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There is a particular burden that falls on those who walk away from a catastrophe that kills the people standing next to them. It is not quite survivor’s guilt in the clinical sense, though that is part of it. It is something older and harder to name: the feeling that a life spared must somehow be justified. For the children who survived the Aberfan disaster on 21 October 1966, that feeling quietly organised the next six decades of their lives.
This month marks sixty years since a colliery spoil tip above the Welsh village of Aberfan collapsed after days of rain, sending hundreds of thousands of tonnes of coal slurry down the hillside and into Pantglas Junior School. One hundred and forty-four people were killed, among them 116 children who had just taken their seats for the last morning of school before half-term. The disaster remains one of the worst industrial accidents in British history, and the question of what it did to those who lived through it has never fully been answered.
The Silence That Lasted Decades
Janett Bickley was eight years old and barely recovered from pneumonia when she arrived at Pantglas that morning. A classmate dug her out of the debris. She climbed through broken rafters and joined a queue of children waiting to be pulled through a window. When she reached home, she discovered she was the only child from her street to have come back from school that day.
What followed, for Janett and for many others, was not therapy or open grieving. It was enforced silence. “We were lucky, ‘You lived, don’t speak about it ever again’,” she recalled being told. Families across Aberfan adopted the same posture, pushing children to look forward rather than inward. Even the psychiatrists brought in to help made little difference in practice. “We all went to a psychiatrist, and we never spoke about it, even to the psychiatrist,” said Denise Morgan, whose younger sister Annette was killed in the disaster.
Denise had just passed her eleven-plus and started grammar school when Annette died. The grief derailed her academically. “When I came to take my O-levels as they were then, I failed them all miserably apart from one,” she said. Her parents were traumatised. The family, like so many in Aberfan, simply did not speak of it. It was not until survivors were well into their thirties and forties that the seal began to break. “When we finally broke that seal of talking about it, it healed us, in a way,” Denise said.
The psychological cost of that prolonged silence is visible in the divergence of outcomes among survivors. “You can see it in some people in Aberfan. They have come through it. Others have not, and suffered for many years,” Denise observed. The contrast between those who found a way to process the trauma and those who did not maps, in many cases, onto whether they eventually found a way to speak about what happened and to redirect their energy outward.
Service as Recovery
What is striking about the survivors who agreed to speak to the BBC ahead of this anniversary is how consistently they describe community service not as altruism but as something closer to self-preservation. The act of helping others, it turns out, was also the act of helping themselves.
Denise had decided she wanted to be a teacher before the disaster, inspired by the staff at Pantglas, many of whom died trying to protect their pupils. She held onto that ambition through grief and academic failure, eventually qualifying, becoming a head teacher, and receiving an MBE for services to education. Much of her career was spent working with children from disadvantaged backgrounds. “I often told my story,” she said, sharing with those children the conviction that “you can be anything you want to be.” She still thinks about the teachers she lost. “They all helped to save many of the children that are alive today.”
Jeff Edwards was one of the last children pulled alive from the school. He built a career in accountancy and moved to London, but returned to Aberfan in the mid-1990s to find a community hollowed out by pit closures and industrial decline. Young people were drifting without qualifications or prospects. Some were caught up in crime, drugs and alcohol. Two had taken their own lives. “I think the reason I really came back was those youngsters hanging about the street with no future. It was the second generation who were being lost to the community,” he said.
Using grants from organisations including Children in Need, and at one point receiving a private donation from the late Queen Elizabeth II (the amount of which he says he cannot disclose), Jeff built projects focused on literacy, parental support, employment and youth engagement. He later served as an independent councillor and then as leader of Merthyr Tydfil council, channelling funding into education and community development across the region. “By helping them, I was helping myself, in terms of my own recovery process,” he said.
David Davies was knocked unconscious when the tip collapsed and was initially placed among the dead in the school playground, covered with a blanket, until someone noticed his foot move. He was taken to hospital and, remarkably, was discharged in time for Bonfire Night. He studied at Aberystwyth and Cambridge and built a career in international law, but has spent 26 years as chair of the Aberfan memorial charity, overseeing the preservation of the memorial garden and cemetery. “It’s really in their honour and in their memory that I’m driven forward,” he said. He credits the late Queen with capturing the community’s character precisely: “an indomitable spirit.”
What Aberfan Taught the World About Surviving Disaster
The experience accumulated in Aberfan over sixty years has not stayed within the village. Jeff Edwards noted that survivors have been contacted by communities in the aftermath of the Hillsborough disaster, the Grenfell Tower fire, and the Manchester Arena bombing. “They always contact us in Aberfan after the damage to see how we survived, how we coped,” he said. The village has become, in an unintended way, a repository of hard-won knowledge about collective trauma and long-term recovery.
The lessons are uncomfortable ones. Suppression does not work, or at least it does not work for everyone. The silence imposed on Aberfan’s survivors in the years after 1966 reflected the conventions of the time, but it left many people carrying weight they were never given the tools to set down. The relief that Denise and others describe when they finally began to talk openly suggests that the timing of that release mattered enormously, and that sixty years is a long time to wait.
Janett Bickley, who spent thirty years in the pharmaceutical industry before turning her energy toward community organising during the Covid-19 pandemic, recently had a clock face tattooed on her arm, frozen at 09:13 on 21 October 1966, the moment the tip gave way. “It is with me for life,” she said. The image is not morbid so much as it is honest: a permanent acknowledgment that survival is not a clean break from the past but a continuous negotiation with it. What the survivors of Aberfan demonstrate, across very different lives and very different paths, is that the negotiation goes better when it is conducted in the open, and in the service of others.
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