by Robert Lacey
Some details about the tip have been changed, including the description of how the start of the subsidence was identified – in reality, the coal tip supervisor, whose name has been changed, had travelled up to the tip that morning, so he was the first witness to see the disaster unfold.
Harold Wilson is shown hearing the news of the tip slide at the opening of a hypermarket (a term not established in the UK until 1970) in Skelmersdale New Town, Merseyside. In reality the Prime Minister was in Wigan, next door to Skelmersdale, having lunch with the local corporation, and he completed his visit while receiving updates on the disaster, before flying to Aberfan – four hours after first hearing the news.
Tony Armstrong-Jones, Princess Margaret’s husband Lord Snowdon, was among those early on the scene, having rushed from London to Aberfan the moment he heard the news. The various details of his dramatic visit have been reconstructed from his original itinerary and from press accounts. He went straight to the Bethania Chapel, where 50 or so parents, mostly fathers, were still waiting to identify their children’s bodies and were emerging quite shattered. Leaving the trained rescue teams to do their job, Snowdon concentrated on those who wanted to pour out their feelings.
‘He had gone spontaneously,’ wrote Harold Wilson in his diary, ‘and instead of inspecting the site, he made it his job to visit the bereaved relatives, sitting holding the hands of a distraught father, sitting with the head of a mother on his shoulder for half an hour in silence.
‘In another house he comforted an older couple who had lost thirteen grandchildren – in another where they were terribly upset, he offered to make a cup of tea, went into the kitchen and returned with a tray with cups for them all. He helped an older man persuade his son, who was clutching something in his tightly clenched fist, to open his hand. It was a prefect’s badge, the only thing by which he had been able to identify his child …’405
Prince Philip arrived the next day, but Elizabeth II held back, actually refusing her staff’s suggestions that she should go down to South Wales.
‘We kept presenting the arguments,’ recalls one adviser, ‘but nothing we said could persuade her.’
‘People will be looking after me,’ she objected. ‘So perhaps they’ll miss some poor child that might have been found under the wreckage.’406
Elizabeth’s imagining of the lost child showed the reality of her concern – and she could not imagine why her own particular presence should matter. ‘She has no vanity,’ said one of the advisers involved in the daily meetings which tried to get the Queen to budge. ‘She can’t understand why people should want to see her. She is not an actress like her mother. She has a horror of what she calls “stunts”, and she simply has no sense or instinct for the balm that her presence brings.’407
Episode 303 suggests that Marcia Williams and other Labour Party conspirators attempted to shift newspaper attention away from the government and towards the Queen, but there is no evidence for this. The big question is why Elizabeth II waited eight days before she went to Aberfan. Did she care too much – or too little? What problem did the monarch have with the knotting of her inner impulses? Or is that her strength? The depiction of her eventual visit to the home of an Aberfan resident is based on her visit to Councillor Jim Williams, where she stayed and spoke with the family for nearly 20 minutes and emerged visibly emotional. She is known to have prayed for the victims of the catastrophe so she is shown as saying her prayers inside one of the five chapels in the village.
Perhaps the most useful perspective that history can lend is to note that, unlike many who got there ahead of her in 1966, the Queen has since been back to revisit the village at least three times. She returned in March 1973 to open the new community centre; in May 1997, when she planted a tree in the Garden of Remembrance; and most recently in 2012, when she met some of the remaining survivors for a fourth time in 46 years.408
October 29, 1966 – Elizabeth II and Prince Philip at Aberfan
Hoping to diffuse the dismay that Aberfan provoked around the country, Harold Wilson immediately set up a tribunal of enquiry under Lord Justice Edmund Davies QC, a Welshman born two miles from Aberfan. It was his brief to start investigating and come to some conclusions as rapidly as possible. The tribunal convened initially at nearby Merthyr Tydfil and then, after Christmas, in Cardiff, hearing evidence for 76 days and delivering its conclusions on 3 August 1967.409 The problem, it turned out, with all the towering piles of coal waste that ringed so many British mining communities at that date, was that they were not really composed of coal – that is, not the nice large lumps of coal that people then liked to burn in their fireplaces, or which factories and locomotives could usefully employ. In 1966 British Rail trains were still powered by steam engines burning ‘big-lump’ coal.
