of these people that live through this. And it's just heartbreaking. I don't think I would be able to cope as well as some of these kids have coped, especially years later when we hear about what happened to Phil after he got rescued. Like I would just be broken.

[00:45:43] [SPEAKER_00] Yeah.

[00:45:43] [SPEAKER_03] Early on, rescuers would follow basically the faint screams and cries. But Adam, once the people nearest the back had been reached, any remaining sounds from deep inside were basically being dampened by the surrounding waste that was impacting them. So you couldn't really hear it. It's like being in the studio where kind of any noise that you make gets absorbed by the acoustic panels. That's essentially what the waste was acting like. So you could be screaming as loud as you could, but it was just being absorbed into the waste.

[00:46:12] [SPEAKER_03] And no one's going to be able to hear you or know exactly where you are. That's right. To deal with this, the miners came up with the system that they would basically move as much waste as they could for a few minutes. And then suddenly someone would blow a whistle and then the entire site would just completely stop like hundreds of people, including machinery, everything. And then they would just listen for even the faintest sound coming from beneath the rubble. If they heard anything, that told them obviously where they needed to keep digging.

[00:46:40] [SPEAKER_03] But if they didn't, then just the digging would then start again. So it was really effective because through that, as they inch closer and closer in, they could then start to hear some of the screens that were coming from within the school.

[00:46:51] [SPEAKER_01] And so when they do hear something, is it a case of I found someone, no one else like dig or whatever. Let's just get this person out or whatever.

[00:46:58] [SPEAKER_03] Possibly. Yes, that's right. And then they would dig again. So they had all these different teams digging, but that's essentially how they had it. Because remember, it's like finding a needle in the haystack. Where do you dig when you have this three-dimensional room, this classroom? Like you could be digging up, you could be digging down, you could be digging. Where do you dig?

[00:47:14] [SPEAKER_01] It's amazing when I sometimes think that humans are put under that pressure, what they can do quite quickly to take control the best they can of the situation.

[00:47:24] [SPEAKER_03] Humans are amazing in that sense. Yeah. Adam, eventually most of the children being pulled out were... Already dead. Because I guess they'd been buried for so long that they suffocated or they'd end up drowning or... Being crushed. Or being crushed, yeah. Adam, many of them were still at their desks. Like the fog had given them very little time to react. But the deeper the rescuers got into the school, also the slower the work became.

[00:47:49] [SPEAKER_03] Like you couldn't just dump the waste to the side because that might be dumping it near where another child might be trapped just inches away. So every shovel of debris had to be carried back and dumped somewhere clear of the rescue site. But even then it was still harder because every time you cleared a small section, debris from above would just slide down and fill the space that you'd already dug.

[00:48:10] [SPEAKER_01] It's like quicksand almost.

[00:48:12] [SPEAKER_03] You could literally dig two feet of ground and then lose three. It was just, it felt almost pointless. A volunteer named Alan, he talks about how while he was digging, he came across two little girls that were folded over their desks. And he says one of them had a blonde ponytail just like his four-year-old daughter. And for him, that was it. He just broke down. And Alan says that his team dug for 10 hours and all they managed to recover were four small girls and their teacher.

[00:48:40] [SPEAKER_03] That is just how fruitless what they were doing felt because it was literally like digging for a needle in a haystack. Because how do you know where to dig, right?

[00:48:50] [SPEAKER_01] Yeah. But then I guess it's one of those, look, they did take part and they did recover bodies at least that can give the parents some comfort.

[00:48:59] [SPEAKER_03] Yeah. But you also got to think about all the guilt that's wrapped up in that as well. Now, digging for 10 hours, you're probably so exhausted that this feeling that if you stopped, could that time where you weren't digging, could you have found someone? Do you know what I mean? So a lot of these people, these volunteers that are digging, trying to find these bodies, they're also dealing with that lifelong guilt of, well, what if, right?

[00:49:21] [SPEAKER_01] And when do you stop? When do you call it a day? Once if you stayed for another hour. Yeah.

[00:49:26] [SPEAKER_03] Meanwhile, obviously outside the school, parents are literally just waiting for any news that their child was okay. And honestly reading about this, there's almost something really unbearable about the way it unfolded because waiting becomes its own sort of torment for these parents. The cycle of dread and hope. Every time a child would be carried out alive, somewhere in that crowd, a mother or a father would break down with relief.

