Surviving Aberfan

50 years ago, a roaring avalanche of coal waste crashed into a school

and 18 houses in the South Wales village of Aberfan.

Death and destruction were wrought in a few unbelievable minutes.

It was a race against time to rescue survivors.

I was gasping for breath because the air was getting less and less...

but at least I had that pocket of air. But the panic, I think, set in,

really, what, how was I going to get out?

"I'm sure there's somebody under here," he was shouting.

And when he dug onto my stomach,

I could, like, feel the air coming into me.

Oh! It's...it's like something out of this world, like.

And I could take a breath, like.

116 children and 28 adults were killed.

Not a day goes by that any of us ever forget this terrible disaster.

It lives with you and it's as vivid as if it was yesterday.

She went through a lot when she was a little baby

and, to come through all that, and then this happens.

Why? Why does it happen?

But it's no good thinking too much about that.

You've got to get on with your life and we've all helped one another,

really, over the years...

and we always will do.

In this film, the people of Aberfan tell their stories of tragic loss,

miraculous survival and heroic rescue.

They also reveal how they have coped

with the consequences of the disaster.

This is their story of surviving Aberfan.

Half a century after the Aberfan disaster,

the site of the school is now a memorial garden,

visited by people from all over the world...

..but it stirs the deepest emotions

for the survivors of a day they can never forget.

Jeff Edwards, a former mayor of Merthyr Tydfil,

is a survivor of that day.

Well, this is the site of the Pantyglas School and it's now the Memorial Gardens,

which commemorates the disaster of 21 October, 1966.

The design of the gardens is based on the classrooms within the school itself.

This would to be standard four, this would be standard three,

this was standard two, standard three,

standard two and standard one.

Here, I think it's quite calm

and it's a serene place, really, for us

and, effectively, it brings back the memories of the day.

But I get a lot of solace in actually coming here.

The school faced onto Moy Road, with the mountainside behind.

In the mid-1960s,

this was the heart of the community for the young children of Aberfan.

Yeah, you couldn't get in the card school!

Alan Thomas is looking at old family photos

with his younger brother Phil.

Both have fond memories of their early childhoods with their friends

at Pantglas Junior School.

We were all the same. Either your dad worked in the colliery,

or he worked in Hoover's.

It was a fabulous...well, I enjoyed school, anyway.

I never missed.

You know what I mean? Always went to school.

The teachers - even the teachers were lovable.

They were like your special mothers!

They were very thoughtful and caring.

This is Hettie Williams, a former teacher at Pantglas School.

Her memories of the children before the disaster bring back strong emotions.

21-year-old Hettie was in charge of the first year juniors.

This was where my classroom was

and, on the anniversary, I come back to the school

because that's where my memories are

and I can still see the children in their classes and things.

And I come, and there's a tree over there that's...

..twisted, and I've taken a fancy to the tree,

so I like to go there and put my flowers under that tree.

And I feel I can feel my children around me and you can think back

to the days when it was a lovely place.

I can see, um, the tables and chairs,

with the children sitting in them and they were such a happy

group of children. They were just adorable.

Marilyn Brown lost her ten-year-old daughter Janette in the disaster.

She has cherished memories of her little girl ever since.

For Marilyn, it is a comfort to keep photographs of Janette

around her home so that she can touch them as she passes.

I don't know. It gives me a sense of...

she is still with us, you know.

There's that feeling of...

Yes, yes, I do remember you and I will always remember you.

And another thing, as well, I think about and I think

she would have been 61 now and I think,

"What would she have been like now? What would she have done?"

Janette was a fighter.

When she was born,

she was rushed to Sully Hospital outside Cardiff

with two holes in her gullet.

When we eventually went down to Sully to see her,

she'd had two operations and they asked if I would stay there

with her, you know. She needed breast milk to keep her alive.

I'd be woken up at two in the morning, four in the morning,

every two hours, really.

And then, eventually, she came and she was fine.

Whoa! Biccy.

You want a biccy, huh? Come on.

This is Gerald Tarr.

He has lived in Aberfan most of his life.

As a young married man in the mid-'60s,

Gerald lived with his wife Shirley in Moy Road near the school

and worked at Merthyr Vale Colliery in the village.

I was a collier - that's digging the coal out.

It was really hard work, like.

You'd be on your hands and knees sometimes, all day,

but when you went low, over a fault on the ground, you know,

your back was bent.

