John Pritchard was an ambulance technician when he was called to Dunblane Primary School on March 13, 1996, where Thomas Hamilton killed 16 children and a teacher
An ambulance crew member has recounted how Dunblane Primary School felt “eerily calm” whilst emergency responders appeared “almost shellshocked” whilst dealing with the consequences of the 1996 massacre.
John Pritchard was working as an ambulance technician in Crieff when he received a call about a shooting incident at a primary school on 13th March that year. He was amongst the emergency personnel dispatched to the location after Thomas Hamilton murdered 16 children and a teacher before taking his own life.
Mr Pritchard and his partner had scant details as they made their way to the scene and hadn’t grasped the true severity of what had occurred until reaching Dunblane and witnessing the sheer volume of police presence and the looks etched on their faces.
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Recalling the journey 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 the village of 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 partner entered the school and were led into a room to collect a youngster, who was amongst the final pupils requiring transfer to hospital.
Mr Pritchard, formerly an RAF medic, 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 and managing with really good handovers.
“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.”
Following the transfer of the child to Stirling, they subsequently transported one of the wounded youngsters from there to the former Royal Hospital for Sick Children at Yorkhill in Glasgow.
The Crieff-based father of two went on to become an air ambulance paramedic and currently serves as area service manager for the south air ambulance division.
Now 57, he described the Dunblane shooting as the most harrowing incident he has attended throughout his entire career. He revealed that around this anniversary he takes a moment to contemplate what unfolded and stressed the importance of society remembering and drawing lessons from history.
Mr Pritchard, who has never previously discussed the incident with journalists, explained: “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.”
