Tom White Addresses Pupils on Aspiring Towards a Brighter Future
September 9, 2026
I'm wearing my Make America Great Again hats today and you will be forming an opinion of what that represents. Costume is very powerful, and a MAGA hat is almost like a flag. I don't know, I must try to be balanced, and there might be Donald Trump fans in your family. In social situations, I signal my hostility to MAGA with a frown. Can I recommend that to you? When you are part of a conversation that you know is unkind, don't be a bystander. Very often a frown is a powerful and effective response that sends a very clear signal without provoking a bigger argument. It’s called frown power.
Maybe we should put the ‘Great’ back into Britain. That’s a gentle joke on the people who say that sort of thing, since it indicates that they don't know what Great Britain means. Excuse me a moment while I explain. There is a large group of about 150 inhabited islands off the coast of northwestern Europe. Collectively they are called the British Isles. There are two big ones: the one on the left(west) is called Ireland. The one on the right is called Great Britain, because it is the biggest of the British Isles. This morning you are resident in a country called the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Great Britain isn't going to stop being Great anytime soon. My assembly today aims to encourage you to imagine an even better Britain: not by looking back into an imagined past, but to inspire you to work towards a future version that's even better than the present, or the past.
Today I have a dreadful story to tell you about a disaster in Wales that took place almost exactly 60 years ago. Just because quite a lot of things are bad now, it doesn’t mean that everything is getting worse, or that things used to better. Things that are normal today: health and safety, counselling, accountability, litigation, compensation – were almost completely absent 60 years ago. I’m 56, so while 60 years ago sounds like ancient history if you are 12, it isn’t all that long ago in reality.
On that dreadful day in October 1966, it had been raining hard for weeks. The 240 pupils of the Aberfan Junior School wound their way through the back lanes of miners’ terrace houses on their way to morning assembly. You probably know that coal mining built industrial Britain. But by 1966, the coal industry had been in long decline and several pits had shut. The mining workforce had fallen from its peak, but pit jobs kept Aberfan going. The National Coal Board had control of UK mining and wielded great power. It had a firm grip on government, and it was held in what now seems uncomfortable reverence. The working man knew his place; authority knew best.
Numerous complaints had been made to the Coal Board about the dangers of one of the seven gigantic spoil tips that loomed high above the village. Every mining community had its tips of waste material dug from the mines. The entire south Wales valleys landscape was jagged with them. The one above Aberfan had slipped three years previously when an ominous crater appeared at the top. A bulge had formed at the foot of the tip as a stream that was unable to drain away liquefied the tip into thick, black quicksand. The Coal Board brushed the complaints aside. Everyone knew that if they made a fuss, the mine would be closed.
If the disaster had come 20 minutes earlier, the junior school below the tip would have been empty. In the classrooms lights began to flicker and sway before there was an ominous roar. A glistening black avalanche consumed everything in its path and then ruptured a water main, engorging it further and increasing the speed of its descent towards the school. A survivor said later, “one minute we were young innocent children of eight years of age … and then at twenty past nine we were totally different people and would never be the same again.”
I have decided to leave most of the witness testimony out of this assembly. One of the first police officers on the scene recalls being rigid with shock. "A huge bank of water was coming directly towards us," she said. "It was like a tsunami, it was terrifying”. The crisis whistle sounded in the colliery and miners, their headlamps still lit, ran to the school where women were clawing at the slurry trying in vain to reach the children. News reports described the site resembling an earthquake or the aftermath of a high explosive bomb. I can’t tell you what the parents went through, but one rescuer recalled: “It goes to show how primitive it all seems; I wrote up a notice and pinned it to the chapel door informing parents that death certificates will be issued at the local fish and chip shop”. The waiting took 15 days to identify 144 bodies.
The handful of surviving children did not really have a formal education for many years. Time and again, testimonies from the past describe the same thing – no one talked about what happened. This was an age of a stiff upper lip, embodied by the tough, macho miners themselves. Psychological help was stigmatised and viewed with suspicion. A local GP described the village as consumed with guilt, psychological problems, alcoholism and nervous breakdowns. All of that went untreated.
What followed was a saga of cruelty and indignity. Donations to the Aberfan Disaster Fund poured in from all over the world but the money was taken away and the bereaved were initially refused help to pay for their children’s gravestones. The Coal Board initially offered £50 of compensation for each dead child before raising it to the "generous offer" of £500. A more substantial sum, it was advised, would have destroyed the working-class recipients not used to large amounts of money.
The NCB chairman insisted to reporters that it was “impossible to know that there was a spring in the heart of this tip” although everyone else seemed to know and Ordnance Survey maps proved it. The tribunal that followed concluded the disaster was “a terrifying tale of bungling ineptitude by many men charged with tasks for which they were totally unfitted, of failure to heed clear warnings, and of a total lack of direction from above”. No one lost their jobs, was demoted or fined.
This is obviously a horrible story. I’m telling you because you need to know, and it’s an antidote to thinking that Britain was such a brilliant place in the past. I could have chosen any number of examples. The 70s, 80s and 90s featured behaviour and events that I can scarcely believe are true from today’s perspective.
And of course, the main reason I’m telling you is because you represent the Britain of the future. We won’t move forwards by nostalgic memories of some phoney past. As future leaders and people who will serve our communities, it’s your job to present an attractive vision of a better society that we can all work towards. Our speaker at prizegiving, Chanel Contos, was an inspiring example of a youthful changemaker. And the obvious first step is for you to be the change you want to see in the world.
