The Aberfan Disaster

In 1966, a mining disaster in Aberfan, Wales, killed 144 people. It was a completely preventable tragedy, but none of the victims were in the mine itself, and 116 of them were children.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to step you missed in History class from how
Stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy B. Wilson and I'm Holly Frying. Most of
the time, when when we talk about mining disasters in history,

(00:21):
they tend to play out really similarly. There's usually an
underground fire or explosion or some kind of collapse that
kills some of the people working in the mind while
trapping others, and then we have a whole rescue situation.
Usually the casualties are the miners themselves and their rescuers,
and then sometimes working animals like horses. Another running theme

(00:45):
is safety precautions that could have prevented the whole disaster
that were either ignored or just didn't exist yet. That
is one of the reasons why there is only one
episode dedicated just to a mining disaster in our archive.
That is the nineteen six Courier mining disaster, which we
covered back in That's not to say we're never going
to talk about another of these disasters, but they do

(01:08):
tend to be uncannily similar. Yeah, I mean, it's come up.
I think you've probably had this happen to where I'm
looking around at possible topics, and I'll be like, oh,
this is a mining thing. This is really similar to
that one we did last year. So then I back
off and find something else. Yeah, we have the same
problem with fires. A lot of the fire episodes play

(01:28):
out and just an uncannily similar trajectory. So today's disaster
is an exception to a lot of what I just said.
In nineteen sixty six, a mining disaster and aber Van
whales killed a hundred and forty four people. That was
a completely preventible tragedy, so that lines up. But none
of the victims were in the mine itself, and a

(01:51):
hundred and sixteen of them were children. So brace because
it's not it's not a fun one. It's really not.
It's I wasn't planning to do this episode. I was,
in fact getting research for completely unrelated stuff and stumbled
across this one sentence mentioned of this and then said,

(02:11):
now I have to find out this is what happened.
So people in Wales have been using coal since prehistory,
and the first efforts at deliberate coal mining there started
in about the fifteenth century, but it wasn't until the
eighteenth century that coal mining started to become a major
industry in Wales, and with the Industrial Revolution it really

(02:32):
started to flourish. By the nineteenth century, other industries were
growing up in tanem with coal mining. There was a
whole network of canals, railroads and ports that allowed the
coal to be transported around Southern Wales and then shipped elsewhere.
By ninety two hundred, seventy one thousand men were working
in Welsh coal mines and coal was the nation's single

(02:54):
biggest industry, and at its peak, the Welsh coal mining
industry was particularly danger is. In addition to the typical
threats of explosions, collapses and toxic gases, the seams in
the South Wales coal field tended to be very fragile,
with the area's geology particularly prone to collapse. Between eighteen

(03:14):
fifty one and nineteen twenty, there were forty eight disasters
and three thousand deaths in the South Wales coal field,
in addition to more minor day to day accidents and injuries,
as well as illnesses and diseases that were just essentially
occupational hazards. Yeah, the coal was a high quality, but
getting it out of the ground came at a pretty

(03:35):
high cost. The Welsh coal industry really started to decline
pretty rapidly after World War One, though, shedding hundreds of
minds and hundreds of thousands of jobs by the nineteen thirties.
In ninety seven, in part to try to protect what
was left of it, Wales nationalized the coal industry, including
making some investments into improvements and safety. After this point,

(03:59):
Welsh coal times were overseen by the National Coal Board.
By the nineteen sixties, the nationalized coal industry in Wales
was still alive, but it was really struggling. Even so,
Minds continued to be the major employer in a number
of towns dotted along the South Wales coal field. One
of these was aber Van, many of whose residents worked

(04:20):
at the Merthyr Vale Colliery, which had been established in
eighteen sixty nine. Getting the coal out of this or
any other mine was not particularly clean or efficient. By
the nineteen sixties, Mirthr Vale Colliery was producing about thirty
six tons of waste a day. This included coal waste,
ash and sludge, collectively known as spoil, and it also

