50 years since Aberfan disaster.

[empip]

21st Oct 1966 - Tip slide disaster.

A campaigning journalist married his first wife - a lass from our village in Somerset 1958 :- John Summers.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/2646811/John-Summers.html

Quote :-
"...Summers was outraged when Harold Wilson’s Labour government insisted on taking £150,000 from the £2.5 million charity fund established to assist the bereaved, in order to help meet the cost of removing what was left of the slag heap and the remaining heaps which still loomed above the village.

An instinctive supporter of the underdog, Summers vented his anger in articles for The Daily Telegraph magazine, and the glossy magazines Harper’s Bazaar and Queen. Years of campaigning by Summers and others finally resulted, in 1997, in that money being returned to the fund by the then Welsh Secretary Ron Davies — though it was reimbursed without any interest. Summers was not alone in describing the avalanche of money that poured into the Aberfan fund as the second disaster to overtake the pit village.

Although it was Summers who personally issued the High Court writ that eventually restored the money to the fund, his efforts attracted a measure of controversy, since he was assisted by members of the Free Wales Army (FWA), the group of fringe agitators who had planned to disrupt the investiture of the Prince of Wales at Caernarfon in 1969..."

£2.5m in '66 would be about £44.5m in today's money.
£150k in '66 should have been about £1.3m in 1997.

Reimbursed £150k after 31 yrs with no interest...

-0-

 

[securespark]

Absolute f'in scandal. That they get away with stuff like this is appalling.

BTW, I was born in Wales in 1966, albeit in August in Aberystwyth.

 

[jbcberks]

I lived in the next valley over from Aberfan and as a kid walked over the mountain to see where the tip had slid down the mountain. One of the memories is seeing the miners in our street coming back from Aberfan after digging at the school and seeing a few of them crying.

It was well known that the labour government had robbed the fund to pay to remove the tip, so I could never understand why anybody in our valley would vote for them. I never have and never will.

When it was "paid back" in the 90's, where was the fanfare for it, Governments love to shout about giving money to the people but this was one episode that Blair's lot wanted to keep quite.

As an aside, the FWA didn't get up to much disruption, they were a bunch who dressed up in army surplus and marched around with flags and banners. They took the attention from the real perpetrators of the disruption, MAC. Two of their members were killed planting a bomb the night before the investiture.