Penloom History · The stories they left out

Aberfan — and the bill sent to the children's fund

Wales, 21 October 1966

The tribunal blamed the Coal Board outright. Then the government took £150,000 donated for the dead children to clear the tips.

At a quarter past nine on a Friday morning, colliery waste tip No. 7 above Aberfan liquefied and came down the mountain into Pantglas Junior School, minutes after the children had gone into class. 144 people died; 116 were children. The tip had been built over known springs, and complaints had been made for years.

The tribunal

The tribunal under Lord Justice Edmund Davies reported in 1967 and blamed the National Coal Board outright, naming nine of its staff and finding the root cause to be a total absence of any tipping policy. Nobody was prosecuted, dismissed or demoted.

The bill sent to the fund

Then the part that is hard to read. The public gave about £1.75 million to a disaster fund. The remaining tips still loomed over the village and the NCB would not pay to remove them — so the government privately pressed the trustees, and £150,000 donated for the dead children paid to take them down. The Charity Commission later called it unquestionably unlawful. It was repaid in 1997, without interest.

Sources

Report of the Tribunal appointed to inquire into the Disaster at Aberfan on October 21st, 1966 (HL 316 / HC 553, HMSO, 1967) — the Edmund Davies tribunal report.
Iain McLean and Martin Johnes, Aberfan: Government and Disasters (Welsh Academic Press, 2000).
Hansard, House of Commons, 26 October 1967 and 31 July 1997 — the debates on the tribunal's findings and on the repayment of the £150,000 to the Aberfan Disaster Fund.

Penloom History — dark history you can trust. Every claim traced to a named archive, monograph, report or paper, and everything the record does not carry labelled where it sits. How we check a history fact before we repeat it →