(04:42):
included general debris like broken cables, pieces of pipe, broken
up bits of concrete and the like. The method of
dealing with this waste was to put it in an
outdoor pile known as a tip. This was a standard
practice in the industry. There were about five hundred coal
tips in South Wales at the time, and the tribunal

(05:03):
report that followed this disaster described it this way quote
Rubbish tips are unnecessary and inevitable adjunct to a coal mine,
even as a dust bin is to a house. But
it is plain that the miners devote certainly no more
attention to rubbish tips than households. Due to dust bins,
these coal tips could be quite treacherous. Coal is often

(05:26):
found mixed in with layers of clay and shale, and
the material tends to be pretty wet, so if you
put such a mixture into a giant pile, it's going
to be naturally prone to shifting and sliding around. In
nineteen sixty six paper in Quarterly Journal of Engineering Geology,
which was entitled Rapid Failures of Colliery spoil Heaps in

(05:46):
South Wales Coalfield described twenty one rapid failures that had
happened between eight and nineteen sixty five. Fortunately, none of these,
which were a lot like landslides, None of these caused
any known loss of life, although they had destroyed property, buildings, vehicles,
and roads. Do you know how big these tended to be? Huge? Colossal,

(06:11):
like giant. They look like big hills or mountains. I mean,
we're putting out dozens of tons of waste each day,
so it makes sense that they would be massive, But
just to get a sense of scale, I wanted to
mention them. Yeah, and we have. We have some more
specific figures in terms of the one that actually caused
today's disaster. But yeah, that when you there are still

(06:31):
these exists still all over the world in places that
there have been coal mines, and some of them really
look like that is the local mountain right there, then
it's really a local mountain made out of coal spoil,
leftover stuff, gotcha. And the wetter that these piles got,
the more unstable they became, which was also well established.
That wasn't a secret. Everybody knew it. Professor George Knox

(06:53):
had written Landslides in South Wales Valleys in nine which
outlined the dangers to stability that came from uncontrolled water.
After Professor Knox's time, changes to coal processing lead to
another type of waste tailings just sort of an oozy
wet sludge of very fine particles. Tips that included both

(07:15):
traditional spoil and tailings tended to have more issues with
water related shifting and sliding. In spite of the known
hazards and the history of landslides, these tips were not
really regulated in any way. The National Coal Board had
no official policies or procedures governing where they should be
placed or how they should be inspected or maintained. The

(07:38):
closest thing to some kind of official direction was a
memo written by an engineer at Powell Different Company after
a slide in nineteen thirty nine. This memo outlined to
some common sense strategies for tips safety. I'm going to say,
as a person who is not an engineer or someone
who works in the coal mining industry, these make a
lot of basic sense. Limiting the height of the tip,

(08:03):
arranging its slope and surrounding drains to allow the water
to flow away from it, and never tipping over springs
or water logged ground. This memo was written before the
creation of the National Coal Board, but Clifford Jones, who
went on to become a National Coal Board engineer, got
a copy of it from his father, who had been
an engineer at Powell Dufferin before the coal industry was nationalized,

(08:27):
and after a nineteen sixty five incident in which a
tailing disposal site collapsed, Jones remembered the old memo, dug
it out, added guidance about disposing of tailings ideally separated
from other spoil and recirculated it. Even that small amount
of direction wasn't being followed at the tips on minnote
Murthur or mirth Or Mountain above the town of Abervan.

(08:50):
The murther Vale Colliery had started creating tips on the
mountain in the nineteen teens, and by nineteen sixty six
there were seven tips. They were situated between a series
of streams and drains that flowed towards the valley. These
tips varied in height from forty to two hundred meters
or a hundred and thirty one to six d and
fifty six feet. Spoil was transported from the mine up

(09:13):
the mountain by a tram and then a crane was
used to dump the tram cars contents onto the top
of these piles. Once a tip had reached the end
of its usable life, for some reason, the company would
just start a new one. Tip seven had been started
in ninety eight after a farmer complained that spoil from
Tip six was spilling onto his land. The site was

