A Strange and Disturbing Incident

Towards the end of June, 1994 and shortly after mid-day, a somewhat strange looking man came into the school carrying what seemed to be a fire extinguisher. No one paid him much attention and those who noticed him at all seem to have decided that he had come to service the school’s equipment.  What happened then could not possibly have been imagined or anticipated by anyone.

What the man was carrying was not a fire extinguisher, though that is exactly what it looked like, but a home-made flame-throwing device, and he took it into the main school hall, where a group of Upper VI students were coming towards the end of an A level examination.  He then proceeded to use this home-made weapon, firing at least two bursts of flame towards the young people sitting in the desks closest to the doors through which he had entered.

From what I was told afterwards, I gather that the students in the hall looked up, saw what had happened, initially did not believe what they had seen and then fled, using the nearest available exits. And one of them had the presence of mind, when she got out of the hall, to break the glass on the school’s fire alarm system, setting it off immediately and, though she did not know it, distracting and disturbing the attacker sufficiently to cause him to run off and out of the school altogether.

A kind of organised chaos followed. The students in the hall made their way outside by whatever means they could. Those who were in classes going on in the school followed the evacuation procedure in an orderly way, gathering with their teachers on the all-weather hockey pitch at the bottom of the drive. Ambulances, fire engines and tenders and police vehicles of many kinds appeared and a helicopter eventually arrived too. Journalists, radio and television crews, parents and grand-parents and interested passers-by gathered at the school gates, all of them wondering what could possible be going on. Very few, if any, of them had even the remotest understanding of what had happened.

Eventually, the ambulances took the three most seriously injured students, all Upper VI boys, to hospital, while other members of the ambulance staff gave first aid to those whose injuries were much more minor, and very slowly and gradually a kind of order began to return. The fire which the attacker had started was put out, the pupils who had gathered at the bottom of the drive returned to their classes, cleaners arrived to clear up the mess and the police began their pursuit of the man who had made the attack.

This man was eventually caught, charged, brought to trial, found guilty of attempted murder and sentenced to life imprisonment, and it was made clear that, because he was found to have an unalterable personality disorder, he would never be released. As it happens, he died in prison a few years after his trial, a victim of stomach cancer.  Why he decided to do what he did on that day will never be known, but the indications are that he harboured all kinds of resentments against the school from his days as a pupil 30 years before and that these resentments came to the surface on that June day and he decided to seek some kind of revenge.

The three badly-injured boys all made very good physical recoveries, thanks very much to the excellent care and attention they were given by the staff of the Royal Victoria Hospital in Belfast, and they were able before long to resume their careers. Whether they were able to recover as quickly from the shock of their experience is impossible to say with any certainty, but evidence suggests that, with the support of family and friends, they were able to get back to a normal kind of life before long. And the school gradually returned to a kind of normality too. The end of the summer term came, pupils and staff departed for holiday and on return in late August, all the Upper VI students who had witnessed the attack had moved on to the next stage in their lives and we had 140 new pupils in Year 8 who knew little or nothing about the incident the previous June.

While it was a deeply shocking experience for the students taking their examinations in the school hall and also for those supervising them, what happened on that day in June profoundly shocked the whole school community, including the Upper VI students who were not in school that day because they had no examinations and who were, perhaps somewhat surprisingly, more seriously affected by what had happened than many of those who were.

Our sense of security was briefly but totally shattered. Our assumptions about the predictability of our world were swept momentarily and disturbingly away.

But, while it may be remembered as a bizarre, unpredictable and shocking incident which deeply disturbed the school as a whole and had a much more profound effect on the young people who were attacked and, in three cases, badly injured, it is also important to emphasise that schools such as ours are resilient institutions because they are inhabited by very resilient people.

I believe that what happened on that June day nearly 15 years ago deserves a place in the annals of the school because it was by any standards a very remarkable event, but I also believe that what really deserves to be remembered (and celebrated too) is not that a very disturbed man attacked students with a home-made flame-thrower, but that so very many people in the school responded to this totally unexpected challenge so magnificently and in such thoughtful and considerate ways.

Faced with something we could never have imagined or predicted and for which we had certainly not been  prepared, very many of us, pupils as well as members of staff, found the resources, imagination and good sense to do the right things. And that helped enormously. We were very severely tested, but we passed the test and became very much stronger as a result. That is, to me, what really deserves to be remembered.