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Thirty years on, the Dunblane massacre remains almost unbelievable and the grief of the families unfathomable. In a terrible way, it is almost harder to see them now, three decades on; three decades lived without the children who should now be grown up, with families of their own.
On 13 March 1996, a man called Thomas Hamilton shot dead 15 primary schoolchildren aged between five and six and their teacher Gwen Mayor in their gym as they were beginning a PE lesson. Some of them he shot at point-blank range when they were incapacitated by earlier bullets. A 16th child died on the way to hospital.
The documentary to mark the event’s anniversary, The Dunblane Tapes, retells the story as quietly and unsensationally as you would hope. It shows contemporary news footage sparingly but effectively – the parents running down the streets towards the school, some of them still in their slippers, the gathering to wait for news, one of the policemen bowing his head and covering his eyes as it arrived. Journalist Melanie Reid, an early reporter on the scene, remembers seeing a woman driving behind her on the road suddenly covering her mouth in horror as she evidently heard the news coming through on her car radio.
The tapes of the title refer to the video recordings that John Crozier, who lost his five-year-old daughter, Emma, made in the aftermath of his bereavement. He documented some of the gatherings of the bereaved parents, many of his conversations with his friend Les Morton, who had also lost his five-year-old daughter, Emily, and he documented the continuation of family life around their losses – the bewildered siblings who had to be cared for, the arrival of new ones, along with the thousand and one tiny things that still make up a day even when it feels as if they all should have stopped. We see Emma’s three-year-old brother, Jack, and the tray of fairy cakes he has made with Grandma. He plans to grow up to be “a big baker”.
The two men sit on the sofa together now, white-haired and remembering. Les says he was annoyed at being interrupted in a meeting. Then they told him there had been a shooting at the school. “I said – say that again?” On John’s tapes, dark-haired and radiating grief and rage, he talks about how he sees Emma’s face before him every morning when he wakes up. “Is it like a photograph?” asks John – and what a nightmarish shared understanding they have that allows him to ask the question. “No, it’s like a live picture,” says Les. You can see him visibly struggling with his appalling situation before he speaks again. “Nobody would think it’s possible,” he says. “I still don’t think it’s possible … I feel venomous every day. My child’s gone. Never to be seen again.”
Other parents are seen, then and now, including Mick North. He, too, lost a five-year-old daughter, Sophie. They had lost her mother to illness just three years before. You want to ask him how he bore it, how he is still standing, but that’s a question perhaps beyond even John’s privilege to ask.
The stories of the bereaved are interwoven with the story of the one tangible good that rose from their limitless suffering. It began with the Snowdrop Petition – named after the flowers that were the only ones blooming in Dunblane in early March when the children died. It was launched by Ann Pearston, who couldn’t get past the fact that assault rifles had been banned after the Hungerford shootings but not the handguns the killer had also used, which had in fact been more deadly and that Hamilton had legally possessed. “He didn’t actually do anything wrong until he fired the first shot,” says Jacqueline Walsh, who along with another friend of Pearston, Rosemary Hunter, had quickly became involved in the petition. It soon grew into a public campaign to outlaw the possession of handguns for all private citizens.
They garnered cross-party support, faced down a well-organised and well-funded pro-gun lobby and eventually – with the help of a general election in 1997 that got Tony Blair’s Labour government into power and lessened the hold of the kind of men who thought any infringement of their right to access guns was an outrage – got the full ban they sought.
It was an incredible achievement then and seems even more so now, 14 years after the murders of 20 six and seven-year-olds and six staff members at Sandy Hook Elementary School in the US failed to result in any changes to US gun laws whatsoever. “I have the greatest admiration for those three women,” says John. “Absolutely,” says Les.
It seems to have brought them a measure of peace. But, of course, as John tells the press at the time: “It’s hard to think of anything in terms of winning and losing when you’ve lost your only child.”
