Teen Nurse Sang to Young Boy Killed in Aberfan Disaster

It is one of the most painful yet deeply moving stories I have ever heard. On October 21, 1966, 18-year-old cadet nurse Dianne Thomas responded to the call for help in Aberfan and was given a responsibility that has stayed with her ever since.

Her memories also explain why she stayed away from the village until today, when she joined the King, Queen and Prince of Wales in commemorating one of the darkest days in post-war British history.

Dianne was sent to a makeshift mortuary inside a local chapel, where she helped wash the bodies of those killed when 150,000 tons of mud and slurry from a coal tip swept into Pantglas Junior School and nearby homes. Of the 144 people who died, 116 were children.

With grieving parents facing the unbearable task of identifying their children, every effort was made to ensure their final glimpse was as peaceful as possible. Dianne had only just turned 18.

‘You didn’t want the parents to see them with…’ she said, before asking me not to repeat the more graphic details. ‘Let’s just say I washed them with warm soapy water.’

One eight-year-old boy has remained particularly vivid in her memory. ‘I was going to be the last person to hold him like his Mam had held him. So I held him in my arms and started singing to him. “Hey, diddle, diddle…”’ Hearing the story was difficult; recounting it was clearly harder still.

‘And then I put my hand in his pocket,’ Dianne continued. ‘There was his spelling book. He had just scored eight out of ten in his test. I remember thinking that if I could find his Mam, it might bring her the smallest bit of comfort if I could tell her that.’

Amid the chaos, she never discovered the boy’s name. She worked on one side of a dividing sheet in the emergency mortuary, while the chief mortician prepared bodies for new coffins, which were ‘piled floor to ceiling’.

Dianne said the smell of fresh pine can still trigger flashbacks. ‘And whenever I hear “Hey, diddle, diddle”, I well up,’ she added. After Aberfan, she abandoned her ambition to become a nurse and instead pursued work in child protection, first as a social worker and later as a schools inspector.

Those memories cast a shadow over Wednesday’s commemorations. The King, who has visited Aberfan many times and developed a longstanding friendship with the bereavement group Aberfan Wives, was never going to miss the anniversary. He also attended the 50th anniversary in 2016 as Prince of Wales, representing the Queen.

In 1966, she arrived eight days after the disaster and broke down at the home of a mother who had lost two children. Since then, she has returned to the small Welsh village more frequently than she has visited some major cities.

On Wednesday, the King was joined by Queen Camilla and Prince William. They laid floral tributes at the Garden of Remembrance on the former school site before meeting residents during a walkabout at the community centre.

Such a large royal presence is usually reserved for major state occasions. Yet few dates are etched into the Welsh collective memory as deeply as this one. Representatives from every level of Welsh public life, including the First Minister, attended the commemorations.

The day began with a private ceremony at the steep cemetery where the children were buried side by side. The graves were covered with a vivid carpet of fresh flowers, while several carried the devastating inscription: ‘Together at last’. Six decades on, many of the bereaved parents have died, and almost all chose to be buried beside the son or daughter who never came home. In some cases, both parents were laid to rest there.

Among them were Cliff and Iris Minett, who lost Marylyn, aged ten, and Carl, aged seven. Their surviving daughter, Gaynor Madgwick, said: ‘I did have a bit of a breakdown this morning at the cemetery. I normally try to contain myself, but that minute’s silence got to me. My father and my mother and my brother and my sister, they’re all together. I couldn’t breathe.’

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She remembered that her young brother hated going to school. ‘Mum only managed to get Carl there that day because it was about to be half term, and she told him he would be home by noon. She always had to live with that guilt.’

Gaynor only escaped because she was shielded by a radiator. She has devoted much of her life to counselling others. Visit St Fagans National Museum of History and you can see some of the things she has donated for posterity, including Carl’s football, Marylyn’s brooch and her own handwritten childhood account of the disaster, called A Sad Story.

On Wednesday, she was in charge of escorting Queen Camilla at the local community centre.

Prince William joined Denise Morgan, who lost her 11-year-old sister, Annette. ‘We did everything together,’ she told me. ‘We even slept in the same bed.’ She recalls her father returning from the morgue, clutching Annette’s purse and saying she looked ‘so peaceful – as if she was sleeping’.

That is precisely why the delicate work of Dianne Thomas and her colleagues was so important.

Doing the introductions for the King was Jeff Edwards, the last child to be pulled from the wreckage – just after 11am. ‘From our darkest hour,’ he told the monarch in his speech of welcome, ‘to this present day, you have remembered us, you have stood with us.’

The King told them: ‘We have heard stories of heartbreak, but also of heroism. We have heard of the most agonising grief but also of the most inspiring grace. Hearts far from this valley will ache with yours.’

He then met people like David Wilson, who at 23 drove seven nurses up from Port Talbot in his roofer’s van. He promptly joined miners digging into the quagmire only to unearth the body of a man trapped under a boulder.

Here, too, was Mair Morgan, 85, the last surviving teacher. She managed to get all the children in her reception class, at the far side of the school, out safely. She stayed here for the rest of her career, rebuilding a shell-shocked school from a fleet of caravans.

The royal party were serenaded by the Ynysowen Male Voice Choir, set up in the aftermath as a form of therapy for grieving menfolk. They include Ray Lee, who continued to cling on to hope until 10pm that dreadful night when he identified his only child, Anne, in the Bethania Chapel. ‘I like to think I’m singing to her when we sing,’ he said.

As the royal convoy drove away and the elderly witnesses to the unimaginable drifted home, I heard an enchanting sound from the memorial garden. For it is also now home to a playground.

Here were the same happy shrieks you might have heard before 9.13am on October 21, 1966. Even in Aberfan, life goes on.

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