(09:37):
chosen without a survey or much scrutiny at all. It
just seemed to be the only available site on the mountain,
and its proximity to Tip six made it easy to
just move the equipment. There was a whole process that
they were going to need to go through if they
were going to move to a completely different tipping site,
but adding a new tip in an already existing complex

(09:57):
did not have a lot of scrutiny it all, so
they basically said, Okay, we're gonna move it over here.
By nineteen sixty two, Tip seven had expanded to the
point that its base was covering a spring, and by
nineteen sixty six that had grown to thirty four meters
or a hundred and eleven feet tall. It contained about
two hundred twenty nine thousand, three hundred cubic meters or

(10:19):
three hundred thousand cubic yards of coal waste. It was
also known to be unstable. After the base extended over
that spring, it pretty much immediately started experiencing issues with
sinking and slumping, and it had a major slide in
nineteen sixty three. Tips seven was also the only one
on the mountains that contained tailings, which wasn't the cause

(10:40):
of the disaster, but did make the water related hazards
greater than they would have been without it. The tipping
crew at Merthyr Vale never saw Clifford Jones nineteen sixty
five memo due to a breakdown in communication within the NCB,
they had no specific training or guidance in how to
man manage the tip. Tip seven failed at nearly every

(11:03):
guideline that the memo outlined. It was very tall, it
was placed on a steep, porous slope that eventually covered
a spring. It also contained both tailings and traditional spoil,
and on top of all that, it was above an
elementary school. Residents of Abravan had had raised concerns about
the tip and its proximity to the school and the

(11:24):
rest of the town, especially after that nineteen sixty three slide.
For example, Burrow and Waterworks engineer D. C. W. Jones
wrote a number of letters to raise the alarm about
Tip seven beginning that same year, and a letter to
the district Public Work superintendent dated July twenty he wrote
under the heading danger from coal slurry being tipped at

(11:47):
the rear of pant Glass School. He said that he
considered the situation to be extremely serious, writing quote, the
slurry is so fluid and the gradients so steep that
it could not possibly stay in position in the wind,
inter time or daring periods of heavy rain. D. C. W.
Jones sent another letter on August nineteen sixty three, this

(12:08):
time to the n c B S Area Chief mechanical
Engineer D. L. Roberts. He stressed the danger to people
and property and the dangers of winter weather and storm
water on the tip. D. L. Roberts sent a letter
back on March thirteenth, nineteen sixty four, which ended quote,
as you will appreciate, these tailings are very difficult to handle,

(12:30):
and we are very careful in disposing of this material
so as not to inconvenience any person or persons, and
therefore we would not like to continue beyond the next
six to eight weeks and tipping on the mountain side
where it is likely to be a source of danger
to pank Less School. Apart from the letters about the
coal tip, there had also been letters and complaints from

(12:50):
residents about persistent flooding of parts of aber Van because
of shale and slurry from the tips that had blocked
natural waterways. These are just example. These were complaints that
came in from engineer DC W. Jones, from the council
and from residents, but none of these complaints were heated,
which ultimately led to the disaster that we'll talk about

(13:11):
after a quick sponsor break. Aber Van, Wales had been
a mining town for almost a century, and for about
fifty years it had existed in the shadow of spoiled
tips along north Or Mountain. There were farmhouses on the
mountain slope between the tips and the town, and the

(13:32):
mountain itself was a place for recreation. Children played, their
families went on picnics there, even as residents, the council
and engineers raised concerns about the proximity of the tips
to the town and to the school. For the most part,
this mine and the tips were just a fact of life,
but that changed on October twenty one, ninety six. When

(13:53):
the tip and crew arrived for work that morning, they
noted that the tip had sunk by about nine meters,
created a depression under the crane track. One of the
men went back to the colliery to tell their manager
about it because they no longer had a phone connection
because the wire had repeatedly been stolen. There was a
lot of conversation about whether a phone connection would have

(14:15):
helped and the ultimate The ultimate decision was that this
happened so quickly that it would not have. The rest
of the crew moved their equipment back from the edge
of this depression. By the time they were done, though,
it seemed like the tip had sunk even further. They
decided to move everything even farther back, but first to
stop for a break and have a cup of tea

