A Day Like Today: Memoirs

I had hit seventeen when that happened and decided it was time to leave to work on my next newspaper, the Merthyr Express. It was also a weekly, but there the similarity ended. Penarth was prosperous and so prim and proper in those days that it may even be true that it was the inspiration for the old gag about its residents believing that ‘sex is what coal comes in’. Merthyr was a tough industrial town with a glorious past and not much of a future. It went from being the most prosperous town in Wales to the poorest. There was still coal mining in the South Wales valleys but towns like Merthyr were living on their histories. And what a history.

At the peak of the Industrial Revolution, the Welsh valleys were producing vast amounts of coal and iron. Merthyr had four great ironworks (one of them was said to be the most productive in the world) and – maybe Merthyr’s proudest boast – the first railway. The locomotive was designed by the Cornish engineer Richard Trevithick – Stephenson’s Rocket came later – and it managed to haul twenty-five tons of iron and a few passengers too.

So there was plenty of money being made, but not much of it found its way to the wretched souls slaving for a pittance in the ironworks and the pits as they created the wealth for the mighty ironmasters and pit owners to enjoy. The great Victorian essayist Thomas Carlyle wrote of ‘those poor creatures broiling, all in sweat and dirt, amid their furnaces, pits and rolling mills’.

The area where most of them lived became known as ‘Little Hell’ – and for good reason. If their jobs didn’t kill them there was a pretty good chance they and their families would be seen off by the cholera and typhoid which thrived in the open sewers. Flushing toilets were a stranger to Little Hell. A century after Carlyle, when I was reporting for the Merthyr Express, I had my own tiny taste of what the miners he had written about all those years ago had to endure. To this day I marvel that any of them managed to survive.

To drop in a cage to the bottom of a deep mine is not an experience for the faint-hearted. The speed of the descent through total darkness is terrifying, made worse by the grit that flies through the air, stinging your face. And when you get to the bottom all you can think about is how quickly you can get to the surface again. The idea that these men could spend a third of their lives down there was simply incomprehensible to me – as was the massive physical effort it had taken to create this and every other deep mine in the valleys.

I suppose I had imagined in my childish ignorance that once a mine had been sunk the miners immediately found the coal waiting for them to hack away and get it hauled to the surface. But first, of course, they had to dig out the thousands of tons of rock and waste to form the tunnels that gave them access to the black stuff. I looked up at the roof of the tunnel we were walking through to get to the coalface. All that stood between us and instant death were the ceiling props these men had put in place. If they got it wrong they died. And, of course, vast numbers did die: some from roof falls, many more from the deadly gases that could seep into the tunnels and reach the coalface.

Carbon monoxide was one of the big killers until, in 1913, someone had the brilliant idea of taking canaries down the mine. If the canary keeled over, the miners knew they had to get to the surface fast. Canaries were still being used until only a few years before I first went down a mine in 1961. An even bigger killer was methane.

An old miner told me what it was like to be working at the coalface and hear a loud bang. It happened to him once and, mercifully, turned out to be a relatively minor incident – a few injuries but no one killed. Even so, I struggled to imagine the sheer terror as he and the men with him raced back through the tunnel, not knowing whether the blast had brought down the roof ahead of them so they would be trapped. Perhaps rescuers would break through the fallen rock to save them. Perhaps they wouldn’t and they would die, as so many miners had, when their oxygen ran out or the attempt to rescue them brought more rocks crashing down and crushing them. Fatal accidents were commonplace.

Every miner in the Welsh valleys had his own story to tell of disasters that nearly happened – and those that did. The worst – only a few miles from Merthyr – killed more men and boys than any other mining disaster in the history of British mining. It was in 1913. Nearly 950 men were working at the Senghenydd colliery when a massive explosion ripped it apart and 439 were killed either by the blast itself or the poisonous gas that had created it.

Like most reporters working in the valleys in the days when almost every village had its colliery and every colliery had its share of tragedies, I was occasionally ordered by the editor to knock on the door of a grieving widow. I dreaded it. How could such an intrusion be justified at such a time? But never once was I sent away. Invariably I was invited in, given a cup of tea and shown photographs of the dead miner while the widow talked about what a wonderful man he had been. I seldom saw a tear shed – and I have always wondered why. Perhaps it was because women who married miners lived with fear from day one. They were prepared for the worst to happen. They knew, too, that even if their husband survived, his retirement would be a short one. The biggest killer of all was not the gas: it was the dust.

The first time I went for a drink in a miners’ club I noticed that many of the miners coming in after their shift would have a pint of water plonked in front of them by the barman. I asked him why. His answer was obvious when you think of it: ‘Waste of money buying a pint when your throat’s full of dust isn’t it? Makes sense to wash the dust away so you can taste the beer.’ If it was doing that to your throat, I thought, what the hell was it doing to your lungs? The answer: pneumoconiosis or silicosis or any of the other hideous illnesses caused by a life spent underground breathing in the deadly dust.

