'Ryan shot at me, then at my mother'
(Filed: 07/12/2004)
With violent crime a key political concern, the BBC has returned to Hungerford to make a film about the 1987 massacre. Elizabeth Grice asks why, and talks to survivors
Most of us think of the Hungerford massacre as a panorama of horror, unfolding like a film, in which a crazed gunman in full camouflage went on an afternoon's killing spree in his home town. Sixteen people were murdered by Michael Ryan that hot summer day in 1987. Fifteen were injured. He killed his mother, his neighbours and a policeman, pumping them full of bullets from a Kalashnikov with lunatic ferocity.
Alison Chapman was 16 when she was shot: the bullet is still in her body
Ryan set his house on fire and burned three others. Finally, holed up in the local school and surrounded by police marksmen, he shot himself. The retrospective narrative we know so well gives the whole thing a spurious unity. But for the people of the small Berkshire market town who were caught up in Ryan's terrible progress through Hungerford on August 19, there was no big picture, just a series of disjointed individual atrocities that made no sense.
Alison Chapman, then 16, heard what she thought was the cracking sound of workmen dropping scaffold poles. She was worried about the effect of the noise on her flighty mare, Buckskin, who was grazing nearby, so she and her mother, Linda, drove up towards Hungerford Common to check the horse. In South View, they saw a man in the road, standing beside a wrecked police car with a gun in his hand. Because of his camouflage uniform, they thought he was "something to do with the police".
"He pointed the gun at my side of the car and fired," Alison recalls. "It happened so quickly. A hot, burning sensation went through my leg and after that my body seemed to go into preservation mode. Then he started shooting at my mother. A bullet went through her shoulder. She was covered in glass and her throat was cut. Her face swelled up to twice its normal size. I have never seen anything so horrific. It looked as if she had been sprayed through a sieve with something red."
Ryan, "blank and expressionless", fired 11 bullets from his semi-automatic into their Volvo. The moment he paused to reload, Linda Chapman, with unbelievable presence of mind, reversed down the cul de sac and somehow managed to reach the doctor's surgery in her damaged car. One of Ryan's bullets had travelled through Alison's right thigh and into her lower back, destroying some of her nerves and removing a large piece of flesh. Her Wellington boot had filled with blood. Both women were deeply traumatised. Mrs Chapman, her windpipe constricted by the cut, spent two weeks in intensive care.
Alison Chapman is what the courts would term a reliable witness. There's no melodrama in her account, no bitterness or self pity, even though she has been left partially disabled and had to give up work three years ago. She has nightmares about Ryan. "In my most violent ones, I am being buried alive, chased through a wood, being stabbed or drowned or shut in a burning building. Sometimes I see Michael Ryan's face. When I wake, I am scared to go to sleep again."
The bullet is still in her body because to remove it would have risked paralysis. As a way of accommodating its inflammatory presence, she calls it Billy – "my little friend, my little foe". Immobilised by pain, she is sometimes confined to the house for several days and has to have help with simple tasks such as washing her hair. But she still feels lucky.
"Yes, it causes pain, but mostly I'm mobile. I've got a normal life. Other people went through very much worse. An experience like this makes you grateful for what you've got. We lost a lot of people we knew."
Pc Jim Wood: 'innocent people are still being killed by illegal weapons'
Alison Chapman, 33, now lives in the West Country with her husband, Richard, but many of her relatives are still in Hungerford. She consulted them before agreeing to take part in a BBC documentary about the Hungerford massacre to be shown tonight. None of them had any objections.
Hungerford is said to be in "uproar" about a programme that will inevitably open old wounds, but she thinks local distress has been exaggerated. Reassured that she would not be part of an exercise that tried to apportion blame, she was happy to contribute. "With something as unprecedented as this, you cannot lay blame," she says. "There is no manual on how to deal with something like Hungerford."
In fact, the programme resembles an extended version of a Crimewatch-type reconstruction. The short, stocky Ryan is played by a lean, unshaven actor. His depredations are intercut with the reminiscences of people he wounded or terrified, most of whom have not spoken before and seem happy to do so now.
"This is not a Rambo movie," says Simon Ford, executive producer. "It is a sensitive treatment of an important event. This was an iconic moment in recent British history and it repays looking at it again through the eyes of the victims. Many of them found it cathartic."
Outwardly, it takes a detached and chronological approach to a day of utter chaos, confusion and appalling unreadiness. The BT telephone exchange at Newbury was inadequate for the flood of 999 calls that catalogued Ryan's attacks. The Thames Valley tactical firearms squad were on a training exercise 40 miles away. The police helicopter was in for repair and had to be scrambled out of the workshop, at some risk to the pilot. "It was a very frightening scenario," admits the commanding officer, Charles Pollard, in the film.
