I first met Tyrone O’Sullivan while making a TV documentary in Wales for East German television in the aftermath of the miners’ strike and in the early days of the workers’ takeover of Tower Colliery. He was a big man and at first sight looked more like someone you might see slogging it out in a wrestling ring than the office manager he had become. But he was very much the opposite: kind and softly spoken.
He and his wife, Elaine, welcomed us with generosity into their miners’ cottage in the Cynon Valley. He introduced us to the village, and the miners who lived there, where they still had a brass band and a miners’ welfare club. He also took us to see the Aberfan cemetery in the next valley where, in 1966, 116 children and 28 adults were killed as a slag heap collapsed. That’s the cost of coal, he told us, with an unusual note of anger in his voice. He will be long remembered, not least by his comrades in south Wales.
