At the sound of the first shots, Eileen Harrild, a PE teacher at Dunblane Primary School, turned toward the door. She was surrounded by a group of excited five-year-olds in white T-shirts and shorts, about to start the first class of the day.

Instead, she saw Thomas Hamilton walk into the gym with a gun in his hand.

‘He did not pause or speak, he just continued walking straight towards me, looking at me. He pointed his gun at me and shot me,’ she was to recall.

‘The first shot hit me on my right forearm. There was a terrible noise of continual firing. He started to spray shots everywhere.’

Wounded in the arm, hand and chest, she staggered towards the gym store cupboard while trying to usher children to safety.

As she did so, Hamilton, who was wearing a woolly hat and ear defenders, turned and fired repeatedly at Year 1’s class teacher, Gwen Mayor.

A bullet pierced her right eye, killing her instantly. She had been standing near to – and perhaps shielding – pupil Emma Crozier, who was also shot dead.

Children were screaming as the room filled with gunfire. Mrs Harrild stumbled towards the storeroom, clutching her bloody arms across her chest. She had lost her glasses. A small group of children followed. They had also been shot but, incredibly, were still able to move.

Teaching assistant Mary Blake, wounded in both legs, somehow struggled to her feet and also began to shepherd the children in front of her to the storeroom. Others ran around hysterically, while classmates were already lying on the bloodied gym floor.

Amy Hutchison, a little girl who had been arguing with her mother over which boots to wear that frosty morning, remembered skipping in plimsolls when her legs turned to jelly and she fell to the floor, having been shot multiple times. She somehow dragged herself to the gym cupboard.

Classmate Coll Austin was shot in the foot but still managed to follow Mrs Harrild and Mrs Blake. Limping and struggling towards the storeroom door, he was shot again, this time in the back, then fell face first on to the gym floor.

It is 30 years since the massacre on March 13, 1996, at Dunblane, a quiet town in central Scotland. But what happened that Wednesday morning remains deeply shocking.

In a few horrifying minutes, 43-year-old Hamilton killed 16 children and a teacher, and wounded 15 others before turning the gun on himself. It remains Britain’s worst mass shooting.

The massacre of children not only devastated the lives of their families but changed Britain itself by igniting a fierce political and public debate about gun laws.

During his killing spree, Hamilton fired 105 bullets from guns that were legally held, despite a history of complaints to police about his odd behaviour.

The Snowdrop Campaign, set up in the wake of the murders, gathered more than 700,000 signatures and later ushered in an almost total ban on privately held handguns.

Memories of what took place in Dunblane are still vivid. As a writer and documentary producer, I have covered the story over many years – speaking to witnesses, those who lost loved ones, politicians, police officers and people who knew the killer – and digging deep into the national archives for witness statements that crucially help to construct a complete picture of what happened.

Headteacher Ron Taylor was in his office when he heard a ‘burst of three or four bangs’ in the distance. He assumed it must be construction work that he hadn’t been informed about. He looked out of the window and into the playground but couldn’t see anything. The noise seemed to be getting louder.

As he stood up to investigate, his deputy pushed open the door. She was crouched down with a look of terror on her face, her eyes wide open. ‘Somebody’s in the school with a gun. Get down.’

At around the same time the previous morning, Mr Taylor had been going through the school mail in his small office.

One of the envelopes he opened contained a photocopy of a letter from Hamilton to ‘Her Majesty the Queen’, complaining that he had been badly treated by the Scout Association in Scotland (which had dropped him as an aspiring Scout master years before). He said this had done ‘untold damage’ to his reputation and asked the Queen to intervene.

Mr Taylor had met Hamilton a couple of times and considered him a troublesome crank. He showed the letter briefly to a colleague, then set it aside.

Hamilton certainly was an oddity, an increasingly scruffy loner who had been running after-school clubs and summer camps for boys in several nearby Scottish towns for many years.

‘Mr Hamilton’, as he was known to the children, cut a stern and forbidding figure, quick to bark orders or slap them for minor misdemeanours.

Boys at the club practised football or did gymnastics. Hamilton told people he was a qualified gymnastics instructor and his boys were expected to undertake ‘strenuous’ exercise – usually wearing just skimpy black trunks he supplied.

Parents had been complaining about him sporadically to police since the 1970s – about the lack of safety equipment on his sailing trips and summer camps, the terrible food, his poor organisation, and his unsettling habit of taking hundreds of photographs of the boys in his care.

