Horrifying missed possibilities to cease the monster of Dunblane… and a troubling questions: Author STEPHEN McGINTY reveals shooter’s a whole bunch of images of boys of their pants, how he compelled them to sleep in his van and punishment beatings

On the afternoon of July 20, 1988, PC George Gunn of Central Scotland Police, one of the nation’s smallest forces, was ferried on the mailboat across Loch Lomond to the uninhabited island of Inchmoan. 

Children who had recently left a summer camp for boys on the island claimed to have been physically assaulted and slapped. Gunn was sent to investigate.

In his dark blue uniform, he clambered out of the boat and made his way through a thicket of trees to a clearing. Near a cluster of tents, several boys aged around eight or nine were playing unsupervised, most dressed only in swimming trunks despite the chilly weather.

The children’s bare legs were a tapestry of scratches. They explained that ‘Mr Hamilton’ did not permit trousers while at camp: they had got scratched hiking through the thick nettles, bracken and gorse covering the island.

The camp was a dreary mess. A wooden picnic table was littered with dirty dishes and the sleeping bags in all three tents were damp to the touch.

On a sandy beach nearby, he found a portly man with a balding head and square glasses tying up a large wooden rowing boat with an outboard engine. Unlike the children, he was fully dressed, wearing cotton trousers and a filthy work shirt with sweat stains around the armpits. Thomas Hamilton had a large, moon face and a false smile.

He told Gunn he ran a series of boys’ clubs for children aged between seven and 12 in central Scotland, particularly in Stirling, Falkirk and Dunblane. The clubs, which ran in the evenings from Monday to Friday, focused on gymnastics, physical exercise and football.

The highlight was the summer camp, during which groups of boys came to the island for a week at a time.

When questioned about assaulting the boys by slapping them, Hamilton was defiant. He insisted that physical punishment was necessary to maintain discipline among boisterous young boys and that the recipients had been disruptive, cheeky and bullying. This kind of punishment for children was still common in the 1980s.

After a while, Gunn returned to the mailboat. He did not consider the children on the island to be in imminent danger, but he was left with an uneasy, ill-defined concern about Hamilton, who waved him off from the shoreline surrounded by a cluster of half-naked children.

This was Gunn’s first encounter with Hamilton, whose day job was running Woodcraft, a DIY store in Stirling. The last would come eight years later as he surveyed 43-year-old Hamilton’s dead body on the floor of the gym at Dunblane Primary School.

On a Wednesday morning, 30 years ago this month, Hamilton – armed with four handguns and more than 700 rounds of ammunition – walked into the school gym just as a class of five-year-olds was about to start a PE lesson.

Within minutes, firing mercilessly, he had killed 16 children and a teacher and wounded many others in what remains Britain’s worst mass shooting. He then turned the gun on himself.

Gunn, who was off-duty, was one of the first police officers on the scene. His own two children were pupils at the school and he had rushed to the gym as soon as he heard what was happening. It was only after witnessing the blood-soaked horror there that he discovered his children were safe.

Inevitably, in the wake of the shootings, everyone wanted to know – could Hamilton have been stopped? Gunn was far from the only person in authority to feel ‘uneasy’ – and more – about Hamilton over the years. Not only police officers but the local MP tried to shut him down, to no avail.

Hamilton was always clever enough to stay just on the right side of the law and aggressively attacked anyone who crossed him.

His treatment of Gunn is a clear illustration of why he was left unchecked – and able, ultimately, to cause carnage.

Thomas Hamilton was born into a poor and unhappy home in Glasgow in 1952. His mother, Agnes, was just 21 and a few weeks after Thomas’s birth, she discovered her husband was having an affair.

She left him, moved back in with her parents and went out to work at a local hotel. Her parents adopted Thomas, who grew up thinking Agnes was his sister. He only discovered the truth, that she was his mother, in his twenties. No one knows how it affected him.

His fascination with guns began young. Having left school at 15, he joined a community rifle club the following year. He worked as a draughtsman in an architects’ office until, aged 18, he opened Woodcraft. It soon became a magnet for young truants, who hung around the shop. Hamilton enjoyed their company, giving them sweets and comics and showing them his guns.

His first real run-in with authority was in the early 1970s, when he joined a local Scout troop and was promoted to assistant Scout leader. Though he was ‘keen and willing’, Hamilton’s enthusiasm exceeded his organisational abilities and what had initially been regarded as leadership potential was later viewed as a cloak to disguise more sinister intent.