(14:36):
before they went on with their work. This break likely
saved all of their lives. Not long after nine am,
the crane driver Gwynn Brown, saw the tips seemed to
rise and first slowly and then rapidly, and then it banished.
While the weather at the top of the mountain was clear,

(14:57):
down in the valley, it was very foggy with low
line outs. The visibility was only about fifty yards, so
the mountain was almost invisible. In side pank Lass Junior School,
it was the last day of school before mid term break.
The students had just returned to their classrooms from a
morning assembly when they heard a very loud roar, like
thunder or a jet engine. At about nine fifteen am,

(15:19):
a wall of liquefied coal waste described as a dark
glistening wave, hit pant Glass School and several adjacent houses.
It poured around and through the school and the homes,
both crushing and filling them, before flowing across the street,
through two more rows of houses and into another street.

(15:40):
It had also destroyed a farm on the way down
the mountain, killing the family who lived there. As it
came to rest, about one hundred forty thousand cubic meters
of previously liquefied debris began to harden like concrete. Am
merthyr Tinville Police received an emergency call that said quote,

(16:00):
I have been asked to inform that there has been
a landslide at pank Glass. The tip has come down
on a school. Work at the colliery stopped immediately, with
the miners going to work at the rescue. Miners came
in from other nearby collieries as well, along with around
two thousand emergency workers and citizens. Using shovels, buckets, and
household pots and pans, people formed bucket brigades to try

(16:23):
to move the debris out from around the school. Some
parents resorted to using their bare hands to search for
their children. Whenever somebody thought they heard a cry or
some kind of movement under the debris, a whistle would
be blown and all movement would stop while everyone stayed
silent and listened. But nobody was removed from the wreckage
alive after eleven am. The situation inside the school was gruesome.

(16:49):
Most of the deaths were due to suffocation, skull fracture,
or severe physical trauma. Some of the victims had been
dismembered by the force of the landslide. David Bayannon was
the school's deputy head teacher, and when his body was
recovered from the wreckage, he was cradling those of five
of his students. Later on, his son, who was thirteen

(17:10):
at the time of the disaster, theorized that the students
had heard the sound of the slide and had runned
his father, who had taken them all up in his
arms before the landslide hit. But Sanya Chapel was used
as a temporary mortuary, with the bodies being laid out
on the pews and covered in blankets. Nurses and volunteers
cleaned off the soil and made notes of the appearances

(17:32):
and belongings of the bodies to help with identification. The
bodies that were really badly damaged are dismembered were marked
with notes not to be viewed. Eventually, the chapel became
so full that the bodies had to be carried to
the upstairs gallery with stretchers supplementing the pews. Since there
were no government offices nearby, burial and cremation certificates were

(17:54):
issued from a fish and ship shop that was five
doors down from the chapel. Coffins were brought into Abervan
from elsewhere in South Wales as well as the Midlands
in Northern Ireland. Hundreds of embalmers arrived the Sunday after
the disaster to clean and dress the identified bodies, and
once they were in coffins, they were removed to a
second temporary mortuary at Abervan Calvinistic Chapel to be held

(18:19):
until their burial. Because of the scale of the disaster
and the fact that so many structures were destroyed by
the slide, the city and police went to great lengths
to make sure everyone was accounted for. This was particularly
necessary since some of the children inside the school lived
and destroyed houses that were nearby, so if their parents

(18:39):
had been killed in their homes, there was no one
to come to the chapel to look for them. Police
conducted house to house searches, and they crossed reference school records,
tax records and the like to make sure that no
one had been overlooked. In the end, one hundred sixteen
children and twenty eight adults, including the school's headmistress and
four teachers, died. Most of the children were between seven

(19:03):
and ten, although the youngest was a three month old
that was killed at home. Eighty one children and Gwyneth Collins,
a mother who was killed in her home while her
two sons were killed at school, were buried at a
mass funeral on October. Those who wanted their loved ones
to have their own service or burial elsewhere did. Lord

