- 2 years ago
Lockerbie tragedy: 35 years on
It was Britain's worst ever terror atrocity - the 21st of December, 1988, when the Lockerbie disaster claimed the lives of 270 people.
Pan Am Flight 103 between London and New York was destroyed by a bomb while it was flying above the tiny Scottish town
It was Britain's worst ever terror atrocity - the 21st of December, 1988, when the Lockerbie disaster claimed the lives of 270 people.
Pan Am Flight 103 between London and New York was destroyed by a bomb while it was flying above the tiny Scottish town
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00:00 [Music]
00:22 35 years ago on the evening of the 21st of December 1988, Pan Am Flight 103 exploded and crashed into the small borders town of Lockerbie,
00:31 killing 270 people in the worst terrorist attack in the history of the United Kingdom.
00:36 Shortly after 7pm, when the Heath Road to New York bound aircraft was in flight over the town,
00:41 it was destroyed by a terrorist bomb, killing all 243 passengers and 16 crew.
00:47 11 Lockerbie residents were also killed when large sections of the plane crashed into the houses below.
00:53 At one point 21 houses were in flames as firefighters struggled to fight the blaze,
00:59 and for days and weeks afterwards the emergency services worked to recover bodies in the surrounding hills and fields.
01:05 Anyone under 40 will not remember the events of that night and the following days,
01:11 but those who were there will never forget and neither will succeeding generations, as 35 years on the town still honours the dead.
01:18 Lockerbie has rebuilt and come to terms with what happened,
01:21 and in remembering made new connections that have helped it take steps towards healing and ultimately embracing the town motto of 'Forward'.
01:38 I was a serving police officer, newly recruited in 1988 and a resident of Lockerbie here.
01:45 I set off from a parents home, which is near Gretna Green in fact, about 10 miles south of here,
01:50 and it would be around 7, 20 to 7 or thereabouts, and I was going to a Christmas party.
01:58 And as I approached the town, it would be within half a mile of the hotel I was going to on A74,
02:04 when Param 103 crashed in front of me on the road.
02:08 It was startling, it was shocking obviously, and you know, it was out of the dark.
02:16 There was just nothing to suggest there was anything going on in the air at that point.
02:21 I thought it was a crash on the road.
02:23 So I immediately veered off the road.
02:26 Fortunately for me, I was near the exit to the A74 into Lockerbie,
02:32 and I just took that exit.
02:35 There was another one further north, but I changed plan straight away because of the explosion.
02:41 I headed towards where the flames were and the burning houses,
02:46 and it all just unfolded from there.
02:50 It felt like being in some surreal disaster movie.
02:54 I had a bit of a journey in the space of an hour,
02:58 in that for me, I thought it was a truck on the road that had crashed.
03:03 Just from the line of sight I had, it was dark, I couldn't see anything come out of the sky.
03:09 The previous week in probationary training police classes,
03:12 I'd been learning all about haz chemicals and trucks with dangerous loads and things like that.
03:18 So that was at the forefront of my mind.
03:21 I get into the town, I come across a colleague of mine, a police officer,
03:26 one of the two or three who were on duty that night,
03:29 and he said he thought he heard jet engines.
03:32 So we both kind of assumed then it was a small military aircraft,
03:37 and clearly the area in Sherwood Crescent was all on fire, so it must have fallen in there.
03:44 We then, about 20 minutes later, learned that there are pieces of wreckage elsewhere,
03:50 and that didn't make sense.
03:53 It was only within about 40 minutes or 50 minutes or so that we learned, in fact,
03:58 it was a Boeing 747 that had fallen out of the sky, and of course then things started to make sense.
04:03 The abiding memory is feeling helpless,
04:07 that really the best you can do is protect people from secondary harm.
04:14 There were live cables, there were gas pipelines and suchlike,
04:18 that in the dark needed to be located and cordoned off and so on.
04:23 People to be evacuated from Rosebank, it was a scene of complete surreal devastation.
04:30 There was a house ripped open, lots of wreckage, and apparently there were bodies in the area too.
