The Premonitions Bureau
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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Life is full of inevitable, unpleasant experiences. But thanks to modern medicine, perimenopause doesn't have to be one of them.
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In the early morning of October 21st, 1966, a 52-year-old dance teacher in London named Lorna Middleton suddenly woke up from her sleep. It was around 6 a.m.
She described waking up and experiencing a choking sensation and felt like she couldn't breathe, a kind of physical sensation in her throat and struggling to breathe.
Writer Sam Knight. Lorna Middleton had a tenant staying with her. He made her a cup of tea that morning, and she told him about what had happened. She said she had an ominous feeling. Hours earlier, a man named Alan Hensher was at work at a telephone switchboard in London when he said he suddenly began to tremble all over and had a feeling something bad was about to happen. He later wrote, "...it just hit me without warning. I did mention to a lady sitting next to me that a big disaster was taking place in this country, which could cost many lives. I couldn't pinpoint the place of occurrence." Around the same time, a 10-year-old girl who lived in a small village in South Wales called Aberfan reportedly told her mother that she'd had a bad dream.
She'd dreamt that she was on her way to school, but the school in Aberfan was gone. It was covered in something black. Tell me about the village of Aberfan. What was the village like in the 1960s?
So Aberfan was built pretty rapidly during the second half of the 19th century to be a mining village.
Were most of the people living there in the 60s somehow touching the coal industry? You knew someone who was working in the mines or you were supporting those who worked in the mines?
100%. It was a place defined by the colliery and the activity of taking the coal out of the ground.
On the morning of October 21st, a group of men were working on a pile of coal waste on a mountain just outside the village. There were several huge piles, like this one on the mountain, that had been created from waste brought out of the mines.
You would mine the coal, take the good coal, and then there would be the debris, the waste from that, and also particularly something called tailings, which is the coal which is too fine, the kind of powdery stuff that's sort of too fine to use or to sort of sell or to kind of package up in a useful form. And then that would be hoisted onto a kind of tramway. Can you imagine something a bit like a ski lift? Sort of hauling cartload after cartload after cartload up the hill where it would kind of reach the top where there would be a small gang of men, six guys, and then they would kind of unhook the topmost cart and tip it onto the waste pile. And these heaps would grow and grow on the hillside until they would become unstable.
And then the coal plant would shift the tramways to another part of the hillside and make a new one.
That morning, the men noticed something unusual.
It'd been raining for weeks, and the men working on the tip had noticed it shifting and starting to shift down the hillside. You could sort of take a reading off a tree or a fence post. There was a particular dead tree that... the men kind of kept an eye on and they could see that the pile was beginning to shift.
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Chapters
4 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:00–7:22
2
What triggered the episode and how did eyewitness premonitions first appear (who were Lorna Middleton and Alan Hensher)?
7:22–18:00
3
What was life like in Aberfan and how did the coal tip system create a disaster risk?
18:00–37:25
4
What happened during the Aberfan disaster and what were the immediate human consequences?
37:25–50:29