He was reprimanded for having extended ‘playtimes’ with the boys at the expense of the Scout curriculum. When he volunteered to take some boys out on his boat as part of their sailing proficiency badge he was found to lack the correct number of lifejackets and oars and did not have a distress flare in case of emergency. The planned trip was cancelled.

In the winter of 1974, he invited a few favourite boys for a weekend in the wilds of the Cairngorms, an almost three-hour drive north in his Transit van. 

On arrival, the boys were told their hotel accommodation had been double-booked so they would have to sleep in the van. The weather was so cold the engine froze. The boys huddled together for warmth in the back. Hamilton slept on the front bench seat with his sleeping bag and blankets.

He was warned by his superiors that his planning needed to improve, but the same thing happened three weeks later. When a colleague called the number of the hostel Hamilton had supposedly booked, he was told that no reservation had been made.

His bosses began to suspect Hamilton had deliberately sought to spend the night alone with the boys. None had yet made any allegations of inappropriate touching, but it was agreed that Hamilton should be asked to resign.

Hamilton was told that he lacked the necessary qualities to be a Scout leader and was put on an informal blacklist, ensuring that any branch of the organisation he tried to join would reject him.

Yet, from the start, Hamilton showed himself to be clever and devious. He devised his own narrative about this incident by going home and writing a letter – predated by two days – to his boss, claiming he had chosen to resign on a point of principle, rather than having been made to do so.

He would make multiple attempts to return to the Scouts in a leadership role. He requested that the organisation hold an inquiry into his complaint that he had been victimised, a request that was rejected. Over the next three years he bombarded the Scouts with letters of complaint.

But Hamilton was soon to realise he didn’t need the Scouts to get close to the young boys whose company he so enjoyed. He would start his own club, and the boys would come to him.

The exact date and location of his first boys’ club has never been established, but what is known is that by the late 1970s, Hamilton was the sole coach and organiser of the Dunblane Rovers, based in a community centre. Between November 1981 and March 1996, he ran 15 separate boys’ clubs.

He claimed to have a qualification that allowed him to coach gymnastics if supervised. Occasionally, he said he was a former Scoutmaster who now wished to branch out on his own. The clubs were advertised for seven-to 11-year-old boys and cost 20p to 30p a session.

Hamilton explained to parents that he had a desire to ‘keep children off the streets’ and out of mischief. The first club had an army-style uniform, similar to the Scouts: a green jumper with elbow patches, black trousers, black brogues and a khaki belt. 

As many as 24 boys played football, darts and pool, and at the end of the night Hamilton would allow them to try his .77 and .22 air rifles, holding the boys’ arms to show them how to line up the sights with the target.

Some of the boys considered him odd; one described him as ‘very effeminate in his speech and actions, but that was as strange as he got’.

As well as having an interest in guns, Hamilton also fancied himself a photographer and at one point claimed to be setting up a business photographing weddings and events. His main subjects, though, were ‘his’ boys.

He became a regular at a photography shop in Stirling, where, on an early visit, he explained to the store manager that he ran a boys’ club and would be taking numerous photographs.

The owner was unprepared for the sheer volume of film Hamilton bought. He visited every two or three days, each time dropping off six cartridges of 36 photographs.

One day he brought in 30 spools of film for development.

In addition, he began bringing in slides from a professional Hasselblad camera.

Each film was sent to Colour Care in Livingston for development and arrived back in a sealed packet, which was then handed over to the customer without the contents being scrutinised. This was standard practice.

Over time, the manager grew suspicious, and one day in May he looked inside the envelopes. ‘I saw pictures of boys jumping over gymnastic equipment and hanging onto wall bars,’ he said. ‘The boys were all dressed in navy blue or black pants.’

He phoned the lab at Colour Care and spoke to the staff responsible for developing the film, all of whom shared his unease.

His second phone call was to the police. An officer attended the shop the same day and examined the photographs. Technically, they did not break the law, and so the manager was asked to continue to monitor the situation, with the agreement that he would alert the police if the contents became criminally pornographic. 

Yet as the manager explained, ‘All the photographs that I saw, the boys always had shorts or pants on.’

In all the hundreds of rolls of films developed over the summer, not a single frame was of anything other than young boys.

By the time PC Gunn started investigating, Hamilton’s clubs were well-established. Opinions about him were mixed. Some people found him creepy, others were stout defenders. 

When a Dunblane resident, the MP George Robertson, withdrew his son from Dunblane Rovers and tried to raise concerns about Hamilton with the local council, his efforts were countered by a petition signed by 70 parents, who praised Hamilton’s ‘excellent quality of leadership and integrity’ and said he was ‘absolutely devoted to his lads; above all, he cares’.

