The Aberfan Disaster

9:13am on October 21st 1966, Pantglas School in the small Welsh mining village of Aberfan

Inside the school, more than 200 children and nine teachers were waiting for their first lesson of the day to begin when the air was filled with the sound of a distant rumble.

A massive coal tip - a mountain of waste generated by the town's mines that employed 8000 people had collapsed and a landslide of mud and debris flooded into the classroom, burying the school and engufing everyone inside

116 children and 28 adults were killed

It was one of the worst industrial disasters Britain has ever seen. An accident that could and should have been prevented and a tragic account of a mistake that cost a village an entire generation of its children.

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This has been a Stinking Pause production.

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Scott

The Sixties had begun. Someone had apparently forgotten to tell the prosecution.

It is 1960. The Beatles are still playing clubs, the mini-skirt is some way off, Britain has yet to start swinging and much of the country still carries itself with the reassuring conviction that there is a proper way of doing things.

And then Penguin Books decides to publish Lady Chatterley's Lover.

D. H. Lawrence's novel had been written more than thirty years earlier, but its frank treatment of sex, adultery and class had ensured that British readers had never legally been offered the complete, unexpurgated version. Penguin intended to change that, producing an inexpensive paperback that could be bought by virtually anyone.

The establishment was not entirely delighted.

In October 1960, Penguin Books found itself at the Old Bailey, charged under the recently introduced Obscene Publications Act. What followed became one of the most famous obscenity trials in British history and, almost accidentally, a wonderfully revealing portrait of a country standing with one foot in the 1950s and the other edging rather nervously towards the modern age.

At the heart of the prosecution was a question that would become far more famous than anyone asking it could possibly have imagined:

"Is it a book that you would wish your wife or your servants to read?"

It was only one sentence, but somehow an entire disappearing Britain seemed to be contained within it.

This episode of Rainbow Valley tells the story of the book, D. H. Lawrence, Penguin's decision to publish it, the extraordinary cast of academics, writers, clergymen and lawyers who assembled at the Old Bailey, and the trial that turned a supposedly obscene novel into one of the most sought-after books in Britain.

Because the Sixties may have officially arrived on 1 January 1960, but attitudes do not change simply because somebody replaces the calendar.

The old Britain was still very much in evidence.

The new one was beginning to clear its throat.

So settle in as we return to London in 1960, when literature, sex, class, censorship and the British establishment unexpectedly found themselves sharing the same courtroom.

Rainbow Valley – bringing you the stories from the decade that shook the world.

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