Aberfan

Yes, I remember my mum crying at the News. I must have been 7, too.

It was a terrible tragedy.

I was a teenager and cried buckets. I remember watching the dreadful scenes of people desperately searching through the rubble and sludgy coal on our little black and white telly, yesterday I saw a survivor interviewed who was 15 and had left school, but his younger brother was in school that day and was handed his dead brothers body. I just don’t know how you move past that. So was crying buckets again. Back then my old mums eyes were red for days as she then spoke of the terrible tragedy with friends and neighbours. And even my old dad got something in his eye and a frog in his throat.

It affected me terribly as it affected the whole Nation. We wanted to dig out the children ourselves.

I remember my mum crying twice at news items, the assassination of President Kennedy and Aberfan, the sheer magnitude of all those dead children. It shouldn't have happened a terrible tragedy.

On GN the subject of Aberfan is synonymous with AnnieBach I think she mentioned she knew Aberfan well, I haven't seen her posting lately, I do hope she's ok.

I was a student at Training College, on teaching practice, and remember the Headteacher conducting a very moving assembly for the assembled infants. We were in shock that such a terrible thing could happen.

I remember it very well. I was in my mid-twenties, a tutor in a university hall of residence. I went into the Senior Common Room, and a Dutch girl there was obviously very upset. She had been listening to the radio. She didn’t speak very much English, and struggled to explain to me what had happened. It was a while before I fully grasped it. We didn’t have television, so it was only later that I saw footage of the tragedy.

I remember it well. We had a special assembly at school. The teachers were all upset. Quite scary for us children somehow. We then had a big fundraising drive to raise money to re equip the new school library in Aberfan.

I’d just turned 8 and I remember watching it on the news . So sad 💐

I remember being deeply saddened by the fact that this was not a natural disaster. It could have been avoided if proper precautions had been taken and the colliery spoil tip had not been sited on a hill, allowed to become over 100 feet high and built over a spring. Heavy rain was what finally caused the tip to slide down the hill onto the school below.

The television news items at the time included diagrams showing just how dangerous the tip was.

We have family in the valleys - it's where my father was born and grew up.
I saw this last night and wept buckets.
I do think about this terrible disaster quite a lot really.
It was actually talked about a lot when I was younger as the pain was terrible .

www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m003375t/aberfan-the-village-that-fought-back

Here is a link to the programme I watched last night