The 30th anniversary of the deaths of Sophie and 15 of her Primary One classmates as well as their teacher Gwen Mayor, will be marked on Friday.
A man whose daughter was murdered in the Dunblane massacre has opened up about the day that shocked the nation and changed his life forever 30 years ago as he issues a new anti-gun warning.
Mick North’s daughter Sophie ought to be 35 now, yet he cannot permit himself to picture what she might have become as an adult.
Sophie, just five years old, was amongst the 16 children killed by Thomas Hamilton during the massacre at Dunblane Primary School on 13 March 1996, their teacher Gwen Mayor was also killed. This Friday, the town – alongside the entirety of Scotland – will commemorate three decades since the devastating tragedy.
Mick, now 78 and still an active anti-gun campaigner, said: “Losing and missing Sophie is with me every day. I can’t torture myself any more by trying to imagine what she would have been like and thinking about the life she never had or all the things she didn’t get to do.”
He is normally more comfortable talking about gun control than his own grief and loss but has opened up to the Daily Record in an exclusive interview.
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Mick had already experienced profound loss with the death of wife Barbara from breast cancer in 1993. Sophie was their only child, and they were already close, but the loss of Barbara made each of them central to the life of the other.
Mick has many happy memories amid the sorrow. He and Barbara enjoyed a trip together to the United States with Sophie when she was not yet a year old.
After losing Barbara, Mick returned twice with Sophie to see friends and to enjoy road trips when she was three, and again when she was four, the latter trip exactly a year before her life was cruelly taken.
He also recalls fondly a road-trip they took to Denmark. He said: “I had a few days off with nothing planned. So I just packed us a few things and set off. I think I remembered to book us onto the ferry before we left.”
Travelling alone with a little girl for company was always a pleasure. “She was very mature for her years and sometimes when we chatted in the car it was hard to believe I had a three or four-year-old in the back rather than a little adult.”
The silence that follows says everything about what he lost 30 years ago. Mick was the only parent of the 16 children murdered by Thomas Hamilton with legally-held handguns to lose their only child having already also lost a spouse.
While he can’t allow himself to imagine the future that Sophie never had, talking about her can clearly give him pleasure. Like Mick, wife Barbara was an academic and he was always hands-on as a father. “We both worked and we both took charge of looking after Sophie at different times.”
Mick recalled: “Before Barbara was diagnosed with cancer, our days were pretty normal. She worked at Glasgow University, so would leave home at 7:30am. I worked closer to home at Stirling University, so I would have breakfast with Sophie and take her to nursery for about 8:30am. Barbara liked to get back to collect Sophie by 6pm, and we would all have dinner together.
“Sophie liked all the things you would expect. She liked to watch videos and to have stories read to her, and I enjoyed being involved in that. We learned Barbara had breast cancer and she had a mastectomy when Sophie was just a year old. That was traumatic, but I think Sophie at that age would hardly have noticed any changes.
“But about 18 months later, Barbara had pains in her back for two or three weeks and when she went to the doctor, we were told the cancer had come back and spread. Sophie was older now and would have noticed her mother was absent when she was in hospital, but she would also have been aware that she wasn’t terribly well when she was around.
“I spent a lot of time with Sophie during that spell. I remember when Barbara was in hospital in 1993, I read Sophie the Winnie the Pooh stories in the evenings. Sophie was a great comfort to me through Barbara’s illness and death. When you have a young child to care for, you have to cope.
“She was also such a pleasure to have around and was able to cope very well herself with the loss. She must have got used to Barbara being around less and less towards the end and that must have given her time to adjust.”
The 13th of March 1996 was unusual because it had been so icy overnight that Mick had to scrape the frost from his car, so they set off later than usual for school.
He said: “I remember the paths were treacherous and it’s hard not to think ‘if only she’d slipped and twisted an ankle and not gone to school’. But we got there and I left, expecting to see her as always that evening. I didn’t have a busy morning at work. Sophie liked the children’s entertainers, The Singing Kettle, and I went out at about 11am to buy tickets for their summer show.
