Ambulance worker recalls ‘shellshock’ of emergency workers at Dunblane shooting

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 after Thomas Hamilton killed 16 children and a teacher before shooting himself.

Mr Pritchard 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 Dunblane and saw the number of police around and the expressions on their faces.

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 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 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 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.”

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, he said the Dunblane shooting is the worst incident he has been involved in responding to during his career.

He said that 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.”