It was mining waste and discarded ‘tailings’ – the fine particles left after the washing process – that had been dumped in the Aberfan valley by Merthyr Vale Colliery on sloping, low-value land: highly porous sandstone riven with streams and underwater springs, whose water had liquified the tip dust into the thick, black quicksand that came pouring down into the valley to flood over the school and had then solidified so quickly around the victims in the classrooms.
Aberfan had been expressing concerns about these ‘spoil tips’ for years, particularly ‘Tip 7’ which had been started in 1958 and had risen eight years later to a mini mountain, 111ft (34m) high, containing some 300,000 cubic yards (229,300 cubic metres) of damp, powdery waste.410 Tip 7 had been piled up on the sloping hillside above Pantglas School on top of a running stream that was actually marked on the Ordnance Survey map. Children used to play in the water where it emerged from the tip, collecting tadpoles in the spring. In 1963 the school had organised a petition protesting at the ugliness and dangers of the slag heaps that surrounded the village, but the National Coal Board (NCB) had brushed all complaints aside.411
As the tribunal scandalously revealed, the NCB had no policy at all, and not even safety guidelines, for the scores of waste tips with which it had littered Great Britain’s mines and excavations for the past 20 years. Merthyr Vale Colliery had operated tip safety guidelines when it was in private hands, but these had been discarded when the mine came under public ownership, along with 957 others around the country – the property of some 800 private companies all nationalised by Clement Attlee’s post-war Labour government. ‘This colliery is now managed by the National Coal Board on behalf of the people,’ proclaimed a notice proudly posted at Merthyr and at every colliery in the country on 1 January 1947.412 But it was difficult to detect much care ‘on behalf of the people’ from the NCB’s conduct in Aberfan.
Lord Alfred – ‘Alf’ – Robens, Baron Robens of Woldingham, the former trades union official who was given a life peerage when he became chairman of the NCB in 1961, was heading towards Guildford in Surrey on that Friday morning when he received news of the Aberfan tip collapse, but he decided to keep on travelling. Robens was due to be installed as the first chancellor of the new University of Surrey. That was his priority on 21 October – and he did not arrive at Aberfan until the evening of the following day. There he immediately raised hackles by saying that his NCB staff could not possibly have foreseen the danger of the tip collapsing, claiming in a later interview that the trouble was down to ‘natural unknown springs’ beneath the tip. When told that the course of his ‘unknown’ stream that helped generate the lethal flood could clearly be traced on the Ordnance Survey map, he was not embarrassed.413
Lack of embarrassment was Alf Robens’ style. Once considered a possibility for Labour Party leadership, he hugely enjoyed the trappings of his lofty position, which included a Daimler with the registration number ‘NCB 1’, an executive aeroplane – a six-seater De Havilland Dove – and a flat in Eaton Square.414 Robens’ £10,000 a year salary, along with subsequent business interests, enabled him to retire to the stately Laleham Abbey in Surrey, once the home of the Earls of Lucan. Not for nothing did Lord Alf earn the nickn
ame from his detractors of ‘Old King Coal’.
Worse was to come. When the question arose of financial compensation for the loss of life at Aberfan, the Charity Commission proposed asking the grief-stricken parents ‘Exactly how close were you to your child?’ – with the idea that those considered not close to their children would not need to be compensated. In the event, the NCB stepped in to offer £50 per life lost (£900 per life in 2019 monetary values) – £5,800 for all 116 children, a little over half of the chairman’s annual salary. Such was the outrage that Lord Alf was shamed into a more ‘generous’ offer – £500 per head (£9,000 per life in 2019). A more substantial sum, it was explained, would have confused working-class recipients not used to handling large amounts of money.415
Justice Edmund Davies’ tribunal was scathing in its condemnation of the NCB’s incompetence, indifference and inhumanity – ‘a terrifying tale of bungling ineptitude by many men charged with tasks for which they were totally unfitted,’ as the judge put it baldly in his opening statement. The tribunal listed a damning catalogue ‘of failure to heed clear warnings’, and deplored ‘a total lack of direction from above’ – which presumably referred to Lord Robens.416 Worse, it noted how the NCB had actually hampered the tribunal’s enquiries, prolonging its work by weeks and costing even more taxpayers’ money by declining to cooperate from the start. Only towards the end of the hearings did Robens grudgingly admit the inescapable – that the NCB had entire responsibility for the existence, siting, maintenance and safety of Tip 7, and thus had to assume entire responsibility for the tragedy.
