“I SAW one little girl in a cavity. This was the last one I got out.

“She was dead and still had her pencil in her hand. After this I just cracked up.”

Half a century ago most British newspaper front pages were dominated by the Aberfan disaster.

This newspaper was no exception.

The shifting of a badly-positioned, neglected National Coal Board spoil tip overlooking the village destroyed a school and homes on October 21, 1966, killing 116 children and 28 adults.

The would-be rescuers who shovelled and clawed at the waterlogged heap included parents, other villagers, miners and other people who happened to find themselves nearby that day.

One was a 39-year-old Wootton Bassett man called Peter Miller, who drive a lorry coal merchants Cannon and Son.

He rescued two or three children and recovered the bodies of others.

We reported: “Mr Miller said that he was at the Merthyr Vale pit, about a mile from the school, at 8.30am. Little girls on their way to lessons waved as he passed by.

“About 9.30, about 20 minutes after the school was buried, a message was received at the tip, asking for every lorry to go to Aberfan.”

At 30 tons, Mr Miller’s lorry was too big to get close, so he took a shovel and began helping the rescuers at the scene.

“When I got there,” he said, “all the mothers were crying.

“I put my lorry on the pavement and we started digging through into the classrooms which were buried.

“I was using the shovel off my lorry but we had to pick the big stones up. The mothers had formed a human chain to take the rubble away.

“Every now and again I heard a voice. Mostly they were crying ‘Mum.’

“I got two or three out alive and two or three dead. One of the girls alive was whimpering, ‘Mum,’ and she had a cut on her head and a smashed ankle.

“I could see the mountain was still moving. As you took out two shovels another moved in its place. It was the worst thing I have ever seen and I saw the London blitzes during the war.”

In spite of what must have been an unimaginable trauma, Mr Miller’s sole concern in talking to us was to call for a local disaster relief appeal.