The Dunblane Tapes: Anna Hall from Leeds' Candour Productions on revisiting families decades on from massacre for Channel 4 documentary

Dunblane felt like “the safest place in the world” when running around as a child, says Anna Hall.

“I was climbing trees and building dens and doing all the stuff that kids used to do in the 70s. I had a very, very happy childhood growing up in Dunblane.”

Two decades later she watched in horror from a newsroom in Yorkshire as the sleepy town in Scotland she knew so well became world news.

On March 13, 1996, a gunman entered Dunblane Primary School, shooting dead 16 children in the Primary 1 age group and their teacher, Gwen Mayor, before killing himself.

Anna, now 57, had attended the school as a pupil herself and had her PE lessons in the gym where the children were murdered.

Her cousin had known some of the victims, so Anna ended up meeting the families to make a film about them called Dunblane: Remembering Our Children, which aired on the first anniversary in 1997. Around 6.6 million people watched it live, “which is almost unheard of now,” she says.

Last summer, she went to meet some of the families again and 29 years on she will release a follow-up documentary, The Dunblane Tapes.

“I've often thought that the film that should be made about the families in Dunblane and what happened, was what happened after the mass shooting,” she says. “The bereaved families, particularly, came together and there was a group of women who set up a campaign called the Snowdrop Campaign. Between the families and this group of just normal, everyday mums” - Ann Pearston, Jacqueline Walsh and Rosemary Hunter – they “decided that there should never be a shooting like this again in this country. So I've been saying to Channel 4 for a while, this is a film I think we should make, which is how these families changed the law.

“We've got one of the tightest pieces of gun control legislation in the world because of what those families did after the Dunblane massacre.”

She didn’t want to just make a film about the upcoming anniversary - it will be 30 years since the tragedy next month - because she thought the more powerful story was of grieving parents fighting to ban handguns. It was a move that, people might be surprised to learn now, initially met with some resistance in Parliament from a portion of mainly Conservative MPs – although proposals set out by Prime Minister John Major’s government did exceed the recommendations of the 1996 Cullen Report following a public inquiry.

However, after the New Labour government came to power, the law, effectively prohibiting the private possession of all calibres of handgun in Scotland, England and Wales except for certain exceptions (such as vets using them for humane animal slaughter), passed with the Firearms (Amendment) (No 2) Act 1997 in June that year.

Anna says: “My children are now in their 20s. They've got no idea what those families did and so I've been thinking for a long time, somebody just needs to record the fact that's what was achieved after Dunblane and that's what those families did in their time of horrific despair at what had happened - they made the country a safer place for all of us.”

Back in 1996, the production company Anna worked with had given the families camcorders and it turned out that John Crozier, who didn’t want to be in the first film, had a trove of home videos from the time of the campaign.

Anna and her crew went up to Scotland to watch them. “I'm co-directing this with a woman called Niamh Kennedy and we had a producer called Will Stone, who was there, and the three of us just sat with John and we laughed - he's a very funny person - we laughed, we cried. We all cried. And then at the end of that meeting, I said to John: ‘What should we do with these tapes?’ And he said: ‘Just take them, Anna’. So I went back to Leeds and went back to Candour with 60 tapes in my boot.”

Anna is founder and chief creative officer of Candour Productions, a female-led and multi-award winning independent production company based in a mill on the outskirts of Leeds. In 2023, the company won a BAFTA for Best Factual Series with Libby, are you home yet? about the investigation into the disappearance of Hull university student Libby Squire, and in 2024 it won Best Doc Series for The Push, about murder trial in Edinburgh, at the Griersons Awards.

Anna knew that even though the home videos she brought back from Scotland gave her only a “skeleton of a film”, so-called “hidden tapes” interested television commissioners.

And what she found is that Mr Crozier’s own approach to filming was compelling.

She says: “What became very clear as we started to watch this footage is that John was a brilliant interviewer and he would talk to his friend who’s called Les Morton, in particular. Les had lost his daughter, who was called Emily, and John had lost his daughter, who was called Emma. The camera would go on and the conversations would turn to gun control. So we just had the most extraordinary footage with these two guys talking about what they were trying to do, talking about the campaign, talking about the backlash, talking about how difficult it was going to be, talking about how disappointed they were sometimes when bits of votes hadn't gone through, and it's just the most extraordinary record, as filmed through the eyes of one of the dads.”

The views of Anna, who is also executive producer of the film, are clear.

"I think if you don't know what the history is and how hard-won that legislation was, then you don't know why you're fighting to keep it. And so for me, that was a real driving factor, which is: we need to make sure that these gun laws stay as they are in this country.

"I think that's really important, that people know what the sacrifice was that the families made. I think, to be honest, it's one of the biggest, most successful grassroots campaigns in British history.”

The Dunblane Tapes, a Candour Productions film, is on Channel 4 tomorrow at 9pm.