[00:49:49] [SPEAKER_03] Which in effect, that gives everyone else this insane level of hope that their child would then be next. But then Adam, another child would be brought out and this time they wouldn't be alive. And so you would then kind of watch a whole another set of parents collapse. And that would then just crush everyone else's hope. Thinking like, well, if they're now finding dead people, then my child's going to be next and they could likely be dead.

[00:50:12] [SPEAKER_01] It must feel like a roulette almost.

[00:50:15] [SPEAKER_03] With every rescue, it became this horrifying cycle where people were trapped between hope and dread. It's just heartbreaking.

[00:50:22] [SPEAKER_01] I'm guessing the longer the operation goes on, it's less likely to find people alive.

[00:50:28] [SPEAKER_03] Marilyn Brown was one of those parents desperately waiting to hear whether or not her daughter Janet had been rescued. Her husband, Bernard, had literally been digging all day, Adam. But eventually he reaches a point where he physically cannot continue. At that point, they still hadn't found Janet. All he could do was just wait. Which again in itself, like I said, is its own sort of torment, right? If it wasn't for my body giving up on me, I would still be able to dig.

[00:50:55] [SPEAKER_03] And so that's probably something that he lived with for the rest of his life, knowing that he had to stop digging. Yeah. So together, Marilyn and Bernard, all they could do is just watch children be pulled out of the rubble. Like Marilyn got to the point where she can't face finding out whether or not any of the bodies or any of the children had been pulled out were Janet. And so each time she would send Bernard to go and check. When she sent Bernard to look at the last collection of kids that had been brought out, Bernard came back and basically he had tears in his eyes.

[00:51:25] [SPEAKER_03] Marilyn knew exactly what that meant. But still, she asked him hopefully whether or not Janet was okay.

[00:51:32] [SPEAKER_01] I think until you hear those words, you just, you can see all the signs, I think, in that situation. And know in like in your heart what's happened. But I feel like you need someone to tell it to you before you can accept it.

[00:51:46] [SPEAKER_03] And so I guess for Bernard, a part of him believed that if he hadn't been forced to stop, he might have been the one to find her, right? So I can't imagine the guilt that he was left with or because basically his body just simply gave out. Later, when Marilyn wanted to see Janet's body, Bernard insisted that she didn't. All he told her was that Janet just had a small mark on her head and that she just looked like she was sleeping. Which I think for Marilyn's own sanity, I guess that's the thing that she accepted.

[00:52:15] [SPEAKER_03] But to be told to not go and see her, I think that told a very different story about how horrific Janet's injuries may have been.

[00:52:22] [SPEAKER_01] Yeah. Do you think he was trying to shield her from...

[00:52:25] [SPEAKER_03] 100%. Oh yeah, I think so. Because otherwise, if she did look like she was sleeping, I don't see any reason why he wouldn't afford Marilyn the opportunity to go and see her. But he's told her not to.

[00:52:38] [SPEAKER_01] Yeah, that's true. You think, God, what if that's just Janet, what about the other kids?

[00:52:44] [SPEAKER_03] Yeah, that's right. And so Adam, at the end of that first day, 60 bodies had been pulled from the school. They'd found no more survivors after that. Eventually, 144 people were confirmed dead. 28 of those were adults and 116 of those were children. Among them was, of course, headmistress Anne Jennings, whose body was literally the last to be recovered by rescuers. Which is strangely symbolic in a kind of way. It's almost like the captain going down with a ship.

[00:53:13] [SPEAKER_01] That was just what I was thinking. Yeah, there must be some weird coincidence that it happened like that.

[00:53:18] [SPEAKER_03] And that's the thing. Anne was incredibly well-respected and loved by the children and also throughout the community. And although she had lived a full adult life, like I believe at that point she was into her 60s, maybe 70s, some of the teachers who died, just like the children, had literally their whole lives ahead of them. Like had barely begun. And Mrs. Marge Rees, she was only 22, she'd only just been married that summer. And Hetty talks about how that week she'd been talking about them starting her own family.

[00:53:48] [SPEAKER_03] Of course, while the people of Aberfan were still trying to understand the scale of what they had lost, the rest of Britain were also now beginning to see it. Like the tragedy became this international story with all these vivid images of these miners digging through the rubble, parents literally waiting outside the chapel for news, and of course, bodies being carried from the school. And the response was enormous, like complete strangers were coming to this village to help these people that they didn't even know,

[00:54:15] [SPEAKER_03] which is deeply reassuring for humanity's capacity for compassion.

