Dunblane : "Quiet dignity and respect" as town remembers 30 years on

Reverend Colin Renwick, who moved to Dunblane Cathedral 12 years ago, said the 16 children and their teacher who died “will never be forgotten”.

Dunblane Cathedral will be open until 8pm on Friday, the day of the anniversary of the school shooting, to allow for “quiet and respectful remembering”.

Other churches in the area will also be open.

Candles will also be placed in the windows of some homes as a “quiet way to remember and pay their respects,” the minister said.

The atrocity in the Stirlingshire town, where 16 children and their teacher Gwen Mayor were killed, shocked the nation and led to the UK enforcing some of the strictest firearms legislation in the world.

The Church of Scotland released some remarks from Rev Renwick, as well as a special prayer he will read at Dunblane Cathedral on Sunday.

Rev Renwick said: “For those people whose lives were shattered by the tragic events in Dunblane on March 13 1996, remembering is not confined to particular anniversaries. There are still those who, every day, think of a child they lost.

“Each birthday, each Christmas, the marriage of a sibling or contemporary, and many other events, still bring times of poignant remembering and wishing things had been different.”

He continued: “The 16 children of Dunblane who died that day, and the teacher who died trying to protect them, will never be forgotten.

“Nor will people forget the determination and persistence of those who campaigned so hard to ensure that the gun laws in the United Kingdom were changed, making this country a safer place.

“Thirty years on, the people of Dunblane will, as they have always done, remember with quiet dignity and respect.

“It is important that people are given the space, opportunity and peace to remember and grieve in ways that are appropriate to them.”

Dunblane Cathedral contains a stone memorial to the victims of the tragedy.

Rev Renwick’s prayer includes a reference to the snowdrop campaign, which achieved a ban on UK private handgun ownership in the wake of the tragedy.

One part of the prayer reads: “As the fragile snowdrop breaks through the cold winter earth, and somehow endures the elements that buffet it.

“We give thanks for the resilience of many, and for the determination, arising out of tragedy, that this country should be a safer place than it used to be.”

As the anniversary is marked, recollections of the darkest day - and its impact on those forced closed to the atrocity - have been shared.

An ambulance crew member has recalled how Dunblane Primary School was “eerily calm” and emergency workers seemed “almost shellshocked” as they dealt with the aftermath of the 1996 shooting.

John Pritchard was an ambulance technician in Crieff when he was called to a report of a shooting in a primary school on March 13 that year.

He was among the emergency workers sent to the scene.

Mr Pritchard and he and his colleague had little information as they drove to the scene and did not realise the full gravity of the situation until they arrived in the small town and saw the expressions on the faces of gathered policemen.

Remembering the drive there, Mr Pritchard said: “We thought ‘has it been an air rifle, has it been something small?’ We didn’t think anything more than that.

“In those days we had VHF radio, so we didn’t really get any update en-route to it, whereas now we would normally get more intelligence.

“I think the first thing we really knew is when we came off the A9 at the junction and then turned into Dunblane, we started to see police then on checkpoints as we were coming in.

“Really you could see in their faces, you know, being beckoned through quite quickly.

“Then it started to drop that something more serious was going on.”

Mr Pritchard and his Scottish Ambulance Service colleague went into the school and were taken into a room to collect a child, who was one of the last youngsters who needed to be transferred to hospital.

Mr Pritchard, who was previously a medic in the RAF, told the Press Association: “I was dealing with the child along with a medical team and we then transferred that child through to Stirling Royal.

“It was quite eerily calm when we went into the room we were pulled into, eerily calm.

“There were medical colleagues, the GPs, there were other ambulance staff there that were all working away very quietly.

“You could see in everybody’s face how shocked they were, I think it was almost what I would call shellshock, almost, at the incident that had happened.

“I’d come out of the RAF and even in my time in the military I had never seen anything like this before.”

After taking the child to Stirling, they then transferred one of the injured children from there to the former Royal Hospital for Sick Children at Yorkhill in Glasgow.

The father of two, who lives in Crieff, went on to become an air ambulance paramedic and is now area service manager for the south air ambulance division.

Now aged 57, Mr Pritchard said at this time of year he takes time to reflect on what happened and said it is important for people to remember and learn from the past.

Mr Pritchard, who has not spoken to the media about the incident before, said: “Each time it comes to this time of year I always have a little bit of time to myself, where I go for a walk, and I just think about the age those children would be now, how those families have been affected, how their friends have been affected, how the children that survived have been affected.

“And also what good has come out of this? The gun laws in the UK have changed, but now we’ve gone on to knife crime, all these things open up your mind to how society is with these type of incidents.

“This is the 30th year. I think it’s good to be able to remember, and it’s also good to remind people of how this tragedy happened and how do we stop that from happening again.

“It disappears into the past but, actually, we don’t know if something like this could happen again.

“We see it with these schools in America, we’ve seen it across the world where incidents still sporadically pop up.

“If we don’t learn from our past, then we can’t go on, it just could easily happen again.”