To remind people of the minute silence

[Famalam13]

Posting here due to traffic.

Today is 50 years since the Aberfan disaster in which 116 children and 28 adults died. A minute silence will be held at 9:15am.

I've just watched the Huw Edwards documentary. Very well done I thought. Especially the reconstruction of the inquiry. So shocking how in the face of all that evidence, no one lost their job or ended up in prison. I like to think it wouldn't happen now, with press pressure and stronger regulation.

Cave I read that at work the other morning. Beautiful article. So so sad. Tears in my eyes all day.

Pp, I've been aware of it for a while, I can't remember how I first heard. I'm in my 30s and no direct links with Wales.

I live near the village and I remember the terrible loss very well. What I don't understand, is why aren't most British children taught about this trajedy In school, as part of the nations history ?

Thank you for the links. I grew up not very far from Aberfan, and remember the terrible shock and sadness, the diminishing hope as the days went by and the death toll went up- and up. The children's photographs in the paper. A child in my class lost a young relative. We were told about the children being told to get under their desks, by their teacher. The child that survived because they were off sick. Later our school collected money. Its good that this terrible disaster is remembered, and those born after the tragedy can read about what happened.
I remember and will never forget.

I grew up in Aberfan and even though the disaster happened a decade before I was born I grew up very much in its aftermath.

Many of my neighbours lost children in the disaster, 7 children were killed in my street alone. I had a relative that was seriously injured in the disaster.

Even though I grew up surrounded by stories of the disaster, however, the full scale of the tragedy never really hit me until I became a parent myself. The heartbreak those families must have felt seems almost unimaginable to me now.

We go back to Aberfan every couple of weeks to visit my DM and DF who still live there. My children, like me, are growing up with stories of the disaster. I feel its important that the families of Aberfan are not forgotten.

Do schools teach about tragedy's like this though? Not just Aberfan but Lockerbie, Dunblane, 9/11 etc? I was about 8 when Lockerbie happened and around 14 when Dunblane happened and I don't really recall either being talked about at school at the time.

I guess there's an element of not wanting to upset children, particularly things like Aberfan and Dunblane which both happened IN a school.

I remember this event very well i was at school out in the flat lands of East Anglia and around midday there was to be an announcement of a bad disaster and an assembly was held after dinner. The headmaster told us what happened and being a strict catholic school prayers were said for the victims and all involved. There was to be a collection for the disaster fund to which we all gave our weekly pocket money. I remember coming home from school and we all were all in the living room glued to the TV for the evening news. We watched it in total silence, and even my dad was quiet afterwards nobody said anything we just had dinner in awestruck silence.

Some years ago I took the family to see an old friend in Somerset and as we had all day to get home i decided to drive over into mid Wales on the way back. We went though many small valley villages I took the road through Aberfan and wanted to stop but my then wife said we shouldn't as it might upset the children who were with us. That journey all the way back was in silence i was very upset.

One day before long I'm going there by myself just to be there and remember those people especially the children. One day I promise you people of Aberfan I won't forget!

I only found out about the tragedy recently. I'm not from the area and we didn't cover any modern history in history lessons at school.

It's hard to imagine how a community could move on from something like this. Very sad.

Thank you for posting that, OP. I missed the minute's silence but I think of Aberfan everytime I go there as one of my sites is there. It isn't a hallowed place or really distinctive, in my opinion, if you didn't know about the disaster, you'd think it unremarkable and undistinguishable from any Welsh mining town.

But I know, and everybody here knows about it and the victims of this shocking disaster are remembered on a daily basis, just not by the same people every day.

It was before my time and I didn't live in Wales until ten years later but it's odd to me that people don't know about it and unthinkable that they'd be so crass as to berate someone for saying so. There are local disasters in many places and I'm sure I don't know about them all but in that case I'd just acknowledge and keep quiet.

OP. My mum told me about Aberfan when I was a child and it was such a sad story. I couldn't understand how children could go to school and not come home again. Around 10 years ago I was in Wales and we visited the memorial site and the cemetary and it was such a humbling moment. The sight of all those white arches was so upsetting and I can't imagine what those poor parents went through.

It should never be forgotten.

cavemum my DS (6) said they had a special assembly about a landslide landing on a school. He said his teacher told them (he's rather morbid - he probably asked!) that the best place to be to not die is under a table.

DC's school had an assembly too. Even my 6 year old came home with quite a bit of detail.

Bit of a paradox but over here in the far flung reaches of England we did admire those tough stoic mining families who did hold it altogether under such horrendous circumstances. But they were so used to tragedy that coal has cost thousands of lives over the years. Course its the same coal that pulled them together into such communities but now its gone I wonder if its quite the same now there?.

Course it was the price of coal that took the children that's what make it so poignant and harrowing.

Glad in away to see that end of that industry.

Have a look at this site each month the opening title is "In Memoriam"

October was a bad month for Wales, some 439 lives at Senghenydd 207 at Blantyre, No. 2 Pit plus the 144 at Aberfan and that's not all.

Sorry!

www.dmm.org.uk/mindex.htm

I'm in South Wales, grew up in the valleys. My manager in work tells me her daughters school taught the children about Aberfan, so it seems to happen now - I'm 39 now and my school never mentioned Aberfan, though we covered the Senghenydd explosion a lot as it was local - another avoidable disaster. The youngest to die there were just 14. At least one poor woman lost a husband and two teenage sons.

I don't know if it's just me, but all the Valleys have a rather melancholy air. A lot of hardship and a lot of death in mining communities.

Unless there is a local connection, people mainly know what they remember, and there are so many tragedies and disasters - off the top of my head, Hillsborough, Piper Alpha, Kings Cross, Herald of Free Enterprise, Lockerbie, Dunblane, Hungerford, Clapham. You could make a good guess at someone's age by which disasters they name when asked.

I'm 39, grew up in Cardiff and we did it at primary school.

I think the thing that got me was the sheer awful timing of it. If it had happened 20 minutes earlier, or the following Friday when it was half term, the kids would not have been there. It would still have been a tragedy for the people killed in their homes, but the schoolkids would have been ok for the most part.

I knew about Aberfan but I didn't know about the institutional failings before and after. We had this, then Hillsborough :(

The list is so sad! Seeing a few with some from the same family as well :-( heartbreaking. Such disgusting behaviour by the coal board before and after!!

Have spent all day on and off reading various websites about Aberfan. I probably found out about it in the late 80s when I was in my mid-teens, and had an obsession with the 1960s.

So sad. Both for those who died and those who had to carry on without them.

I only found out yesterday that my grandad went up to dig :(

I've reported the spam