Some Objects Tell the Time. Others Stop It.

Today, a small clock takes on renewed significance at St Fagans National Museum of History. Its hands are frozen at 9.13am on 21 October 1966, the moment disaster struck Aberfan.

It forms part of Wales is… Aberfan, opening today as Wales begins to mark the 60th anniversary of one of the darkest moments in our history. Alongside it are deeply ordinary things: schoolbooks and a football belonging to siblings Marylyn and Carl Minett, who both lost their lives. At Big Pit, another exhibition opening today uses personal possessions, memories and oral histories to preserve the experiences of those affected and those who came to help.

On 21 October 1966, 144 people died at Aberfan, 116 of them children. Those numbers are important; history requires accuracy. But perhaps objects such as a football, a schoolbook or a child’s doll achieve something statistics cannot.

They remind us that every number was a person.

I find that particularly powerful because so much of modern life encourages us to reduce people to labels. We notice what somebody wears, what they do for a living, what they own, how they speak and where they come from. Increasingly, we even reduce ourselves to profile photographs and a few lines of biography.

Naturism challenges some of that instinct.

Remove the clothing and many of the immediate signals of wealth, profession, fashion and status disappear with it. We aren’t suddenly identical, and nor should we be, but we are given an opportunity to encounter the human being before making assumptions about the packaging.

Perhaps that’s why today’s exhibitions have affected me.

The museum isn’t preserving expensive possessions because of their monetary value. It is preserving ordinary things because they belonged to people. Amgueddfa Cymru says the programme deliberately brings together collections, community voices and oral histories so that remembrance includes the individual lives and lasting human impact of Aberfan. Some of those stories and objects are being displayed publicly for the first time.

There is another profoundly Welsh element to the story too. Hundreds of people travelled to Aberfan following the disaster: colliery rescue teams, emergency services, voluntary organisations and ordinary people who simply came because other human beings needed help.

Community, at its best, is exactly that.

Not a logo. Not a membership number. Not agreeing about everything.

It is recognising the humanity of the person standing beside you.

As Naturism Wales, we talk often about Acceptance, Kindness, Respect and Community. Today feels like an appropriate day to remember why those words matter. They aren’t principles that belong exclusively to naturism. They’re human ones.

Later this month Wales will formally remember the 144 lives lost at Aberfan sixty years ago. Today, perhaps, we can begin more quietly.

With a clock.

A football.

Some schoolbooks.

And the reminder that behind every statistic, every photograph and every name is an individual human story worth remembering.

What ordinary object in your own life would tell somebody your story long after you were gone?

Further reading: Amgueddfa Cymru – Aberfan 60 programme⁠ · Wales is… Aberfan at St Fagans⁠ · Stories from Aberfan at Big Pit⁠