Leon Rosselson 1966
Written following the Aberfan disaster of 1966 outside Cardiff where a coal mine waste tip collapsed and avalanched slurry into town, killing 109 children at Pantglas Junior School and 35 others. Rosselson wrote "I like playing fantasy games inventing the newspaper headlines I'd most like to see. 'Lord Robens Buried by Slag Heap' would be rather pleasing." Robens was chairman of the National Coal Board in 1966 and showed a degree of indifference to the disaster. He proceeded to tell lies about it to the press before raiding the public disaster funds to cover the Coal Board's own clean-up costs.
Martin Simpson & the Wilson Family: https://towerseyfestival.bandcamp.com/track/palaces-of-gold
If the sons of company directors
And judges’ private daughters
Had to go to school in a slum school
Dumped by some joker in a damp back alley
Had to herd into classrooms cramped with worry
With a view onto slag heaps and stagnant pools
Had to file through corridors greyed with age
And play in a crackpot concrete cage
Chorus:
Buttons would be pressed
Rules would be broken
Strings would be pulled
And magic words spoken
Invisible fingers would mould
Palaces of gold
If prime ministers and advertising executives
Royal personages and bank managers’ wives
Had to live out their lives in dank rooms
Blinded by smoke and the foul air of sewers
Rot on the walls and rats in the cellars
In rows of dumb houses like mouldering tombs
Had to bring up their children and watch them grow
In a wasteland of dead streets where nothing will grow
I’m not suggesting any sort of a plot
Everyone knows there’s not
But you unborn millions might like to be warned
That if you don’t want to be buried alive by slag heaps
Pitfalls and damp walls and rat traps and dead streets
Arrange to be democratically born
The son of a company director
Or a judge’s fine and private daughterÂ