Hungerford: One Man's Massacre

by Jeremy Josephs

  'I was walking into town to pick up a radiator hose,' the soldier would later recall, 'when I heard gunshots. I thought someone was just messing around. Then suddenly I saw this guy standing in front of me, dressed in US-style combat gear and headband, looking like Rambo. He had a pistol in his hand and an automatic weapon slung over his shoulder. I dived through a hedge and stayed low for one or two minutes. But as I scrambled out I heard rapid gunfire.'

  The gunfire heard by Harries was directed at Sandra Hill, who was driving into Hungerford on her day off from work.

  'I saw this car, engine running, radio blaring, still moving slowly along the road. There was a bullet hole in the windscreen and a young woman slumped at the wheel. She tried to speak, but her mouth and throat were full of blood. I tried desperately to clear her mouth, but it was useless -1 knew she was dying.'

  His hands still covered in blood, Harries was then alerted to the fact that a man had been shot through the neck in a Ford Sierra. It was Ian Playle, the clerk to the Justices at Newbury Magistrates Courts, seeking a way into Hungerford.

  'I tried mouth-to-mouth and chest compresses and he started breathing again. His pulse came back, but then the blood started pumping out of his neck. Then I heard a noise from a house across the road. I looked through the letter-box and saw a man cowering behind the door. He had been shot in the knee. He told me that he was OK, but that there had been another shooting next door. I ran over and found that the lock had been blown off the door and the glass partition kicked in. Mrs Gibbs, who lived there, must have heard the crunch of glass under my feet and called for help. There was blood everywhere. She was screaming by her husband's side. I could tell he was already dead: his eyes were fixed in a death stare.'

  While the courageous soldier was in search of victims to see what assistance he might be able to render, his father, Peter Harries, was looking for his son, having heard that he had been trailing the gunman. 'I was frantic,' Peter Harries would later admit. 'I thought, Christ, he could be killed. I have to come to terms with that - he's a soldier. But abroad, yes; in your home town in Berkshire, no. When I eventually caught up with him he was crying. I just broke up too.'

  Lance-Corporal Harries would later receive the Queen's Commendation for Brave Conduct. For a little over ninety minutes he had cradled the dying and heard their last words. He comforted the wounded and covered up those for whom there could be no help. Or, as the Queen's citation would put it: 'Without consideration for his own safety Lance-Corporal Harries continued to render first aid to the injured and dying both in the street and in their houses and to organise members of the public in this task.'

  The doctors and nurses of the Princess Margaret Hospital had been trained to control their emotions. Not that they were in any sense immune to the enormity of the tragedy in which they had become key players. It was just that their training had taught them otherwise. Before long a consultant anaesthetist from the intensive care unit had arrived, an incident room had been set up in the department manned by both poüce and the hospital's administrative staff, and inevitably the coroner's officer had made contact too.

  Among those to visit the injured at the hospital was the Reverend David Salt. Aware that it was his responsibility to comfort the bereaved and to offer support, he had himself been praying for extra strength.

  'I have to say that my visit to the hospital at Swindon was a unique experience,' he explains. 'You would have thought that they had just had a ward party; there were balloons everywhere. They were almost on a high, I would say. It was perhaps because of all the media attention, although I couldn't be sure. Often that can help because it can make you feel that you are not alone. What I do know, though, is there was very much a feeling of thankfulness that they were alive. There was a tremendous camaraderie on that ward. There was no wailing. Even by the poor lady who had lost her husband, Mrs Wainwright. I came with the heavy task of comforting these people, but their calmness and fortitude were quite unexpected.'

  At 4pm the RAF hospital at nearby Wroughton made contact with the Accident and Emergency department of the Princess Margaret, informing staff there that it was in a position to take the next two serious and six minor casualties. It was a generous offer, designed to relieve the pressure building up at the Swindon hospital, and it was gratefully accepted. Betty Tolladay, the elderly lady who had been shot after rebuking Ryan about the noise he had been making, finally found her way there. Of all those injured in the massacre, it was Betty Tolladay who had been the most closely involved in David Salt's congregation at St Lawrence's. One of those seriously injured, she was now to face a series of operations.

