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Author: Admin | 2025-04-28
October 21, 1966, the day when 116 children and 28 adults died in Aberfan, South Wales, after rain-soaked coal waste slipped down a mountain engulfing a school, marks one of the most harrowing events in Queen Elizabeth’s reign. The Aberfan disaster was always going to be a key storyline in season three of The Crown – as writer Peter Morgan strove to tell the tale of one of peacetime’s darkest days though the eyes of the local people, the Queen and senior royal family members. The Queen didn’t visit the site of the tragedy until eight days after it occurred, despite husband Prince Philip going sooner. Her brother-in-law Lord Snowdon, the photographer Tony Armstrong-Jones, also headed down to Wales as soon as he heard the news, making “it his job to visit bereaved relatives,” Robert Lacey quotes Prime Minister Harold Wilson saying in his book The Crown, The Inside History. He said it was “probably the worst day of my life,” Hugo Vickers writes in The Crown Dissected. But the delay by the Queen is something that has haunted her. Hugo Vickers, whose book (excerpted in The Times) has just been published, confirms that her various biographers have stressed this point. Providing possible insight into her delayed visit, Sally Bedell Smith quoted the Queen as saying, “People will be looking after me. Perhaps they’ll miss some poor child that might have been found under the wreckage.” School engulfed by coal killing children and teachers buried in the school and surrounding area. Staff/Mirrorpix/Getty Aberfan. Writer Morgan uses Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson as the vehicle through which to show how courtiers and others advised her to go and meet survivors in the “Aberfan” episode. And it has emerged that actor Jason Watkins channeled some of his own painful experience when acting
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