And sometimes the coal was hard, really hard.

Oh, it would be murder, then, digging it.

But I never really liked it underground but, at that time,

there wasn't much work about and it was good money in the pit.

Coal dominated life in Aberfan.

The mine was the main employer and much of the land was owned

by the National Coal Board.

Mining coal produced a huge quantity of waste

that was expensive to transport,

so it was dumped up on Merthyr Mountain,

above the village, in huge tips.

These tips became a forbidden playground for many of Aberfan's children.

As youngsters, we had quite an eventful and adventurous life, really.

An enjoyable one, with all my friends.

We used to play on the tips themselves

and we never told our parents that we used to go up there,

because we would have had a row had we gone, when we got home,

so we kept that very quiet,

but it was an adventure playground for us, really.

Aberfan's children also knew about the springs and streams

that ran down the mountainside to the River Taff.

One man who remembers the stream as a boy is Bernard Thomas.

Like other survivors,

he returns to the site of his old school every so often.

It is not difficult for him to picture the tips

that once stood on the mountain above.

As a kid, myself and a good many others

used to go up and play around the mountain,

around the tips, towards the tips there,

and we used to dam part of the stream and make a swimming pool

not far from the tip and swim in it.

The water was freezing cold.

Of course, we didn't realise the danger.

You don't see it when you're a kid.

In fact, the covering of this water with coal waste was to prove fatal

to the children of Aberfan.

After decades of dumping on the mountain,

the latest tip was built up over the springs and stream.

Gradually, the water liquefied the waste into a slurry.

Both the junior and senior schools lay directly below the tips.

Teachers never imagined their children's lives were at risk.

It was a disaster waiting to happen...

..and on 21 October, 1966, it did.

Early that Friday morning, Aberfan was shrouded in thick autumnal fog.

Households with families were stirring for another school day.

Like his brother Alan, Phil Thomas enjoyed school.

He was ten and in a mixed-age class in the junior school.

12-year-old Alan was now in the senior school,

but both boys always set off for school together.

Got up in the morning, Mam called us, "Breakfast!"

Me, my brother and my sister.

We had breakfast that morning...dressed...

..out through the door, down to catch the bus then, for school.

Couldn't see no further than your nose. It was a horrible day.

Jeannette wasn't very good that morning.

She didn't want to go to school,

but it was trying it on, really. You know what they are.

They don't want to go to school sometimes.

Sent her out of the door,

watched her walking up the street, and shut the door and came in.

I said, "Good. I'll have a nice cup of tea now.

"I'll have MY breakfast now."

In 1966, Karen Thomas lived with her parents near Moy Road.

She was aged seven at the time

and would walk to school with her cousins, who lived nearby.

My cousins lived six doors away,

so I'd call for them and my mother would stand on the door and we...

the three of us left for school that morning,

with my auntie and my other cousins standing on the door.

We walked to the bottom of the street and, when we looked back,

we couldn't see them cos it was very, very misty and foggy,

so we just carried on walking, laughing, going to school.

The headmistress of Pantglas School was 64-year-old Ann Jennings.

She ran a tight ship and was adored by junior staff,

like Hettie Williams.

At nine o'clock, Miss Jennings rang the bell for the start of the day.

I went into the classroom.

Of course, the children were excited because it was half term,

we were going to break up, and on the last day of term

we didn't have assembly in the morning,

we'd have assembly in the afternoon,

so Miss Jennings could say, you know, not to go and play on the railway,

not to go down by the river, to keep themselves safe.

Children in schools up and down the valleys were settling down

for their first lessons of the day.

I went to get a library book and walked back to my seat,

which was completely the other side of the room

and I was about the third desk up from the front.

And we sat down and then Michael Davies, the teacher,

started the first lesson.

The paying of dinner money was common to most primary schoolchildren.

There was a knock on the door for us to go to the dinner lady,

so five of us that were nearest the door left the classroom

and we went to pay our dinner money.

Teacher said could I go on an errand with Robert

down to the other school to pick up money

he owed for dinners off his sister Margaret,

so me and him set off that day.

We went down to the other school,

we chatted to some of the children

who were up on the wall and the gates.

It was 9:15.

At that moment, high above on tip number seven,

a crane operator suddenly saw the coal waste slip away

from the edge of the tip.

It was the start of a massive avalanche of liquefied slurry,

a flow slide that careered down the mountain towards Aberfan.

