On Saturday morning, I was in attendance at a very special and moving event in Faifley along with more than 150 others.

This event, highlighted in last week’s Post and covered by them on the day, was organised by Faifley Community Council and has been two years in the making (since the Faifley Community Council was reformed in fact).

It was to mark the deaths of three local men who left the Doublet public house on January 2, 1971 to attend a Rangers v Celtic football match and were to perish when staircase 13 collapsed and they died alongside 63 other football fans in a tragedy remembered today as the Ibrox Disaster. More than 200 other fans were injured on that day.

George Adams, 43, Charles Dougan, 31, and John Gardiner, 32, left Faifley on that fateful day and never returned home.

Following the sale and demolition of the Doublet Public House over the last two years, a member of the Hardgate Celtic Supporters Club, John Maxwell, was in discussion with a number of people who had drank in the bar, where the local Rangers Supporters Club bus left from, about how George, John and Charles were remembered and how they could be honoured in some way by the local community.

John was encouraged to speak to Claire Gallagher, chairperson of Faifley Community Council, and the idea was born.

All the members of the community council agreed that something should be done and a plaque was commissioned to remember the tragedy and the affect it had on the families and the community.

Faifley Housing Association, who owns the land opposite the Doublet site, readily gave permission for the plaque to be installed.

Members of the extended families were present on the day, including Mr Dougan’s son who had crossed the Atlantic for a family wedding and was rather fortuitously going to be in the area to visit his mum.

I would like to think it was divine intervention. I spoke to Mrs Dougan after the service about how my father, Danny, was at Ibrox that day as a St John’s Ambulance first aider and had been a boilermaker, the same profession as her husband Charles. A very small world.

My thoughts and prayers with the Adams, Gardiner and Dougan families. #LestWeForget