Evening Telegraph (First Edition)
Dunblane: Scars still run deep for Dundee photographer
A DUNDEE photographer has admitted he is still haunted by the Dunblane Tragedy 25 years on.
Sixteen children were murdered along with their teacher on March 13, 1996, and Ron Cathro was among the first on the scene.
Ron has never spoken publicly about his experience until now and said it was a scene of unimaginable chaos and confusion.
He was weeping from behind the camera but managed to hold it all together as he captured images in the face of unimaginable grief.
But the tears flowed when he got back to his car.
“I cried all the way home,” said Ron. “I was overcome with emotion and when I got home my T-shirt was soaking wet from the tears.”
Ron had been a photographer for The Courier for 12 years when Thomas Hamilton broke into the gymnasium of Dunblane Primary School armed with four handguns and 700 rounds of ammunition and began shooting at a class of five and six-year-olds before turning the gun on himself.
Ron’s day had started as normal when he was sent to a job at Guardbridge Paper Mill before his pager went off.
He called news editor Steve Bargeton who told him to drop everything and go to Dunblane following reports of a shooting at the primary school.
The rest is history. News kept getting worse
“I coach football at Strathmartine Primary School and I thought of every one of them – I couldn’t get that picture out of my head,” said Mr Cathro.
“I turned the radio on as I was driving and the news just kept getting worse and worse – it was pandemonium. “I was one of the first photographers on the scene and watched the parents arriving at the school.
“I thought of my own daughter who was eight at the time and I couldn’t imagine the pain they were going through.
“The one thing that sticks in my mind was a wee man in a bonnet walked past me and asked what’s going on.
“I told him someone had shot some of the children and he replied: ‘It’ll be that b ***** d Hamilton’.
“I never thought any more about it until the next day when we found out who was responsible.”
Ron said he still feels pangs of guilt about aiming his long lens and doing his job while the community was in mourning.
“I felt like I was intruding on their grief but instinct took over and I had a job to do,” he said.
“In my 12 years with the paper I had covered many tragic stories but there was nothing before or since that comes close in terms of the horror and the heartbreak.
“It was incredibly sad and still makes me emotional even now.”
Ron said he couldn’t let go of his daughter once he finally got home.
The next day he was sent back to Dunblane which he said was “the last place on earth” he wanted to be.
“You can’t quantify the hurt,” he said.
“I was trying to be professional but I was weeping behind the camera.
“Even now when I have to drive past Dunblane it leaves me cold.
“I’m still haunted by what happened that day.”
Ian Lamb, from Arbroath, was The Courier’s assistant editor at the time of the tragedy.
He said: “It was unbelievable – you couldn’t believe that something like that was happening in your own back yard.
“I was thinking of the parents who had dropped their children off at school that morning – where could they have been safer than in a primary school?
“I just felt myself welling up at my desk. It was a day that you can’t describe.
“It’s understating it to say it