Claude Lancaster – 1967 Speech on Aberfan Inquiry
The speech made by Claude Lancaster, the then Conservative MP for South Fylde, in the House of Commons on 26 October 1967.
I do not intend to comment on the speech of the hon. Member for Merthyr Tydvil (Mr. S. O. Davies) because I have a number of things to say and I know that many other hon. Members wish to speak. A fortnight ago the Annual Report on accidents at mines was published. It is a very encouraging Report. Last year, deaths from accidents totalled 160—the lowest figure ever. But Mr. Stephenson, Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector, said that in view of advances in engineering technique applied in recent years, we should not be complacent about that.
The Aberfan disaster was not reportable under the Mines and Quarries Act, 1954. Nevertheless, Mr. Stephenson says that the disaster will have a world-wide impact. I was abroad when it occurred, visiting the Trucial States. Immediately on my return, I happened to have a conversation in the Lobby with the hon. Member for Bedwellty (Mr. Finch), who has given me permission to refer to it.
The hon. Gentleman asked me what I thought and I said that I knew no more about it than what I had read in the newspapers abroad. He inquired what my opinion was of the possible cause of the disaster and I replied, “I fancy that you will find that it was a trickle of water”. I shall refer to that later.
In its first-class Report, the Tribunal puts the cause of the disaster on a breakdown in communications both horizontal and vertical. I suggest another dimension —the psychological. It was endemic in the formation of the National Coal Board, which was hurriedly put together in 1947, that it should take on an over-centralised aspect. I am certain that if the right hon. Member for Easington (Mr. Shinwell) were here he would be the first to say that, with the passage of time, it needs seriously overhauling.
Unfortunately, the only important inquiry, the Fleck inquiry, did nothing to bring about any decentralisation. Indeed, the Board solidified something which was already too over centralised. The result has been that, progressively, all decisions have come to be made at Hobart House.
Hobart House is responsible for every aspect of mining, including the administration of coal production. Thus, there has arisen a tendency for the men in the regions to look to Hobart House for decisions in all sorts of directions, be they the shape of shafts or the use of props at the coal face. There was, there-for a tendency not to give the soil tips the attention that the problem deserved.
It is true that there were no regulations about coal tips before Nationalisation, but in the East Midlands there was a common practice, which I believe was fairly general throughout the coal industry—I do not think that we were any more enlightened than anybody elsewhere the control of tips was a regular feature of the day’s work. Soil tips are a necessary evil. For every ton brought out of a pit almost a quarter of that weight goes on to the coal tip. It is the difference between the run of mine coal and saleable output. It was necessary to take considerable precautions to settle on a piece of land which was not unduly soft or broken ground and had no previous encroachments and to have very careful regard to the type of debris being tipped.
As an example, a change-over from dry slag to effluent, or what is now called tailings, could have a definite effect on the angle of repose. Therefore, the matter had to be watched very carefully and, above all, it was against all tradition to site a tip either on a spring or in the vicinity of a stream.
There was normally a gang of men working on the tip and they were responsible for whatever mechanical devices were being employed. Over that gang was a man called a chargehand and among his various duties were two very important ones. One was to report any unusual movement of the tip, and certainly he had to report any signs of water emerging from the base of the tip. He made his report either to the surface manager or, in a smaller pit, to the surface foreman who in his turn reported it to the colliery manager. The colliery manager went up every three or four weeks and had a good look at the tip, decided where the tipping for the next period would occur, and drew the charge-hand’s attention to any aspect of the tip which was giving him cause for concern.
These precautions were carried out in the East Midlands not because life was at stake—at least we hoped not—but because undue spreading of the tip involved compensation to farmers for destroyed buildings and the like in the vicinity.
1933In South Wales, the need for precautions on the sides of hills with a 60 in. rainfall is all the greater. It would be presumption on my part to talk about South Wales, but it so happens that a few years after nationalisation two of my original staff went there. One was chairman of the South Wales district and the other was the chief mechanical officer. I used to go down and talk to them, so, although I never talked about tips, I have some familiarity with what went on down there.
That is all I have to say about tips in general. As has been said, it is essential that we take a fresh look at these matters and do everything possible to rectify this appalling situation, more particularly in South Wales.
I come now to Lord Robens’ part. Lord Robens has been a very distinguished Chairman of the National Coal Board. He has been there since 1961 and has proved himself a supreme salesman and a doughty fighter on behalf of the coal mining industry. I think that his greatest contribution was restoring the morale of the industry after the setback from a seller’s to a buyer’s market after the year 1958. He restored confidence to the industry. Moreover, as regards pits being closed and redundancy, he has acted with a great sense of imagination and charity.
I have had a number of discussions with Lord Robens and I have accompanied him up and down the coalfields visiting pits and the like. He is a friend of mine. Therefore, what I have to say is the more invidious.
I consider, first, that his public image has been immensely spoiled by this tragedy. He should have gone down there on the first day. Years ago, when I was first learning something about coal mining—I had no executive position—I went away on a Saturday and the colliery manager rang me that night and said that there had been an over-wind in the shaft, two men had been killed, and I must come back straight away. He was a wise old man. He said. “You must be here because you are the boss class.”Today, Lord Robens and the people around him are the boss class, and they should have been there if for no other purpose than showing their sympathy at that moment with the bereaved.
The second thing I must say about him is that he was most unwise to make any comment about the cause or otherwise of the tragedy. He is wholly untechnical. He was bound to make mistakes, and he did so. He would have been much wiser to have said nothing about it.