[00:54:21] [SPEAKER_01] I think because the school is at the centre of this tragedy as well, it's just, I think any...

[00:54:27] [SPEAKER_03] Anything that involves children is going to attract a lot of community support.

[00:54:34] [SPEAKER_01] Yeah, absolutely.

[00:54:35] [SPEAKER_03] On the day of the disaster, the mayor launches the Aberfan Disaster Fund simply to handle all the donations that were beginning to flood in. Not just from across Britain, but literally from around the world. Like people literally sent anything they could. They were receiving envelopes, Adam, with loose change inside them, just a few pennies. That's all they could afford. But they felt that obviously the community of Aberfan needed more. By the time the fund closes, they'd received nearly 88,000 separate donations, which raised around £1.75 million,

[00:55:05] [SPEAKER_03] which Adam is the equivalent to £30 million today. It's huge.

[00:55:09] [SPEAKER_00] Yeah, wow.

[00:55:10] [SPEAKER_03] Just six days later, on the 27th of October, at the van, they began burying the dead. The funerals drew tens of thousands of people. And in that first procession, 81 children and one adult were laid to rest in these two really long communal graves.

[00:55:28] [SPEAKER_01] Is it just one big grave or an individual?

[00:55:32] [SPEAKER_03] That's right. So it's just two big massive graves that they dug and they just laid the coffins side by side. But Adam, today, it is just beautiful. The graves are all marked with two rows of these stunning marble arches, each with a stone bearing one of the victims' names. And it's the funeral footage that really gets me because when you see the cemetery from a distance, these two really long rows of these graves in these arches just suddenly shows you the scale of the loss. And that was only 81 of them.

[00:56:01] [SPEAKER_03] It wasn't all of the kids. So we also need to talk about the Queen for a second. Of course, if you watch the third season of The Crown, you'll probably remember them covering Aberfan in one of the episodes and how the Queen obviously came under a ton of scrutiny for not visiting in the immediate aftermath.

[00:56:17] [SPEAKER_01] I can't remember. Why did she come under such scrutiny? Is it because the royal family at the time weren't necessarily in the sort of most favourable position within the public?

[00:56:26] [SPEAKER_03] No, I think this is one of the things that tipped them over into that. The Queen obviously has a very famous reputation of coming across quite cold, especially when it comes to showing emotion in public.

[00:56:37] [SPEAKER_00] Yeah.

[00:56:38] [SPEAKER_03] And I was kind of in two minds about whether or not to include the controversy surrounding the Queen only because I wanted to tell the story of Aberfan rather than spending too much time on, like, what was happening around it. But also, for the families of Aberfan, I honestly don't think they cared either way, especially considering what they were already dealing with.

[00:56:55] [SPEAKER_01] Yeah, like for some, maybe it's comforting. But yeah, they've probably got other things on their mind.

[00:56:59] [SPEAKER_03] But basically, in the aftermath of the disaster, the Prime Minister Harold Wilson at the time, he ended up visiting Aberfan. And it was this that kind of made the wider public start questioning why the Queen hadn't done the same thing. However, the palace did send a representative in Lord Snowden, that's the Queen's brother-in-law. But this visit didn't attract nearly as much media attention.

[00:57:22] [SPEAKER_01] I guess it's almost like, why are you sending him? Why are you not visiting yourself? This is actually like a UK disaster.

[00:57:29] [SPEAKER_03] The thing is, though, they sent Lord Snowden for that very reason, because they knew that it wouldn't attract too much media attention. But the Queen's concern was that a visit from her would inevitably become a major event in itself. Like, it would require security, press, officials, crowds would come and gather as well. All of that would have to be managed at the time when rescuers were still desperately trying to reach the children beneath the rubble.

[00:57:52] [SPEAKER_01] Yeah, like, they're not going to stop to shake her hand.

[00:57:56] [SPEAKER_03] And so her thinking was that was the most respectful thing she could do in those first few days, was to basically just stay away and not risk becoming a distraction from the rescue efforts. But of course, in the media, this looks extraordinarily bad, especially when the coverage is contrast between images of miners digging through the rubble, literally with their bare hands in some cases, with footage of Buckingham Palace suggesting that the Queen is sitting comfortably inside.