Police communications were so woeful that for most of the operation Pollard (who had to travel 40 miles to Hungerford), had no idea where Michael Ryan was. Pollard says he felt "a ball of ice" in his stomach when he saw there were only two telephone lines at Hungerford police station, which was undergoing renovation.
He received nine separate reports of Ryan's whereabouts – but all the sightings conflicted. "You just hadn't any information," he said. "You hadn't a handle on it. I thought we had completely screwed up. I was powerless for most of the afternoon."
But he, too, was bewildered by the blitzkrieg of separate incidents and only the next morning, when the operation could be assessed against all the logistical frustrations and limitations, could he conclude: "Actually, we did OK."
The unhyped account of Ryan's murderous rampage comes from people who have all been scarred by it in some way – policemen, ambulance men, residents – people who at the time had no idea of the scale of destruction or that they were part of something unimaginably big.
Semi-automatic weapons were outlawed in Britain in 1988 as a result of Hungerford but nine years later there was Dunblane, where another loner, Thomas Hamilton, gunned down 16 children and their teacher in the gym of the local primary school. And late last year PC Ian Broadhurst was shot dead at point blank range in Leeds with a semi-automatic pistol believed to have been part of a consignment smuggled into Britain from Croatia.
The programme could have been used to point up lessons about the persistent inadequacy of gun control laws, but it is content to cite the 1988 Firearms Amendment Act as a positive outcome of the massacre. Its main message seems to be one of retrospective outrage: Michael Ryan harboured an arsenal of legal weaponry and look what happened.
Adrian Coggins now and (inset) as a paramedic: 'it's the sort of thing that stays with you for ever'
Simon Ford sees it as a way of countering the gun lobby's argument for a relaxation in the gun laws. "It is important for people to see what the consequences of these weapons were."
PC Jim Wood, whose best mate, PC Roger Brereton, perished in his police car in a blaze of 23 bullets, argues that the 1988 Firearms Amendment Act has "done no bloody good at all". Innocent people are still being killed by powerful illegal weapons. "It's a good time to remind people of that," he says.
Brereton was first on the scene. The police had been alerted by reports that someone was walking around with a gun in South View, a quiet residential cul de sac backing on to Hungerford Common. Nothing unusual about people carrying guns in pheasant country, says Wood. "In Oxford Street, yes, but not in woolly old Berkshire."
When he arrived, another colleague was coming towards him covered in blood and he saw Ryan pumping his friend's car full of bullets. Then Ryan turned and fired at Wood. "My reaction was disbelief and a little bit of terror. I could hear the bullets whizzing past but at the time I was not scared for myself," he says. "It didn't register. You just switch into police mode, work mode. I honestly don't think my ticket came out of the hat that day." Wood had to break the news to Brereton's wife, the worst thing he has ever had to do.
He had no idea of the scale of the disaster, or where he fitted into the puzzle, until the late evening news. The next day, he went into work as usual. "It was my duty – though I hasten to say I didn't do a lot." Eighteen months later, he was being treated for post-traumatic stress syndrome and, when he went back to work, he was on traffic duties. "Not a day goes past when I don't think about what happened. My best buddy was killed. I'm hoping this programme will lay the ghosts to rest."
He believes there is no such thing as being prepared for the unimaginable. "The same could happen again," he says. "West Berkshire is a vast area. The whole killing field was done in 55 minutes."
Adrian Coggins was only 23, a rookie ambulanceman, when Hungerford erupted. The ambulance crew ahead had been shot at but he and his colleague did not receive their message to keep away. The scene was mayhem, he says. He remembers the unusual high-pitched cracking sound of the Kalashnikov and the sight of PC Roger Brereton lying across the front seats of the police car, a radio still spluttering in his hand, the engine running.
He found Ivor Jackson badly wounded, Dorothy Ryan dead and a young girl shot in the legs. "I thought I was gone," says Jackson. "Adrian saved my life."
"It's the sort of thing that stays with you for ever. I wasn't offered any counselling. You just carried on in those days. When I pieced it all together, I couldn't believe it. Nothing happens in Hungerford."
Charles Pollard thinks Britain "grew up" as a result of Hungerford. "The realisation that this could happen in fun-loving England, where we don't have guns and the police aren't armed... it changed policing and it changed society for ever."
The Hungerford Massacre is on BBC1 tonight, at 9pm
This is why alot of the UK population dislike guns immensly and warm to members of IANSA and Rebecca Peters and her lackies.