(19:23):
Alfred Robins of Waldingham, chairman of the National Coal Board,
arrived on the scene about thirty six hours after the disaster.
He told a TV reporter that the cause of the
disaster was a spring under the tip that no one
had known about, and that no one could have known about,
but the locals contradicted that immediately that spring was something
they had always known was there. In fact, the tipping

(19:46):
crew had been in the habit of drinking from the
spring before the base of the tip covered it up.
Lord Robins was also heavily criticized for not coming directly
to the disaster scene, but instead attending the ceremony to
install him as chancellor at the University of Surrey. First.
There were naturally immediate calls for an inquest, and we

(20:07):
will talk about that inquest and its findings after one
more quick sponsor break. After the Aberban disaster, Prime Minister
Harold Wilson ordered a tribunal under the terms of the
Tribunals of Inquiry Act. Of this tribunals basic intent was

(20:27):
to establish what happened and why, whether it was preventible,
and what could be learned from it. Glad When Hughes,
Secretary of State for Wales, led the inquiry, which launched
on October with Judge Edmund Davies presiding. The general public
had doubts about this based on the response to past disasters.
There were worries that the whole thing was going to

(20:48):
be glossed over. This was compounded by the Attorney General
restricting the media from speculating on the cause of the disaster.
But in the end, the report issued by the Tribunal
did not sugar coat anything. It was released after a
seventy six day investigation, which was at the time the
longest in British history. Over those seventy six days, they

(21:09):
heard testimony from a hundred thirty six witnesses and they
examined more than three hundred exhibits. That report, which was
issued on August third, seven, is scathing. Quote. The Abervan
disaster is a terrifying tale of bungling ineptitude by many
men charged with tasks for which they were totally unfitted,

(21:30):
of failure to heed clear warnings, and of total lack
of direction from above. Not villains, but decent men led
astray by foolishness or by ignorance, or by both in combination,
are responsible for what happened at Abervan. The report also
makes it very clear who should be responsible. Quote. Blame

(21:51):
for the disaster rests upon the National Coal Board. That
is shared, though in varying degrees, among the NCB headquarters,
the Southwestern Divisional Board, and certain individuals. The legal liability
of the n c B to pay compensation of the
personal injuries fatal or otherwise, and damage to property is
incontestable and uncontested. The report notes that the tip never

(22:15):
should have been on top of the spring, that the
site had not even been adequately examined or analyzed for
use as a tipping site in the first place. It
documents from repeated failures to pass important information about managing
the tip down to the people doing the work, or
from the tip crew up to management. There are numerous illustrations, diagrams, charts,

(22:36):
and reports that boiled down to the fact that the
disaster was completely preventable and should have been prevented, not
just something that was preventable in hindsight. Even though this
report was incredibly clear and while documented, it did not
lead to any ramifications for the n c B. No
one was fired, fined, or faced any criminal charges. Although

(22:57):
Lord Romans offered to resign, that off for was refused,
and there's also a pretty cynical read on his timing
of making that offer. He made it after visiting several
South Wales coal towns and and and denouncing nuclear power
while he was there, which bolstered his popularity among the
mining communities who thought nuclear power would threaten their own livelihood.

(23:19):
The NCB also refused to acknowledge its responsibility for the
majority of this inquest, even though that responsibility had been
acknowledged in private before the tribunal even began. The tribunal
report described the n cbs financial liability as incontestable. Even so,
the NCB refused to accept blame or to pay for

(23:39):
things like rebuilding the school, removing the remaining tips from
the mountain, or raising and rebuilding Bethania Chapel, which congregants
felt too traumatized to even use after its service as
a temporary morgue for more than a hundred children. The
Coal Board was reluctant to even pay reparations to the
victims families, and this really suggesting fifty pounds per person

(24:02):
and then eventually raising that to five hundred pounds. Most
of the money for these things instead came from the
disaster fund that was raised in the wake of the tragedy.
More than ninety thousand contributions to the fund totaled more
than one point six million pounds. Only one memorial fund
and the UK has ever been larger, and that was

(24:23):
the one raised for Diana, Princess of Wales. It was
finally a hundred and fifty thousand pounds of Disaster Fund
money that was spent to remove the rest of the
tips from the mountain above Abervan. The NCB kept insisting
that these tips were safe, while the people of Abervan
insisted that they could not possibly feel safe living under them.

