On 1 November 1967 British soldier Robert Mone, absent without leave from his army unit and after drinking for days,[1] entered a girls' needlework class at St John's High School wearing his uniform and armed with a shotgun.
[11] Teacher Nanette Hanson engaged Mone in conversation and he asked for Marion Young to be brought to the school.
In May 1967 she married Guy Hanson in Bradford, and the couple moved to Dundee, where Nanette had got a job teaching at St John's School.
"[8] She attempted to talk down Robert Mone during a siege before being fatally wounded by him, and is credited with saving the lives of the twelve girls in her class.
[15] In 1971 the Albert Medal was replaced by the George Cross, although Hanson's post-nominal letters remain AM as the change was only made to GC for living recipients choosing that option.
Her citation reads: Mrs. Hanson was taking a needlework class of twelve girls at St. John's School when a soldier, armed with a shot gun, entered the classroom, ordered her and the girls to barricade the doors, and then herded them into a small fitting room which adjoined.
During the period that followed the man fired several blasts from the shot gun at the classroom door, on the other side of which the headmaster and members of the staff had gathered.
Mrs. Hanson persuaded those outside to leave her to handle the situation; this despite the fact that the soldier had already once attempted to shoot her at point blank range and would have done so had the gun not misfired.
The nurse had meanwhile been brought to the school, and quite voluntarily entered the room in an attempt to pacify the man and secure the release of the girls.
This was eventually accomplished through the joint efforts of Mrs. Hanson and the nurse who were then left alone in the room with the man trying to persuade him to give himself up.
How did you know I wouldn’t blow your head off?”[citation needed] [10] At one point, when Mone momentarily put the shotgun down, Young picked it up.
In 1983, 3+1⁄2 years into his life sentence, Robert C. Mone was stabbed to death in Craiginches Prison by a fellow inmate.
On 30 November 1976, Mone broke out of Carstairs with his lover and fellow patient Thomas McCulloch, who had shot and wounded two employees at a restaurant in a dispute about getting too little butter for his roll.
[20] They killed another patient, Ian Simpson, and a nursing officer, Neil McLellan,[7] then climbed a barbed wire fence.
[23] Four Scottish police vehicles were joined by reinforcements from Cumbria Constabulary, and they forced the fugitives onto a slip road of the M6 motorway where they crashed.