Four lives, a lone gunman and a bond of love unbroken by the horror of Dunblane
Twenty years after the school shootings which shocked the world, four stories of loss, pain and hope which have emerged from the tragedy
ON March 13, 1996, shortly after 9.30am, a gunman burst through the gym doors at Dunblane Primary School and fired off 105 shots in quick succession from two handguns. In the space of three minutes, Thomas Hamilton, a loner who bore a grudge against society, shot dead 16 Primary One pupils and their teacher, Gwen Mayor, before turning the gun on himself. To date, it remains the deadliest firearms atrocity in the UK.
In the wake of the shootings, amid huge public pressure, a desire emerged for some small good to emerge from such a heinous act. In response to the parents of Dunblane, the Government introduced the 1997 amendment to the Firearms Act that effectively banned ownership of handguns.
Now, as the 20th anniversary of the tragedy approaches, a poignant BBC documentary, Dunblane: Our Story, features interviews with many of those affected by the tragedy, including some who have never spoken before.
Here, four tales offer powerfully different perspectives of those catastrophic events and an uplifting message that love can triumph over evil.
RON TAYLOR, FORMER HEADTEACHER OF DUNBLANE PRIMARY SCHOOL
IN a box under the stairs at his home, in among the newspaper cuttings and files, headteacher Ron Taylor keeps a painstakingly hand-written account of the events of March 13, 1996, and of how he tried in vain to save the lives of his dying pupils.
‘I locked it away and, thankfully, I have never looked at it again,’ he said, speaking about the terrible event for the first time since. ‘And it’s quite easy to keep that box locked. It’s much more difficult to keep the box in my head locked.’
He recalls only too clearly dialling 999 at 9.41am after being alerted to the presence of an armed intruder, before racing to the gym. Inside, was a vision of hell on earth. He said: ‘ There was an incredible silence, the air was thick with smoke, the smell of cordite. And I just couldn’t believe what I was seeing. It was unimaginably horrible to see children dying in front of you.’
Instinct took over. As he cradled the dying in his arms, he told one teacher to escort four traumatised children out of the gym, while others tried to staunch the flow of blood with paper towels.
‘Seeing the staff tending to the injured, seeing the bodies of those who had died, and I think just in that moment the enormity of the event then hit me,’ he recalled. ‘That moment has never left.’
He returned to the gym later to help identify the victims’ bodies. The following day, his quiet dignity shone like a beacon at a press conference, where he famously told the world’s media: ‘Evil visited us yesterday and we don’t know why and we don’t understand it and I guess we never will.’
But as he helped a shattered community pick its way through shock and grief, the deadly attack continued to haunt Mr Taylor’s thoughts – even though he knew no one could have anticipated or adequately prepared for it.
He said: ‘I felt enormous guilt – more than justj a survivor’s guilt. It was my school. I felt violated. I felt I should have been able to do more. And that guilt lives with me.’
The pressure in the days following the massacre was unrelenting, with visits by politicians and senior royals, including the Queen. The head found the visits enormously stressful but understandable: ‘They represented the country’s support and concern for us,’ he said.
Mr Taylor pushed for the school to reopen quickly – the children returned nine days after the shooting – calling the milestone ‘the beginning of our recovery’ after ‘a long, dark week full of tears’.
But, behind the calm exterior, the almost unbearable personal strain was taking its toll. Within a year, his marriage was disintegrating and he took a sabbatical from the school. Despite his intention to return, he never did, moving instead to a post within the Scottish Office.
Once the face of a community in mourning, 53-year- old Mr Taylor has been happy to sink back into the shadows. He has rarely talked about his ordeal but is adamant the horrors of Dunblane must never be forgotten. ‘ This event was so unprecedented and so huge, with so many implications for so many people that we really must mark this important anniversary,’ he said.
‘It’s very difficult for people. It’s very difficult for the community and many people might not agree with me but it’s hugely important to help as best we can those who sur- vived and support those who have lost.’
