Foreseeing a Disaster?

Forgotten Dreams of Aberfan.

Shortly after 9.15am on the morning of Friday, 21 October 1966, the worst disaster in post WWII Welsh history struck the village of Aberfan, Glamorgan.An avalanche of coal waste from the Merthyr Vale Colliery poured down the mountainside, engulfing Pantglas Junior School and killing 144 people, 128 of them children in their classrooms.The fact that victims were so overwhelmingly children imbued the calamity with a sense of horror which marked it as exceptional, even in the long history of Welsh mining disasters. Indeed, so traumatic was the impact of Aberfan that, far from persisting in public consciousness, the tragedy seemed almost expunged from collective memory, until the 50th anniversary approached in October 2016 and commemorations were held across Wales.

Yet in the immediate aftermath of the disaster in the autumn of 1966, the nationwide sense of shock and grief was acute. In its wake, the anguished questions so frequently ventilated after man-made calamities were voiced. Officially and privately, numerous people asked if the disaster could in any way have been foreseen or averted. For some, the search for answers to such questions went far beyond the bounds of the technical and legal inquiries commenced by Parliament and in the media. In the weeks following the tragedy public appeals were launched with the aim of discovering if Aberfan had been foreseen by anyone on a psychic level, in premonitions or precognitive dreams.

DR BARKER’S DREAM SURVEY

The man largely responsible for launching investigations into premonitions of the disaster was Dr JC Barker, a consultant psychiatrist at the Shelton Hospital in Shrewsbury who, on the day after the tragedy, had travelled to Aberfan to offer help. Shocked by the devastation and by the trauma suffered by survivors, the bereaved and rescue teams, Barker found himself wondering if anyone could have experienced a premonition of the events.