Month: June 2020

Another episode of THE CROWN. This one is called Aberfan. This episode takes place in 1966 when the town of Aberfan in South Wales experienced a tragedy. With South Wales largely being a mining town, my dad who was born in Princetown, South Wales as a young child went to work with his father in the coal mines. Unfortunately that was more or less the staple of employment in that part of Britain. In October 1966 one of the spoil tips (a repository for waste from a coal mine) liquefied and sent half the mountain down in a black sluice into the town killing 154 people, 115 of which were children in a school. The disaster was amplified by the inaction Queen Elizabeth took getting to the scene of the disaster. While the episode does well to try to portray the Queen (Olivia Coleman) in a sympathetic way, for the most part it is well-known how absent of emotion both she and Philip are. The disaster at Aberfan is considered by Elizabeth as one of her failures as Queen. The other was the death of Princess Diana in how she failed to react sooner. Instead of the usual links to the screencaps in the gallery, I thought I’d include a mini documentary made by Netflix for the series. It’s excellent in encapsulating the disaster and the making of the episode. I will be including the text link though.