BEV AND STEVE BIRNIE, PARENTS OF SURVIVOR MATTHEW BIRNIE
BEV Birnie recalls clearly how a phone call from her husband, Steve, on a bitterly cold March morning left her in turmoil. She said: ‘Steve had phoned and asked if I was okay and said “There’s been an incident in the school”. He said, “There’s been a shooting”.’
Without another thought, an i ncreasingly frantic Mrs Birnie joined dozens of anxious parents racing towards Dunblane Primary School. Like them, she was calculating the odds of her son, Matthew, being caught up in the carnage. After all, Dunblane was Scotland’s largest primary, with a school roll in excess of 700 pupils, so there was a strong chance her five-year- old would be safe, she reasoned.
She knew few familiar faces waiting at the school gates as the family had moved to Dunblane only in 1995 from the Wirral through her husband’s job as a pharmaceutical company executive.
Then, two parents nearby struck a devastating blow. ‘It’s Mrs Mayor’s class’, they said. That was her son’s class. Asked to wait with other affected families, the Birnies were left for hours in a state of nearpanic, unaware the police were briefing the media with details of the death toll – an error that would cause lasting bitterness. Mr Birnie said: ‘We were cocooned and I think the media knew more about what was going on than we did.’
By early afternoon, the couple were finally told that Matthew was in intensive care at Stirling Royal Hospital. Mrs Birnie, now 51, said: ‘The surgeon who operated on Matthew came into the waiting room. First things he said to us were, “You’re Bev and you’re Steve and Matthew has a little sister and his favourite food is baked beans”.’
The relief was palpable – if Matthew was talking then he could not have been seriously injured. In truth, he had been very lucky. Shot twice, one bullet through the back recoiled off a rib. ‘If [the rib] hadn’t deflected the bullet, it would have gone straight through his heart,’ said Mrs Birnie.
She spent the following night curled up next to her son in among the tangle of drips and tubes ‘just holding his little hand and thinking I am just so lucky, I’ve got my boy’.
But, Matthew’s recovery only truly started when he was discharged after ten days. Withdrawn at first, and aggressive towards his threeyear- old sister Lauren, he gained confidence from his return to school only a fortnight after being shot.
Gradually things improved but Mr Birnie, also 51, said: ‘It was hard because you had to sit there and just listen to what he had to say and try not to get too emotional.’
His wife added: ‘If we got emotional, then he wouldn’t say anything. He wouldn’t want to upset mummy and daddy.’
They try hard not to dwell on the past but are acutely aware that their son, who works as a travel agent in Glasgow, is looking forward to a future cruelly denied to so many classmates.
Mr Birnie said: ‘You did get huge guilt about the fact that you still had your son and others had lost theirs.’
His wife said: ‘ Matthew got to grow, got to go to high school, got to his 18th birthday, got to his 21st birthday. We watched him develop
from a young child to a warm loving young man.’
Mr Birnie added: ‘One thing that’s really important to Matt is that he wants to be defined by what he does in life rather than by what happened to him and that’s a good thing.’
DEBBIE MAYOR, 39, YOUNGER DAUGHTER OF TEACHER GWEN MAYOR
IT had begun like any other day for Debbie Mayor i n her London student flat.
She recalled: ‘I was in my bedroom drying my hair hundreds of miles away and this thing was occurring. I didn’t have any inkling at that time of what was ahead and that,
basically, my l i fe was changed forever.’
Then 19 and studying at the University of North London, Miss Mayor had heard on the radio that morning there had been an incident at the school where her mother Gwen taught. But phone lines to the school were jammed and it was 3pm before she received the call from her father, Rodney, now 72, that she had been dreading.
She said: ‘It sort of happened in slow motion. The chances were getting higher and higher but you are still in your head thinking “No, no, no, it’ll not be my mum”.
‘But my dad said he knew, he just knew straight away. My mum would have been the first person killed so she wouldn’t have seen anything else. I can’t begin to think...’
Even as details emerged of the
shattering act of brutality committed in the gym, Miss Mayor found herself clinging to the shards of comfort she found there. A pathologist’s report on her mother, who was 45 when she was murdered, found she was shot six times, including a shot through the eye that would have killed her instantly.
