Dunblane 30th anniversary

My new baby was five days when the horrors of Dunblane revealed itself. We only lived a few miles away at the time, which made it very close to home. Those poor babies and their families and Mrs Mayor, too, of course.

I will never forget that morning 🌹

Awful.

I was sitting at my Headmistress desk in school when I was told, and my blood ran cold. Such horror.

It changed safety in schools forever.

I was teaching when we heard. We were quietly discussing it at break when a colleague appeared and asked what were we talking about. I will never forget the look on his face when we told him. His children went to the school. He rushed out. Fortunately his children were safe but another colleague lost her 5 year old niece that day. I think about that day and those sweet bairns and their teacher. My daughter was the same age and it could have been any of us.

My eldest is the same age as the victims, and a close friend of mine worked at the school. We had been in Dunblane the week before it happened.

I was at work on the day, and saw the headline on my way home. I bought a paper and read it on the bus, frantic to get home to my children. I know from that journey what it is to have your blood run cold.

I think there must have been many of us that day who couldn't wait to hold our own children in our arms. Our gun laws must never be relaxed.

I had been teaching a couple of years when the tragedy happened. Until that day parents had been able to come into school in a morning and at hometime. It all changed the following day and it's hard to believe how open schools used to be.

I was driving home from a visit as a Local Education Authority Inspector of Schools and had been observing a Year 2 PE lesson.
I still have a vivid memory of the moment I heard the news on my car radio.

I think I read that Andy and Jamie Murray were at that school at the time of the shooting.

We were so upset that our children got upset and we all hugged and cried together.
I remember a young Lorraine Kelly reporting on it.
I imagine the families of those lost children will be thinking now of the futures those children might have had if they hadn’t had any hope of a future cruelly taken away.
Only Aberfan could come close to how shocking this was. I remember both.

I don't think you can begin to compare Aberfan and Dunblane.
One was entirely preventable and cost the lives of 116 children and 28 adults, the other was an horrendous individual who took the life of 16 children and one adult, then killed himself.
Perhaps because I was young when Aberfan happened it has stayed with me forever. Seeing on TV the men digging in the mud with their bare hands, the silence when everything stopped at a whistle because somebody thought they heard something will never leave me. Asking "mum, have they found someone?" and seeing the tears rolling down her cheeks.
Dunblane was truly awful and every child lost was a tragedy as well as their teacher, but that was one deranged individual and thank goodness the tightened laws and safety rules for schools have ensured there's never been a repeat.
It isn't just 'big anniversaries' for the families concerned, every day is a day without their loved ones, it must hurt so much.

I watched this with such sadness I cannot even imagine how the parents got through this tragedy.

I will never forget Dunblane. I was teaching a class of a similar age to the victims, and my thoughts were with all the families who had tragically lost their dear children.

One of my DCs was the same school year as the victims so I felt a special empathy for the unimaginable shock and sadness the families must have felt.

A work colleague, who also had a child of a similar age, was so upset when she came into work that she was constantly in tears and had to go home and take a week off.