Hundreds of feet below, shrouded in fog,

the children and adults in Pantglas School and the houses alongside

were in mortal danger.

Miner Gerald Tarr lived in one of the houses.

His wife Shirley had gone to work and he was in bed after finishing

another night shift at the colliery.

I had a big dog in them days,

Buster we used to call him,

and the dog ran upstairs and banged the bedroom door open,

run in the bedroom and his ears were sticking up in the air.

So I went to get up. I said, "What's the matter, boy?

"What's the matter? What's the matter with you?

And, with that, the whole ceiling...

the whole ceiling split right open all the way.

All the way through. About a foot, like that.

I thought, "What the hell's happening here?"

Well, with that, then, the back wall come down on top of me

and squashed me down into the bed.

I could feel it squashing me down.

The next thing I realised, I woke up buried alive.

The avalanche consumed 18 houses on Moy Road,

just where Phil Thomas was waiting with his friend Robert.

You couldn't see,

you could hear, but you couldn't see what was coming.

It was like if somebody was throwing at us, so me and Robert run.

Robert went back towards...

..our school and I run straight forward.

I remember something hitting me on the back of the head

and I was falling.

The wall of slurry ploughed into the junior school.

We heard this rumbling, thought it was thunder or a jet flying over.

And next, the teacher shouted "run" or something

and pandemonium broke out.

I just stayed sitting at my desk.

And looked up like that and I could see all...

out of the mist, out of this fog, all this...

like, a wall of slurry.

Like a tidal wave, tsunami...

..coming towards the school. I thought, "Oh, that'll stop outside."

And, all of a sudden, it hit the school, such a force, and the noise was...the noise was unbelievable.

At the other end of the hall,

glass started coming down the corridor from the headmistress's room

and Nansi the dinner lady jumped on top of us.

The wall, I think, more or less pushed us all together

and she took the full impact.

240 children were in Pantglas School when the avalanche struck.

It completely destroyed three classrooms on the east side of the building

and filled most of the classrooms at the rear with watery black waste.

At the front of the school,

Hettie Williams was in her classroom with 35 children aged six and seven.

I went to the door and there was like an iron girder through the glass

and, when I looked out, the corridor was like a...

Well, like a tunnel. Things had come down but it looked as if there was a

gap at the bottom.

So I said to the children, "Right, now, you go straight out and it's fire drill.

"You stand in the yard. Don't go running around."

And I went first and, when I got outside,

I couldn't believe what I could see

because...our end of the room was still standing -

that was up -

but there was black behind where the classrooms were.

You couldn't see anything.

It was as if the mountain was right up on the school.

It was.

One and a half million cubic feet of liquefied slurry

had engulfed everything in its path,

right into the centre of the village.

Phil Thomas was caught up in the avalanche on Moy Road

but, miraculously, survived.

I woke...

..pitch-black, buried.

Couldn't see a thing.

I started crying, shouting for my mum.

Karen Thomas and four of the children were trapped alive

beneath the body of dinner lady Nansi Williams.

We were shouting at the dinner lady and I was trying to pull her hair,

because I could just touch her hair, to see if we could have a response

from her because she wasn't saying anything to us.

I just thought to keep pulling her hair to try and wake her up.

We just didn't know what...

what was happening cos we just couldn't hear anyone else.

It was just our voices and our screams that we could hear.

The other memory is of the other kids screaming.

Fear, screaming for help.

Screaming at the teacher, like, screaming for their parents.

I thought I'd better try and get out of here as quick as possible,

try and get up. Sat up...

and looked round, and I saw my teacher, and I thought,

"I'll get across to Mr Williams now." And he'll help me out through...

the small panes of glass at the top of the classroom door were smashed through...

and we get out through there and across the main hall of the school.

110 children and four teachers were able to escape from the parts of the

school left standing -

these were mostly from the younger classes -

but those with 7-11-year-olds took the full brunt of the avalanche.

With the fog lifted,

the first locals on the scene combined together in a frenzied search for survivors.

I got up to the school and I just couldn't believe that part of the school

had come down and my first thought was,

"Oh, the children have already come out."

But someone said, "No, the children are in there."

Confusion reigned.

The sheer size of the avalanche made it difficult for rescuers to grasp

the severity of what they faced.

The first call to the emergency services was recorded at 9:25.

