Prince William and King Charles to Make Rare Joint Appearance on Anniversary of Major U.K. Tragedy

0King Charles and Prince William on Sept. 16, 2025Credit: Samir Hussein/WireImageQueen Camilla will also join the father-son duo in paying their respects to the town of Aberfan in South Wales, where 144 people died in a 1966 mining disasterNEED TO KNOWKing Charles and Prince William will make a rare joint public appearance next week

The father and son will visit Aberfan in South Wales, the site of the 1966 mining disaster that killed 116 schoolchildren and 28 adults

Queen Camilla will join the father-son duo in paying their respects to the community

Prince William and King Charles are set to make a rare joint appearance next week.

The Prince of Wales will join his father and Queen Camilla in Aberfan, South Wales, on Wednesday, Oct. 21, to mark the 60th anniversary of the devastating 1966 mining disaster that claimed the lives of 116 children and 28 adults.

They will first meet with survivors, bereaved parents and members of the community at Aberfan Memorial Garden, where the King and the Prince of Wales will lay wreaths and the Queen will place a posy in memory of those who were lost.

The garden stands on the site of Pantglas School. On Oct. 21, 1966, the last day of school before the fall term break, a coal tip from the nearby Merthyr Vale Colliery slid downhill and engulfed the school, 20 houses and a farm in 150,000 tons of mud and slurry. Nearly half of the school’s students were killed in the disaster, most between the ages of seven and ten.

The disaster became even bigger news when Queen Elizabeth didn’t visit the town until eight days after the disaster, instead sending her husband, Prince Philip, as a representative of the crown. While the monarch, advised by her private secretary Lord Charteris, believed her presence would distract from rescue efforts, she received heavy criticism for staying away and came to regard the decision as one of the biggest mistakes of her reign.

The Queen returned to the Welsh village multiple times over the years, opening the memorial garden during a 1974 trip to the community.

Following their visit to the memorial garden, Prince William, 44, King Charles, 77, and Queen Camilla, 79, will then embark on a short walk to the Aberfan & Merthyr Vale Community Centre, where they will meet with more survivors and members of the community.

King Charles has specifically requested to meet Gareth Jones, who was just 6 years old when the disaster struck. Jones survived after a school caretaker pushed him to safety and urged him to run home. Remarkably, both of his older siblings also survived.

Jones, now 66, and his family met Prince Philip when the Duke of Edinburgh visited Aberfan in the immediate aftermath of the disaster. A memorable photograph of the then-6-year-old standing beside Philip, visibly shaken by the tragedy, reportedly prompted King Charles to request a meeting with Jones during his upcoming visit.

“I remember a man coming to visit and we all came out the house to see him,” Jones told the Daily Mail ahead of the visit. “I thought he was the King because he was the Queen’s husband.”

He added, “The photo has always been special to me, but it also has meaning for the King because his father is in it. If you look at it closely, you can see there are no other children in the picture; they’d all been lost in that horrible day.”

William previously visited Aberfan with wife Kate Middleton in 2023, shortly after the couple officially became the Prince and Princess of Wales. They met with members of the community, one of whom recalled that William said, “My grandmother always spoke about Aberfan.”

Another survivor, Jeff Edwards, took the royal couple around the town’s cemetery, which lies only yards from where the school stood, and the memorial garden now rests.

“The visit to the cemetery itself was a very emotional affair. The Princess was really touched. She obviously saw the children were aged between 7 and 10, which related to her own children,” Edwards tells PEOPLE, referring to the couple’s three children — Prince George, Princess Charlotte, and Prince Louis, who were 9, 7, and 5 at the time. “That hit her really.”

When King Charles (then the Prince of Wales) visited Aberfan on the 50th anniversary of the tragedy in 2016, he said in a speech, “Anyone who is old enough can remember where they were when they heard the appalling news about the Aberfan disaster.”

“I was at school in Scotland, having just returned from a period at school in Australia, and I can never forget the feeling of utter despair as I heard of the unspeakable tragedy that had befallen your community,” he recalled. “Aberfan showed the world the darkest sorrow, but also the most shining selflessness: a spirit which endured not just for the time of crisis, but for a lifetime.”

The Aberfan disaster became better known to the modern public, and outside the U.K., when it was chronicled in season 3 of The Crown. The Netflix series focused, in particular, on how the Queen, played at the time by Oscar winner Olivia Colman, agonized over whether or not to visit and how the public backlash grew with each day that passed.

However, as a first-hand survivor of the tragedy, Jones told the Daily Mail that he holds no hard feelings towards the late monarch.

“To me, she held back as a mark of respect to the families who lost children,” he said. “The Queen waited for the dust to settle; I still think it was the right thing to do. She was showing respect to the people of Aberfan.”