04:39 So it was really just a case of protect that as best you could.
04:44 I think everybody from the outset recognised that potentially this was all a crime scene,
04:50 so the preservation of evidence is something that was paramount right from the outset.
04:56 But in terms of rescue and so on, it was hopeless.
05:02 Once it had happened there was an eerie silence.
05:05 People, I think the cliche is, tried to take stock,
05:11 because at first there was a broad feeling that it might have been an RAF incident,
05:17 because they were doing low flying around here.
05:20 But very quickly word got round that it had been a jumbo jet.
05:25 Particularly in the Sherwood Crescent area there were very serious fires, houses were blazing.
05:33 I walked up from where I lived towards Sherwood Crescent, because there was a councillor.
05:40 I thought it sensible to go and try and see what's happened.
05:45 I met a couple of families that I knew, one of them was a colleague in the school.
05:50 I was absolutely pleased and relieved when I saw them, because their houses were on fire but they had got out.
06:00 But there came a point when the police and the other services wouldn't let me go any further, quite sensibly.
06:08 Because what could I add to emergency services?
06:13 So I contacted my colleague on the council,
06:19 and it was really the following day before we started to get in touch with the council officials and all that kind of thing.
06:29 Trying to pull together what needed to be done.
06:33 In the first instance it was dark of course, and it was really the following day before the extent of the disaster became more obvious.
06:43 I was there pretty much all night from the moment it happened until about 8.30 the following morning when it was first light.
06:51 Reinforcements, fresh staff were bursting in from all over the country to relieve the people who had been there all night.
07:01 It was a night of confusion, improvisation.
07:06 Everyone was having to learn by the minute what was involved and what their role was.
07:13 It took a few days for that to settle into a systematic routine.
07:20 But policing is very good at that.
07:22 It's very good at not knowing what's going to happen in the morning,
07:25 and then having a plan and a system in place for whatever has happened by the evening.
07:30 So that mindset of "this is serious, this is broken, we need a plan" just kicked in.
07:44 For me the first night was very much a mixture of being at different places.
07:50 At one point I was at Lockerbie Academy back in the school.
07:54 I'd just left 18 months to 2 years earlier because I knew the layout of the school.
07:59 I was able to help the school staff unlock doors, put lights on and so on,
08:04 get the place ready for it to be inhabited by all sorts of agencies that would use the school for weeks afterwards.
08:11 I was at Rosebank for a while, as I said, very early on.
08:16 And then the Town Hall was another place that was identified as being a temporary mortuary.
08:22 And it needed to be guarded. And it was there that I experienced the full weight of the seriousness of things.
08:30 We encountered a farmer who came to us with a young child who'd been found in his field.
08:37 The extent of the casualties wasn't known for a couple of days.
08:41 It took quite a wee while.
08:45 But there was never any panic or chaos.
08:51 There was a squaring of shoulders and people thought, "Right, well, what do we need to do?"
08:59 In the first few days, everyone was still settling into different teams.
09:06 There was a 12 to 16 hour day shift and a 12 to 16 hour night shift.
09:10 And I was basically night shift for the entire month of the recovery operation.
09:16 I was the youngest of the young, so I had a very junior role in things.
09:20 My role was very much guarding places, lifting and carrying.
09:25 And early on, the mortuary was a 24/7 operation at the Town Hall and then laterally at the ice rink.
09:34 So passengers needed to be lifted and carried from place to place for various parts of the pathology process to a car.
09:44 And you would mix from doing an hour or two of that to going to where the property was being logged and stored for a while.
09:54 But then after a few days, it then settled into teams who were completely dedicated to one task or the other.
10:01 And my role was more, as I say, I was useful because I knew the area, I knew the roads in the darkness, I knew the place really well.
10:09 So I usually was paired up with officers from outside of the area who knew nothing about where they were going and things.
10:17 And we went from place to place, such as up to the nose cone to guard it for two or three hours.
10:23 Then we move on to some other wreckage and so on until the wreckage was recovered.
10:29 And that took about four weeks.