Many years after I had left the valleys behind me I reported on the 1984–5 miners’ strikes that brought the coalfields to a halt in a doomed attempt to save them from the cost-cutters and the hated Margaret Thatcher. I talked to many angry miners. But it was rare to meet a miner’s wife who mourned the death of the industry. In all my years in South Wales I never spoke to a mother who wanted her sons to follow their father down the pit.

I was to see for myself the ultimate, unthinkable, price of coal: a disaster in so many ways worse than all the others because its victims, crushed or suffocated to death, had not chosen to face the dangers of deep mining. But that was a few years after I had left the Merthyr Express to return to Cardiff and take another step up the journalistic greasy pole.

I had been offered a job as a reporter on a national daily no less – though not exactly the giddy heights of Fleet Street. It was the Western Mail, the national daily of Wales. I’d like to report that pretty soon my name was up in lights, or at least writ large on the front page. Sadly it never was. Not once. My great mistake had been to bear the same surname as the news editor of the paper, though he spelled his with an ‘e’ which I affected to think rather vulgar. Mine, I claimed, was pure Welsh, which was complete nonsense. The truth was that an incompetent registrar had misspelled my surname on my birth certificate so my parents and older siblings were ‘Humphreys’ and I was ‘Humphrys’. I pointed out to my news editor – a rather unpleasant bully with one of the most prominent beetled brows I had ever seen – that the different spelling would remove any confusion in the reader’s mind, but he was having none of it. He ordered me to adopt a different name for byline purposes. I chose Desmond and so I became ‘John Desmond’ for Mail readers. (I had been christened ‘Desmond John Humphrys’ but contracted very severe hooping cough when I was little and was such a miserable child my mother decreed I should henceforth be known as John. She was not, she announced, going to have people calling me ‘Dismal Desmond’.)

In spite of my new name, my brief time on the Mail was not particularly distinguished. But I suppose I must have done enough to impress someone because, my editor told me after I’d been working there for a year or so, I had come to the attention of ‘London’. He seemed almost as surprised as me. For a young provincial hack, ‘London’ was not just beyond my wildest dreams. It had not even figured in them. Until now.

The Western Mail and many other papers, including the mighty Times and Sunday Times, were owned by the Thomson newspaper group. My editor told me the Sunday Times, no less, was thinking of giving me a job and I was to go to London to meet both its managing editor and news editor over lunch. I was terrified – and totally intimidated. I’d been to London only twice in my life and I had never eaten in a restaurant anywhere near as grand as Simpson’s in the Strand, which was where they took me. Nor had I met such imposing journalists before.

My own recollection of the lunch was more of trying to remember which knife and fork to use and agreeing with everything my hosts said rather than making a serious attempt to impress them with my journalistic brilliance. I had no doubt they would send me on my way with a pat on the head and a patronising ‘perhaps you’re not quite ready for the big time just yet’ and, had they done so, I suspect I’d have agreed and felt rather relieved. But they didn’t. They offered me the job of reporter on the paper’s brand-new Insight section. This really was the cutting edge of national investigative journalism. Insight, which exists to this day, was to become one of the most respected institutions on one of the most respected newspapers in the world. On the train back to Cardiff I wondered when I would wake up from this ridiculous dream.

The next day I told the Sunday Times I didn’t want the job.

Like so many things in life it happened because of a chance encounter. When I got back to Cardiff from London I’d gone to meet a few reporter friends for a drink in our favourite pub to do some serious boasting. One of them, Norman Rees, had left newspapers to work for the new commercial television station TWW. He out-boasted me. Newspapers, he told me, were old hat. Television was where it was at. He made it sound amazingly glamorous and exciting. I’d be famous – plastered all over everyone’s TV screens, the prettiest girls in Cardiff throwing themselves at my feet wherever I went! Why didn’t I join him? He promised he could persuade his editor to give me an interview if I was up for it. I was and he did and I got the job.

The Sunday Times were furious. They told me I had wasted their time (not to mention a fat bill at Simpson’s) and my name was on their blacklist. If I ever so much as dreamed of working for Times Newspapers again I could forget it – which made it all the more gratifying when, thirty years later, I was invited to write the main comment column for the Sunday Times and did so for five years.

It’s fair to say that Norman had rather overplayed the glamour and excitement bit. TWW was among the first companies to get a commercial television licence. It broadcast to South Wales and the West Country – a ridiculous cultural mix given that the two regions had virtually nothing in common apart from the Bristol Channel – and it was also among the first to lose its licence. That did not come as a great surprise. Most of us thought its owners were far more concerned with selling exciting new adverts. showing perfectly made-up housewives, with just a few stray blonde hairs escaping from their Alice bands, glowing with pride as they told us how happy they had made their hard-working husbands by discovering how to make the perfect gravy. Not to mention the sheer joy of washing dishes, knowing that it would make their hands just as soft as their face – which would make those hard-working husbands even more proud of them. Ah … the glory days of television advertising.