“I got back a few minutes after 11am and two colleagues called to say there had been news bulletins that there had been a shooting at Dunblane Primary. The news was spreading round quickly and three of us with children at the school travelled to Dunblane together, arriving at about 11:20am.”
In the initial confusion with hundreds of people milling around, parents were asked to go to a nearby hotel but soon they learned that only Gwen Mayor’s class was affected and the parents of those children were to go to a house next to the school’s entrance.
Mick is a calm and measured person and has taken it upon himself to dispel some of the myths and conspiracy theories that grew up around Dunblane, but he still feels sore at the way bereaved parents were treated by police that day.
“I learned much later that the police went outside at about 1:30pm to brief the media and give reporters the news that 16 children and their teacher had been killed,” he said. “It remains a source of anger that they didn’t see fit to tell us until about two hours later, and that later some families came under pressure to alter the time they had been given the news on their statements.”
Mick’s life obviously changed forever that day, and one of his coping mechanisms was to throw himself into the campaign to ban handguns in the UK, a movement that had succeeded by 1 July 1997.
He has travelled all over, confronting the powerful gun lobbies in countries like the USA and Turkey, and he and his colleagues in the Gun Control Network are never complacent enough to believe thinks can’t change for the worse in the UK.
He said: “The work of the network has probably helped me get out of bed at the worst moments. It’s something I can fight for with Sophie in mind, but always remembering that our campaigning can help other children to live.
“It might seem wrong to continue to live when your only child has been murdered, but you wake up every morning and you have to go on with your life and try to achieve something positive.”
The anniversary comes as the Scottish Police Federation, which represents the vast majority of Scotland’s 16,000+ officers, wants a gun to be carried in all patrol cars to enable officers to respond to relevant threats without having to wait for firearms’ back-up. While the Scottish Government and the force’s senior officers have not made any favourable noises, the federation has formidable lobbying powers, and the ability to attract public sympathy.
Mick said: “I recognise the police do need access to guns in certain, very limited circumstances, but I worry about the consequences should they have them in every patrol car.
“All the evidence from all over the world shows that the more guns there are in circulation, the more they will be misused, and when criminals know the police will be armed, they are more likely to arm themselves.
“It also sends out the wrong signals, giving the impression that guns are the solution to problems when they are not. Normalising the use of guns in the UK, even by the police, is likely only to lead to more fatalities.”
After the initial shock at the horror in the school gym at Dunblane, much of the media focus fell on the fact that Hamilton, who ended the rampage by taking his own life, had caused all the devastation with four legally-held handguns.
It also emerged that he had been allowed to keep his gun licence despite numerous reports being made over a number of years by the police to prosecutors about Hamilton’s bizarre and violent behaviour towards children.
Crown lawyers had ruled it had not been in the public interest to prosecute Hamilton, but a conviction for violence would have resulted in the loss of his licence.
The Snowdrop Campaign, which Mick was an integral part of, soon emerged to lobby for a total ban on handguns over .22 calibre in private ownership in the UK, an aim achieved the following year.
Mick said: “I took early retirement from work and the Gun Control Network probably gave me a focus I needed.”
Campaigning has taken him to the US many times where school shootings are so common that schools have drills to practice how children and teachers should respond in such a crisis, and to many other countries where the laws are looser than in the UK.
Mick said: “There has never been another school shooting in the UK, while they occur too often elsewhere, especially in the US. Gun crime generally has decreased significantly in the UK. In most recent years there have been fewer than 30 gun deaths annually, lower than the number of people murdered with guns every day in America.
“I became a hate figure to some people who said they had to give up their sport because of the handgun ban. I lost my only child because Hamilton was allowed to keep guns for the sake of his sport. I don’t think you can compare the two, but as long as that mindset exists, and the gun lobby raises the issue every few years, we can’t relax.”