The Coal Board's Mines Rescue Service was established

to rescue miners trapped underground.

But with Aberfan,

the men of this elite squad were given little information

about the emergency they had been called to.

We were all changed. We were all sat there in the van

and we were going to some school in Merthyr.

And I always remember, I turned to the men in the van,

I said, "Gents...

"..this is going to be something terrible.

"What the hell do they want the Mines Rescue Service at a school for?"

In 1966, Len Haggett was an officer with the Merthyr Tydfil Fire Brigade.

Within a few hours minutes of the call from Aberfan,

fire engines were on their way.

This is the first time Len has spoken about his harrowing memories of the disaster.

This is the route that I drove the emergency tender down.

The call had been received to a house that had collapsed

in Moy Road, Aberfan and that's what we were responding to, actually.

But there was no way that anyone was aware...

..that the school had been involved.

The fire brigade was proud of its service.

It was Len's job to rescue people,

but nothing could prepare him for the catastrophe of Aberfan.

This is the entrance that I pulled into Moy Road.

Immediately, we came here,

it became obvious that it wasn't a house that was involved.

It was a row of houses that simply collapsed

and there was a wall of slurry,

20-to-30-foot high, straight off the road going up.

The vast amount of slurry divided the rescue effort between

one end of Moy Road and the other.

At the school, no tools were immediately available,

so some women worked with their hands -

one of them was Mary Morse.

I tried to help as much as I could and I just got involved

in the line of women that were there.

We were at the side entrance of the school.

Brick for brick was picked up off the floor and passed along,

and put to one side. It was like a conveyor belt,

exactly like conveyor belt.

But we were just numbed,

just numbed, that's all I can say.

Many mothers and families stood on Moy Road watching

as more and more people joined in the rescue -

amongst them was the Mines Rescue Team.

We'd arrived there at 9:50 that morning.

We pulled up outside the school.

Well, it was just chaotic.

I don't think anybody realised what they were doing or anything.

We were running around like fools, we were, everybody.

And why?

Come back to the same thing all the time, don't we? Cos it's children.

Together with the emergency services,

miners from the local colliery started to organise a more co-ordinated rescue operation.

But now the race to find survivors became even more urgent.

When the avalanche hit the old railway embankment above the school,

it fractured two big water mains that supplied the whole of Cardiff.

Hundreds of gallons of water flooded into the already saturated slurry.

In the mayhem around the school,

12-year-old Alan Thomas was desperately looking for his brother Phil.

I come out of the school and down this road here,

and I got as far as this point, where there was a...

..a river, basically, of slurry and water,

where the mains pipe had been burst

and the water was being channelled down

through the gully here, down to the river.

As I reached this point, I looked up and noticed that my mother

was standing on the other side...

..which I didn't expect.

You normally see waves in the sea,

but if you can imagine waves coming down through a gully

and heading down towards the river,

it was horrific. It's frightening.

It's unnatural. You can't believe that it was happening,

the amount of water and where it was coming from, brown slurry,

thick, and it went down all the way to the river.

I'm standing on the pavement shouting to her, "I can't find Phil!"

And she just...come through the water without a care.

At that moment,

Alan's younger brother Phil had been found alive but trapped in rubble on

the other side of the avalanche.

He was in grave danger as the torrent of water from the fractured main spread through the slurry.

Firemen now battled to free the injured boy before he drowned.

He was terrified, understandably, and he was trapped by his feet.

And though we could get at his head and shoulders,

we just could not get him out.

And there was probably about six or seven people around this stone...

..trying to lift it, but not succeeding.

And then, the inrush of water started

and you could hear the people calling, "The water is coming!"

And the water was coming, and it was coming in and around this young lad.

And we had to hold his head up, back,

out of the water that was coming and we done one final lift

and how they lifted that wall that day I don't know, but we did.

We raised it just long enough

to get your arms around, under his shoulders

and, as they lifted to pull, and he came out.

And if he hadn't come out, within a few minutes, he would have drowned.

The fact that that young boy was alive and he'd been saved,

that was elation, without a shadow of a doubt.

Firemen worked against the clock

to pull survivors from the ruins of their houses.

Gerald Tarr was pinned down by a bedroom door.

They couldn't get my shoulder out...of my arm.

It was the other side of this door

and this door had crushed me down, like.

But as they was digging, this chap come down

and I could hear him on top of me. "The pipe have busted," he said.

