Aberfan: The Village That Fought Back review – the contempt they have faced to get justice is sickening

The scene at Aberfan, Glamorgan, after a mountain of pit waste slid down on to Pantglas junior school and a row of housing, killing 116 children and 28 adults. Photograph: PAView image in fullscreenThe scene at Aberfan, Glamorgan, after a mountain of pit waste slid down on to Pantglas junior school and a row of housing, killing 116 children and 28 adults. Photograph: PAReviewAberfan: The Village That Fought Back review – the contempt they have faced to get justice is sickeningAs we witness the endless indignities these grieving families have endured in the six decades since the mining disaster, it is impossible not to turn red with rage

‘I’d like to have known her that bit longer, really. Those eight years went very, very quickly. I loved the child. I lost her. And that seemed to me to be the end of everything really, when she’d gone.”

Ray Lee, now 90, lost his daughter Anne on 21 October 1966. It was the day her primary school, along with several surrounding houses, in Aberfan was engulfed by an estimated 100,000 tonnes of slurry from one of the colliery spoil tips that overshadowed the Welsh mining village. Anne was one of 116 children killed, alongside 28 adults.

View image in fullscreen‘It seemed to be the end of everything’ … Ray Lee, who lost his daughter Anne in the disaster. Photograph: BBC Studios/Mei WilliamsGaynor Madgwick (nee Minett) was in the same school and was the same age as Anne when the disaster struck, but she was catapulted back to the far wall by the initial impact and, although severely injured, survived. Her grandfather dug her out. When she asked her father that evening, in hospital, where her brother and sister were, he told her they had both gone to heaven.

Marlene Gerlach remembers screaming and screaming for her three children across the unrecognisable school site. They all survived. The guilt has never left her.

Aberfan: The Village That Fought Back devotes the first quarter of its run time to these stories. Even when the focus of a programme is slightly elsewhere – and this hour-long film attends to the underacknowledged aftermath and the sickening behaviour of the National Coal Board and the government of the day – it must be done. It remains unthinkable, inhumane not to. The suffering lives on and so does the duty to bear witness to it.

It also throws into even starker relief the astonishing, appalling reactions of the NCB and the ministers, including and especially the secretary of state for Wales, George Thomas, who failed to stand up to the board and its chairman Sir Alf Robens, whose contemptuous attitude towards the village and its unfathomable grief was evident from day one, the Friday, when he went ahead with his installation ceremony as the first chancellor of the new University of Surrey instead of travelling immediately to Wales. He got there on Saturday evening instead. From the foot alone we may infer the anti-Hercules.

The waste heap had been built on top of several springs that made it inherently unstable. The coal board denied knowledge of them, saying they had been covered long before they took over responsibility for the tips. The tribunal that was set up to inquire into the causes of the tragedy found evidence that the NCB knew that this and other tips around the village were, in contravention of all guidelines, built over multiple water sources, and in its report detailed many other failings in the “terrifying tale of bungling ineptitude”. It laid the blame firmly with the NCB but no further action against it was taken.

View image in fullscreenGaynor Madgwick, who was severely injured but survived, lost her brother and sister in the mining disaster. Photograph: BBC Studios/Mei WilliamsFurther indignities were caused to the stricken villagers, powerfully evoked in this restrained documentary by well-chosen memories from its interviewees. Gaynor remembers her father sitting puce with rage every evening in his chair as the NCB continued to fight liability for the deaths and deny the (expensive) need to remove the tips. “He said it was murder, every day.” Her mother was on Valium and moved through the days “like a zombie”.

The Aberfan Disaster Fund had received charitable donations from more than 50,000 members of the public. When the NCB finally agreed to remove the tip, it demanded £250,000 from the fund towards the cost. The fund – left unprotected by the Charity Commission that should have prevented such a payment – handed over £150,000 and work began.

When the time came for disbursing funds to the intended recipients, the Commission offered £500 a household – if the parents could prove they had been close to the dead child.

The people of Aberfan fought back, and back, and back and back. They formed committees, wrote letters, visited Thomas’s offices in London (and emptied a bag of slurry on to the floor – “He was our minister but he was a coward”) and remained unbowed by the rebuffs and by the condescension and contempt with which they were treated. Release of government material from the time under the “30-year rule” in 1997 shows how deep it ran. The sense of betrayal felt in 1966 – especially from a Labour government and a Labour-nationalised coal board – was confirmed and renewed. The newly elected Blair government returned the money. Ten years later, the new Welsh Assembly adjusted the payment for inflation and added £2m to the pot.

Ray went on to have two more children. “It did help a lot that all the love we wanted to give to Anne and we couldn’t, we could give to them.”

Nobody was ever held to personal account or punished for the disaster. Sixty years on, with Hillsborough, Grenfell and so many more national disgraces behind us, it is hard to feel that there are not many more catastrophes to come.