When a teddy bear's picnic took a tragic turn - a look back at the Express & Star in the 1990s

It should have been a day to treasure. The sun was shining, and the nursery school garden reverberated to the sound of boisterous chatter as a group of three and four-year-olds enjoyed a teddy bear’s picnic to mark the end of term.

At about three o’clock, a couple of mothers were chatting at the school gate, waiting to pick up their children from the party. Then in the corner of her eye, a young nursery-school assistant noticed a slightly built man in his 30s running alongside the fence around the school.

“I didn’t think anything of it at first,” recalls Lisa Webb, or Lisa Potts as she was then. “Then I could see he was coming quite fast towards the nursery. I could see this man had a knife in his hand, at first I didn’t think that knife was real, but then all of a sudden he hit both of those parents across the head.”

The laughter of the children at St Luke CE nursery school turned to tears on the afternoon of July 8, 1996. Paranoid schizophrenic Horrett Campbell ran amok with a machete, inflicting horrible injuries on three-year-old Ahmed Malik and Rhena Chopra and Francesca Quintyne, both four. Lisa suffered life-changing injuries as she shielded the children from the heavy blows, and three mothers were also hurt. Pictures of the scattered teddy bears and an abandoned pushchair became a poignant symbol of just how fragile life could be.

The attack lasted just eight minutes, but changed the lives of all involved. For the tiny youngsters who cowered under Lisa’s skirt for safety, their childhood innocence was shattered in a matter of moments. For the parents, there would be a nervousness each time they dropped their children off at school. The blows from Campbell’s machete left Lisa with severe injuries to her left arm, which still affect her to this day. And when she returned to her job at St Luke’s the following January, she suffered flashbacks and nightmares, which made it impossible for her to continue work there.

The attack came less than four months after the Dunblane massacre, which saw 16 children and one teacher killed when Thomas Hamilton opened fire on a primary school gym class. It later emerged that Campbell’s actions had been influenced by those of Hamilton and Australian serial killer Martyn Bryant, who shot 35 people in Tasmania.

Recalling the day in question, Lisa says it had been a particularly joyous time until Campbell arrived. 

“It had been a happy day, the sun had been shining, and we had two picnics, one for the younger children in the morning, and one for the older nursery children in the afternoon,” she says.

She felt no pain when Campbell struck his first blow across her left arm.