[00:58:21] [SPEAKER_01] That's one of those things where it's almost like she's damned if she does, damned if she doesn't, because actually, now you explain it, it makes, like, logical sense. She could come visit in a week or whatever or something like that to pay her respects.

[00:58:34] [SPEAKER_03] And the thing is, this is such a big story. But again, I don't think that the people of Aberfan even cared, right? Eventually, though, the Queen and Philip, they do visit on the 29th of October. It's like eight days later or something. But years later, she apparently said that delaying her visit was one of the greatest regrets of her reign, which I'm not sure how to take because I agree that it wasn't appropriate for her to go and visit Aberfan. So I'm in two minds what she's regretting exactly.

[00:59:03] [SPEAKER_03] Was it not visiting sooner or was it the damage that the decision did to her reputation?

[00:59:08] [SPEAKER_01] Oh, I see. Yeah. I don't know. I mean, she did visit. She did. Maybe she, like, what would she have done? She, like, if she did get there sooner?

[00:59:16] [SPEAKER_03] If she did get there sooner, she would have caused a distraction.

[00:59:19] [SPEAKER_01] Yeah, like, she's just going to tell people, I'm sorry, or we're thinking of you. That's not what they need at that point.

[00:59:25] [SPEAKER_03] Yeah. Her visit does end up being a massive thing. She goes and does some visits with some of the families personally. She meets some of the crowd. They give her flowers and all that stuff. But I'm not really going to go into it because I didn't really think it was that important. However, following the disaster, the natural thing that people wanted to know was who was responsible for this. And honestly, Adam, the answer is not complicated. It's the National Cold War, quite frankly. In the aftermath, the government established a tribunal which heard from 136 witnesses

[00:59:54] [SPEAKER_03] that reviewed a huge amount of evidence showing that actually the NCB had been aware of the risks of dumping waste on their mountainside the whole time, which, I mean, is not a surprise to us because we already covered some of that.

[01:00:06] [SPEAKER_01] Yeah. And the fact that they had some like near misses beforehand. Exactly.

[01:00:09] [SPEAKER_03] The report was eventually published in August of 1967 and basically unanimously found that based on the NCB's conduct, the disaster could and should have been prevented.

[01:00:22] [SPEAKER_01] Yeah. And I guess like no one would have thought, OK, this is going to be as severe as this. But they knew that the landslide was possible. Why did you just not either look for new land or make sure there was security or measures in place to make sure it doesn't slip down the mountain?

[01:00:37] [SPEAKER_03] Exactly. Yeah. However, in the lead up to the report's findings, the NCB always maintained that Aberfan was an unforeseeable natural event, blaming the unprecedented amount of rain that had fallen in the weeks beforehand. But at the tribunal, they found that simply wasn't true because the report showed that tip seven had, of course, been deliberately built on a set of natural springs.

[01:01:02] [SPEAKER_03] And before settling on that particular site, the NCB would have had access to ordinate survey maps showing that the springs existed and those maps were readily available. So they should have had access to them. And so it was very likely that the NCB had seen them. And yet they still chose to put tip seven where tip seven was. And it's probably because they probably had kind of tram rails very close to the site anyway.

[01:01:29] [SPEAKER_03] They're like, we just need to build like another 20 meters or 30 meters of railway track to reach the site rather than going, is this actually the best site?

[01:01:36] [SPEAKER_01] Yeah. So almost lazy, money saving, all that sort of stuff.

[01:01:41] [SPEAKER_03] I think money and corporate greed is at the center of this for sure. But here's the thing though, like they denied that they knew anything about the maps. But the thing is that the people of Aberfan knew about those springs for literally generations. Like their parents were swimming in those springs and their parents' parents were swimming in those springs.

[01:02:00] [SPEAKER_01] I'm surprised, although, you know, it was 60 years ago that they were allowed to build on springs. Like surely they not, you know, they should be protected. It's natural water.

[01:02:09] [SPEAKER_03] Well, the fact that they're mentioning that they should have known about the springs would suggest that they should have known it was a danger, right?

[01:02:15] [SPEAKER_01] And also it's like a natural spring. Like why would you want to put coal on there?

[01:02:20] [SPEAKER_03] Sure, true, true. Because again, that water's got to flow somewhere, right? So where's it going to go? It's just going to be saturated with all this coal waste and it's going to go into the river. Yeah. But also the report points to remember the slips in 1944 and 1963. Yet in the lead up to the report, the NCB denied knowing anything about those slips. They denied them.