10:31 Indeed, Cumbria and Northumbria, I think, supplied officers for the searching in particular, especially initially.
10:38 And then later when the search was widened into both areas south of Lockerbie too.
10:45 But yes, all over Scotland, particularly Glasgow and Edinburgh, there was a major transport operation to bus in hundreds of police officers.
10:54 It would take them the best part of an hour just to get here and home again at the end of the shift.
11:00 So there was an operation here to make sure that the place was constantly staffed whilst the day shift was changing to the night shift and vice versa.
11:09 On the following morning after the plane crash, over a thousand police officers reported for duty here, as opposed to the usual two or three.
11:18 So there was a lot of reorganisation had to take place.
11:22 Equipment had to be found quickly.
11:25 It was the winter, so things like wellies and heavy duty coats, because some of the city officers didn't have some of the rural uniform that we here are more used to.
11:36 So it was a massive logistical operation just to make sure the place was properly staffed.
11:42 Each day, over 600 of those police officers were searchers and joined the army and other agencies at the primary school to be briefed and then go off to the sector that they were responsible for all over the area.
11:55 And some of those were miles away into the countryside.
11:58 Everybody did what they could.
12:01 I remember on the night one of my teaching colleagues, he was actually directing traffic.
12:09 It could get down to that level.
12:13 But it quite quickly became obvious that the background to this was above and beyond the local dimension.
12:23 So local people focused on the local dimension.
12:27 They welcomed any number of visitors from the United States.
12:32 They made scones for the soldiers.
12:36 Famously, the women washed the clothes over the succeeding time.
12:42 And I think the concentration here was doing what they could in practical terms rather than getting involved too much in the sort of international or geopolitical dimension, which they were content to leave to people who knew more about it.
13:00 In my story, I was the youngest cop at the time, so that was something significant.
13:05 But yes, there are hundreds.
13:07 I know of a friend who became a father on the 21st of December for the first time.
13:13 So he was at the maternity ward in the morning and by evening and for the days afterwards, it was all death and destruction.
13:22 And every 21st of December, he has this horrible tension between celebrating his daughter's birthday and remembering the horrors that followed on the same day.
13:33 And that's just one story amongst hundreds of police officers.
13:38 They all have a story to tell.
13:40 I shut it away for the best part of 25 years.
13:44 Got to 2012 and my daughter turned 17 and decided kind of out of the blue that she wanted to go to Syracuse University on the scholarship.
13:53 So it kind of, as I say, it was a generational thing. It sort of brought it back and it gave me reason to talk to her about what happened to me when I was her age, more or less.
14:06 And she then went off to Syracuse and she sort of blazed this trail of meeting relatives of the passengers that I had, some of whom I dealt with.
14:17 I didn't know who they were at the time and you tell yourself it's not personal.
14:22 So 25 years later, for my daughter to then introduce me to these relatives and loved ones and so on, you sort of tell yourself, is this going to be difficult to deal with?
14:38 But actually it wasn't. It was really quite fulfilling and useful, cathartic for me to meet them and tell them my story and listen to theirs.
14:49 The difference for me has been that experience of meeting people from the US, from Syracuse University, through the scholarship that my daughter and my son, in fact, have both been on.
15:01 It's made it okay to talk about. And obviously there are still times and there are moments that are really emotional, especially when you hear someone's story afresh.
15:13 And some of those people are still coming forward to tell their story for the first time. It's taken them all this time to absorb and get to a point that they feel this is something they want to do.
15:26 So it can be raw, but that's okay. It's, I think, a positive thing to talk about and engage with for your own health and for other people to hear too.
15:36 You have to handle it the way you handle it. Leave plenty of scope and pay out plenty of rope for people who feel that bottling it up is the way they can deal with it.
15:51 For other people, opening up is the way they can deal with it. And that might change over time. There might be people who have never spoken about it before, who quite suddenly decide to talk about it.
16:02 There might be people who still wish it would just all go away. And you've got to leave room for everybody.
16:10 The effect on police officers in particular, I think, is one that's very discreet, unseen.
