I was saddened today to read about the death of Hettie Williams. I remember her, not personally, I hasten to add, as Hettie Taylor, a schoolteacher who led her pupils to safety when a waste tip from a nearby colliery slid down the mountainside engulfing Pantglas Junior School, killing 144 people, 116 of whom were children. The world learned of the tragedy in one word: Aberfan.
It happened on the day of 21 October 1966 and it remains one of my most vivid and upsetting childhood memories. I can’t have watched it ‘live’, so to speak, because there was no such thing as ‘breaking news’ back then. Instead, the BBC would issue a ‘news flash’ if an event was deemed important enough. I would imagine I got home from school and watched the TV news with my mum on the tiny black and white set crackling away in the corner of our living room. Some things I remember from childhood, some things I think I can remember but it could be that the memories are actually photographs. Aberfan has stayed with me ever since.
Miss Taylor became part of the story, guiding children out of her classroom as the disaster unfolded. Without her, the devastation would have been, incredibly, impossibly, even worse. I do not know if she received an award, such as an MBE, and I doubt that she would have wanted one either, but if she didn’t, then she should surely be awarded one posthumously. After all, we are quick enough to reward politicians and civil servants for merely doing their jobs. They didn’t do their jobs very well in 1966.
Years passed by until I fully understood the scandal of Aberfan. How the disaster fund was plundered to pay for the tip removal, how the National Coal Board (NCB) escaped the blame that was surely theirs, how the then secretary of state for Wales, George Thomas who went on to become speaker of the house, made it all about him and not the dead and their families, how the chairman of the NCB was far more desperate to keep his job than to accept any blame. The people of Aberfan were failed not just by the disaster itself but everything that followed.
Meanwhile, 144 people were killed and but for the efforts of the emergency services and people like Miss Taylor it would have been many more. Her death by way of a heart attack at the age of 75 takes away from us a real hero. She, at least, put people before anything and everything else. And for that we should be truly grateful.