But Gunn was constructing a different sort of picture of Hamilton’s activities. One of the boys featured in his initial report said he had been made to do exercises and every time he made a mistake he got hit on the bottom with a wooden spoon.

Almost every child who had been at the summer camp spoke of being slapped. They also noted the lack of life jackets and how Hamilton overloaded his boat. 

Once, when a man shouted to them the boat was overloaded, Hamilton told them the man was drunk and that anyway, he had a special licence that meant he could decide the boat’s capacity.

A mother whose son had come home in someone else’s clothes was so concerned she decided to visit the island herself.

Her son said he had been hit on his bare legs for not eating Smash, the powdered mashed potato that was a staple of the island diet, and that on a boat trip, the boys had been told to take their swimming trunks off before they got into the water to save them getting wet.

Hamilton told her they had been supposed to camp on another island, but at the last minute someone had caused the plan to fall through. He said he had been badly let down by fellow club members, but that he was making the best of things for the children’s sake.

This tendency to blame other people and feel hard done by was his standard response to criticism.

Hamilton was also given to retaliation. He later, allegedly, turned up on the same mother’s doorstep, wearing a three-quarter-length anorak with his right hand pushed deep into the pocket. He said he had heard she had been ‘telling tales’ to the police. 

He owned four guns, he said, and was an excellent shot. He said he considered his guns to be his ‘friends’, and that his ‘friends’ didn’t like people talking about him. Thoroughly alarmed, the woman slammed the door in his face.

Gunn’s report was submitted to the Procurator Fiscal, who would decide whether to press charges, in August that year.

Frustratingly, the prosecutor believed there was not enough evidence to proceed. While almost every child had testified either to Hamilton striking themselves or another camper, these assaults were either not corroborated by another witness, as was usually required under Scottish law, or there were discrepancies between the accounts.

One child would state that his friend had been struck, but when questioned the friend would have no recollection of this. The incidents for which there was corroboration were so minor as not to merit criminal prosecution.

So, Hamilton was free to continue associating with children. This was a pattern repeated over and over again, to the chagrin of those who pursued him.

Hamilton’s reaction to Gunn’s investigation is an object lesson in how he managed to fend off the authorities for so many years. Hamilton struck back at what he believed was unfair treatment, triggered by a cabal of police officers and senior officials from the Scouts, who had become an obsession.

The first salvo was a series of letters falsely accusing Gunn of both incompetence and of repeatedly lying in his report about his visit to the summer camp. 

The letters were copied to Gunn’s superior officer, Inspector Michael Mill, whom Hamilton knew and was friendly with; other officers at Central Scotland Police; and to Stirling council and Hamilton’s local MP, the Conservative Michael Forsyth.

Even before the police report had been sent to the Procurator Fiscal, Hamilton turned up at the police station demanding to discuss the matter with Gunn, who at first refused to speak to him and finally threatened arrest if he did not leave. 

On another occasion, Hamilton sat outside the station for three hours, hoping to speak to Gunn.

His letters became more obsessive. Hamilton’s accusations against Gunn (whom he incorrectly accused of being a Scout leader intent on destroying a competing boys’ club) were investigated and dismissed.

At first, he appeared to accept the decision, before almost immediately changing his mind. 

He wrote again to the chief constable, stating that Gunn’s investigation had been triggered because of ‘a long resentment shown to our group by many adult members of the Dunblane Scouts’. 

He believed a ‘brotherhood’ between senior police officers and the Scouts in Dunblane were behind his continual harassment.

Hamilton then made an official complaint against Gunn, forcing Central Scotland Police to follow protocol and appoint an investigator, Inspector James Keenan, to study the allegations. 

As part of the investigation, Inspector Keenan interviewed Thomas Hamilton for almost three hours.

He also spoke to boys who had attended the camp and to their parents, some of whom praised Hamilton’s organisational skills and leadership. Keenan also met Gunn, who argued that Hamilton’s evidence was ‘untrustworthy, vindictive, wholly unreasonable, malicious and obsessive’. 

The officer had seriously considered suing Hamilton for slander, but he knew just how slippery his adversary could be – and he decided it would be a waste of time.

Over the next eight years, multiple police officers would follow in Gunn’s path, investigating allegations of abuse only to be frustrated by false counter-allegations from Hamilton as well as a reluctance from the Procurator Fiscal’s office to press charges. 

None managed to divert Hamilton from the path that led to March 13, 1996, one of the darkest days in modern British history.

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