  In Hungerford, medical staff from the town's surgery treated the injured who had been brought there, while doctors went out with police in a series of search-and-rescue missions, some of them then accompanying the wounded on their journey to the Princess Margaret Hospital. Meanwhile, in Newbury, news of the incident was reaching the divisional social services offices. Immediately, the Director of Social Services was informed, as were the county's Emergency Planning Officer and the press officer at Shire Hall, Reading. The bureaucratic machinery, used to proceeding at a more leisurely pace, nonetheless swung into action at once, the Housing Department of Newbury District Council soon standing by to accommodate those made homeless as a result of Ryan's razing of part of South View.

  Hazel Haslett, the ambulancewoman who had braved Ryan's hail of bullets to rescue the injured, was herself treated at the Princess Margaret that afternoon, having been showered with glass from her ambulance windscreen and receiving leg and arm injuries. She and Linda Bright, the driver, would later be commended for their bravery, for, putting their own suffering to one side, they would continue to work late into the night.

  While Haslett and Bright ferried the injured to safety, eight surgeons were operating on twelve patients. But although the hospital's assistant general manager, Paul Vandendale, was eventually able to confirm that the progress of the majority of his patients was satisfactory', Myrtle Gibbs, Ian Playle and George Noon all remained in critical condition in intensive care. At the Accident and Emergency department, there was consequently a continuous updating of information, as orthopaedic consultants and registrars liaised with anaesthetists to discuss the progress and prospects of this patient or that.

  Twenty-five miles from Hungerford, in Calne, Wiltshire, the unease in the Fairbrass household had by now reached breaking-point. Michael Ryan's relatives were still desperate to find out if he and his mother had survived the massacre. Then, suddenly, the BBC's mid-evening news bulletin put them in the picture. It was not at all what they had been expecting to hear.

  'All the time my mother was extremely worried,' Ryan's cousin, David Fairbrass, would later recall. 'Because my mother and her sister Dorothy were extremely close. Then, on the Nine O'Clock News, they named Michael as the killer. We were stunned. There was total disbelief. Who could accept such a thing?'

  The Drinkwater family, then holidaying in France, were shortly to be stunned too. Linda and Kevin Drinkwater, together with their two young children, had left for a touring holiday in France on Tuesday 18 August, the day before Michael Ryan was to change the character of the town of Hungerford for all time. Their home in South View, recently purchased from the council, was one of the row of four cottages he set on fire. French police had been informed of the particulars of the Drinkwaters' vehicle so that they could be alerted to the tragedy, but to no avail. Linda Drinkwater explains: 'We didn't know anything about it until we got onto the ferry and we read it in the newspaper. Just at the bottom of one article it said that we were on holiday - something like "they were on holiday in France and are unaware that their house has burnt down". When we eventually did make it back home, all that was left was the video in the living-room.'

  After recovering from the initial shock of losing his home, along with his business van parked outside, Kevin Drinkwater was soon able to put the family's loss in perspective: 'We were in the luckiest place -
as far away from Hungerford as possible. Had we been here, anything could have happened. I could have been going to my wife's funeral. Anything. Somebody was looking over us that week, that's for definite. Because we still have our children. Everything we have lost can be replaced. The dead cannot.'

  Although staff at the Princess Margaret Hospital were acting speedily and professionally, the massacre was not sufficiently severe, according to the hospital's own rules and regulations, to be designated a major incident. The district plan had defined a major incident as one involving twenty or more stretcher cases. Senior hospital nurse Anne Eggleton, in charge of the emergency unit on the day of the tragedy, was well aware that if ever anything constituted a major incident, it was Ryan's slaughter of the innocent in Hungerford. But she also knew that rules were rules, drafted by wise committees whose members had ostensibly considered these things. In any event, Anne Eggleton had other worries on her mind than juggling with statistics. Aware that ambulance personnel had come under fire, she was worried that her own husband might be among the injured: 'My husband Stephen was on duty at Hunger-ford that day and I realized what was going on. I had no contact with him until he came home late at night.'

