The Old Firm match on 2 January 1971 had finished 1-1. Colin Stein had equalised for Rangers in the final minute to cancel out a Jimmy Johnstone goal. The 80,000 crowd began to leave. On Stairway 13, the steep exit passageway at the eastern end of the ground, something went wrong. The precise mechanism has been disputed: the most widely accepted account is that a section of the crowd near the bottom of the stair turned back or stumbled, creating a compression wave that those behind had no way of responding to. Crush barriers gave way. People fell.
66 people died on Stairway 13 that afternoon. 200 more were injured. The dead included five teenagers from Markinch in Fife who had come to Glasgow together for the game. The youngest victim was 9 years old.
It Was Not the First Time
What made the 1971 disaster particularly anguishing was that Stairway 13 had already been the site of two previous fatal incidents. In 1961, two people died in a crush on the same stairway. In 1967, another person died and 11 were injured. The stairway was steep, narrow for the volume of people using it, and opened directly onto the street at a point where crowds from different parts of the ground converged. The configuration was known to be problematic.
A fatal accident inquiry was held. It found that the disaster resulted from overcrowding on the stairway but did not establish a single definitive cause. Rangers were censured but not prosecuted. The inquiry’s recommendations on crowd management and ground safety were largely advisory rather than mandatory.
The Rebuilding of Ibrox
The Ibrox disaster accelerated a transformation of the stadium that Rangers had already begun planning. Over the 1970s and early 1980s, Ibrox was rebuilt into what became the model for the modern British football ground. The old terracing was replaced with seated stands. Stairway 13 was rebuilt and eventually closed. The Main Stand, with its distinctive red-brick facade dating from 1929, was retained, but the three other stands were entirely reconstructed to a design by the Husband and Company engineers.
By 1981 Ibrox had been converted from a predominantly terraced Victorian ground to a largely seated modern stadium with a capacity of around 44,000. It was the first major British ground to complete this transformation. The Taylor Report after Hillsborough in 1989, which mandated all-seater stadia across the top two divisions, essentially required other clubs to follow what Ibrox had already done.
Memory and Legacy
The 66 victims are commemorated by a memorial outside Ibrox at the corner of Edmiston Drive, unveiled in 2001. Every year on 2 January, Rangers hold a memorial service. The names of the dead are read out.
The disaster changed football ground safety in Britain, but the change was slow and incomplete. Heysel came in 1985. Bradford came in 1985. Hillsborough came in 1989. Each disaster produced recommendations; the recommendations were not always followed. The history of crowd safety in British football is in part a history of lessons that had to be learned more than once, at terrible cost.
Ibrox today holds 51,082 people in a fully seated configuration. Stairway 13 no longer exists. The ground is regularly cited as one of the finest football stadiums in Britain.
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