"If you don't get him out," he said, "he's going to drown."

Gaw, I started to claw at the door.

I was ripping my fingers into this door, trying to...

I thought, "I'm not going to drown after all this," like,

you know what I mean? I thought, "Oh, my God!"

This fellow says, "Stop clawing!"

I'd taken my nails off my fingers, trying to claw this door.

So he put a jack under there.

He pressed a button and up the door come, six or seven inches.

And he dragged me out, look.

"Oh," I thought, "Thank God for that."

"I'm not going to drown." You know what I mean?

They chucked me on a blanket then

and rushed me to the ambulance, like.

The flood of water was having a devastating impact.

A million cubic feet of slurry was still moving.

It was now starting to engulf the senior school.

Back in the wrecked classrooms of the junior school,

firemen were inching their way through the mass of muck and rubble.

On my left-hand side, there was a girl's head

and that head was just straight here,

next-door to my face, really...

..and I couldn't get away from it, and the person had died.

All I could see was a small aperture of light.

And the next thing I remember,

the firemen came and they smashed a window and they got in.

They got down to the desk itself,

and they just couldn't shift it because all the stuff was around.

And they got their hatchets out and they actually broke up the desks.

This was the moment Jeff Edwards was brought out.

Something hit me on my shoulder

and I screamed,

and then we all started to scream

and then we could see there was a little bit of daylight coming.

So we shouted and we could hear somebody shouting, "There's some here!"

Then he shouted down to tell us, "You're OK! We're getting you out!"

Men and women from the community carried the children to the triage

set up in the playground at the school's entrance.

After seeing her class to safety,

teacher Hettie Williams stayed on to help with the rescue.

If they brought a child out,

we would bring that child and take it to the doctors then.

A lot of the children that were handed over to us were injured -

didn't know what had happened to them.

They were in shock, really.

But to see a face, they would smile and say, "Oh, Miss!"

Some of them...some of them didn't talk at all.

But it was so wonderful to see - if somebody's eyes moved,

it was absolutely fantastic.

Karen Thomas and her four friends were carried to the triage.

Like all those rescued,

here she was given first aid and her injuries assessed.

Karen was diagnosed with internal bleeding.

There was a lot of people around me and they were examining me and,

the next thing I know, I was being bandaged from my neck to my feet,

not for me to move,

and I was put on a stretcher and put into an ambulance.

As news of the disaster spread,

more and more people flocked to Aberfan to help with the rescue.

The most urgent search for survivors was led by firemen and miners

working in the ruined classrooms of the school.

Volunteers dug at the surrounding slurry and formed bucket brigades to

carry the lethal waste away.

The flow of water from the broken water mains

was finally turned off by 11:30,

but the slurry remained in a dangerous state.

The spirit of the people there that day was incredible.

You went around doing what do you think you could for help,

where it was needing, and if you ever asked...

..what resources would you want at an incident of that nature,

we had the best in the world. We had the miners.

They were the boys who could shift the slurry...

..and they worked a very good system.

They would be working and, suddenly,

you'd hear a whistle-blow and they'd say "Silence".

And how you could obtain silence in those circumstances,

with that number of people who were present,

is difficult to imagine and yet it was.

You got absolute silence,

hoping that you could hear a voice, or a call...

..so you could rescue them.

But as the hours slipped by into the afternoon,

the rescuers were confronted by a grim reality.

All the children they were finding in the school now were dead.

Many of them were still sitting at their desks, entombed by the slurry.

I honestly believe that that slurry was travelling at a rate, obviously,

and once it come into that school, it just swept through the school...

and the damage was done.

Very quickly.

You know, if you can understand the slurry was so small and fine

that I like to think that instead, the children, more or less,

it happened and they suffocated straightaway,

rather than suffered and agonies, that sort of thing.

I think that's a fair comment, too.

The liquefied slurry made digging a difficult, slow job,

even for experienced miners like Allan Lewis.

He was put to work in one of the classrooms.

I was there two hours or more before I first saw the desks.

I was clearing mud. Every time you cleared mud,

because it was 30 feet of mud sliding down all the time.

There was people up the top, they were doing a bucket brigade,

taking the top layer off. But as we were advancing in the class,

it was sliding down and sliding down, so every time we advanced two-foot,

it would be buried, and we advanced two-foot-six, type of thing, buried -

it was advancing quietly like that.

