Twenty years ago, I stood outside Dunblane primary school among families waiting to hear whether their children were alive or dead. It was March 13, 1996, and barely two hours earlier Thomas Hamilton had stormed into the building, shooting dead 16 children and a teacher before turning one of his four guns on himself.
The legacy of that day has hung over the town ever since. For many years, Dunblane closed in on itself, dreading the anniversaries as they came and went, the media inquiries, the inevitable calls for a comment whenever there was another school killing somewhere across the world.
I have been part of that intrusion in years gone by, walking apologetically down its high street, encountering the barely concealed resentment of a town that wanted nothing more than to get back to normal. Last week was different. Something has happened over the past decade, something that seems little short of a re-awakening — a town looking forward rather than back, rediscovering its spirit and prepared to celebrate it.
Take this as an example: last January, the Dunblane Centre, where mothers take their young, or go for aerobics classes, invited children to audition for its summer production of Peter Pan. So great was the rush that it had to close its books after taking 170 applications in 24 hours. “They’ll all get a part,” promised Pamela Mackie, the drama teacher. “But we may have to make the stage a bit bigger.”
Nothing remarkable, you might say, about a small town with big ambitions. Except in years gone by the idea of community drama would have seemed unthinkable. Dunblane is a dormitory town for commuters who work in Stirling or Glasgow. This is a town of which it was once said that it had “a population of more than 8,000 but no real community”. Even the Dunblane Centre, , built for £2 million after donations poured in from across the world, was labelled a “financial disaster” because so few people chose to visit.
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Not any more. Its shows sell out as soon as tickets reach the market. It has staged full-scale musicals such as Oliver!,Annie,The Wizard of Oz,The King and I,Into the Woods,The Full Monty,The Addams Family and the full range of pantomimes. Ms Mackie brings in actor friends to help out, all of them delighted to offer their services free. They now do four shows a year — all oversubscribed. This year they are staging a production of Grease, to which most of Dunblane’s teenagers seem to have signed up.
“What we have found is that there is a strong sense of community here which had perhaps not been tapped into before,” says Gemma Connell, the centre’s manager. Whether that has something to do with a long, drawn-out reaction to those events 20 years ago, she does not know. “But what I am really aware of is the way that different groups here support each other — mothers, kids, older people — I’ve never seen that to such an extent anywhere else.”
There is another factor that has to be acknowledged. On one wall of the centre is a huge mural of Andy Murray, the local boy turned international tennis hero. His success has given Dunblane a powerful image to celebrate. “There was a time when if you told people you were from Dunblane, they immediately talked about the massacre,” Ms Connell says. “Now they talk about Andy Murray.”
Dougal Thornton, a retired landscape architect who designed the memorial garden in the town’s cemetery, says a letter box painted gold to mark Murray’s Olympic gold medal, has become a popular tourist attraction as well as a symbol of the new sense of community. “There is not a lot of local employment in Dunblane itself, and though it’s a nice enough place to live, young people moved away to go to college and couldn’t come back to live because it’s a challenge to afford the price of a house here,” he says.
He cannot explain how or why things began to change. “I think that subconsciously we felt that the time had come to work together.”
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Mr Thornton sits on the town’s development trust, set up in 2003 to work on simple things such as improving flower displays, painting shops, installing Christmas lights. It has 400 paid-up members and a large number of volunteers, a level of civic involvement that would not have been seen ten years ago.
Dunblane, of course, will never turn its back entirely on its past. A magazine celebrating the 10th anniversary of the Dunblane Centre was co-edited by Pam Ross, whose daughter Joanna was a victim of the massacre, and Mick North, who lost his daughter, Sophie. Writing in the magazine, Mrs Ross tried to explain how her grief had turned into pride, and even fulfilment. “It wasn’t an easy change of heart,” she wrote, “but over time . . . I began to realise that something good could be created; something that all my other children, and eventually grandchildren, could benefit from, and that would be a permanent, useful and living tribute to my daughter Joanna, all her classmates, and her teacher Gwen Mayor.”