Billy and Veronica Robertson, pictured on their wedding day and now, are set to celebrate their 50th wedding anniversary. Billy is also pictured at the memorial to those who died, pointing to his late friend s name A PRESTONPANS couple were wed just a week after the groom almost became a victim of the Ibrox football stadium disaster. Billy and Veronica Robertson, of the town’s Gardiner Crescent, will next Saturday (January 9) celebrate their golden wedding anniversary. But their thoughts this week will very much be with the 66 people who lost their lives on January 2, 1971, following a match in Glasgow between Rangers and Celtic.
THEY were just fans at a football match. Spectators at a game, a banal everyday occurrence. They were there to support their team, Rangers, but they never came home. Instead on Stairway 13 at Ibrox Park, they met with crushing death and injury. Even 50 years later the sheer unfairness of it makes you weep – no one should die for being a football spectator, no one should die in such a manner. Remember the 66. For the sake of our common humanity, remember the 66. I told last week of how the disaster unfolded, and now I will deal with the aftermath. It was the sight of the bodies laid out in lines on the turf of Ibrox Park that broke hearts all over Scotland and beyond. Only some grainy newspaper pictures survive to tell the tale, as there was no filming of what happened – a mercy, given what unfolded that cold, foggy evening in Glasgow.