The sister of one of the victims of the Summerland disaster has broken her 40 year silence on her brother’s tragic death.
Stella Sissons’s brother Bill Aves was just 18 when, along with his friend David Piper, 17, he was killed in the fire that broke out at the Douglas leisure complex.
Mrs Sissons, aged 63, will be visiting the island this week from her home in Enfield, London, to attend a service to mark the 40th anniversary of the tragedy that took place on August 2, 1973.
She said the ‘terrible tragedy tore my family and my marriage apart’.
At the time of the fire, she was married to a Manxman and living in Glen Vine.
Her first baby, Nicholas Corlett, was just two weeks old.
Her younger brother Bill and his friend David were visiting the island as their first holiday without their parents.
And it was Bill’s first chance to meet his nephew.
Mrs Sissons said: ‘On the evening of August 2, at about 8pm, a neighbour popped her head into the cottage I lived in at Glen Vine and said she thought that there had been an IRA bomb that had gone off in Summerland.
‘I had a horrible feeling somehow that my brother would be there with his friend.
‘I immediately left my newborn son Nicholas with my lovely sister-in-law and myself and my husband drove into Douglas.
‘We didn’t know that they were there, but I had a great sense of foreboding.’
She said: ‘I sat all night in their hotel in Onchan waiting for them to come home, but they did not.
‘They were two of the 50 who died that night.
‘They are both buried in the same grave in Marown.
‘It was decided that as they loved the island, that they should be buried there, also I lived there at the time.’
Mrs Sissons has since remarried and moved back to London, but she still comes back to the island.
Her son Nicholas will be getting married in a month’s time.
She said: ‘Ironically, his birth was announced at the back of the paper on August 3 when the news of Summerland was on the front.’
