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Double tragedy of Dunblane massacre

Cambridge Evening News editor Murray Morse was the news editor on Scottish newspaper the Daily Record when the Dunblane tragedy unfolded. He recalls covering the terrible event.


“Dead. Dead. Alive. Condition unknown. Unknown. Wounded. Dead. Critical. Dead? Yeah, dead. That’s Sophie North. She’s dead too. Oh my God, look at her little face. Can you believe that someone could do that to her . . . to any of them?” My voice tailed off and I didn’t bother to listen to the reply from my colleague at the other end of the line.

It was the most difficult telephone conversation of my life and still haunts me 10 years on.

It’s a conversation that will live with me until the day I die.

The date was March 13, 1996 – a day that has gone down in British history as the bloodiest and cruellest event ever to happen inside a classroom. It was the day of the Dunblane massacre.

In the space of a few minutes, demented gunman Thomas Hamilton had marched into the school and sprayed a gymnasium with bullets, shooting indiscriminately at a group of five-year-olds who were about to do PE.

I was the news editor of Scotland’s biggest-selling national newspaper, the Daily Record, based in the paper’s offices in Glasgow.

On the other end of the phone was my opposite number at Canary Wharf in London, the news editor of the Daily Mirror.

We sat with the same photograph in front of us, comparing notes on identities and whether the children were alive, wounded or dead.

It was a typical class photo, the sort that parents are given every year by their excited toddlers as a keepsake of when they were in infant school . . . the sort of photo that we’ve all sent to grannies and granddads, to aunties and uncles.

It shows four lines of smiling children. A mix, no doubt, of little angels and mischievous rascals. Children with their lives ahead of them – adventures, successes, tears, laughter, fun and, importantly, hope.

With them, stood proud and tall, their teacher.

It has become an iconic picture of tragedy. It’s a picture that has been burnt in my mind for a decade.

I looked at their faces. A total of 28 children in all. I could not believe that half of them were gone. Their teacher was gone. All hope was gone. Their lives snuffed out in a hail of gunfire from a maniac who’d been able to store powerful semi-automatic guns and stockpile enough rounds to wipe out a small army.

It was early in the morning even though my newsdesk team and I had already been at work for a couple of hours. Many people were still travelling to work. The M8 was jammed at Kingston Bridge in Glasgow. It was always jammed.

In schools up and down the land children were just settling down to their first lessons of the day.

In Dunblane Primary School a group of children were excitedly getting ready for gym class. For all of them it was to be their first class of the day. For half of them it was to be their last class . . . ever.

Seconds later the gym was filled with loud bangs. Children fell to the floor. Others screamed in terror and fled towards their two teachers. Both women desperately tried to shield the children behind them. Bullets ripped into them. Cordite filled the air.

In moments, 16 children lay dead or dying. Beside them was the body of their teacher, Gwen Mayor, also dead. Gunned down where she stood. In another corner fellow teacher Eileen Harrild lay bleeding. She’d been hit by four bullets and was to survive. She’d inevitably saved the lives of some of her little pupils who’d hidden behind her. And then Thomas Hamilton turned a gun on himself.

Within three minutes I was to become the first journalist in the country to learn of the sickening news.

I took a phone call from a radio ham I employed on a retainer of less than £30 a month to tune into the airwaves.

“Murray!” he barked, his voice trembling. “I think something terrible has happened in a place called Dunblane. It’s a school. They are talking about a child being dead. They’re talking about gunshots being heard and explosions.”

He put the phone to his radio. I listened as someone, presumably a police officer, said: “There are at least one, erm, no, two, no three. There are at least three bodies and we’ve had reports of gunfire lasting nine or 10 seconds. We need ambulances. I’m going into the gymnasium.”

I can only imagine the scene of utter carnage that befell the man who seconds earlier had been speaking on the radio.

I shouted down the phone to my contact: “Where are they? Where the hell is Dunblane?” He didn’t know. Before the day was out, the whole world would know.

I told him to stay tuned to his radio and stay on the telephone. He was to be on there for hours, relaying events as they unfolded. Within 15 minutes the death toll climbed. First to five, then eight, then 13.

It was the most surreal news conference of my career. You could have heard a pin drop as I told my editor and the other senior executives around the table what I knew. People that had nothing to do with the conference were gathered outside, listening at the door.

“Erm.” My throat was dry. I didn’t quite know what to say or even how to get the words out. “Er, I have to tell you that 13 children have been shot in a school in a place called Dunblane.” A sea of faces looked back at me in silent disbelief.

By the time the conference had finished and I got back to my desk, the death toll had risen again. Among them was the gunman who had wreaked havoc that spring morning.

We had already scrambled every reporter we had available. We had booked every room in the Dunblane Hydro Hotel for them to stay for the next week.

The picture desk had gone into overdrive. The picture editor tried to hire a helicopter to fly over the school. When that failed, he tried to hire a fixed-wing aircraft. When that failed he offered to buy the plane if the pilot would fly a photographer over the school.

Within an hour we had tracked down a little photographic shop in Stirling. Here worked a photographer who annually took all pictures for the local schools. He’d recently taken the class photos at Dunblane Primary.

“Tell him we want to buy the photograph,” said the picture editor to one of his photographers inside the shop. “Tell him ten grand. Right, okay then, tell him we’ll buy every picture in the shop. Right, okay, tell him we’ll buy his business. Now, right now. We’ll buy the shop and every picture in it – we can always sell it back to him when we’ve found the picture.”

It was a surreal conversation.

Almost as surreal as the one I was to have later in the day as I stared at the picture of the Dunblane schoolchildren.

The photo of the class line-up had been released to the media pack by the police. The job now was to identify every child and whether or not they were alive or dead, whether they were wounded or had escaped unscathed. It was the conversation at the start of this story. The rest is history.

That night, after more than 18 hours at work, I went home to my wife and I looked in at our 18-month old girl. She lay sleeping.

“I just hope some good comes out of all this mess,” I said to my wife, who a few days later took me to Dunblane to lay flowers outside the school. Piles of flowers stretched along the road outside the school for as far as you could see. You could hear the rustling of the cellophane wrappers. It was a sort of therapy for me. A sort of closure on an event that was to scar me more than all the terrible events I’d covered in Belfast, the bombings and the shootings just two years before.

And we were promised that something would be done. We were promised a national firearms register would be introduced to try to stop people like Thomas Hamilton getting their hands on guns and ammunition.

Ten years on we’re still waiting.

And we’ve let them down. We’ve let every one of those 16 poor mites at Dunblane down.

The government, the politicians, the Cullen Inquiry, the Snowdrop Campaign, the education authorities, the media and me, we’re all culpable, because there is still no firearms register.

The Home Off
ice says its £5.4 million database has technical problems.

Handguns campaigner Lord Marlesford says the delays are “preposterous”.

I look at that picture and I think back to that telephone conversation I had on March 13, 1996.

And 10 years on, I think the lack of action on guns is worse than preposterous. It’s a bloody disgrace.