As a desk come in front,

clear a bit more, and then we could see the little girls

crumped over their desks, two little girls.

We dug this one little girl and she had a ponytail and, at that time,

my daughter was four years old and she had a ponytail.

So the resemblance was there and, well,

I couldn't help it but filling up and the overman who was behind me,

he could see that there was sobbing and tears were rolling down my cheeks, to be honest with you,

but he said, "Do you want to be relieved?"

And I said, "No, no, no. I'll carry on."

But it was an awful feeling.

But we carried on and we got that little girl out to the side of her desk.

Put her in a blanket. As soon as we got the body out,

we'd shout for a blanket and someone would come with a blanket and we'd put her in,

and they'd take her out on a stretcher.

We was there for ten hours

and, in that ten hours, we dug four little girls out,

or helped to dig four little girls out, and the schoolteacher.

It's an experience I'll never, ever forget.

With the lives of so many children at stake,

the rescue operation became worldwide news.

Earlier in the day, hopes were high of finding many survivors.

But the mood changed with each passing hour,

as more bodies were brought out.

Waiting parents were in agony.

We were waiting, thinking, "Yes, we're going to have news any minute

"now of the children, where they are."

And kept asking questions all the time but you could see,

as time was going on, there were more people coming,

more people coming to dig.

Marilyn's husband Bernard had been digging since the morning,

hoping to find their daughter, Janette.

I can remember my husband sitting on the wall, absolutely exhausted.

He said, "I don't know what to do, Marilyn." He said, "I don't know what to do."

And I said, "Well, sit there for a while."

But, eventually, news came through

that quite a few of the children had been buried.

This time, you didn't want any more news.

You didn't want any more news cos you're still thinking,

"Yes, she'll be all right. She'll be fine."

The dead were taken to a makeshift mortuary set up in Bethania Chapel in the village.

For many waiting parents,

the moment they dreaded came when they were asked to go to the chapel

to identify their child.

Marilyn's husband and her father returned from the temporary mortuary

to tell her their news.

My father started to cry and I said, "Is she all right?"

And he said, "No."

"Janet had died," he said. We just identified her.

"Oh," I said, "I want to go. I want to go and see her."

"No, no," he said. "You don't go and see her. She's fine," he said.

I said, "What does she look like?"

He said, "She's got a tiny mark on her head."

And he said, "She's sleeping."

And that was that. Well, I just give in to it then.

My father, he was crying and I think it was because he was crying

I was crying as well.

But it sort of comes over you, then, "Yes, she's gone."

At the end of the day,

60 bodies had been recovered from the disaster area.

Eventually, the death toll reached 144 -

116 children and 28 adults.

One of the adults to lose his life was 21-year-old teacher Michael Davies.

His friend Hettie Williams was asked to identify him.

Michael didn't have a mark on him.

His suit was fine.

But he was...he had died straightaway.

I think it was on the second day that they found Miss Jennings.

Miss Jennings was one of the last.

I realised, it's never going to be the same again, you know?

And thinking of people like Michael and Madge,

they'd only just started teaching and their lives had gone.

Madge had got married in the summer and had her, you know,

her future in front of her and having children and things like that, you know?

And it was all wiped out because of the slurry.

Nine months later, a tribunal found the National Coal Board was to blame for the disaster...

..but there were no prosecutions.

The tips were removed only after a bitter campaign

by the community of Aberfan.

The memorial garden laid out over the site of Pantglas School is lovingly maintained.

It is a fitting reminder for those who perished there now 50 years ago.

But, since then, survivors of the disaster

have faced a struggle to overcome injury and trauma.

When Phil Thomas was rescued, one ear was hanging almost off.

He had two head wounds and a badly injured hand.

The doctors managed to save his ear but not his three crushed fingers.

After the operation,

Phil first saw his hand when nurses came to change his bandages.

They said, "We're going to change your dressing on your hand now."

I just cried.

I just cried.

That broke my heart, but I knew, so...

But then you just get on and get on with it, like.

Alan Thomas was finally reunited with his brother Phil

when he visited him in hospital.

It was the first time they had seen one another

since early on the morning of the disaster.

When, upon meeting him,

the first words he said to me was, "Look at my boxing glove!"

And I said, "That's all right. That's not a problem."

And that was it.

We were reunited...

..and we're still the same today.

Look at the size of that dummy!