16:19 You bury these things away in your psyche and you tell yourself, because it's the conventional wisdom to get on with it, it is your profession, that's what you're paid to do.
16:31 And it's sometimes not until well afterwards that you dwell on, or at least reflect on, what happened there.
16:41 And some of those reflections can be very vivid, even decades later.
16:46 I think a lot of people in the Lockerbie community and over in the US, I know in the Syracuse community too, find it all afresh because they're in the next generation.
16:58 So the students of 1988 are now parents of students 35 years later.
17:04 And it's the same in Lockerbie. People experience the loss of people here in the town too.
17:11 Three children were killed here. The children were 10 and 13 years old.
17:17 So today, that peer group is 45 and 48 years old, with children 10 and 13 years old.
17:26 So it's more fresh in the mind than you might think.
17:31 It's difficult. The town has a very complicated relationship with this.
17:35 Some were deeply traumatised, some were bereaved, and there were 11 people we should never forget.
17:41 I know that there was a teacher who lived in the same street as the children who were killed, who taught them, and had to then deal with the aftermath in a professional capacity as well.
17:54 She had to deal with this as a teacher back at the school, dealing in 1989 with children who had lost their friends, and she had lost a former people that she knew on a daily basis because they went by the door to go home.
18:09 There are so many stories that it's easy to end up feeling that you're on your own with, and I think that's why it's important for people, if they can, to talk, because that sharing helps you realise you're not alone.
18:25 It was my daughter going to Syracuse that brought some understanding and context to the names that are on these walls behind me here.
18:38 They were just etched on the wall and I knew nothing of them, but over the last 10 years I've got to know many of the families. The Pilots' granddaughters come to visit me, the partner of the Chief Purser of Pan Arm 103, Ken Bissett's mum, the Booser family and the Hulsh family there.
19:02 We've met them, they've come to visit us and that's been valuable for them, and it's been valuable for us in the town to meet many of these people.
19:11 The bonds are as strong as ever, and if anything they are widening and getting stronger, and I think that's a good thing.
19:18 For us as a school, the real positive has been the Syracuse scholarship. Since 1990 we've had two students from Lockerbie Academy, from S6, go to Syracuse University where they've studied throughout the year.
19:33 They get a year's scholarship, everything is paid for when they go out there, so there's a real great connection between us and Syracuse University who lost 35 students on the 21st of December 1988.
19:45 So the positives is that legacy, the number of Lockerbie scholars who have gone out there, we're into the 60s now, which is a huge number and that's going to continue for some time.
19:55 The bond that we've got with Syracuse is something that we've had, and I think for families in Syracuse it's always nice for them to have part of Lockerbie out there with them.
20:03 And I think going forward that's something that we hope to always have. The motto of the scholarship is 'Look Back and Act Forward' and that's something that's displayed in the students that go out to Syracuse.
20:13 Lockerbie is 35 years on, lots of changes have happened in the town. It has probably changed, but it's changed for the better. We've got a lot of visitors that come to the town who are respectful.
20:24 We've got a large Syracuse family, so a number of parents who are really keen to have visitors, especially from Syracuse and America, come and stay with them.
20:33 So when you're talking about the number of scholars that have gone to Syracuse, when you think about the parents who are out there, and the majority of those parents will have been part of Lockerbie at the time, and they're really keen to have visitors come and stay with them.
20:45 35 years, I think it's moving into a sort of, it's more history than current affairs now. And to that extent it's a matter of telling people what happened, because there are now a lot of people who don't actually know what happened.
21:07 You have to be 45, I would say, to have any kind of memory of the thing. So there's an element of, and this sounds pompous, but there's an element of education that has come into it, which I think down at the Dreyfield Lodge, we'll be following up to try to inform people as much as help them through their difficulties.
21:36 Which has been the emphasis before, a place to come, a place to think about it, this is where it happened, and it was much closer, I think, to the victims' families, perhaps, than it is now.
21:51 And there are maybe more people coming who need to have it described to them. I just get a feeling that that perspective is growing.
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