MORNING SERIAL

MORE miners from Deep Navigation and Taff Merthyr collieries a few miles down the valley arrived soon after. Police from Merthyr joined the early rescue efforts. Periodically, my father related, someone would call for silence and for a while the digging stopped so that everyone might listen in the hush for sounds of life beneath the debris and the muck. The tip had begun its slide down the mountain at around 9.15 that morning, just as the teachers in the school had begun taking the register. Despite the desperate efforts of what eventually became a total of around two thousand rescue workers, no one was pulled out alive after 11am.

It gradually became clear that the grim and heart breaking work of all concerned was turning into an effort to recover bodies.

My father was asked by the police to join a group of men who would receive the bodies as they were uncovered. It was this experience, as he told me all those years later, that was the hardest to bear. Out of sight of the crowds of parents and other relatives that had gathered round, in a part of the school that was relatively intact, this small group took the little bodies that were brought to them, still coated in filth and slurry, and wrapped them carefully in blankets.

By 2.30pm, the police Regional Crime Squad had set up a temporary mortuary in Bethania Chapel just a few hundred yards away. The children’s bodies, still wrapped in their blankets, were laid on stretchers and passed hand over hand to begin their journey to Bethania. Here, amidst the all- pervading smell of disinfectant, in the Sunday School room at the rear of the chapel, the bodies were washed clean and labelled with a number at wrist and ankle and then wrapped once more in clean blankets.

Their clothing and property were placed in plastic bags.

The children’s bodies were small enough to be laid directly onto the chapel pews. This was where their parents would find them, when they were admitted two groups at a time, and were asked to identify their child or children.