Always said you was a gutsy bugger!

When the nurses took me and they said, "You have lost your fingers,"

I think THAT was the shock.

Now, I don't miss them.

I'd rather be without them than with them...

..and that's the truth, that is.

You know, I wouldn't know what to do if I had bloody ten fingers.

I wouldn't! I would not know what to do.

And again! Right.

During the avalanche, Gerald Tarr suffered a broken pelvis,

a crushed shoulder and lacerations across his head.

His wife Shirley cried when she first saw him in hospital.

I said to her, "Stop crying. Don't cry. I'm OK."

I said, "I'll be OK," you know. "I'm only happy to be alive," I said.

"I'm happy," I said, "just to be living.

I said, "Look at all them people around me, dead, like,"

you know what I mean?

"All my neighbours are gone, everything," I said.

"All of them kids."

It took years for his injuries to heal,

then Gerald and Shirley had a child of their own.

But his feelings for the children lost in the disaster remain as strong as ever.

I can remember like it was yesterday...

..still in my mind now.

And, do you know? If I could have saved one of them kids,

I'd go through it a dozen times...

..if I could just save one.

That's the truth.

-Yes, 40.

-40.

In 1967, a temporary school and play centre

was set up in Aberfan in a village club.

Here, the children of Pantglas School who survived the disaster

were supervised by the four teachers who also survived.

When they started to come back, the ones that survived,

they were so frightened to begin with,

but seeing us and knowing that we'd been there as well,

they knew they could talk to somebody.

Robert, are you going to see Sound Of Music tomorrow? Are you?

We knew what they had gone through and what we had gone through,

and we just needed to see one another,

and to see the children smile at you and say,

"Oh, Miss, what do you think of that?" - you know.

The new junior school for Aberfan was opened three years later,

next to the colliery.

Our aim was to make that school as good as it had been and to remember

the people who had worked there and, for us,

it was to continue that with the children and to make sure that those

children were happy, that they were in the same school...

in a different place, but it was still Pantglas School.

Today, Ynysowen Community Primary School stands near the site

of the colliery that closed in 1989.

Jeff Edwards is visiting the school to talk to some of the children

about the disaster that happened 50 years ago.

He feels it's important to make a link between their generation in the village and his own.

So, really, you're talking to somebody who's a bit of history,

really, me sitting here.

Because, at the time of the disaster,

I was eight years of age and I was very lucky,

because, out of my class of 34, only four of us survived -

me being one of them.

So I'm able to tell on behalf of all those people

who lost their lives on that day what happened and so that people

never forget what happened in the village. See?

How were you involved?

How was I involved? Well, in the morning of the disaster,

I lived on Aberfan Road.

Most of my friends perished in that disaster,

so my childhood ended on that day, really,

and I had to become a different person after,

and you definitely are different person

from the person that you...were.

We were very emotional.

We could get upset very easily.

We would still think about our friends who had gone

and it was really...

life was difficult, really,

in the village in terms of growing up without friends.

The majority of children who died in the disaster were laid to rest

in a special part of the cemetery in Aberfan.

Among the survivors,

the 29 children buried alive suffered deep psychological scars.

In the years that followed,

they relived their traumatic experiences in nightmares

and, for some, they continue to this day.

Jeff Edwards was trapped with his face against the head of a dead girl

for nearly two hours.

The most distressing thing was this girl's head on my shoulder

and the inability, really, to get away from that.

And subsequently, you know, I used to have terrible nightmares

for many, many years after...

..having sight of that girl in my memory all the time.

It was so upsetting.

And I still have those nightmares on occasions.

I still suffer from deep bouts of depression...

..and I've found that talking about these things helped tremendously

because it releases from your subconscious those things

that many people have hidden away.

And these were huge things that our parents had to deal with, really,

and all the parents of those children had to deal with,

because we all suffered the same symptoms in many respects.

Karen Thomas suffered internal bleeding

and lost a kidney during the disaster.

She likes to visit the cemetery to pay her respects

at the grave of Nansi Williams,

the school dinner lady who died

shielding Karen and four classmates as rubble came crashing over them.

It's only down to Nansi that I am here today.

And the only way that I can thank her is to go and put flowers

on her grave and I go up every year.

Nobody knows that I do it,

but I do go up there and I do put flowers up there every year...

..and it is the only way that I can thank her.

I'll never be able to thank her enough for saving us.