(24:44):
That money was finally returned to the Disaster Fund. In
the Disaster Fund had its own share of complications and issues.
The Charity Commission actually proposed asking parents how close they
were to their children and paying only those who said
they were close. Gosh, that is horrifying. Uh. Families were

(25:08):
worried that if they accepted donations from the disaster Fund,
it would prevent them from being able to accept compensation
from the NCB. Most of the people administering the charity
didn't actually live in Abervan, and in many cases the
village did not feel well represented in the decision making process.
In addition to paying for repairs and rebuilding that should

(25:29):
have been covered by the NCB and were incontestably the
responsibility of the n c B, the Charity Fund paid
for white archways at the mass burial site at the cemetery,
a memorial garden on the site of the former school,
a new community hall, donations to victims, families, and scholarships.
In addition to the tragic loss of life, the financial

(25:52):
concerns and the rebuilding effort, this disaster was emotionally devastating
to the village of Abervan. Similarly to what we discussed
in the New London School explosion, tensions arose between families
who had lost children and those who had not. Many
people reported survivor's guilt, and although the term post traumatic
stress disorder had not been coined yet in nineteen sixty six,

(26:16):
the symptoms of that were clearly widespread. At least twenty
premature deaths were reported among parents who lost children. The
sense of guilt and trauma was compounded by the general
manner of South Wales. The temperament of the era was
a stoic one, and this was particularly true in a
mining town where danger and death were an everyday part

(26:38):
of life, and the industry that fueled the town's economy
was one that was viewed as particularly masculine. A lot
of survivors, children and adults alike, did not talk about
the disaster for decades afterward. The fiftieth anniversary of the
disaster in sixteen was a national observance, with some survivors
talking about it then for the first time and others

(26:59):
still not talking about it at all. The disaster at
aber Van did lead to changes to the coal industry
and how it handled tipping. The tribunal report recommendations included
addressing the lack of regulations of coal tips and requiring
that the tips should be treated as civil engineering structures
with laws and codes in place and with the people

(27:21):
managing them trained to do so. The Minds and Quarries
Tips Act of nineteen sixty nine followed, extending the earlier
Minds and Quarries Act ninety four. The nineteen sixty nine
Act is quote an Act to make further provision in
relation to tips associated with minds and quarries, to prevent
disused tips constituting a danger to members of the public

(27:44):
and for purposes connected with those matters. Ironically, Lord Robins
went on to chair at Health and Safety Review which
led to the Health and Safety at Work Act of
nineteen seventy four. Yeah, that Sarbune report was pretty clear
and the like we we don't think anybody is a
villain here, but in the aftermath of all this, he

(28:04):
is the person that was most often painted as a villain,
not just for his own decisions, but for his manner
in dealing with the tragedy after the fact. Today, the
coal industry in Wales is effectively gone by the nineteen eighties.
It was steeply in decline and then disrupted by a
lengthy strike in the middle of the decade, which began
not long after an announcement that twenty minds were to

(28:26):
be closed. That strike ended in nineteen eight five, even
though the National Union of Miners and Management had not
been able to work out in agreement. Numerous collieries closed
over the next decade, including merther Vale, which closed on
August nineteen eighty nine. The industry was privatized again in
nineteen nine four. The last of Wales's deep coal mines

(28:50):
closed in two thousand eight. A few remaining open pit
and drift mines still operate in Wales today. Okay, when
the murther Veil mine closed, that had been a major
employer in Abervan. So that led to all of the
kinds of social and economic problems that happened when a
place as major employer goes away, and that had actually

(29:12):
been one of the things that was discussed in the
context of this disaster. People feeling like they should have
made a much bigger fuss about those tips, but they
were afraid that if they did, the mind would just
close and then they would have a tip above their
town and no job, and that I think compounded the
guilt for a lot of people, like did I contribute
to this by not making a bigger a bigger fuss

