The power of song | 20 October 2016

‘I went in at seven and came out aged 22,’ said Brian as he looked back on the day in October 1966 when his primary school in Aberfan was smothered in a great black wave of coal slurry. On that day, of his small school of just 141 pupils, only 25 children survived. Brian lost his older sister; he escaped because he refused to get under the desk as the teacher instructed when they heard this extraordinary, unexplained, overwhelming noise, ‘like an aeroplane coming into land’, getting louder and louder. He later joined the Ynysowen Male Voice Choir, formed in Aberfan a couple of years after the disaster as the fathers, husbands and brothers of those who died began to realise that the only thing that was helping them get by day-to-day was singing.

Brian was talking to the Welsh singer Max Boyce, who began life as a miner in a neighbouring valley and on that day in 1966 tried to reach Aberfan to help with the rescue attempt only to find all roads into the village were gridlocked.