At the age of 25, Hamilton owned a 40 foot motor cruiser. How he came to own this boat is unclear, but it would appear that he purchased it for the paltry sum of £5,000. A strong rumour persists that it was ‘gifted’ to Hamilton by a friend in Central Scotland Police. On three or four occasions, Campbell helped Hamilton to varnish the boat. And according to Campbell, within three years of Hamilton owning the boat, the boat was destroyed as a result of a gas cylinder exploding on board (was Hamilton rehearsing for this with his gas canister explosions on Loch Lomond?) Hamilton received an insurance payment of £36,000 after negotiations with the insurance company.
Again, unless you can tell us how these claims are sourced and backed-up, it's difficult to make a judgement about them. I would say that without proper referencing and sourcing, the book you are quoting from is quasi-fiction and next-to worthless. Anybody can say this, that and the other, but as Lord Cullen himself rightly says in his Report when disregarding a particularly lurid claim about Hamilton, each claim must be examined and must stack up or be dismissed.
Overall, my personal opinion based on what I have read about the case is very different from yours. I think Thomas Hamilton was the victim of community malignation that got out of hand and, in possession of lethal weapons, he ultimately snapped and committed a terrible and unforgivable atrocity. I think the 100-year closure order was instituted to protect the community of Dunblane itself from criticism, divisiveness and bad feeling, as there will be some within that town who know that they goaded Hamilton and acted maliciously towards him and thus bear an element of blame for what happened, and may face vitriol and confrontation from others in the community, if their names became widely-known. This, of course, can never excuse Thomas Hamilton, but it is what it is.
I think over the course of Hamilton's life, from the first problems he had in the Scout movement, what we might call a negative feedback loop developed in which adverse impressions and judgements about him were progressively reinforced by flaws in his own character, which included touches of narcissism and arrogance, and perhaps (though we do not know this for certain) a homosexual interest in juveniles. Hamilton tried to carve out his own vision of youth leadership away from the Scouts as a boys' and youth organiser of independent local clubs, but he was a strange bird with idiosyncratic instruction methods that upset a lot of Dunblane parents. Some middle-class parents took the matter further and started making official complaints about him. Some of these complaints will have reflected over-sensitivity on the part of the parents and a tendency found among educated people to second-guess others and perhaps make much ado about matters of little importance in the grand scheme of things; but, some of it will have had some basis and Hamilton should have been looked into more closely and maybe offered constructive guidance and monitoring in an effort to put him on the right track. Other parents, perhaps less couth and sophisticated, spread rumours and allegations about him, at least some of which will have contained a basis of truth, but much of it will have been malicious and based on exaggerations and untruths, and even fabrications of incidents.
The bottom line is that none of the serious allegations made against Thomas Hamilton prior to the shootings had any solid basis. That, I'm afraid, is the plain fact of it. You can cut-and-paste as many blogs and books as you like, it doesn't change the position. Furthermore, many parents and youngsters in the community supported him. This explains why he still held a firearms certificate and ran a boys' club on that terrible day, 13th. March 1996.