Not a single NCB official, however, was dismissed or even disciplined for his role in the catastrophe, and not one resigned, with the exception of Lord Robens – after a fashion. Lord Alf did write to the Minister of Power, Richard Marsh, offering his resignation in September 1967, but papers released in 1997 under the Thirty-Year Rule revealed that he only did so after agreeing the wording of the letter that his colleague and fellow Labour grandee would write in gracious refusal of the resignation.417 In 2006 Marsh (created a life peer himself in 1981, as Baron Marsh of Mannington in the County of Wiltshire) confirmed in a broadcast interview that he had discussed everything with Robens in advance: ‘I said, “Well, you send me in your resignation, and I will send you back a letter saying, ‘Quite understand it, but I don’t accept it’”’ … All ‘on behalf of the people’, of course.418
The final wrinkle in the saga was the question as to when and how the remains of Tip 7 and the six other piles of waste around Aberfan would be removed. The first news of the tragedy had prompted the setting up of an Aberfan Disaster Fund to which ordinary people around Britain – and abroad – rushed to subscribe. Over 90,000 donations soon reached a total of £1.75 million, an estimated £20 million-plus in 2019 values – only the Diana, Princess of Wales Memorial Fund has ever outstripped it.419 Most donors must have imagined that their money would be going directly to help the bereaved families, but the NCB had other ideas. They insisted that the Disaster Fund should contribute £150,000 towards the removal of the remaining waste tips, and this injustice was not corrected for more than 20 years when Tony Blair made repayment – albeit without accounting for interest or inflation.
It seems reasonable to suggest that the scarcely believable heartlessness of the NCB’s behaviour in 1966 and 1967 as a public agency that was charged with ‘caring’ for the workers and welfare of Aberfan was a contributory factor in the demise of Britain’s nationalised industries. No private enterprise would have dared to act in such a high-handed fashion – but the absence of any competition and accountability turned the NCB into a lofty-minded, pretentious and literally lethal institution. In 1994 the NCB’s government-owned successor, the British Coal Corporation, was dissolved and the country’s 15 surviving collieries were handed back to private care and management.420
Today, thankfully, the majority of the waste coal tailings’ tips in South Wales have been removed. Richard Llewellyn would be pleased to see how the valleys like Aberfan’s are green again. But the outline of where the tips once rose above the village can still be clearly identified. There have been fervent and expert horticultural efforts to re-cultivate the sites, but the grass growing over those tips obstinately remains a different colour – a coarse and sickly shade of yellow.421
The captions at the end of the episode reflect how certain people close to the Queen have said that her delayed response to the disaster remains her ‘biggest regret’ as Sovereign – but this, of course, reflects other people speaking on her behalf. Aberfan was not the last time that Elizabeth II’s response to tragedy would be critically examined by the media and the public – not least in 1997 following the death of Diana, Princess of Wales.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
‘BUBBIKINS’
APRIL 1967–NOVEMBER 1968
THE ABERFAN DISASTER OF 1966 PROVED A TURNING POINT in Britain’s attitude towards Queen Elizabeth II, souring the honeymoon that had started so brightly with her 1952 accession and the coronation of 1953. To some extent, this reflected the controversy over the monarch’s delayed and stilted visit to the devastated village – but there was a deeper malaise, as Malcolm Muggeridge, the journalist and self-appointed gadfly of the Windsor clan had reflected in a 1964 US chat show. ‘The English,’ he declared, ‘are getting bored with their monarchy.’422 In fast-changing times, the values that the Crown was traditionally thought to represent – social distinction, respectability and deference – were coming to be seen as a joke: they were prime targets for the country’s burgeoning satire industry. The values of the ‘Swinging Sixties’ were all about classlessness, novelty, equality – and, frankly, some colourful playing to the crowd.
