YESTERDAYS 1957
A driver and mate fled down the Brecon to Abertillery road just before 3½ tons of TNT blasted their lorry into fragments. Only bits of it were found in nearby fields.
Houses in the nearby hamlet of Scethrog were extensively damaged, but, almost miraculously, no-one was hurt.
It was fog which saved the lorry’s crew from a sudden and violent death.
Driver Noel Hancock, aged 22, of Dobwalls, Cornwall, and his 61-yearold mate William Hooper of Liskeard, stopped to clean the windscreen.
When they got out of the cabin they found one of the tyres on fire.
“Realising the danger to passing motorists they ran up the road to stop approaching traffic. They had only gone a short distance when the lorry blew up,” said a local inhabitant.
Engine parts and debris were later found scattered in nearby fields.
Suffering from severe shock, the men were admitted to Brecon War Memorial Hospital, but they were not detained.
The force of the blast rocked the hamlet and made a huge crater in the roadway. Windows were shattered, water mains disrupted and telephones in the area put out of order as a brilliant flash lit up the sky for miles around.
Martin Hurst, who lived a quarter of a mile away, said he had not heard such a noise since the explosion of a V-1 during the war. He estimated damage to his house at £1,200.
“I haven’t a window or door intact,” he said.
Windows were broken up to three miles away.
The lorry and crew were travelling with high explosives to an opencast mining site in Glynneath. the grounds of cruelty dismissed by Mr Justice Willmer in the Divorce Court.
The judge said: “Every marriage partner must take the other as they find them.
“A woman might marry a keen fisherman or golf addict, but that is one of the things which come within the phrase, ‘For better or worse.’” announced. He was 72, and the previous month married Grizelda Hervey, an actress, both pictured, below, left.
Lord Aberdare was on his honeymoon and had been in Sofia for a meeting of the International Olympic Committee. He is understood to have been on his way home. Lady Aberdare, who is 56, was with him in the car. She was in hospital after the incident.
Preliminary reports quoted by Reuters said his car plunged over a precipice into the sea at Risan, a small resort on the Adriatic.
Reports said that Lord Aberdare’s body had been recovered, but his car was lost in the sea.
After the accident Lady Aberdare telephoned from Risan to friends in Sofia with whom she and her husband had been staying. Her injuries were not known. the world calls it the Satellite, the Bleep, the Baby Moon, but whatever the name, it represents the highest in man’s scientific achievements.
The people of Britain were being balked by cloud in their efforts to see the Russian space satellite, though it was thought there would be more chances to view the little manmade moon through field glasses and even the naked eye when weather improves.
Penylan Observatory, Cardiff, was expecting to attract a record number of visitors as developments stimulated local interest in astronomy. There is no sympathy in the NUM for 27 sacked miners whose go-slow tactics led to another 116 other men losing their jobs at Lewis Merthyr Colliery, Trehafod.
The secretary of the lodge, Bryn Rees, said: “We are not helping the 27 to find other work.”
No appeal has been made by the NUM against the dismissal notices, said the Coal Board.
In a get-tough mood the Board sacked the 27 colliers and assistants who had been holding back output