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Remembering Richard Sambrook: Good morning everybody and welcome here to the Bute Building in the School of Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies. I’m Richard Sambrook, I’m Professor of Journalism here and the Deputy Head of the school and I’m delighted to welcome you all here to today’s event. I offer a special welcome to those of you from Aberfan who have come to join the discussion today and we greatly appreciate you being here. We also appreciate those who’ve travelled a considerable distance to be part of this event, including the photographer Chuck Rapoport, who’s come from California, and you may have noticed some of his pictures on the display outside. We’ll be seeing a lot more, I think, this afternoon. And later, Vincent Kane, who is going to be travelling from Cyprus to join us today to give the keynote speech at the end of the day. I’d also like to thank the Cardiff University City Region Exchange project for their support which has made this event possible. I hope that you’re going to find it a very useful and positive discussion and day, and with that, I’m going to hand over to my colleague, Professor Kevin Morgan, to open the first session. Kevin Morgan: Thanks Richard, and welcome to you all. My name is Kevin Morgan, I’m Dean of Engagement at Cardiff University, and I’ve been asked to chair this opening session. And before I introduce our speakers in this opening session, I’ve been asked, for a few minutes, to reflect on my own memories of Aberfan, coming from the Cynon Valley. And my memories basically are a mix of the personal and the professional. The personal are very hazy, very indistinct and the professional are very clear and very distinct and as resonant today as they were when I first encountered them. The personal is a very simple one. I was just a grammar school boy in Aberdare Boys’ Grammar School and I can still remember a rumour circulating in the playground. I remember this in the days before social media. It’s impossible to believe how news travelled so slowly, and none of us knew anything about it until we got home, ’til tea time and saw it on the television. And the main memory is of the only time I can remember in our street in a council village in Rhigos, no kids playing on the street. That was my main personal memory of it as a young teenager. That contrasts then with my very, very distinct professional memories as an academic, whose PhD involved studying the nationalised industries and their role in South Wales and the reconstruction after the war. And it was truly shocking for me to encounter the tribunal report. When I first read the tribunal report from the inquiry into the disaster, I was truly shocked to encounter the behaviour of what we called the board, the NCB, the National Coal Board, because I’d grown up in awe of the National Coal Board, as all mining villages did in South Wales. But then to encounter the behaviour of a coal board that you’ve grown up in awe of, was truly traumatic. And two things emerged from the tribunal report to me. First of all, the unmitigated arrogance of the board and its witnesses, and secondly the disrespect it showed for the South Wales Valleys and Aberfan in particular. I’ll just give three examples. We could speak all morning about the coal board’s arrogance, but I think three are in a league of their own. First of all, in I think seventy-odd days of the inquiry, day after day, we were treated to coal board lies. Jeff Edwards - Remembering © Cardiff University Page 1 And the biggest lie of all, I think probably, in my own view, my own reading of it, was the coal board’s insistence that nobody knew that the tip was built on a spring. Robens said it, Lord Robens, the chairman of the NCB, said it very early on, and it wasn’t until I think day seventy-four of the inquiry, when the coal board’s own counsel gave his summing up speech that they conceded that the spring was known of. All through that time, they’d insisted that it was down to nature and not organisational incompetence. That was truly shocking, when this knowledge was there in the community, it was there in the Ordnance Survey maps, it was all there in the geological surveys. It was a lie, and it was exposed to be a lie. Secondly, there was the failure of the regulators, the lawmakers, the politicians. Even today, it’s shocking to find that the regulation of the coal industry under the Mines and Quarries Act, as it’s called, 1954, that’s what governed the coal industry in South Wales, in fact the whole of the UK. The Mines and Quarries Act was drafted in such a way that only accidents to colliery employees were deemed a reportable incident. In other words, the Aberfan disaster didn’t even qualify to be a reportable incident under the Mines and Quarries legislation. In other words, showing that this corporatist legislation focused entirely on industry relations in that drafting, community and environment counted for nought, which truly shocked… I used to argue with my NUM friends, that they were completely focused on industrial relations, health and safety, rightly so, underground, but nothing above ground. And we used to argue a lot about that, that the environment and the community counted for nothing. Last but not least, was the biggest disrespect of all: that when the community asked for the tip to be removed, both the National Coal Board and the Labour government refused to remove the tip and pay for it outright without a contribution from the disaster fund. And in the end, they insisted that the disaster fund paid £150,000 to clean up the tip itself. That for me was the biggest disrespect of all, for a coal board to show to a community which had given both livelihoods and lives to this industry: to charge the community itself for cleaning up the mess. And my final point I would make about that. This incident loomed so large in Labour politics that on his first day in office in 1997, Ron Davies asked the Welsh Office civil servants to scrub his diary and to write him a cheque, and he took a cheque to Aberfan for £150,000. And if my memory serves me well, he actually gave it to Cliff Minett. I know Gaynor’s not here yet, her father. And that was the first compensation that the Labour government ever gave to the clearance of the tip scandal. So all these things add up, I think, to two things. It shows arrogance of a public body that showed no duty of care to the community in which it was engaged, and secondly, it shows us the need for vigilance on the bodies that work in our communities, that civil society needs to scrutinise these bodies to ensure that public, private, third sector bodies deliver their duty of care to the communities in which they work. And this is one of the great lessons for me as we remember; what does Aberfan mean today? And it means the duty of care of public bodies in our communities. So those are my personal and professional memories. But we’ll have much deeper memories today of course, and it’s my great pleasure now to welcome Jeff Edwards, who I’ve known for many, many years. Jeff’s CV is too long for me to do justice to it, his contributions to politics, culture in the Jeff Edwards - Remembering © Cardiff University Page 2 valleys and society in the valleys, too vast for me to do justice to, as I say. And Jeff is here because he is one of the original survivors and he will be giving what he calls, ‘A survivor’s tale’. Jeff Edwards: Good morning everyone, and thank you Kevin for that introduction. For those who don’t know, Aberfan is a community that is situated 20 miles north of Cardiff and four miles south of Merthyr Tydfil. Prior to 1869, it was a community made up of isolated farms but in that year, John Nixon started the development of Merthyr Vale Colliery, which officially opened in 1875. This saw the rapid growth of the village as a close-knit community, with over 2,000 employed in the mine. This rising to 2,500 in 1918 at the height of the industry and reducing to 600 at the time of its closure in 1989. The Aberfan disaster on 21st October 1966 was caused by colliery tip material being deposited on a spring high on the mountain above the village of Aberfan. As a consequence of this location, the tip slid down the mountainside, engulfing Pantglas School and surrounding houses with the tragic loss of 116 children and 28 adults. And here you can see the extent of the tip coming down and destroying where the school was. This was the junior school in this location here and the senior school here and that was the canal bank, the main water way between the Brecon Beacons and Cardiff, and that added to the velocity of the tip as it came down and hit the school. I’m a survivor of that disaster; I was an eight-year-old child at the time, being in Standard Two of Pantglas Junior School.

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