[01:02:41] [SPEAKER_01] But it was their slips, was it not?

[01:02:43] [SPEAKER_03] Yeah. The tribunal also heard from the local councillors and they reviewed all the documentation proving that they had already raised concerns after those slips only for the NCB to basically threaten the mine with closure if the councillors continue to cause a fuss. Exactly. The inquiry also found that basic checks around drainage and stability weren't being done. The NCB were also putting people in charge of jobs that they weren't qualified to perform.

[01:03:11] [SPEAKER_03] So they were like, I don't know, you're an administrator, you can just go do the job of an engineer or whatever, go assess the site. They weren't putting the right people in the right jobs.

[01:03:19] [SPEAKER_01] And okay, apart from the people high up, those that worked for the NCB that are perhaps lower down your everyday man, they must have felt some level of guilt about this, right?

[01:03:29] [SPEAKER_03] Oh, Adam, you've got to remember, a lot of these people that worked with this mine are Aberfan villagers. Exactly.

[01:03:34] [SPEAKER_01] It's their children. It's their children.

[01:03:37] [SPEAKER_03] That's the thing that makes us all come crumbling down. But the point is, is that the report doesn't point the finger at any one person. Instead, it found that the entire NCB system was at fault. Cost cutting that it started basically from World War I and it hardened over the decades into like a normal way of working. But also the actions of the NCB chairman, Lord Rubens, really doesn't look good in all of this.

[01:04:01] [SPEAKER_03] Apparently, while the disaster was unfolding, rather than going to Aberfan to at least, he might not necessarily need to like help in the rescue effort. He just needs to be there like it's his coal mine that's done this. He decided to intend his formal installation as chancellor of the University of Surrey instead. So he knew this was happening. He's like, well, I've got an appointment and they're honoring me. So I'm just going to go.

[01:04:25] [SPEAKER_01] So a piece of scum.

[01:04:26] [SPEAKER_03] Absolutely. So he was getting a promotion. He didn't want to miss it, basically. When he finally does show up, he basically spends his time telling reporters that the disaster had been caused by a spring inside the tip that nobody could have possibly known about. But of course, the people of Aberfan already knew that wasn't true. So as pressure from the investigation mounted, the tribunal started interviewing employees from the mine. Obviously, he couldn't get them to keep their story straight. And most of them refused to lie.

[01:04:55] [SPEAKER_03] After all, remember, it's their family members. It's their community members that were affected. And so by day 65 of the investigation, Rubin starts slowly backtracking and he acknowledges that actually the geological conditions could have been recognized in advance. In the end, the National Call Board was found responsible. However, not a single person was prosecuted.

[01:05:17] [SPEAKER_01] So what? They just got fined or?

[01:05:20] [SPEAKER_03] Not even that. Like the attorney general said that there wasn't enough evidence to justify criminal proceedings, which is bollocks. The actual problem is that the law in England at the time wasn't set up to easily prosecute a large organization for manslaughter. The law needs prosecutors to be able to attach a guilty state of mind to a particular individual. And because, of course, it was a systemic failure, there was no single person that they could criminally hold accountable.

[01:05:48] [SPEAKER_03] Even though Rubin was the chairman of the NCB and ultimately the guy at the top calling the shots.

[01:05:54] [SPEAKER_01] And responsible. Yeah.

[01:05:55] [SPEAKER_03] In the aftermath, Lord Rubin's, he does offer to resign, but the minister of power, Richard Marsh, refuses to accept it. This guy's like, you've got nothing to worry about. No one's found you criminally responsible. You should keep your job. So it's like, oh, we're too big rich guys. Let's scratch each other's back.

[01:06:12] [SPEAKER_01] I thought it was more of a case of you're not getting out of it this easy. No, no, no. You need to right the wrong.

[01:06:16] [SPEAKER_03] The right thing for him to have done was to resign. He should have insisted. But no, he was like getting this Lord Marsh guy to say, no, no, you don't need to resign. He's like affirmations, like reassurance.

[01:06:26] [SPEAKER_01] You're fine. You're fine. Continue taking your big paycheck.

