Tomorrow marks the 40th anniversary of the Aberfan disaster, one of those tragic stories that was so shocking you remember where you were when you first heard the news. I was drinking with fellow journalists in an East London pub and, in spite of our local weeklies having been published (and, of course, being hundreds of miles from Wales), most of us left our pints and returned to our homes and, in some cases, empty offices. The sombre note struck by the Stratford Express reporter who arrived with the news, Alan Pike (later with the Financial Times), affected even the most cynical among our group.
For the journalists and photographers in South Wales on 21 October 1966 it was, of course, a very different matter. They were witnesses to the horror after rushing to the tiny mining village near Merthyr Tydfil where a slag heap had buried its junior school, killing 116 children and 28 adults. Three of them have been recalling their memories of that awful day in the South Wales Evening Post, and their recollections reopen age-old debates about the work of journalists at the scene of tragedies, raising questions of both ethics and taste.
Malcolm Rees was the first reporter from the Post to reach Aberfan and, like so many journalists who cover such incidents, he said he coped by getting on with his job. "It was horrendous," he said. "But I didn't have time to think about it too much. It was harrowing talking to parents... At that stage they did not know whether their children had survived. Although there was so much going on, I also remember there was a strange stillness about the place. It was quite eerie at times. Rees, now 64, was given the next day off after covering the story. "It is something I will never forget", he says. "And it is important that it isn't forgotten."
Photographer Irwyn Morgan is 80 but he has a pin-sharp memory of the day. Then working for The Herald of Wales, says: "I had seen other landslides, but nothing like this. It was a devastating scene. Everyone was running all over the place, they didn't know what to do. You were not particularly welcome there and nobody had time to speak to you, so I just got whatever photos I could. I remember crawling up the heap to take pictures. I just happened to see a couple standing there whose child had been in the school at the time. It was a miner and his wife. At the time I took the picture they wouldn't have known whether their child was dead or alive."
Morgan's photo became one of the iconic images of the disaster, and was printed in the Herald as a full page. But press coverage aroused considerable hostility, not least from the then chairman of the National Coal Board, Lord Robens. He told /b>: "If we are going to make a public spectacle of people's misery, you can count me out every time." Some time after, however, Morgan was a given a gold watch by the British Safety Council for his efforts in highlighting the effects of the landslide.
Post photographer, Alan Trethewy, who retired earlier this year, was 24 at the time and had just covered an official dinner at a hotel before being sent to Aberfan. The contrast was surreal, he says. Despite the chaos and devastation he began to go about his work. "The camera acts like a barrier between yourself and the reality of what is going on around you," he says. "You have to get on with it. But, of course, you had to be sensitive. It is just burned into my memory. It was the most horrific thing I covered throughout my whole career."
In its report on Trethewy's recollections, the Post carries the following sentence: "Alan, ever the professional, managed to maintain his composure to start snapping away while putting his emotions at such a gut-wrenching scene to one side." It is expressed rather crudely, but the point is well made. At one level it does appear tasteless to see photographers snapping away and for reporters to question numbed, fearful people. But the work of Rees, Morgan and Trethewy was invaluable in describing to the rest of the world the horror of that landslide and, just as important, it ensured that the Coal Board was held to account for its failures. Their "professionalism" was, in the long term, of incalculable benefit to the bereaved people of Aberfan. In other words, it was journalism at its best.
