Content notes: This discusses the Aberfan Disaster, including potentially upsetting details. It also discusses various issues around mental health, including grief and trauma and mentions suicide, depression and anxiety.
Approaching the 50th anniversary, the most commonly-expressed feeling within the community is the desire to move on. ‘We like to see October go out’, let’s get October out of the way, let’s carry on with our lives. This is what the community has done for the last 50 years. With incredible strength, people have lived in ways that resemble life in any other part of the Valleys. People pass reminders of the Disaster on their way out of the village to work, an aging population goes about its business, post-industrial decline effects us like any other working class community. It’s always been like this: in the weeks that followed the Disaster, pubs remained open, milk deliveries were on time and miners went back to the pit after working to rescue children from the rubble of the school. In spite of the unimaginable grief of a small village that had lost 116 children, people bore the brunt and carried on.
They had no other choice. The state provided little support to begin with. Huw Edwards’ documentary charts their struggle for justice when the National Coal Board refused to accept any responsibility, when only £500 compensation was paid at first to bereaved parents by a committee which didn’t include a single villager, and when a huge chunk of the Disaster Fund – donated to support the bereaved – was instead used to remove what remained of the tips from the mountain.
Today, people are still carrying on. On one side of my family, my grandparents have only just started to talk about it, gradually recounting parts of their own experiences, mentioning the nightmares they had for years afterwards, talking about how they kept their children off the streets for fear that the sight of them playing would upset those who had lost their own. On the other side, they don’t say a word about it, despite their own experiences: my great-grandfather worked in the cemetery and had to bury many of those children himself, and Nansi Williams – a dinner lady at Pantglas school and the only member of my family to lose her life in the Disaster – saved five children by shielding them from the slurry with her own body.
That silence – the silence of many in the village – is part of the need to move on, but it is also symptomatic of trauma. The determination to display normality makes the mental health of the community impossible to gauge. Suicide is something you hear about often – but probably no more often than in any working class area that’s lost all of its work. Likewise, depression and anxiety are almost visibly rife and so often untreated, as in any community which relies on small, struggling and overcrowded NHS surgeries.
It’s mostly at this time of year – when the world converges on the village and demands that people talk – that the trauma can be heard through that silence. Even then, for some who have dealt in their own way for 50 years with no wish to grieve publicly, the desire is to carry on like that. There’s an underlying and sometimes stifled anger – usually only expressed in private – at the masses of press and coach-loads of tourists who come and take up space in the village’s narrow streets at every anniversary. It’s well remembered that, at the time of the disaster, parts of the press tried to find and draw out division in the community in their relentless search for blame. When they couldn’t find any, they tired to stir them up.
Similarly, there’s a scepticism of the voices who try to speak for or about the village – of local or national politicians and other public figures who make false claims about (or exaggerate) their own experiences to raise their own profiles , who use the tragedy to condemn a particular government or political party, coopting our history as a point to score in a debate. These people are seen as politicising an event that still causes unspeakable and unspoken pain, breaking that precious silence, opening a very personal history up for abstract discussion.
Whilst some examples of this kind of politicisation are best left unmentioned, involving individuals exploiting their own experiences for political manoeuvre, others are more explicit and shameless – like the historically suspect and overstated claim that the Free Wales Army played some role in winning compensation for the families, presented in articles like this* (much of the text of which is copied and pasted from Roy Clews’ propagandistic book ‘To Dream of Freedom’). Though this is apparently trying to demonstrate some specifically-Welsh form of solidarity, in reality it only serves to downplay the struggles of the villagers themselves.
In the face of such selfish and insensitive claims, it’s entirely understandable why villagers would deride any attempt to talk about the politics of the Disaster and its aftermath.
But for me, this presents a dilemma. I know that no event is without political context, that no interaction is free from power-dynamics and that there is no such thing as apolitical space. But to write from any kind of explicitly political perspective about my home and the tragedy that’s come to define it feels like betrayal. It feels like adding my voice to the endless articles, documentaries or works of art by those who might have visited the village once or twice, might have memories of hearing the news, might share a sense of Welsh identity, but who otherwise have no connection to our community. I live in the village when not in university, I have lived there my entire life and my family has been rooted in the community for generations. Yet I’m writing this as one of the young people who’s ‘escaped’ the decline of Merthyr, from a university that feels almost as far away from the working class town as it’s possible to be. This feels wrong in a lot of ways, but it also feels necessary.
There is politics to the Disaster – its context and its aftermath. There are important lessons to be learnt from the village’s past and its present, especially from a perspective focused on the current crises facing the Valleys: poverty, the slow death of community cohesion and the rising prevalence of mental health problems.
