Following my posts about Aberfan, my friend David Morgan (the one who walks a lot, mostly up hills and generally quite fast) suggested this series of podcasts from BBC Sounds. I’m currently travelling Italy at the moment, so whilst on a flight to Rome and on trains internally, I’ve listened to the entire series today of nine episodes.
The links to the series is at https://www.bbc.com/audio/brand/p09z3n7y.
As a short comment, the way that these families were treated was genuinely shocking. I had realised already that they weren’t respected in the way that they could and should have been, but the treatment was often downright disrespectful. To lose your child and then have to fight to get the tips removed to prevent a re-occurrence, only to discover that it was paid for from the memorial fund is sub-optimal to say the least. Reading old newspapers, it seems that the trustees of the fund begrudgingly accepted the request from the Government to contribute as it was seen to benefit the village, but they shouldn’t have been asked and it was right that the money was later repaid to them.
One of the survivors says that now she’s an adult she simply can’t work out how the families involved coped. Not only did they lose their child, or children, but they faced disinterest and push-back from the authorities in the years that followed. Survivor guilt was also a common theme, how the young children didn’t feel somehow lucky to survive, they were mentally traumatised by what happened and there wasn’t the assistance provided to help them even though some money was made available from the fund.
The worst thing is that no-one was ever held accountable for what happened, there was no-one who lost their job, was demoted or took responsibility for the mistakes that were made. That was what I considered to be the key thing that the locals wanted, they felt that their children had been murdered by the National Coal Board and so they never received the closure that might have helped them deal with the tragedy.
Anyway, they’re definitely worth listening to and the podcasts are well produced.