I won’t forget handprints of kid, 5, who never came home, says Lorraine Kelly as she returns to Dunblane 25 years on
TWENTY-FIVE years ago the unimaginable happened.
I was listening to the radio on the way home from work and heard there had been a massacre at a primary school in Dunblane.
Thomas Hamilton had carried out the deadliest mass shooting in British history, killing 17 before killing himself with one of his four legally-held handguns.
At first I thought it must be somewhere in the US with the same name, because it couldn’t be the Dunblane in Scotland that I knew so well — a peaceful and safe place to bring up your kids and somewhere to stop off for a cup of tea and a warm welcome on the journey from Glasgow to Dundee.
When the news sank in that 16 children, aged five and six, and their teacher had been murdered and 15 more little ones were in hospital with appalling injuries, I headed up to Scotland with ice in my stomach.
My own daughter was just a toddler, and like every parent in the country I was shocked to the core. We all hugged our children very tight that night and in the days and weeks to come.
I presented GMTV live the next morning from outside Dunblane Cathedral with my friend and colleague Eamonn Holmes. I just about managed to hold it together during those three and a half hours of live television but shed many tears afterwards.
ENORMOUS LOSS
I didn’t know it at the time, but many of the families were watching that broadcast, including Pam Ross, whose five-year-old daughter Joanna was one of the murdered children.
Pam said she had seen me on TV over many years, and felt she just needed to talk to someone who could understand. In the most tragic of circumstances, we bonded, and remain friends to this day.
She trusted me enough to ask me to Joanna’s funeral a few days later which, of course, I kept completely private and out of the public eye.
It was only many years later that I interviewed Pam on my TV show, and also her incredible daughter Alison, just a baby at the time of the tragedy.
I have often been back to Dunblane to visit Pam and to see the wonderful legacy of the Dunblane Centre, built from donations given by people around the world after the outrage.
The Centre is where the community can come together and enjoy all sorts of fun activities, including sport, drama and fitness classes, or just to meet up for a coffee and a chat.
It’s incredible that something so positive has come out of such horrendous pain, suffering and loss. It inspired me to make a documentary to mark the 25th anniversary on March 13, this Saturday.
Filming it was a real privilege, especially as people still dealing with enormous loss trusted me to tell their stories.
I spoke to Colin McKinnon, whose six-year-old boy Brett was killed. Colin is one of the bravest people I have ever met.
He spoke to me so movingly and openly about his struggles with mental health after the brutal death of his lad, struggles that once drove him to attempt to take his own life.
HEARTBREAKING
Colin finds solace and healing in wild water swimming, thinking about Brett when he is immersed in the lochs and rivers. He is living with unimaginable grief and is truly a remarkable man.
It was heartbreaking to talk to Lynne Rorie, who still feels guilty about allowing her five-year-old daughter Victoria to go to school that day.
Lynne was worried about a rash on Victoria’s arm and wanted to take her to the doctors, but the little girl pleaded to go to school because she loved PE so much. Victoria was shot in the school gym that morning.
I also interviewed head teacher Gwen Mayor’s daughter Debbie, and was given an insight into this remarkable head teacher murdered trying to protect her little pupils.
Debbie described an elegant, fun-loving, born teacher, who was so full of joy and, at 45, had so much living still to do.
A quarter of a century later, I also really wanted to remind everyone about the bravery and tenacity of the bereaved parents who campaigned for a ban on handguns.
There is a mistaken belief that, after Dunblane, the changes in our gun laws came into force swiftly, with no opposition. But that was far from the case.
The parents and campaigners were accused by the gun lobbyists of being “overly emotional”, and they had a real fight on their hands.
But an unprecedented public “Snowdrop Campaign”, named after the only flower in bloom at the time of the murders, resulted in a massive 750,000 signatures, all loaded into boxes and taken to Parliament.
The piles and piles of signed documents made for an incredibly powerful image and a lasting example of people power.
STILL HEALING
You have to remember, this was a quarter of a century ago, when there was no social media. In order to effect change through cam- paigning you had to do a hell of a lot more than just click on a Twitter link.
People had to make the effort to get hold of a form, fill it out, then go to the post office, buy a stamp and send it off. We don’t know how many lives have been saved
because of this hard-fought change in legislation, but suffice it to say, we have never, thank God, had another Dunblane.
A few months after the murders I was asked by the families to attend the memorial service to read a poem they had chosen and to recite the names of all the murdered children, while their parents lit a candle for them.
This was an important symbol of “light out of the darkness”. And 25 years down the line, Dunblane is healing, but still remembering.
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I will certainly never forget the most heartbreaking and poignant image of all, when Pam showed me her daughter Joanna’s tiny handprints on her living room window.
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They were left there on that dreadful day just before she went to school for the very last time.
- Return To Dunblane airs on ITV tomorrow at 9pm.
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