[01:06:29] [SPEAKER_03] Adam, this caused so much outrage across the UK that MPs debated the issue in Parliament. Where these fuckers genuinely argued that being publicly named and shamed by the tribunal was punishment enough. No, no, it's not. Try telling that to the hundreds of families who had just lost a child. It's disgusting. Following the tribunal, the Cold War was ordered to compensate the affected families. Adam, its first offer was 50 quid.

[01:06:59] [SPEAKER_01] I mean, even in money back then, that doesn't seem anywhere near enough.

[01:07:03] [SPEAKER_03] It's equivalent of 800 quid. Isn't that awful? Obviously, nobody accepted and eventually it was increased to 500 pounds, which is equivalent to 8,000 pounds today, which is nuts considering the public had donated the equivalent close to 30 million pounds because they believe the families in the village would need support for the rest of their lives. And all the Cold War can come up with is epoxy 500 pounds. It's horrendous. That is shocking.

[01:07:29] [SPEAKER_03] However, the Cold War, they also make it very difficult for any of the families to access that money needlessly slow. They thought that they could potentially save some money by convincing the trust in charge of distributing that money to evaluate each family member and their relationship to the victim. What does that mean? Simple. Ask the parents how close they actually were to their dead child. I'm not even joking. Like, how naughty was Lucy? Did you like her very much?

[01:07:59] [SPEAKER_03] Did she ever steal your makeup without you knowing? It's fucking wild.

[01:08:03] [SPEAKER_01] I am really shocked by that. Do you have any other children? Oh, you've got two more. Oh, that's okay then. You don't need this money.

[01:08:10] [SPEAKER_03] Exactly. You've got other children. Like, surely your love must have been spread across the three of them, right?

[01:08:14] [SPEAKER_01] That is disgusting.

[01:08:15] [SPEAKER_03] It's awful. Thankfully, the trustees, they're like, lol, no, that's disgusting. And Adam, that's not even the worst part. Like, the people of Abafan, of course, they wanted the remaining tips removed from the mountain because, of course, they didn't want to be reminded every single day of the pain that these things had caused. And the worry that could have happened again. Exactly. But the NCB said it was too expensive. In the end, the government ordered the tips to be removed, but allowed the NCB to use the

[01:08:44] [SPEAKER_03] equivalent of £2.5 million from the publicly donated money in the Abafan fund to pay for it. So basically, the public money of people who had donated their change from down the side of the sofa, everything they could muster, was used to pay for the removal of the NCB's waste tips that caused this in the first place.

[01:09:05] [SPEAKER_01] I'm not really liking the NCB right now.

[01:09:08] [SPEAKER_03] So as you can imagine, Adam, surviving Abafan did not mean the disaster was over. When Phil Thomas was rescued. His injuries were really horrific. His ear was almost completely torn off and the wall had fallen and crushed one of his hands. Doctors were able to save his ear, but they had to amputate three of his fingers. Phil talks about the moment that he realized that this had happened to him. He says that the nurses were lovely and reassuring, telling him that everything was fine.

[01:09:36] [SPEAKER_03] But then when they came to change his bandages, that was the first time that he probably saw his hand. And he says he just cried.

[01:09:42] [SPEAKER_01] He's a little boy. Yeah.

[01:09:43] [SPEAKER_03] And he's just got to deal with that. He says that when his brother Alan came to visit him in hospital, the last time that he had seen Phil was as Phil and Karen had disappeared into the fog that morning as they spit off. The first thing Phil did was show Alan his hand. Like he's quite resilient little boy. He had come to terms with it. But like Alan was like, that's all right. That's not a problem. And it's just because Alan was just grateful that they were together again.

[01:10:09] [SPEAKER_01] Yeah, of course. Yeah. Like it could have been a lot worse.

[01:10:12] [SPEAKER_03] And decades later, reflecting on losing his fingers, Phil says, I wouldn't have it any other way. In fact, he is. I have no idea what I'd do if I had 10 of him. In the documentary, you see footage of him like playing with his best mate, Robert. They're firing a slingshot as if nothing is wrong. But you just see his like little, those little dinosaur fingers just grabbing and flicking it. It's just kids are just so resilient. And this is a perfect reminder of that.

[01:10:38] [SPEAKER_01] Yeah. He's got a lifetime to get used to that and he won't know anything different.

