You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
On 5 October, as reporters were giving accounts of the devastation caused by the collision of two trains just outside Paddington station, a cultural shift that had been building since the Dunblane disaster was fully enunciated. Woven into every report by newscasters that day and during the succeeding new bulletins as the extent of the tragedy was being discovered was the statement that ‘survivors of the crash and relatives of the victims are being offered counselling’.
Trying to absorb the horror and shock of the crash along with everyone else, there was something reassuring and comforting to know that this event was being understood not just as a social tragedy or as a political indictment (as indeed it was) but as psychologically significant to the individuals as well as to the country, and that the awareness of this as personal and social trauma would surround the interventions made with people who were directly affected by the accident.
There were two new things about the Paddington rail crash that struck me as novel. The first was the fact of the counselling and the reporting of the counselling, the second was the quite widespread accounts of the outrage people felt. Emotions have always been allowed at moments of great public mourning such as Aberfan, a mining town tragedy in my childhood, Dunblane, or at King's Cross, a fire that similarly shocked a nation. The King's Cross fire was a catastrophe with similarities to Paddington - at least in the public imagination: under-investment, neglect, a demoralized work force doing slip-shod work leading to copious unnecessary deaths. But what was different and new about Paddington was the amount of reporting on the reactions of people - those involved in the crash and those not personally affected but passionately caught up by it, as we all were - in the emotional terms in which it was expressed. We heard rage, we heard anguish, we heard terror, we heard deep upset. We didn't just hear that this was a terrible tragedy,