She took the full impact.

She give her life to save the five of us.

I was one of the lucky ones to come out

and I do feel very lucky to be here today.

It's something you'll never forget but, you know,

you've got to keep...your life's got to go on.

But I recognised the voice, then.

Women are gathering for another meeting of Aberfan Wives.

It is a group that originated in the early years after the disaster.

Aberfan then was engulfed in sorrow,

a whole community living with grief.

There were streets with five or more bereaved families.

Many fathers and mothers found it difficult to cope.

Marilyn Brown was grieving for her daughter.

You'd meet them in the street.

You would just say, "Hello, you all right?"

But just say, "Are you OK?" I'm OK. Yes, I'm fine."

And that was that, you know.

But you wouldn't talk about the child they'd lost or anything like that.

You wouldn't say nothing about it.

You were afraid of upsetting other people, I suppose.

You knew how you felt and you kept it in,

so you wouldn't say too much to them.

But they were going through the same thing as you were going through, really.

If you know of anybody, we were thinking of...

Weekly meetings of bereaved mothers started up in the village

and, from this, a young wives group was later formed

with the idea of organising talks and social outings.

Oh, no, no, no. Very, very interesting.

It was a way for the women of the village to come together.

That made us feel a lot better

because we were all together doing things,

you know, and helping one another that way.

We must have been about 60 women

and it was wonderful.

We had trips to go and, you know, different things on,

jumble sales to make money.

We went out and entertained the old people in the old people's homes,

we dressed up and did loads and loads of things.

But we enjoyed ourselves and I think the camaraderie was there then.

Mary Morse was a founding member of Young Wives.

It was a marvellous group and it brought a lot of people out,

including myself, and there were a lot of people there that had lost

children in the disaster and some had lost their homes, also,

in the disaster

and we felt that, in the Wives, we could talk about it.

We could cry about it and we could laugh, and no offence was taken,

but not a day goes by that any of us ever forget this terrible disaster.

It lives with you and it's as vivid as if it was yesterday.

Nearly 50 years on, the group is still going strong.

Like all bereaved parents,

Marilyn Brown cherishes the memory of her last child.

Janette had overcome two life-saving operations

before she was killed in the disaster.

The memories of her, I keep very safe.

I keep them here.

She went through a lot when she was a little baby

and, to come through all that, then this happens.

Why? Why does it happen?

But it's no good thinking too much about that.

You've got to get on with your life, which I have.

I'm very happy now.

And I have a lot of joy out of my children

and I have a lot of joy out of my friends as well,

who've helped me over the...

Well, we've helped all helped one another, really,

over the years and we always will do. Always will do.

CHATTER

-Phil!

-HE LAUGHS

For the first time since the disaster,

Phil Thomas is meeting two his rescuers from the fire brigade,

Dave Thomas and Len Haggett.

Everybody helped and everything that they could have...

..and I don't know what more could have been done in that disaster.

It wasn't one which you were given a lot of time

to prepare for, or even to be able to effect rescues.

It happened so quickly.

Mainly hidden, to be honest.

It was only a fair bit of your head and shoulders sticking out.

Yeah.

And till this day and this meeting, I never knew who'd dug me out.

Well, there was about six or seven people.

I would like to thank both of you.

-You're more than welcome. More than welcome.

-Thank you very much.

We're only sorry we couldn't get more out but I'm glad to see you're looking the way you are now.

-Yeah. Yeah.

-You're looking good now anyway.

-Yes, yes.

The Ynysowen Choir came out of the companionship formed in the village after the disaster.

Over the years, the activities initiated by the community

have given comfort to survivors and bereaved families.

The Community Centre in Aberfan was built on the part of Moy Road

destroyed by the avalanche.

As mayor of Merthyr Tydfil,

Jeff Edwards strove to improve the quality of life in Aberfan

but he was always reminded of those denied that opportunity.

I'm proud of what we've done in the community.

I hope that those contributions have made a difference to people's lives,

which I think they have.

I think they still have a contribution to make...

..but I always remember those people who lost their lives

at such an early age,

and weren't able to fulfil their role in society

and contribute to making a difference to the community as a whole.

I think that is the tragic loss of Aberfan, really,

a generation that was wiped out.

Aberfan remains the worst disaster involving children in modern British history.

It should be remembered not only for the generation that was lost

but also for the courage and determination of the survivors.