It might have been sexist garbage, but the profits poured in. Charging a fortune to broadcast commercials was so much easier than trying to produce insightful television programmes. The Canadian publishing tycoon Lord Thomson, who owned TWW and half of Fleet Street, famously called it a ‘licence to print money’ and so cross was he when they lost their licence that they abandoned the station months before they were supposed to. I suspect few tears were shed by the viewers.

My own contribution to TWW was limited but it taught me a lot – such as not getting drunk at lunchtime on Christmas Eve if you were live on telly that night. I did – and when I leaned in closer to try to read the autocue I fell off my chair. No one in the studio or the newsroom seemed to care very much – possibly because they were all as drunk as me. I also learned that nothing in the whole world is more scary than drying up on live television. I did it twice. It’s the most extraordinary sensation – as though you are floating just below the studio ceiling looking down on a young man whose body, tongue and brain have become totally paralysed.

The first time it happened I was trying to interview the most famous broadcaster in the land, the ultimate smooth-talking Irishman Eamonn Andrews, and the second time I was interviewing the finest rugby player Wales has ever produced, Bleddyn Williams. Bleddyn rescued me but Eamonn just smiled and waited for consciousness to return to me, which it did after an hour. Or maybe it was only five seconds. Either way, the scars remain.

One memorable (for me) story was the disappearance of a middle-aged man who had vanished from his home in Cardiff without trace for no apparent reason. An everyday event, perhaps, but this was local telly and ‘man disappears’ was news. So I was sent off to interview his wife. She was a nurse – clearly in great distress – and she greeted me warmly, sat me down with a cup of tea and talked at length about her fears for what might have happened to her beloved husband. She shed a quiet tear and my heart bled for her. Some months later he turned up. The police found him underneath the patio on which I had been sitting taking tea with the loving wife who buried him there after she had murdered him.

By now I had been a journalist for the best part of ten years. I was to practise the trade for another fifty years, travelling the world, reporting on many of the great events that would come to define the century. I would, in the words of the old cliché, have the great privilege of occupying a ringside seat at history. I would watch an American president forced to resign in disgrace. I would report on earthquakes and famines and wars around the globe. But nothing would compare with what happened just a few miles from where I was born, on 21 October 1966. I was still a young man who had barely set foot outside South Wales. I watched a community deal with a tragedy I still struggle to comprehend. It left me with memories that will never fade, an immense respect for the strength of human beings faced with horror beyond comprehension and a lifelong distrust of authority.

On that terrible morning I had turned up as usual just after nine in the TWW newsroom, and I wandered over to the Telex machine that was always clattering away spewing out endless, useless information. One relatively small story had caught my news editor’s eye. It reported that there had been a tip slide at Aberfan in the Merthyr Valley.

There was nothing particularly unusual in that. It often happened. The waste tips above the old collieries were notoriously unstable and shamefully neglected. They were slipping and sliding all over the valleys. Sometimes a slide would take the occasional miners’ cottage with it, but mostly they just made a mess of the road and the land beneath. This time it seemed it might be a little more serious than that.

I knew Aberfan well from my years on the Merthyr Express. My closest friend on the paper lived there and I often stayed with him after we had drunk too much beer in his local. So I knew that there was a primary school below the tip and at that time in the morning it would have been full of children. But there was nothing in the PA report to suggest that it had been affected or that this was anything more than the usual minor slippage. Even so, nothing else of any news value was going on in South Wales that morning, so I suggested I might as well drive up the valley to take a look. It was only twenty-five miles away from Cardiff and if I thought the story was big enough to merit sending a film crew I could always phone in and ask for one.

As soon as I’d started driving up the valley I began to get the sense that something truly awful had happened. The steep sides of the Welsh valleys are lined with cottages, little terraced homes of drab grey squatting defensively against the hillside. You could tell which were the miners’ cottages – almost all of them at that time – because it was the day of the week when they had their small piles of coal dumped outside. Cheap coal was one of the few perks of being a miner. Normally the women would have been busy shovelling it up and carrying it through their tiny terraced houses to dump in the small coal sheds at the back. This morning they were standing at their doors looking worried, peering up the valley in the direction in which I was driving. They knew something bad had happened and so, by now, did I. None of us could begin to imagine how bad. Here is how I described, all those years ago, what had happened:

Just after 9.15 a group of workmen had been sent to the top of the big tip that loomed above Aberfan, grey, black and ugly. There had been some worrying signs that it was sinking more than usual. A deep depression had formed within the tip like the crater in a volcano. As the men watched, the waste rose into the depression, formed itself into a lethal tidal wave of slurry and rolled down the hillside, gathering speed and height until it was thirty feet high and destroying everything in its path. From that moment the name of Aberfan has been synonymous with tragedy beyond comprehension.