Thirdly, and most important, he should have gone to the Tribunal when it was set up and should have said not only, “I will put all the resources of my organisation at the disposal of the Tribunal”, but,” I have two or possibly three men I would like to nominate whose evidence you should take. It is up to you, the Tribunal, to call whom you wish, but I have two or three men I would like particularly that you should call. I think that they can give you great help.”The Tribunal, in its early days, said, and said rightly, that it wanted no delay in its proceedings, it wanted no evidence which in any way would mislead it, and it wanted a ready acknowledgement of mistakes that there had been.
There are three men I have in mind. One has been mentioned by my hon. Friend the Member for Hereford (Mr. Gibson-Watt), Mr. Kellett, the Chairman of the South-West District. I have met him. He is a man of high reputation and very well respected. Many chairmen happen to be administrative men, but he is a technical man. He was the man responsible for that district and he should have been one of the men to give evidence.
The second man who I suggest should have been called at the earliest moment is Mr. Harry Collins, who was the Director of Production and a Board Member. Mr. Sheppard, who was called, was not a Board member. Mr. Harry Collins is a man of great experience who has held a number of very high posts. If the right hon. Member for Easington (Mr. Shinwell) were here he would confirm that when Mr. Collins was in charge of our coal production in Germany after the war he gained the confidence of the German coal mining industry, which is not an easy thing to do. He gained it because he was a man of great competence himself and they responded to him. I went to Essen on two occasions to spend some little while with him and I also was most impressed with the reputation that he gained for himself.
If an additional witness was required the Deputy Chairman of the Coal Board, Sir Humphrey Brown, could have been called. He gained his reputation originally in the old Manchester collieries as a planner. He made a good name for himself when he was Chairman of the West Midlands Division and he is the foremost technician on the Coal Board.
What, in fact, happened? Mr. Sheppard became the spokesman for the Coal Board. It is not for me to question Mr. Sheppard’s competence, but I cannot feel that he can look back on his evidence with any feeling of satisfaction whatever. After all, the Chief Inspector of Mines in the South-West Area said of his evidence that it was “astonishing”. Additionally to that, the Tribunal said that nothing it had heard in evidence at Aberfan in any way confirmed a single syllable of the minute of the statement of the Coal Board committee set up by Mr. Sheppard.
None of the stipulations which the tribunal made—that there should be no delay, that there should be no attempt to confuse the issue and that there should be a ready acceptance of responsibility—was met either by Mr. Sheppard or, I am sorry to say, by Lord Robens in his evidence. Indeed, as we have already heard from my hon. Friend the Member for Hereford, counsel for the Coal Board had to ask the Tribunal to ignore Lord Roben’s contribution to the Tribunal’s considerations as being of no value.
Can anybody imagine that either Mr. Kellett or Mr. Collins would agree to that approach? The Coal Board put forward a statement denying blame for what had occurred at any level. These two men would not have lent their names to such a statement. These two men would not have delayed proceedings or mystified the Tribunal, and these two men would have been the first to acknowledge what had gone wrong, because they would have been only too clear about what had gone wrong.
It has been suggested that this was a very complex geological problem; it was not. Tips are not complex geological problems and advice about the movement of earth and the science of soil mechanics was available from any private engineering firm. If any hon. Member would like to see something comparable to Aberfan he can do so within five miles of Parliament at Dawson Hill, in South-East Camberwell, where very much the same thing has happened. The corporation had been tipping rubbish for a generation; there was water and about 40 houses were swept away, luckily with no loss of life, and three streets have been at risk at the bottom of the hill. In the light of what had happened at Aberfan, Southwark Council very sensibly called in a geological concern—and I must declare an interest, because I have worked with that concern for the last 20 years—and the council has put the matter right in a reasonably short time.
However, in the Press and elsewhere it has been suggested that there were imponderables and the like about the tip at Aberfan. There are not such things about tips, which do not represent a complicated geological problem. They represent a problem which the average colliery manager can perfectly well handle and in which he is perfectly well versed.
I join with my hon. Friend in saying that we must ask the Minister to give us the reasons why Mr. Kellett and Mr. Collins were not called. I am sure that the Minister has read the typescript of the evidence and must be appalled by the evidence put forward by Mr. Sheppard and Lord Robens. I do not think that either wilfully set out to mislead the Tribunal and I am sure that they are both honourable men. It was because of the standard of their competence, because they were second-class men in the sense of their technical or general abilities. They went there on behalf of the Coal Board and yet the Tribunal had firmly put responsibility not on the lower or middle echelons of men whom eventually it condemned in its final report, but squarely on the Coal Board, and it was up to the Coal Board to give every assistance it could and to send its best men. It did not do so.
I find myself in the position of not agreeing with my hon. Friend. Lord Robens has done a fine job. He has served the State in a number of distinguished positions. He did the honourable thing by resigning. I feel that the Minister should not have asked him to take back his resignation. I know that the right hon. Gentleman may produce all sorts of reasons, but the underlying position still remains that he ought not to have asked him to take back his resignation.
Aberfan will not be quickly forgotten I can assure the Minister that the Tribunal’s Reports will have been read in Pennsylvania, in Lens, in Brussels, in the Ruhr and in the Donbas. In a strange way the mining world is quite small and follows what happens up and down the mining world very closely. Unless we do what I have suggested, it will be said that we have dropped our standards. For me this is a sad day, because my heart is in the coal industry, but this is something which we shall not forget for many a long day.