But another injury suggested she had been punched. ‘ If you are standing in front of somebody with a gun and you’ve been punched, [it] would suggest there had been some sort of struggle.
‘Nobody knows what they would do if they were in that position. Do you run, do you fight? Well, the evidence shows that’s what she did and I’m very, very proud of that.’
Her mother’s violent death was in such contrast to happy memories of her childhood with her sister Esther, now 40. She said: ‘We were a close family. Mum was always there for me and I looked up to her. She loved her job. She was so bubbly and outgoing. I’m devastated my kids will never meet her.
‘I don’t know, to be honest, why my mum became a teacher. I guess it must have been her calling. Going in to her classroom to see some of the artwork she would do and some of the ideas she had, like a hairdressing corner. She just had lots of ideas that worked very well with the wee ones.’
Two decades on and a mother herself living, like her sister, in nearby Stirling, she still feels overwhelmed by her crushing loss and a lingering anxiety about sending her own young children, Robbie, eight, and seven-year-old Millie to school.
She admits that it was only after becoming a mother herself that she ‘truly understood what the Dunblane parents must have felt’. She said: ‘The pain never fully goes. It made me scared to let my own kids go to school. I just pray something like this never happens again.’
Miss Mayor, a support worker, has always felt uneasy looking at the famous class photo, finding it ‘morbid’ and ‘chilling’. She has another photograph by which she prefers to remember her mother.
She said: ‘She’s out hill-walking and she’s got all her make-up on and she’s got her hair all lovely and she’s got her earrings on and her lippy on and she’s smiling and her eyes are happy. I still have these gloves [she wore]. That’s exactly how I remember her.
‘My children know what happened and refer to mum as their “special granny”. Every year I go back to the school and put a single rose down – I’m determined she’ll never be forgotten.’
ALISON ROSS, 20, YOUNGER SISTER OF JOANNA ROSS
ALISON Ross was only four months old when her older sister, Joanna, was gunned down in the hail of bullets. Now aged 20, this pretty and eloquent young woman still feels the void left by the sibling she never knew.
She admits it is difficult for her generation to fathom ‘how awful it all was and how awful it still is and still affecting us all today’, but it doesn’t diminish her sense of loss.
She said: ‘I’m angry I don’t have my sister now. I feel like she was taken and it’s all very selfish. This man didn’t consider [that he was] leaving parents without children and siblings without siblings.’
She looks at pictures of Joanna, frozen in time as a beaming youngster with a cheeky grin and blonde mop. Those, and the stories related by her mother Pam, now 59, and father Kenny, 64, are the only tangible memories she has.
‘She liked to be called Jo- Jo. I remember my mum telling me that when she went into nursery she asked them to call her Jo- Jo.’
She prefers pictures of Joanna dressed in colourful clothes and smiling: ‘I don’t like seeing her in her school uniform. I’d like to remember her as the young girl I should have been growing up with. And we should have been laughing in the sun somewhere together.’
Miss Ross was about seven when her parents finally told their increasi ngly curious second daughter about her older sister. ‘For so long I wasn’t sure who all these pictures of this girl were in my living room,’ she said. ‘I used to think it was me. I used to ask “Is this me?” and “How come I don’t have blonde hair any more and blue eyes?”
‘And mum sat me down and told me, eventually, what had happened. I remember just being really confused about it all. And it looms over us all, I think. It gets a bit, I don’t know, a bit hard to accept.’
Fighting back tears, she adds: ‘Even something as a simple as her brushing my hair for me, it just isn’t there. It always makes me wonder what kind of relationship I could have had and it’s not there at all.’
For all the sadness which crashes in on her thoughts from time to time, there is a cheerful determination not only to embrace the past but ensure that this most infamous of dates is known as much for its good works as its dark deeds.
Her mother was an organiser of the Snowdrop petition that helped secure a ban on handguns.
Miss Ross said: ‘It’s something that needs to be remembered so that everyone’s aware that we are still here and we didn’t just fade into the background.
‘We still had to push on with our lives and it’s important that everyone knows that we are doing it and doing it well.’
Dunblane: Our Story will be shown on BBC One Scotland on Wednesday, March 9, at 9pm.