[01:10:42] [SPEAKER_03] Yeah, that's it. As for Gerard Tarr, like I said, he had a broken pelvis and he had crushed his shoulder. When Shirley first saw him on hospital, he describes how she broke down in the state that he was in. But Gerard was like, Shirley, at least I'm alive. Like, which is fair. Like they'd lost their entire street. They'd been wiped out. Think of all the children that lost their lives as well. Gerard and Shirley, they do eventually go off and have their own child. But having their own child only reminded him every day of the children who had died that day.

[01:11:12] [SPEAKER_03] So I know they weren't connected, but he would look at his child and just go.

[01:11:16] [SPEAKER_01] I guess they're like, what must the other parents be going through?

[01:11:19] [SPEAKER_03] That's right. Which is rough. He says if going through the disaster again meant he could save just one of them, he would do it a dozen times over. Karen Thomas, she also survived, but she lost a kidney, which is okay. She's got two. But she says that she never forgot that Nancy Williams had given her life to save hers. Jeff Edwards, he survives physically, but he says the memory of his dead classmate never leaves him. Four years afterwards, he just suffers recurring nightmares where he would always see her face.

[01:11:48] [SPEAKER_03] Which is really awful. Jeff actually goes on to become the mayor of Aberfan. Really? Yeah. He's a centenary mayor, which I don't know what that means. Does it mean after the hundred years of Aberfan being Aberfan that they made him like a ceremonial mayor? I'm not sure how it works. Does he get to do mayor duties? I think so. He uses his position as a respected figure in the community and as a survivor to go off and tell new generations about what had happened.

[01:12:17] [SPEAKER_03] And the stark reality is that out of his class of 34, Jeff was only one of four survivors. Wow. After the disaster, it was agreed that everyone should try and get back to a sense of normality as quickly as possible. The following year, they set up a temporary school in the local village club. Hetty Williams says on their first day back, after so long away, their children were really scared. Like they had been for months. They've been living in this fear of what had happened.

[01:12:43] [SPEAKER_03] And now knowing that they had to go back to school, like it's just going to open up old wounds for them. But she says that within hours, you could see the anxiety and the fear started to lift it in real time as like high fives and kind of hugs have been handed out. But it's so sad to think that for months, they'd all be living in this fear about going back to school. But the second they're back together, that's when those wounds start to heal. I guess, I don't know.

[01:13:07] [SPEAKER_01] Is it like the anxiety and the dread of going back and what it's going to be like?

[01:13:11] [SPEAKER_03] Oh, this is not as bad as I thought it was going to be. Yeah, like I'm with my best mate again.

[01:13:15] [SPEAKER_01] And just, yeah, maybe the kids needed their own time to recover, but like just getting the kids back together in some capacity.

[01:13:22] [SPEAKER_03] Yeah, that's it. Of course, this drastically affects the wider community as well. And part of that was because there was a real reluctance to talk about what had happened. There was the sense of guilt around surviving when so many people had died. One survivor who just so happens to also be named Janet said that her parents like discouraged her from mentioning that she was a survivor. And it all came from a place of compassion, but they didn't want their child's survival to reopen somebody else's grief. So that's only going to delay your healing.

[01:13:52] [SPEAKER_03] Do you know what I mean? So people became nervous about talking openly about what they've been through. Eventually, Mary Morse, remember, she was the woman passing bricks hand to hand to clear the debris. She recognized how important talking could be during the healing process. And she set up this support network where people could meet and come together to talk openly about what had happened. She like de-stigmatized a lot of it. And just to show you how deep the scar of Abfan ran, those meetings, Adam, still happen today. Really?

[01:14:21] [SPEAKER_01] Yeah. With the survivors?

[01:14:22] [SPEAKER_03] With the survivors and the people affected because a lot of those people will still be alive. As for Marilyn Brown, losing Janet, of course, was devastating. She says it really helps to surround herself with pictures of Janet. And so before she leaves the house or goes to bed at night, one of the last things she does is gently caress Janet's face in one of the photographs. And Marilyn, like I imagine every parent would, often wonders what kind of woman Janet would have grown up to be.

[01:14:50] [SPEAKER_03] She thinks Janet would have obviously been incredibly strong because before the disaster, she'd already survived two major operations as a baby and a young toddler. And then at 10 years old, she was sent to school and killed beneath essentially a mountain of coal. And her question was like, why did she come through all of that only for this to happen to her when she was 10?

