"A Fitting Tribute": Tip Removal, Land Reclamation and Conservation as Memorialization after the Aberfan Tragedy

This event has ended.

Public lecture/ talk and wine reception

Open to all

Abstract

The collapse of Tip no.7 on Pant Glas Primary School was one of the worst disasters in British history. The tragedy, which coincided with the contraction of the British mining industry, had an immediate impact on tipping policies. The politicisation of the Merthyr Vale tips, and the community’s fight to have the remaining tips removed, are well documented in existing scholarship. Less is known about the clean-up operation in Aberfan – which would then extend to tip reclamation across Wales – or what was done with the mountains of toxic waste that had towered over the village for much of the preceding century. In a bid to contribute to understandings of the Aberfan tragedy, Dr Rebecca Jarman offers some initial findings about the eventual disposal of the tailings and the reclamation policies that ensued after the disaster. Drawing on archival research and interviews with survivors, geologists, and civil servants, she documents how the tips above Aberfan gradually faded from the landscape. Doing so, Dr Jarman elucidates the tensions and allegiances that arose from conflicting attitudes towards the spoil heaps.

The paper begins by accounting for the strategies used by the community to make the spoil heaps visible in national consciousness and by looking at their visions for the reclaimed landscape. It goes on to analyse the competing schemes for the removal of the tips and to identify the companies that stood to benefit from their deconstruction. It also considers the attitudes of British government towards demands for land reclamation which, under the economic strain of the late 1960s, were downplayed as an extravagance made by an irrational minority. Most importantly, the paper demonstrates that, in Aberfan, the removal of the tips was critical in reducing the risks they posed to the village residents while also commemorating those whose lives were taken so abruptly. As the secretary for the Tip Removal Committee put it so eloquently, “there will be absolutely no trace left of the ugly scene, no reminder of what caused the tragic happenings of 1966, and this, we feel, will be a more fitting memorial to those who died than all the elegant monuments and sculptural embellishments that can be devised”.

Biography 

Rebecca is associate professor of Latin American studies at the University of Leeds. She is currently leading an AHRC Fellowship called Moving Mountains, which examines the legacies of landslides in South America and beyond. This talk showcases some of the research undertaken in the early stages the Fellowship, comparing the 1966 Aberfan tragedy to a landslide that destroyed the Peruvian town of Yungay in its entirety in 1970. Rebecca’s most recent book is Representing the Barrios: Culture, Politics, and Urban Poverty in Twentieth-Century Caracas (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2023). Her research is situated at the intersections between culture and history in contemporary Latin America, and examines the forces, aspirations, and tensions that forge places, communities, and shared imaginaries in postcolonial and decolonial environments. Find out more about her work at her website.

Event format & recording

The event will take place in person and will be recorded for publication after the event.

The event will be delivered in the medium of English. You are welcome to ask questions in the medium of Welsh during the Q&A session.

Registration

Register for this event.

We apologise that the entire registration page is not available in the medium of Welsh.  Unfortunately, the platform we use does not offer this service.

Data protection notice

Please note that when registering, your data will be held in accordance with our Data Protection Notice. We will process the personal data you provide to us in accordance with data protection regulations.