Rumours about his unhealthy interest in boys swirled – but as no boy ever complained of Hamilton touching him, he was able to stay on the right side of the law.

Indeed, when George Robertson, a Dunblane resident and Labour MP, tried to shut down one of Hamilton’s clubs, Dunblane Rovers, in 1983, he was countered by a petition signed by 70 parents, which ended: ‘We are proud to have Mr Hamilton in charge of our boys.’ Hamilton fought every complaint, but slowly, his life began to unravel.

In the months leading up to the shooting, he lost his means of income when a trading standards ruling stopped him buying and selling camera equipment.

He took solace in practising at a shooting range. He already possessed an impressive arsenal as he had been fascinated with guns since he was a teenager. He began buying bullets in large quantities: 1,700 rounds of 9mm and 500 rounds of .357 ammunition.

The day before the shooting – and just hours after Mr Taylor had opened the copy of his odd letter to the Queen – Hamilton had made his way to a car-hire centre in Stirling and asked to hire a van for a single day.

His manner was memorable. ‘He unnerved me quite a bit… the way he spoke, mainly,’ the receptionist said later.

‘He spoke very slowly, very clearly, precisely, but with no emotion or expression. There was just nothing, nothing in there.

You couldn’t have held a conversation with him.’

Hamilton then paid a visit to his mother at her home, where he had a cup of tea and a hot bath.

On the morning of March 13, he was up early. A neighbour saw him scraping ice from the windscreen of his hired white van. He then went back into his flat, where the telephone directory sat on a glass-topped coffee table, open at the page containing the telephone number and address of Dunblane Primary School.

His spare gun magazines and more than 700 rounds of ammunition were packed into two canvas camera bags.

He pulled on four leather holsters and secured his guns: Two 9mm Browning semi-automatic pistols, one with an extra-long barrel, and two .357 Smith & Wesson Magnum revolvers, only marginally less powerful than the .44 Magnum used by Clint Eastwood in the 1971 film Dirty Harry.

The drive to the school took 20 minutes. The traffic had begun to ease after the morning rush.

He got out of the van, walked to a wooden telephone pole and cut the wires at its base. Then he walked up the driveway towards the school.

By the time Mary Blake made it to the storeroom, Mrs Harrild and three children were already inside. Two children lay badly wounded outside.

Mrs Harrild and Mrs Blake tried to hush the children by putting their fingers over their lips. A little boy kept repeating, ‘What a bad man… what a bad man… what a bad man.’ Amy Hutchison began to cry for her mother.

Outside, they heard the creak of footsteps. There was a period of deadly silence, followed by the punch of rapid gunshots.

Mrs Blake could feel blood running down her neck and an agonising pain in her legs. Through a gap in the door, she could see children outside in the gym hall, ‘screaming and wailing’.

This went on for around three minutes, but to Mrs Harrild, Mrs Blake and the children in the cupboard it felt like a lifetime.

‘It seemed to last forever,’ Mrs Harrild later recalled.

‘We just lay there on the floor, helpless, just waiting for him to come round the corner and finish us off… I wasn’t feeling any pain. It was as if I was anaesthetised.’

The air in the gym was thick with smoke and the acrid smell of cordite. Bullet casings littered the floor.

There were splintered bullet holes in the wooden floor and white flecks of plaster breaking off the walls.

Hamilton pushed open the fire doors and started shooting at one of the huts used by Year 7 pupils.

He then stepped back inside the gym and walked back across the varnished floor to where Coll Austin was lying in a pool of blood.

The boy could see the gunman’s boots as he approached. Aware that he was still alive, Hamilton shot him once more in the back. Incredibly, Coll would survive and recover.

A few seconds later, Hamilton turned his fire on himself.

From its leather holster he pulled out his .357 Smith & Wesson Magnum, a weapon he had owned for almost 20 years, put the black barrel in his mouth and pulled the trigger.

The bullet passed through his skull, bounced off the stone wall behind and fell clinking to the wooden floor.

When Mr Taylor reached the gym door, he could hear children crying. What he saw as he burst through the door was almost impossible to comprehend. He recalled: ‘It was a scene of unimaginable carnage, one’s worst nightmare.’

At his feet lay the body of Gwen Mayor and, lying partially across her, was Emma Crozier, a little girl he recognised. Both were obviously dead.