Questions of responsibility are a big part of why people refuse to acknowledge any political context or implications to the Disaster. As photojournalist Chuck Raporport recounts in this exhibition, a miner confined in him afterwards: ‘The worst part of it was, I put those bloody tips up there’. If you blame anyone, you blame the entire community. You blame those who knew of the spring under tip no.7 and said nothing, you blame those who operated the machinery which dumped the slurry on the mountain, and of course you blame the miners in Merthyr Vale Colliery who dug it up, people like my grandfather and my father, who went straight from school to the pit to spend years underground, before being forced out of their jobs by Thatcher in the ’80s.
This narrative isn’t only absurd and unjust – it’s political. It denies the responsibility of structures – of capitalism the state – by guilting those most impacted. It doesn’t point to the long history of exploitation and neglect of working class communities, or draw connections to mining disasters across Britain and the world. Instead it presents events as isolated and individuals as responsible. By extension, it blames the personal failures of members of the community for their own circumstances. It is liberal ideology at its worst – masking the ruthless nature of capitalism, the willingness to put profit before the safety of entire communities, to value coal over life.
Remnants of this attitude can still be heard coming from inside and outside the village – people’s guilt is there in their silences. Its result in the ’60s was the National Coal Board being able to claim that it had no responsibility for the Disaster, the village having to pay for the removal of the tips, the lack of compensation for the families and of course the lack of sufficient mental health support offered in the aftermath.
In the absence of the state, people looked after one another. In displays of what can be called solidarity, those who were able to fought for justice for the bereaved, taking on the state and – eventually – winning compromises. People held each other, listened to each other and mustered the strength to carry on with life as normal. This same spirit was visible in the 1984 Miners Strike, when working class communities defended one another and took on a state determined to crush them.
This, I believe, is one of the primary political lessons to be learnt from Aberfan – the importance of care. At a time when mental health services are disappearing, when the NHS is under attack and working class communities suffer the most from austerity (with police violence and prison often filling the gap left by cuts to welfare services), the solidarity and affinity of people who were neglected by the state and attacked by a hostile media should inspire us.
But care without action can only achieve so much. Care helps people survive, but on its own does little to overthrow the structures which caused harm in the first place. Those political structures which value profit over welfare – which dumped the tips on the mountain in the first place and neglected the community afterwards – still stand today. They took a potent form in Thatcher’s government – the legacy of which can be seen today on local waiting lists for social housing and in the vast empty space at the floor of the valley where the colliery once stood. Those policies which did so much damage in the 1980s inspire today’s Conservative government. The working class suffers the consequences as it always has.
At the same time, the sense of community which allowed Aberfan to carry on is being eroded. Funding for libraries and community centres – with their potential to replace rapidly-closing chapels as community hubs – is disappearing. Whereas the people of Merthyr once had a tradition of showing solidarity with other sections of the working class, forces on the right now tell us to hate other workers – those on benefits or those who are migrants, seeking refuge from economic poverty or fleeing their own tragedies in other parts of the world. Wales now has seven UKIP AMs and the far-right has been rearing its ugly head in the Valleys recently.
These attitudes, self-interest, scapegoating – expressed by the state or on the streets – need to be challenged. The values of solidarity and community need to be salvaged and need to become part of our politics. After all, all of this is political. What working class people do to survive in a world stacked against us is political. The mental health of exploited and deprived communities is political. The policies of governments which perpetuate these circumstances are political. And our response needs to be just as political – both defending ourselves through care and solidarity, and creating radical solutions to the structural problems we face.
Writing this, I can’t escape the feeling that I’m just as guilty of politicising tragedy as others, that I’m breaking a silence that isn’t mine to break – that belongs to people who lived through the Disaster and still carry their trauma today – or that talking about the Disaster in this way does nothing to help my village move on. But at the same time, I know that recognising the political significance and implications of our history is exactly what will allow us to move on. When the villagers demanded the removal of the tips following the Disaster, they argued that the they could never return to any kind of normality whilst living in their shadows. In order to truly move on from struggle and difficulty, we have to overcome that which oppresses us psychologically as well as materially. Today that looks like working towards radical societal change to overcome the political, economic and psychological degradation of our communities.
rhwng muriau cen ystadau caeth / tyf tranc hen wladwriaeth
[between the lichen-covered walls of narrow estates / grows the death of the old state]
– Iwan Llwyd, Aber-fan 1989
*Note: The blog original blog from the Communist Party of Britian website ‘Aberfan and the Free Wales Army’ [accessed at https://communist-party.org.uk/arts-hub/poetry/item/2244-aberfan-and-the-free-wales-army.html%5D has been conveniently deleted since this was published.
against the wall 