ABERFAN - my memories

I arrived to start work at the South Wales Fire Service Workshops in Lanely Hall, Talbot Green, at 7.45am - where I was an 18 year old apprentice VM - on a very normal Friday morning 21st October 1966. At 9.45am I was driving a short wheelbase AFS landrover, stuffed to the rafters with spare parts for Coventry Climax fire pumps, having been told there was a flooding incident and I should get to a small village, called Aberfan, up towards Merthyr, the other side of Cilfynydd. As it happened, because of the traffic, I didn't get there until mid-afternoon.

I was not to see the workshops again, nor was I to go home to Ynyshir, until the following Thursday evening.

On arrival it was complete chaos, people everywhere, the roof of what looked like a school protruding up out of a 15 or 20 foot wall of black sludge. I delivered my spares to a Fire Service officer and was then sent up the mountain, about a quarter of the way to the top of a huge tip where very large amounts of water were gushing down towards the village. With many other fire service personnel we established lines of Coventry Climax water pumps, which eventually ran at maximum revs for days, to move the water down into a natural stream at the bottom of the hill to carry the water away from the village.

For the next week we spent our time topping up fuel tanks, checking oil levels and engine temperatures to ensure the pumps kept running, cannibalising parts from dead pumps wherever necessary. I never saw the landrover again and have no idea what happened to it!

I count myself very fortunate not to have been involved in what was going on down the hill in the school building which had been engulfed by the sludge as it ripped down the mountainside. It would have been a harrowing experience, the sort of thing which stays with you forever.

By Wednesday we were notified that the last live victim had been pulled out of the school the day before and relief teams of volunteer fire service were being drafted in to take over from us on Thursday morning. I finally left the pump line about midday and got home by about 7.00pm that night.

Well I was 8 years old when it happened so was not directly involved in it saw it all on the tv but as an 8 year old couldn't really take it all in.However in our street we had a Police House and the PC living there at the time was a Great bloke called Mostyn Evans always cheerful and got on well with all the kids remember him going down to Aberfan in the morning returning at night covered in mud and then repeating it day after day I take my hat off to all those people who helped down there and it's only now much later in life I realise how much heart ache it must have caused the people who lived and helped with the rescue.God bless them all gone but not forgotten

20

John Williams, (Will 40) from the Caernarfon Branch, recently attended the anniversary of the tragic events at Aberfan, he recalls that his trg. platoon, Korea, and Palestine Platoon at Cwrt-Y-Gollen was called out during that fateful day in October 1966, John attended the Memorial garden of remembrance with our Standard, and would like to thank Mr and Mrs B. Wheeler for laying a spray of flowers on behalf of the Caernarfon Branch, although a sad time, he would also like to thank everyone for the warm welcome he received, and the emotional reunion with past Comrades of 1966.