Aberfan Disaster Memorial Garden
A few weeks ago we were bowling down the A470 through South Wales when we passed a local signpost to Aberfan. It had probably been 40 years since I had last visited the village so we duly turned off and followed the winding road back up the valley, through a number of old Welsh mining villages, and eventually found the Aberfan memorial garden and playground, built on the site of Penglas School, where 116 children and five teachers lost their lives on the day before half term, October 21st, 1966.
I guess everyone who is old enough remembers where they were on that day. I was eight years old and living in Ammanford, an anthracite coal mining town in the Amman Valley, a couple of valleys to the west of Aberfan which is in the Taff Valley. I don’t remember our teachers mentioning what had happened that day but I certainly remember the shock of my parents and the mining customers in Dad’s newsagent shop when I got home, everyone was talking about it. Most of the children who had died that day were about my age. We watched the disaster story unfold and the almost-futile efforts of the miners and hundreds of volunteers to rescue their children from the slurry on our black and white TV in the living room behind the shop. Following three weeks of heavy rain a catastrophic collapse of a colliery spoil tip above the Welsh village had caused part of it to slide down the mountain at 9.15am that morning, just as the school had finished morning assembly, burying the children and 28 adults alive as it engulfed the junior school and other buildings in its path.
The memorial garden is a pleasant place with a simple black marble memorial stone set into the wall at its entrance. It was quiet and peaceful on that afternoon and we wandered along its paths and touched some of the original school walls in silent commemoration. We walked through the playground and up the path behind the garden where we found a small, council-erected sign briefly explaining what had happened. Looking behind us the tips had been taken away and the whole area is landscaped behind a road that runs above the garden. A terrace of houses in front of the Garden look in-keeping and there was nothing otherwise out of the ordinary on this disaster site of 50 years ago. I knew a disaster fund had been set up by the local Myrthyr Tydfil mayor and that many thousands of donations had been made from all over the world. From the look of things one might think all was well and the villagers left in peace to continue to grieve their huge loss. We decided not to visit the cemetery where the children were buried and drove slowly away, through the streets of Aberfan and its sister village, Merthyr Vale, back onto the A470 and home.
I was a little surprised that we had only found the one sign at the site explaining what had happened, and nothing in the garden itself, so when we got home I looked up the Aberfan Disaster and learned there is a HUGE story behind the ‘what happened next’, almost none of which I knew….