  Nonetheless the atmosphere within Anne Eggleton's department, although tense, continued to be based on excellent rapport between the staff, and a first-class team spirit pervaded the entire unit. Every now and then, there would be the odd humorous exchange. To the outsider, these might have sounded callous and uncaring. But among the nurses and doctors working at the hospital they served a useful role, providing an outlet for anxiety and tension. It was not until seven o'clock that evening that ambulance control was finally able to report that no more casualties would be sent to the Princess Margaret. The immediate pressure was over. And the Accident and Emergency department had passed its most rigorous test with flying colours.

  Over the next few days there was to be both good news and bad at the Princess Margaret Hospital. Lisa Mildenhall, for example, Ryan's youngest victim, was making a rapid recovery and soon found herself able to celebrate a family birthday in hospital. Mrs Myrtle Gibbs, on the other hand, was never to regain consciousness. Ever since her admission, she had only been able to breathe with the assistance of a life-support machine. One of her four sons, then serving with the RAF in Denmark, was flown to the hospital by helicopter and was with her when she died. Another son was being flown back from overseas when news of his mother's death was broken to him in mid-flight. The neighbours were unanimous in their judgement: Mrs Gibbs would not have wanted to Uve without her husband, who had died courageously trying to save her.

  A few hours after Mrs Gibbs's death, staff at Ian Playle's office in the Magistrates Courts in Newbury broke down and wept on being informed that Ian, who had been transferred to Oxford's John Radcliffe Hospital, had also died. He was Ryan's sixteenth and final fatality. Mr Charles Hoile, the West Berkshire coroner, would later pay tribute to the heroism and courage of the people of Hungerford. What had happened, he would inform the inquest jury, was absolutely unprecedented not just in one remote corner of Berkshire but in the whole of Britain. 'It is a matter,' he would declare 'which has held the whole nation in horrified fascination.'

  And at no time was this horror and fascination more intense than when the news media reported that Ryan had disappeared into the John O'Gaunt School, where he had been a pupil a little over a decade earlier. For a few hours, there had been no more shootings in Hungerford, and an eerie silence had descended over the town. The sound of gunfire had ceased, the smell of cordite had begun to fade. But the gunman, it seemed, now had something to say.

  TWELVE

  'I killed all those people'

  The John O'Gaunt School, Hungerford's uninspiring redbrick comprehensive, offered from its third storey a wide, unrestricted view of the town. It was there that Ryan had chosen to position himself. Fortunately, the school was closed, its pupils away for the long summer holidays. The caretaker, however, was in his bungalow beside the school, with his two children. A phone call from his wife from her place of wprk had warned him of the shootings.

  The next thing I knew,' John Miles would later explain, 'two terrified kids came riding up the road on bicycles shouting, "There's a man with a gun." ' Rushing out to alert some workmen outside the school bungalow, Mr Miles had noticed a man in army fatigues walking up the drive. It was Ryan. 'My kids and I crouched behind the bushes with the workmen. We could see him but he could not see us.'

  Unlike Bert Whatley, who had earlier dialled 999 to inform the police that Ryan was at the school - only to find the telephone exchange overwhelmed with calls - John Miles managed to get through on his third attempt. Since he was himself a former policeman, the Thames Valley Police immediately treated his information extremely seriously. Nonetheless, there remained a number of other reported sightings to be investigated and it would clearly have been reckless of the police to have suddenly abandoned these. Unfortunately, one consequence of this combination of caution and confusion was that some ninety minutes were to elapse before the caretaker would finally see the police arriving at the school.

