The Shadow of Aberfan
The Belmont community visit Dowlais, and remember the Benedictine Mission to South Wales as the country remembers the Aberfan disaster.
This week marked the sixtieth anniversary of the Aberfan disaster, a tragedy which remains deeply embedded in the memory of South Wales and far beyond. On 21 October 1966, a colliery spoil tip collapsed onto the village, killing 116 children and 28 adults, most of the children as they began their school day at Pantglas Junior School.
For many from Merthyr there is a personal connection, a memory, or a loss. My own family was touched by the events of that terrible day. My grandfather was the first doctor on the scene. My cousin Mike, then aged seventeen, travelled from the south of England to help. He arrived that evening and dug through the night, in darkness and rain, alongside so many others desperately searching through the devastation. One of our monks at Belmont had a similar experience and, even sixty years later, finds the memory of what he witnessed deeply distressing. There are some experiences which a lifetime cannot erase; for those who suffered bereavement and loss, the scars are deeper still.
Perhaps that was partly why Aberfan was in my mind when, the week before the anniversary, the Belmont community travelled to Dowlais to sing Vespers at St Illtyd’s Church as part of the parish’s 180th anniversary celebrations. We received a wonderfully warm welcome from Fr Francis, Fr Morgan and the parish community.
The landscape of the Taff Valley itself tells the story of the area. During the Industrial Revolution, iron ore was drawn from the earth and later the “black gold” of coal was extracted in abundance. Great wealth was created. When St Illtyd’s was founded in 1846, Dowlais possessed the largest ironworks in the world and was part of one of the fastest-growing industrial communities in Wales. People came in great numbers to work, including Catholic families from Ireland and elsewhere. They needed somewhere to worship, somewhere for their children to learn the faith, somewhere to baptise their children, celebrate marriages and bury their dead.
Into this rapidly changing industrial world came the Benedictines. They arrived at St Illtyd’s in 1873 and for more than half a century served the Catholic people of Dowlais. There were Benedictine foundations too in Merthyr, Maesteg and elsewhere in South Wales and its first bishops were Benedictine, such as Thomas Joseph Brown, buried in the Abbey Church. Belmont helped out there in more recent years, too.
The monks celebrated Mass and heard confessions, taught the faith, visited the sick, buried the dead, helped establish the school, and built and enlarged the church. Their work was not spectacular. It was the ordinary Benedictine work of stability and presence: remaining with a community, sharing its life, and trying to make Christ present within it.
There is a poignancy in remembering that history during the anniversary of Aberfan. The enormous wealth created by the valleys came at a great human cost. Coal and iron transformed Britain, but the communities from which that wealth was extracted often carried the heaviest burdens. Aberfan remains the most terrible reminder of the human consequences when industrial power, human vulnerability and neglect came together.
The Catholic church at Merthyr Vale, the sister village to Aberfan, was also established by the Benedictines in 1892 in that same South Wales mission. A church was opened in 1908 dedicated to St Benedict. It was soon condemned due to mining subsidence, and the present church built in 1932, also dedicated to St Benedict. Eleven members of the parish died in the Aberfan disaster, and there is a memorial in the sanctuary.
Our visit to St Illtyd’s was not simply to remember history. We went to pray, to sing our psalms and hymns. The great ironworks have gone. The coal mines have closed. The Benedictines themselves came and went. The population has changed, and the Church has changed. Yet the purpose remains. Christ is still proclaimed, the Eucharist celebrated, the poor served, children brought to baptism and the dead commended to God.
Perhaps that is one of the gifts of Christian communities in places marked by both achievement and suffering. They remember. They keep faith.
This week, in the shadow of Aberfan, we remember especially the 116 children and 28 adults who died, their families, the rescuers, and all whose lives were changed for ever by that terrible morning sixty years ago. And we pray that St Benedict, whose name has been part of the Christian story of these valleys, may intercede for them all.
Abbot Brendan
