At Aberfan, I saw fathers digging for their missing children. And the lessons society should have learned, it hasn’t | John Humphrys

Aberfan taught us a lot. Mostly, of course, that those in power cannot be trusted. Correction: must not be trusted.

Too sweeping?

I might have thought so until 60 years ago this week when I stood alongside mothers weeping and praying as they watched their husbands digging for the bodies of their children who lay crushed beneath the ruins of their little school.

The parents’ faces were black, save for the streaks of white from their tears. Two hours earlier those men had been digging coal from deep beneath the ground. With the coal, of course, came the waste that would have to be separated to become the great mounds that disfigured every mining valley.

My best friend’s father was a miner. I had been a reporter on the local paper and I once went down the mine to watch him at work. I begged to return to the surface after no more than an hour of breathing in the deadly coal dust. I tried to imagine every working hour trapped in that living hell and failed.

This, surely, was the most dangerous and demanding job in the land. Few miners escaped serious lung damage. I never once spoke to a Valleys mother who wanted her son to follow his father down the pit. But what I witnessed that day was something even the toughest miners, let alone their wives, could not have dreamed of in their darkest nightmares.

Every so often, one of the diggers would shout for silence. He thought he had heard a child cry out. We stood and prayed, hardly daring to breathe. Sometimes our prayers were answered. I watched a little girl handed to a policeman. She was unconscious but, thank God, she was breathing. She would live. Most did not.

I did my best to tell the outside world what was happening from a phone in the local pub overlooking the school. But what I failed to report until many hours later was the terrible truth that this was a disaster that need never have happened.

Correction: a disaster that should never have happened.

What every miner in that village and every miner’s wife had always known was that the massive waste tip that was to destroy their lives should never have been built. Or at least, should never have been built on that spot. This was not one of those disasters that might eventually be written off as part of the price society was reconciled to paying if we were to enjoy the benefits of what we once called “black gold”.

Every miner knew he faced danger from the moment he stepped into the cage that would drop him a couple of thousand feet below ground. Until the nightmare of Aberfan, the most painful job I was ordered to do as a teenage reporter on the Merthyr Express was knocking on the door of a miner’s cottage a few hours after his wife had been told she was now a widow.

The first time I was scared. Surely I would be ordered by the newly bereaved widow to clear off? But I learned quickly that they almost always wanted to talk about their dead husbands. And there was seldom any anger. They had always known – even if it was never talked about – that he might never come home. Accidents were inevitable.

But what happened in Aberfan was no accident.

A young John Humphrys reporting from Aberfan in October 1966. Photograph: Archif Ddarlledu Cymru/Wales Broadcast Archive/ITV Wales

It was the result of grotesque indifference on the part of the men who ran the National Coal Board (NCB) and were responsible for the location of every waste tip of every nationalised colliery in the land. Above all, of the man who chaired that board: Alfred Robens.

Such was his unbelievable disregard for the hell that had been visited on that little Welsh village that he couldn’t even spare a few hours to share their grief. While they were still digging through the filth that had choked the lives from so many children, His lordship was being chauffeured to a new university for a ceremony where he was to be made chancellor. And the year of the disaster, he also accepted an honorary degree for his services to the mining industry.

His “services”? Has ever the English language been more abused?

What Lord Robens had always known – if only because he would have been briefed by his team of senior officials – was that to build a massive tip on that particular spot on the hillside was the equivalent of lighting a bonfire in a dynamite factory.

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I can state that as an absolute fact after all these years, because even as those brave miners and their wives were trying so desperately to deal with their grief, they were showing me copies of the letters they had written over and over again warning the NCB that it was criminally reckless to site the tip on that spot.

There was a simple reason that even an ignoramus such as me could understand. It rains a lot in the Welsh valleys and there are many springs beneath the surface of the hills. The spot the officials chose for the tip was notorious for its springs. But it was directly above the village. And Pantglas junior school.

Every morning two miners would trudge up the hillside of their own volition to examine the state of the tip. When they saw what was happening on 21 October 1966, they turned and ran down the hillside. But it was too late. Within minutes 100,000 tonnes of coal waste had hit the school at 80mph, killing almost everyone in its path.

It took a little more than a year for Robens and his henchmen to face a form of justice. I sat through the public inquiry when the scale of the disgrace was unveiled, day after agonising day, and Robens was the final witness.

The inquiry chairman treated his protestations of ignorance and innocence with richly deserved contempt and I remember leaping into my car to deliver a live broadcast with the sense that justice had finally been delivered.

But had it? Have we really learned anything as a result of Aberfan? The horror of the Grenfell Tower inferno suggests not. The inquiry found that the deaths of all 72 people in 2017 were “entirely avoidable”, resulting from systemic failures, deregulation and corporate dishonesty. It added: “There is still a great deal to learn.”

True, the last of the collieries in the Welsh valleys has long since gone, but can it really be true that no one deserved to face charges for criminal negligence?

What is true is the extraordinary spirit of those who suffered so much and, indeed, of those who survived.

I remember going to the home of a little girl who’d been one of the survivors and asking her mother why she hadn’t sent her to the new school. She answered with almost chilling simplicity: “Because I don’t want mothers who’ve lost their kiddies to see her in the street and be reminded of what they’ve lost.”

• John Humphrys presents The Odd Couple podcast with Matthew Norman