Survivors mark 50 years since Aberfan disaster

A survivor of the Aberfan disaster has spoken publicly for the first time, 50 years after the coal tip collapsed on to his school in South Wales.

Gerald Kirwaun was eight years old when he was trapped inside a classroom at Pantglas Junior School, his friend Paul dead next to him.

In all 144 people died in the tragedy.

This week is the first time he has spoken to his family about what happened, mainly, he said, for the sake of his grandchildren.

He told Sky News: "I've got a little lovely grandson who is very bright and intelligent and is two months younger than I was at the time.

"I look at him sometimes and think this should never, ever have happened and should never ever happen again, and that people should know.

"We put ourselves in that little dark place and we kept ourselves there and it's not ever going to go away until we die, is it?

"It's nice for the children of the future to know exactly what happened to us that day."

The disaster happened on the 21 October 1966, the last day of school before half term.

Swollen streams underneath the tip caused it to collapse, sending tonnes of waste from the nearby mine tumbling down the mountainside into the village below.

The school took the main force of the rubble with 116 children between the ages of seven and 11 killed inside.

Jeff Edwards was in the same class as Gerald. He said: "I went to school as a child but I became an adult within 15 minutes.

"Play, which is such an important part of child development, just disappeared because one we didn't have anyone to play with, and secondly play was frowned on.

"So we tended to go up into the mountains, up into the plantations out of the way of the rest of the community."

While the tragedy has all the hallmarks of a natural disaster, a tribunal found the National Coal Board was to blame.

It said: "The Aberfan Disaster is a terrifying tale of bungling ineptitude by many men charged with tasks for which they were totally unfitted, of failure to heed clear warnings, and of total lack of direction from above.

"Not villains but decent men, led astray by foolishness or by ignorance or by both in combination, are responsible for what happened at Aberfan."

Denise Morgan was 11 at the time. Her sister Annette was killed in the school.

She told Sky News: "My mother re-tells the story, she grew up with her grandfather and she remembers him saying to her as a young child that the tip is going to slip one day and it's going to have a catastrophic effect, but nobody did take any notice of the warnings."

Today Prince Charles was greeted by local people as he arrived for a visit to the Aberfan Memorial Gardens.

A minute's silence was held across Wales on Friday morning to remember the 144 people killed.

At 9.15am, the exact time the coal tip collapsed on top of the village, First Minister Carwyn Jones had asked people across the country to stop and remember the victims.