Bob Strachan lost his dad to the infected blood scandal at eight. Now he wants him remembered

Bob Strachan was eight years old when his dad died in 1987. His father was a haemophiliac who contracted HIV through contaminated Factor VIII treatment, one of the victims of what is now known as the infected blood scandal.

“Losing Dad was hard enough, but there was also the stigma surrounding HIV, the fear and a lot of questions nobody seemed able to answer,” Bob says. As a child he did not know what to do with any of it, so he got on with life, carrying far more than he realised.

That life went in several directions. Bob, from Aberdeen, has been a police officer, an RAF officer, a pastor, a counsellor, a musician and a performer. One thing stayed fairly constant through all of them. “I’ve always wanted to help people,” he says.

Being diagnosed with autism and ADHD in his mid-forties explained a great deal. Things he had struggled with for years began to make sense.

Through his counselling work he developed what he calls the Five Vs, a way of helping people understand and work through emotional hurts. In time he realised he needed to use it himself. While he had been helping others with their problems, he had not dealt with all of his own.

One of the biggest moments came when he was finally able to say goodbye to his father, almost forty years after his death. “It’s difficult to explain just how much that meant,” he says.

Now Bob wants to speak and write about what he has lived through, and to shine a light on a scandal that families are still living with. His campaigning and family story have been recognised in the Scottish Parliament. “My dad was a person, not a statistic, and I want people to know his story,” he says.

He joined a programme run by Marco Robinson to help him build a new career in public speaking and writing.

“I can’t bring Dad back, but I can make sure he’s remembered.”

Heroic Breaking News is run by Marco Robinson, founder of the Start Over Movement.