Looking along the full length of the gym hall, Mr Taylor saw a group of injured children close to the storeroom entrance. In the centre, close to the climbing ropes, a silent group of children lay on a gym mat, huddled together. They all appeared to be dead.

In a state of shock, Mr Taylor shouted for staff to call for ambulances. He was briefly unaware of the arrival of John Currie, the school janitor, who walked towards where Hamilton lay with his right hand still twitching.

Mr Taylor shouted to Mr Currie that the gunman was still alive. He could also see a handgun on the floor and, afraid the killer might reach for it, shouted to Mr Currie to kick the gun away.

Mr Currie also spotted that Hamilton still had the Smith & Wesson Magnum in his left hand, so he reached down and prised it from his grip. He threw it across the gym, where it bounced and landed near the fire exit.

As he was throwing the handgun, a voice behind them shouted for him to leave the gun.

It was an off-duty police officer who had dropped his child at the school’s nursery only minutes before. He had been standing with his son when a teacher ran past and said there had been a shooting, and set off running through the corridors.

The officer told Mr Taylor to put pressure on the gunshot wounds and to find some rags or clothes or anything else to hand.

The headteacher ran to the shower room opposite the assembly hall stage and grabbed as many green paper towels as he could.

Noticing that two young girls in the group in the centre of the gym were still breathing, he pushed the paper towels against the bullet wound in one girl’s back, but he saw that she also had serious bullet wounds to her chest. She died in his arms.

He then went to the left side of the gym, where three young boys and a girl were lying. One boy’s arms were moving, but he had a bullet wound to his head. Mr Taylor could see no way to help. All he could do was say sorry and move on.

Next, he went to a young boy who was lying on his back with his hand holding his wounded shoulder, whimpering quietly. He passed him some paper towels and told the child to hold them tight against his wounds.

When Mr Taylor next stood up to look around, he noticed the storeroom, where he found Mary Blake, Eileen Harrild and the children. He gave them paper towels and assured them that help was on its way.

It was then that the first two uniformed police officers from the local station in Dunblane entered the school and ran down the corridors towards the gym.

A call from one of them to a senior officer was recorded. When asked how many were dead, he replied ‘Eh, several, over a dozen – it’s Tommy Hamilton. He’s a f****n’ nutter.’

Meanwhile, panic was spreading in the nearby streets as news of the shooting leaked out.

Anxious parents began gathering at the school gate, among them Judy Murray, then a part-time tennis coach. She had been helping in her mother’s toy shop that morning when a colleague told her the radio was reporting a shooting at Dunblane Primary School.

Her two sons, Jamie, ten, and Andy, eight – both future Wimbledon champions – were pupils at the school. As well as being tennis mad, the boys were football fans and, for a time, had attended the boys’ club at Dunblane High School run by Thomas Hamilton. On occasion, Judy would give Hamilton a lift to the station.

It would be much later in the day before the identity of the killer was confirmed but it was already common knowledge on the streets of Dunblane. Judy pulled the car over on the way home – as the boys knew Hamilton, she didn’t want them to hear it from anyone else.

After she broke the news, Jamie remained quiet. He would never speak of it again. Andy wanted to know why Hamilton hadn’t just killed himself. Later, he would think about how a man capable of mass murder had been in the family car, sitting next to his mum.

No one will ever know exactly how or why Hamilton began planning his attack on the school. He spoke to no one about it and left no note.

At the inquiry into the shooting, Professor David Cooke, a forensic psychologist at Glasgow Caledonian University, probably came nearest to an explanation.

Having reviewed all the evidence, he said he believed the shooting had been planned for months and was directed at the community as an act of revenge. ‘One of the most powerful ways of getting back at people is to kill their children,’ he added.

The families, in their grief, were determined that something positive would come from their loss – that never again should anyone be able to carry out a mass murder using lawfully held weapons.

They would have a long and fierce fight on their hands against Britain’s powerful gun lobby.

They also insisted the authorities take a long look at Hamilton’s troubled history. Could he – should he – have been stopped?

• Adapted from One Morning In March by Stephen McGinty (Swift Press, £22), to be published March 12. © Stephen McGinty 2026. To order a copy for £18 (offer valid to 15/03/26; UK P&P free on orders over £25) go to www.mailshop.co.uk/books or call 020 3176 2937.