People often refer to the Ibrox Disaster, but in reality there were three separate fatal events at the ground over the years, and the one which most people refer to was the last of them. The first was the collapse of a stand at a Scotland-England game, a stand constructed so that they keep up with the size of Celtic Park, and which the media had written was safe for such a high profile game in spite of never before that being more than half full.
The second was on the infamous Stairway 13 itself, which club officials knew full well was a potential death trap.
And the third, of course, killed 66 people.
The media pushed a lot of varying narratives on that disaster over the years, but they went out of their way not to cover either the fatal accident inquiry or the private prosecution which the wife of one of those who died brought against the club.
There was a good reason for that; they might have had to ask some very hard questions.
Witnesses at the first hearing testified that the area had long been deadly; some described games where fans leaving could get all the way down those stairs “without their feet touching the ground”. Several previous incidents – including the deaths of two fans in 1961 – had not resulted in wholescale changes as the club continued to gamble with the safety of fans.
And yet the Fatal Accident Inquiry was not terribly tough on the club.
On the back of two major reports into crowd safety in the years before the Ibrox Disaster, 23 separate recommendations were made to protect fans. The Ibrox board didn’t particularly bother with any of them, and the results are a matter of historical record.
At Margret Dougan’s private prosecution, for which she was awarded more than £26,000 in damages, the judge wrote a scathing verdict, slamming the club and its board in an astounding 27-page summary judgement and even accused people inside Ibrox of lying under oath.
Others had – as amazing as this will sound – tried to pass the blame to a director who had since died.
“Certain of their actions can only be interpreted as a deliberate and apparently successful attempt to deceive others that they were doing something when in fact they were doing nothing,” he wrote of the board’s efforts to evade the safety recommendations.
The only publication in the country which covered the matter properly was a fanzine – I am sure that will amaze you as it did me. In an article entitled Falling Masonry (and yes, the dark pun was intended as you’ll see) the fan publication Foul covered the verdict in exhaustive, and eye-popping detail. Accusing the original Fatal Accident Inquiry of instigating a “masonic cover-up” to protect the Ibrox directors, many of whom were in “the Brotherhood.”
How accurate was that suggestion? Well, The Daily Record relegated the public prosecution to page five of their paper. The Scotsman put it on page eight. And the BBC sent a reporter up from London because they simply didn’t trust the Scottish office to “ask the right questions.”
The more things change …