It crushed part of the school and some tiny houses alongside like a ton of concrete dropping on a matchbox. And what that foul mixture of black waste did not flatten it filled – classrooms choked with the stuff until the building was covered and the school became a tomb. The moment the terrible news reached them, hundreds of miners had abandoned the coalface at the colliery which had created that monstrous tip and raced to the surface. And there they were when I arrived, their faces still black – save for the streaks of white from the sweat and the tears as they dug and prayed and wept. Most of them were digging for their own children.

Every so often someone would scream for silence and we would all stand frozen. Was that the cry of a child we had heard coming from deep below us? Sometimes it was and some were saved. I saw a burly policeman, his helmet comically lopsided, carrying a little girl in his arms, her legs dangling down, her shoes missing. She was a skinny little thing, no more than nine years old. Thank God she was alive. The men dug all day and all night and all the next day. They dug until there were no more faint cries, no more hope, but still they kept going. They were digging now for bodies.

I watched through the hours and days that followed as the tiny coffins mounted up in the little chapel. There is nothing so poignant as the sight of a child’s coffin. By the end of it there were 116 of them. One hundred and sixteen dead children and twenty-eight adults.

When the miners finally stopped digging they went home to weep, to mourn, to relive the nightmare. To cherish the children who were spared. And later to show their anger at the criminal stupidity and venality of the officials and politicians who had allowed it to happen.

Never was anger more justified. The National Coal Board who ran the mines had – from a mixture of deceit and cowardice and fear of retribution – tried to claim that the tragedy was an act of God. It was not. It was an act of negligence by man. Criminal negligence. The politician responsible for the NCB, Lord Robens, a blustering lying bully of a man, had gone on television to say that the cause of the disaster was the water from a natural spring which had been pouring into the centre of the tip and produced the water bomb that finally exploded with such devastating results. The spring, said Robens, was completely unknown. That was just one of his lies. Not only was it known, its presence was marked on local maps and the older miners knew exactly where it was and what the danger was and they had been saying so for years. They were ignored. Mercifully, they had put their fears in writing and the letters, written by the miners and ignored by the NCB, were eventually produced at the inquiry into the disaster so the truth could be revealed for the world to see.

I was twenty-three when Aberfan happened. I have been back many times over the years and talked to the dwindling handful of bereaved parents and to the few children in the school who survived the disaster. And every time I wonder how they were able to recover from their grief and the nightmare of that terrible morning. But ‘recover’ is the wrong word. As so many have told me, you don’t get over it … you just have to live with it. What is the alternative? To that, there is no answer.

What we owe the people of Aberfan

Today, 20 October 2016

When I drove here from Cardiff fifty years ago, the hills on either side of the valley were scarred with tips. Black and ugly and threatening. Now, as I look back down the valley from this cemetery, they’re gone. Bulldozed away or covered with grass and trees. The mining valleys of South Wales are green again. The river that flows beneath me was also black and dead. And now it’s clean and children can play and fish in its shallows. And the men of these valleys, unlike their fathers, do not end their day’s work with lungs full of coal dust. I never met a miner who said he wanted his son to follow him down the pit. The nations owed miners a debt of gratitude for the wealth they helped create over the centuries. The mines have gone, of course, but our generation owes something different to the people of Aberfan. Respect for the courage and dignity they have shown for fifty years in dealing with unimaginable grief. But more than that. The children in these graves were betrayed by the men in power decades ago who refused to listen to their fathers when they warned them their little school faced a mortal danger. If Aberfan stands for anything today, apart from unbearable grief, it stands as a reminder for every journalist in the land of this: authority must always be challenged.

3

Building a cathedral

I was still in my early twenties when I was offered a job by the BBC. I remember feeling terribly pleased with myself. I was going to be based in Liverpool, the most exciting beat in Britain for a reporter in those days, with the Beatles and the Cavern club at one end of the news scale and dock strikes at the other. I was to work out of Castle Chambers, an office building in the heart of the city where the north-west Representative of the BBC was based. The Representative (I can never think of him without the capital letter) was a dapper little fellow called Reg. But only to his closest friends. To young pond life like me he was Major H. R. V. Jordan (Retd), JP, BA (Hons) and he was a very grand figure indeed.

Reg had an extremely large office with a well-stocked cocktail cabinet and two elegant young secretaries. Not one, you will note, but two. Their duties, it is accurate to say, were less than onerous. Reg graced the office a couple of times a week to sign a few letters, and occasionally drove up the coast to Blackpool for lunch with ‘my friend, the mayor of Blackpool’ in his large plum-coloured Jaguar and white cotton driving gloves before returning to his home in The Wirral.