(29:34):
about the tips? There are still tips scattered around Wales
and around the rest of the world in places that
there are coal mines. Some of them that were determined
to be unsafe have been removed. The ones that were
above Abervan were removed at the request of the residents.
Eventually others of them have been landscaped over, but the
disposal of mine waste continues to be an issue anywhere

(29:57):
in the world that there are minds like there are
still lots of minds and are lots of tips uh
in existence around the world today. Some of them are
a lot cleaner than they used to be um and
the idea is, well, one day if we close the
mind we can fill it in with all of this
removed rubble. But yeah, there's like a whole series of

(30:18):
environmental and economic issues connected to what to do with
the other stuff that comes out of the coal mine
in addition to the coal. Yeah, it's it is a
multi layered problem. Uh. That's a depressing episode, Tracy. I know.
I'm really sorry. I'm sorry I wrote such a depressing episode.

(30:39):
I really I have I think four different episodes that
I was requesting and grabbing the research for, and like
I said at the top of the show, like I
read this one sentence reference to this and kind of
went okay, But now this is all I can think about,
and I'm not going to stop thinking about it until
I find out what happened and then tell everyone, Um,

(31:03):
do you have listener mail? That's less uh depressing? Maybe
kind of. I have a couple of corrections. First, Um,
in our recent episode about the Fort Shaw Indian schoolgirls
basketball team, for reasons that are inexplicable to me, I
said that the town of Springfield was in Connecticut when
it's in Massachusetts. I don't know what was going on there.

(31:25):
I just messed that up. Well, maybe it's the Simpsons
thing where there is a springfield in every state. Yeah,
there are lots of springfield. Like, that's why the Simpsons
will never say what state they're in and springfield, because
there is a springfield in every state. They never have to.
My brain auto completed the wrong state for some reason.
My other correction is that in our episode about the

(31:46):
Three Women from the Protestant Reformation, I said that the
Great Schism took place in fifteen o four. It did not.
It took place in ten fifty four, and that was
right in the notes. So it is another They're awesome
example of Tracy saying different words than what was directly
in front of my face. Um numbers always tripped me up.

(32:07):
I'll say, my brain will just shuffle them for me
and will happen at different times on the world stage.
But yeah, when when we had that whole deal in
the Esther Cox Great Amorous Mystery episode where I said
that her mother died before she was born. When I
was tweeting corrections about that, I was like, other popular
misspeaks on our show are changing the first two digits

(32:30):
of any year to nineteen because that also happens over
and over. Yeah, I'll change him to any year, my
brain just goes, let's just shuffle these. Yes, I also
shuffled months before in August. My brain will flip. You
would think you would think after four years of doing this,
we would be uh better at at saying things that

(32:51):
are directly in front of our notes. So, yeah, the
Great Schism was five hundred years earlier than I said
it was, which was part of the point of it
been being in that episode. So that's my correction corner
for the day. I also have actual mail. It's brief
because I also had corrections to talk about. Paul has
written to us about Theodosia Burr Austin. Paul says, I'm

(33:12):
listening to the podcast and by your predecessor predecessors about
Burr's conspiracy. They dropped very interesting detail. Many of Burr's
personal papers were lost when Theodosia was lost at sea.
So the disappearance of Theodosia was the disappearance of Theodosia
part of a broader scheme to hide forever the truth
about Burr's conspiracy. One more theory, Paul. Thanks Paul. I

(33:36):
did mean to mention that in the episode about Theodosia
she had among her personal effects, a lot of her
father's personal and professional papers, and they were all sealed
in tin boxes. Her the the ten the material, not
ten the number UM. Her father had left them in
his care when he had fled to Europe, and she

(33:56):
was bringing them back to him aboard the Patriot when
the Patriot it disappeared. UM. This was actually given as
a reason why one of his earliest biographers wrote his
biography while he was still alive. He was basically like,
we gotta do this now because all the man's papers
were lost. So thank you Paul for writing to bring
that up. If you would like to try to us,

(34:18):
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(34:40):
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