“Prettily dressed and beribboned, riding expensive pedal-cars and bicycles, they [surviving children] are an elite, the aristocrats of survival, their lives nervously guarded and also coveted by those who mourn. By luck, chance, and by no choice of their own, they are part of the unhealed scar-tissue of Aberfan.”



- Novelist Laurie Lee from 'The village that lost its children', part of an essay collection entitled I Can't Stay Long

Jeff Edwards was the last child to be lifted out of Pantglas alive. After graduating from the University of London, he left a City accountancy career to return home and set up community projects to tackle social problems among young people after the mine closed in 1989. Awarded an MBE in 2003 he went on to serve as an independent Mayor of Merthyr Tydfil and council leader.

Jeff Edwards decided he would never have children. The trauma of Aberfan, he believes, has somehow corrupted his DNA. “Your personality has changed to such a degree your traits, your make-up, your being has been so fundamentally altered you wouldn’t want to perpetuate it,” he says. “One minute we were young innocent children of eight years of age who were looking forward to the holidays and then at twenty past nine we were totally different people and would never be the same again.”

With sister Julie. Just before the slide her class was taken on a walk which saved her life

That morning Jeff called for his best friend Robert, a local doctor’s son. Jeff was among just four of his 34 classmates who survived. Robert was killed. “I’d gone over to the library books which were on the windowsill at the back of the class which faced the tip and picked up Herge’s Adventures of Tintin,” he recalls. “I came back to my desk and our teacher, Mr Davies, started a maths lesson.

Class photo: Three others survived - David Davies (not pictured), a retired solicitor, Gaynor Madgwick (fourth from right, middle row), who has written books on Aberfan, and Gerald Kirwan, (back row, far left) who was a pit manager

Some of the teaching staff: Head teacher Miss Jennings (front second left) was killed in her study

Jeff recalls a thunderous noise which grew louder and louder. “The next thing I remember was waking up, my right foot was stuck in the radiator and there was water pouring out of it," he says. "My desk was pinned against my stomach and a girl's head was on my left shoulder. She was dead. "Because all the debris was around me I couldn't get away from her. The image of her face comes back to me continuously.

“It was black all around me but there was an aperture of light about 10ft above me. I remember seeing particles of dust spinning and glistening where the light caught them. "I could hear crying and screaming. As time went on they got quieter and quieter as children died, they were buried and running out of air.” The 90 minutes-or-so Jeff waited, gasping for breath, death on his young shoulder, before being rescued is hard to imagine. Above him the muck began to harden and set like cement while torrents of dirty black flood water coursed into the village from the ruptured water main on the hillside above. Yvonne Price, then 21, was one of the first police officers on the scene. She recalls being rigid with shock.

As her patrol car turned into the village, the driver screamed: "I can't get through... The water's rising... the water's rising. "A huge bank of water was coming directly towards us," she says. "It was like a tsunami, it was terrifying." The crisis whistle sounded in the colliery and miners, their headlamps still lit, ran to the school where women were clawing at the slurry - “some had no skin on their hands” - trying in vain to reach children who could be heard crying. The late Cliff Minett, a former miner who lost two children that day, jumped down into the school hall.

“I looked to my left, there was a woman on her knees screaming,” he said. “It was a teacher... I said ‘have the children gone home?’, she said ‘no, they’re all in there’.” What little hope there was ran out after Jeff was rescued. “I heard the men breaking a window and someone said ‘there’s someone down here - I can see white hair’,” he says. “They started to remove all the girders and debris from around me but they still couldn’t get me out. The firemen got their hatchets out and hacked away at my desk.”

Jeff carried to safety, his mother close by (top left)

The 10th and last child to be brought out alive, he was treated for head and stomach injuries. A further 28 children were injured, many seriously. Even so physical injuries were superficial compared to the psychological damage. Terrified of the tips and traumatised by nightmares, Jeff initially refused to go home and stayed with his grandmother in a nearby village. When he did eventually come home, things did not get much better.

Jeff shortly after being released from hospital

One of Aberfan's three local GPs, the late Dr Arthur Jones, spoke of a “strange bitterness between families who lost children and those who hadn’t; people just could not help it”. “You have feelings of guilt that you survived, ‘why me?’,” Jeff says, keen to point out that some parents who lost children were extremely supportive of him. “It is a very difficult emotion to come to terms with. We had no childhood, it was taken from us. “Play is an important part of a child’s development but that stopped. Most of the kids we played with were gone and play was frowned upon by some parents who lost children.” Survivor guilt was not the only burden.

Boys from the nearby senior school look in disbelief

The symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) began to show but in 1966 there was little understanding or recognition of the syndrome. Determined the world would learn from the mistakes of Aberfan he has contributed to NICE (National institute for Health and Care Excellence) guidelines on PTSD, taken part in clinical studies and spoken at conferences and personally helped victims of Enniskillen, Dunblane, Paddington and the 2011 tsunami in Japan. “After the disaster we had interventions from psychiatrists,” Jeff says. “But services were in their infancy. They didn’t really know how to deal with it and it wasn’t much help. There were sessions and we were offered different drugs.” Jeff says the surviving children did not really have a formal education for many years. "We didn’t want to go to school as we were afraid it would happen again,” he says. "The children who survived had to come to terms with the loss of their friends and the scenes of carnage they witnessed."

Surviving children in a make-shift school

Time and again, testimonies from the past describe the same thing – no one talked about what happened. This was an age of stoicism, embodied by the tough, macho miners themselves. Psychological help was stigmatised and viewed with suspicion. "I couldn’t speak about what happened to my parents because of the horrific things I saw, you felt you didn’t want to put them through that," says Jeff, who has never spoken about it to his mother to this day.



Survivor David Davies on his family's farm: His body was pulled from Pantglas and carried to his father - he was believed dead until a nurse saw his leg move

"One of the teachers who survived would, effectively through play, try to get us to open up as many of us became very closed, insular, wouldn’t confide in anybody. "We were afraid to say what had happened to us on that day as when we started to talk about it we’d get very upset. It was a very difficult thing to talk about." While some families contended with the loss of one, maybe two children, others tried to comfort survivors terrorised by nightmares, bedwetting and irrational behaviour. "To a certain degree death was a part of that life but when it comes to children dying in an industrial accident, it really gets to people, even the most macho," Jeff says. "So you had divorce rates go up, an increase in alcoholism, disease, anti-depressants, stress, anxiety which all lead to premature deaths."

A miner whose young brother was among the dead

It was estimated that at least 20 parents went on to die prematurely. In 1968 one bereaved mother reportedly took an overdose of barbiturates. Countless others existed on sedatives and sleeping tablets. The pills worked but only when it was not raining. Then they were too afraid to sleep, terrified the tips would slip again. Dr Jones described the village as consumed with guilt, psychological problems, alcoholism and nervous breakdowns. “By every statistic, patients seen, prescriptions written, deaths, I can prove that this is a village of excessive sickness,” he said. Even 50 years on, Jeff suffers flashbacks. The triggers are numerous and varied - events on TV, reports of other disasters, the sound of thunder, loud noises or simply being left alone. “It’s something you want to get away from but you can’t and never will,” he says. “Some days I get overwhelmed by crippling depression and I can’t function, can’t get out of bed. “It totally and utterly closes you down. You can actually smell the school, somewhere in your psychological background you have the smell and the taste of the school, coal, the slurry; it takes you back there.”