Reflecting on these changes in 1968, the Buckingham Palace press office decided something must be done to portray Elizabeth personally – and the monarchy as a whole – in a more transparent and user-friendly light. The past year had seen the retirement of Elizabeth’s long-serving and snobbish press secretary, Commander Richard Colville – fondly known in Fleet Street as the ‘Anti-Press’ Secretary,423 on account of his determination to keep the media at arm’s length. ‘If there comes a time,’ Colville once said, ‘when the British Monarchy ever needs a “public relations officer”, the institution of monarchy in this country will be in serious danger.’424
Colville’s breezy Australian successor, William ‘Bill’ Heseltine, would adopt an altogether different approach – as he had shown in the summer of 1967 when he staged the televised knighting on the quay at Greenwich of the yachtsman Francis Chichester, the first sailor to circumnavigate the globe single-handed. Heseltine theatrically arranged for Elizabeth to knight Chichester with the same sword that Queen Elizabeth I had deployed in 1581 for the knighting of another maritime Francis, Sir Francis Drake.425 Drake had been the first Englishman to sail around the world, bringing back enough treasure for the Queen’s share of the loot to surpass the rest of her income for that entire year.
Treasure was the root of the problem for Queen Elizabeth II as the 1960s drew to an end. Harold Wilson had come to power in 1964 inheriting an annual balance of payments deficit from his Conservative predecessors of some £800 million, twice as high as the estimate Wilson himself had complained about in the general election campaign.426 For three years he borrowed to try to stave off the inevitable, but in November 1967, having failed to secure a final, crucial bailout from either France or the US, he had to surrender to speculative pressures, announcing the devaluation of the pound sterling from US$2.80 to US$2.40.427
‘Devaluation does not mean that the value of the pound in the pocket in the hands of the … British housewife … is cut correspondingly,’428 the Prime Minister declared in a much-derided broadcast to the nation. The average British housewife knew very well that the value of the pound in her pocket had almost halved in spending power between 1950 and 1969 – 20 shillings were now worth little more than ten.429 And even if the Queen herself did not need to carry around pounds in
her pocket, the same remorseless economic pressures were coming to apply to herself and to the expenses of keeping her monarchy afloat.
Traditionally the Civil List, the annual government grant to cover the Sovereign’s official duties as Head of State (including staff salaries, state visits, public engagements, and the upkeep of the various royal households), would be set at the beginning of the monarch’s reign, and would then remain unchanged until that Sovereign’s demise. But Elizabeth was a long way from ‘demising’ in 1962, when royal expenditure was found to have outrun income for the first time – and this was despite some highly creative accounting. The Royal Navy had loyally taken over the costs of the Royal Yacht Britannia to the tune of no less than £839,000 per year, with National Rail taking care of the £36,000 needed to keep the royal train on the tracks.430
As Edward Heath, Harold Wilson’s successor as Prime Minister, would reveal in the Commons in December 1971, the salaries and expenses of the royal household had risen nearly 150 per cent since 1953 – just over £316,000 to £770,000. ‘Over the same period,’ he declared, ‘the income of the average wage and salary earner has increased by over 200 percent, and the retirement pension by 260 percent.’ The salaries of MPs, he pointed out, had actually trebled in the same period – ‘by 350 percent’. So Elizabeth’s request for a pay rise, he argued, did not seem so unreasonable in the circumstances.431
Not for the first time, however, Prince Philip had to have his say, and he got his chance when interviewed on the US TV programme Meet the Press in November 1969. ‘Queen Elizabeth,’ he was asked, ‘has not had a pay rise for nearly 18 years, a situation that none of her subjects – her working-class subjects – would tolerate for a moment … Is that creating an awkward situation there?’
‘Very,’ replied Philip, jumping straight in. ‘We go into the red, I think, next year. Which is not bad housekeeping when you come to think of it. I mean, we’ve kept the thing going on a budget which is based on costs from 18 years ago.’