  The police operation was to be hindered that afternoon by other factors too, notably the presence over Hungerford of a number of press helicopters. Their noise made searching for the gunman all the more difficult and hazardous. Some airborne television crews, desperate for the right footage, even had the nerve to ask the police helicopter to get out of the way. Ryan, however, made no distinction between them, repeatedly firing at police and press helicopters alike. The Thames Valley Police eventually dealt with the airborne press corps by seeking and obtaining a flying restriction from the Civil Aviation Authority. Although normal procedural corners were cut, this curb nonetheless took some time to obtain. Thus it was fortunate for the people of Hungerford that by this stage Ryan was, as radio and television were reporting in their live broadcasts, 'holed up' at the John O'Gaunt School.

  Shortly before 5pm shots were heard from the school's vicinity. Shortly after the hour another shot was heard. This time there could be no doubt: it had unquestionably come from the school. Then, a few minutes later, conclusive evidence of Ryan's presence in the school, for at 5.25pm, he threw his Kalashnikov out of a third-floor window. It was the weapon with which he had killed eight people and fired eighty-four bullets. Seconds later he was seen in a classroom. But what the police did not know at that time was that Ryan was wearing a bullet-resistant waistcoat which would have protected him against all but the most powerful of police weaponry.

  'There had been a bit of an impasse,' Sergeant Brightwell would later recall. 'So the next move was when we heard that single shot. Maybe he was trying to attract attention to himself, I don't know. I ran through the back gardens and went crashing over some fences to get nearer to the officer, PC Anthony Bates, who gave the report. I then saw the rifle on the pavement outside the school; it had come crashing onto the ground. One of my PCs had called out to him to make contact. He said: "You are surrounded by armed police. Do as you are told and no harm will come to you." But we couldn't hear the reply. Still, at least we knew he was there - up on the top floor of the school. Together with the PC, I ran across the pavement to the corner of the building - and then made contact with Michael Ryan, who was in one of the classrooms. I was reporting back to Mr Lambert, my boss, but you really do have to be able to act on your own initiative in such a situation. So it was me who ended up speaking to Michael Ryan. Not because I was brave in any way -just because I happened to get there first. I had plenty of back-up. Afterwards, I had to write up the conversation. I wrote it up as best as I could recall. But it wasn't word-perfect.'

  Brightwell and Ryan's conversation, which was to last almost an hour and a half, began when the gunman finally confirmed that he had heard the police message that he was surrounded. But the exchange hardly seemed to get off to a promising start.

  SERGEANT: What is your first name, Mr Ryan?

  RYAN: It is nothing to do with you. Min
d your own business.

  SERGEANT: That's OK. I just want to talk to you and get you out safely. Do you understand?

  RYAN: Yes, I've nothing against you.

  SERGEANT: What weapons do you have with you?

  RYAN: One 9mm pistol and ammunition.

  SERGEANT: Mr Ryan, this is very important. Do not come to the window holding any weapons. Do you understand?

  RYAN: I understand. I also have a grenade.

  SERGEANT: Do not come to the window with the grenade. Do you understand?

  RYAN: Yes.

  SERGEANT: What type of grenade is it?

  RYAN: Israeli fragmentation type.

  SERGEANT: I want to get you out of the building safely.

  RYAN: Yes.

  SERGEANT: It is important that you do not come to the window with any weapon. Do you understand?

  RYAN: Yes.

  'It was a bit of a relief when I was immediately answered,' Sergeant Brightwell would later reveal. 'He was actually easy to talk to. The whole enormity of what he had done didn't dawn upon me at the time. I had met George Noon on the way down though, and seen Douglas Wainwright slumped over his car - so I knew what he had done all right. I just wanted to keep him talking - to get him out of the building, as you can see from my report. I didn't want him to be shot. That's the training. Although I'm not a proper police negotiator, we do learn how to negotiate with someone in a building as part of our overall tactical training. I was nervous but not shaking. So at this stage I switched my radio off, in order to be able to concentrate more effectively. Another PC with me was in radio contact and reporting back all the time to Mr Lambert.'