Dunblane: Our Story - a compelling, dignified remembrance of a terrible day

Tennis champion Andy Murray grew up in Dunblane, and every time I come across that fact in interviews or profiles, I don’t think of tennis matches or youthful sporting ambition in a small Scottish town, because the word Dunblane will forever conjure images of something very different.

Twenty years ago, on March 13th, Thomas Hamilton walked into a primary school in the small town, near Stirling, and in the space of three minutes shot dead 16 senior infants – all aged five – and their teacher. He then turned the gun on himself.

Dunblane: Our Story (BBC Two, Wednesday) marks the anniversary of the tragedy and it features interviews with parents, a survivor, siblings of the children, the daughter of the teacher killed, the school principal and a policeman. Many of those interviewed have never spoken publicly about the event – there is a strong sense that these are naturally quiet, reserved people – but it is brutally clear from the way they tell their stories that the words have been running around their heads for 20 years.

The documentary style is simple and restrained – they sit face to camera in a studio against a plain background while a timeline of events is established through superbly chosen news clips. It happened at 9.30am, and an hour later Dunblane had already become a global news story with TV news crews pitched outside the school gates.

One of the most chilling scenes in this relentless, compelling film is of mothers rushing down the street to the school on hearing on the radio that there had been an “incident”. Mick (the style in the film is first names only) a single father to Sophie since his wife died two years before, remembers, “people were calculating the odds. The school had a roll of 700 so the odds of your own child being harmed seemed quite low.” But Sophie had been killed.

Amy, one of the survivors, remembers: “We were skipping around the gym hall. I don’t remember being shot and then dragging myself to the gym cupboard.”

Isabel, mother of Mhairi who was killed, says: “I don’t think it is possible after Dunblane to have a life that is completely normal”. The childhood milestones of her other daughter Catherine, a baby at the time of the shooting, have been bittersweet, because she has now long outlived her big sister.

The film is good at establishing how far-reaching and long-living the tendrils of shock and grief are.

So much of how the parents were treated in the chaos on the day seems, with hindsight, cruel. The media was kept informed throughout the day, and so the public heard the extent of the killing before the parents who had been brought into a waiting area. When she was finally told, Isabel, a widow whose husband had died just three months before, remembers: “The police officer couldn’t use the word dead or deceased. He used victim. He couldn’t give us the finality of the vocabulary - it [the news] came as relief, because knowing is better than not knowing. I just needed to know where she was and what she was.”

Ron Taylor, head teacher, seen in the news clips as a much younger man thrown in the glare of news cameras for comment, says now: “People couldn’t understand why I felt so guilty and yet I felt enormous guilt, more than just as survivors’ guilt. It was my school. I felt I should have been able to do more and that guilt lives with me today.”

Dunblane: Our Story is a compelling, dignified film that captures what was a most sensational story in a quiet, deeply personal way – a fitting anniversary tribute. Impossible to watch without being affected by the sheer random cruelty of it all.