THE bravery of a teacher who tried to save his pupils as a mountain of coal slurry engulfed a village school has finally been told after 50 years.

David Beynon, 47, scooped five children into his arms and braced himself against a blackboard to shield them from the oncoming avalanche.

They were among the 116 children and 28 adults who died in the Aberfan disaster of South Wales on 21 October 1966.

A rescuer who found the 47-year-old deputy headmaster said at the time: "He was clutching five little children in his arms as if he had been protecting them."

Now the teacher's son Philip Beynon, 63, has spoken for the first time of his father's heroism.

Philip said: "My father must have heard the sound of the landslide coming towards the school.

"The children would have been frightened and perhaps ran towards him.

"Automatically he would put his arms around them but they were all buried under the force of that thing.

"All the kids in that class were killed, every single one of them, along with my dad."

Philip, an only child, was left devastated but quietly proud of his father's instinctive actions to try to save his terrified pupils.

He said: "I was only 13 at the time but I was told they found my father with children wrapped in his arms.

"He was a devoted teacher and would have seen it as his job to protect the children in his care."

Mr Beynon had been a good rugby player with Pontypridd in his day and was almost selected for Wales as a hard-tackling flanker.

His rugby career over, the ambitious teacher was working his way up to the position of headmaster.

He was teaching in Merthyr Tydfil when he was appointed deputy head at nearby Pantglas Junior School in Aberfan in the summer of 1966.

His son said: "I remember driving into the village with him and someone saying if the coal tip behind the village ever came down it would hit the village school.

"He had only been working there for six weeks when that is exactly what happened."

Mr Beynon dropped his only child Philip at the grammar school in Merthyr Tydfil that morning and drove five miles down the road to Aberfan.

It had been raining heavily for two days and the valley was shrouded in a grey mist.

The children were excited that morning - it was the last day before breaking up for the Autumn half-term holiday.

Mr Beynon was taking the register shortly before 9.15am when Tip No 7 on a hillside above the school started to slide after becoming saturated with rain water.

More than 1,400,000 cubic feet of coal slurry took just a matter of seconds to fall on the village wiping out a generation of schoolchildren.

The few children who were dug out of the coal slack, in places 40ft deep, said: "Everything went black."

Young Philip Beynon was taken out of class up in Merthyr. A teacher drove him home where his anxious mother Vera was about to leave the house heading for Aberfan.

Friends and neighbours looked after the schoolboy - the family's black and white TV was on the blink that day so he was spared the harrowing sights the rest of Britain was witnessing

as the rescue operation got underway.

His mother came home at 2am the next morning to tell him his father was dead.

Retired civil servant Philip, of Trefin, Pembrokeshire, said: "She had spent all day there hoping he would be found alive.

"He was a good father, a well-respected man. There were hundreds at his funeral.

"I remember the front lawn at our house was covered in wreaths."

As the 50th anniversary of the disaster dawns, the father-of-two says he will be staying away from the memorial services being held to mark the tragic day 116 children died.

He said: "I've been invited but I won't go, I might watch some of it on TV.

"It is a big day for a lot of people - 50 years is a long time but it was such a massive tragedy it doesn't feel like that long ago."

The scale of the disaster is still hard to take in half a century later.

One man lost his wife, two sons, house and all his possessions - he was even left without a photograph of them, everything was destroyed.

The terrible irony was that the menfolk of the village were down the mine at nearby Merthyr Vale when it happened - and it was slurry from their pit which had descended

on the village.

Those same men were first on the scene to start desperately searching through the thick slurry, their wives also frantically clawed into the black sludge

hoping to find their child.

Bodies were still being found almost a week later - the final death toll included five teachers from the school. Just 25 pupils at Pantglas survived.

Around the world Aberfan became known as the "Town Without Children" - a generation had been lost.

Parents of the few children who survived kept them indoors for months not to hurt their friends and neighbours who had lost theirs.

The village milkman "Davies the Milk" started delivering 14 less crates on his rounds after the horror - there were just a few youngsters left to drink it.

Some of the children who survived the terrible blackness still live in the village, as are parents, now in their seventies who lost their children.

Fifty years on there is still bitterness in the village that the National Coal Board denied responsibility for the unstable slag heap which caused the catastrophe.

Parents who lost one or more children were paid just £1,000 compensation because there were fears that coming from an economically deprived mining village they

would not be able to cope with large sums of money.

To add insult to injury the villagers had to spend £150,000 of a charitable fund collected worldwide to flatten the remaining parts of the slagheap.