[01:15:10] [SPEAKER_01] It's one of those things like, it doesn't matter really what you've been through. It's not like good luck or anything. It's just, it's just life.

[01:15:17] [SPEAKER_03] That's right. So Pantglas School was of course never rebuilt in its original site. Instead, Adam, it was converted into a memorial garden with a playground on one side. So children's laughter could always be a permanent feature of the area. And the memorial itself is so well done. Its layout traces the actual school foundations. So you can actually step into them as if like you were stepping into one of the classrooms.

[01:15:42] [SPEAKER_01] So it's like a series of gardens based and they represent like different rooms?

[01:15:46] [SPEAKER_03] Yeah, I think the ruins of the walls are still up. So you could like navigate around and you'll be like in standard one and then standard two and you could be in the standard that maybe your child was in. It makes it really easy for you to kind of visualize where the chalkboard would have been or where your child might have been sitting. So it gives you that more intimate kind of experience when you're sitting within those gardens. Wow. So for visitors, it's a memorial to one of the biggest disasters in British history.

[01:16:13] [SPEAKER_03] But to the survivors and their families, they get to go inside and be able to visualize the space that their children would have been in on a day to day basis. Not necessarily the day obviously that this happened, but when they were young and when they were happy and carefree. It's really lovely. But Adam, that is the story of the Aberfan disaster of 1966.

[01:16:32] [SPEAKER_01] I knew the story. I didn't know just how dirty the company was behind it really. And also just the stories, the personal stories. I think that was a really good way to approach it is to try and understand what their life was like or their daily life going about their normal day that day.

[01:16:49] [SPEAKER_03] How ordinary it was from the very start of the day, the little fights between mum and daughters. That is a small moment that Janet's mum, Marilyn, will carry with her for the rest of her life. That little bit of regret. But it's still, it's a normal thing that would have happened normally on any other day regardless.

[01:17:05] [SPEAKER_01] Yeah. Whether this happened or not. And then I think it's just a series of bad or really unfortunate and sad events. Obviously negligence by the company, but like the fact there was fog that day. So people couldn't see what was going on.

[01:17:18] [SPEAKER_03] The fact that they didn't have assembly that day.

[01:17:20] [SPEAKER_01] Yeah.

[01:17:21] [SPEAKER_03] But I did really want to tell in honor of the 60th anniversary, the story through some of the survivors. Of course there's many more, but if you want to find out more, I definitely watch the BBC documentary, which is still on YouTube called Surviving Aberfan, where they don't really focus too much on what went wrong. So a lot of that stuff I've had to supplement into it just to give you an understanding of what actually happened in the story. But it really follows some of the events from the actual survivors.

[01:17:47] [SPEAKER_03] What like that day was like going to school, fighting with their mom and dad, going to go get their dinner money. It's sad.

[01:17:55] [SPEAKER_01] And I guess a lot of the survivors, the kids, they're going to be in their 60s, 70s now. Whereas I guess the parents of the kids, they might have passed by now, but you still got the survivors of the actual event.

[01:18:07] [SPEAKER_03] I think Janet's mom, Marilyn, she's still around. Yeah. She's in the documentary as well. But yeah, she's had a lifetime of obviously having to deal with that grief. Yeah. But yeah, I didn't really know too much about this disaster. I mean, I'm not English. I am half Italian, half South African.

[01:18:23] [SPEAKER_01] So you lead us to believe.

[01:18:25] Yeah.

[01:18:26] [SPEAKER_03] But all I knew about it was from season three of The Crown, where they briefly mentioned it, but mostly focused on the Queen. But yeah, do you fancy running the outro for this week?

[01:18:35] [SPEAKER_01] Let's run the outro.

[01:18:36] [SPEAKER_03] And that brings us to the end of another fascinating foray into the compendium and assembly of fascinating things. We hope you enjoyed the ride as much as we did.

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[01:18:55] [SPEAKER_03] And for our dedicated freaks out there, don't forget that next week's episode is already waiting for you on our Patreon. And as always, it is completely free to access.

[01:19:03] [SPEAKER_01] And if you want even more, then you can join our certified freaks tier to unlock the entire archive. You get to delve into exclusive content and get a sneak peek of what's coming next.

[01:19:13] [SPEAKER_03] We drop new episodes every Tuesday. And until then, remember, statistics count the dead, but the stories restore their lives. We'll see you next time.

[01:19:22] [SPEAKER_01] See ya.