22nd August 2001

Footballer Bobby Johnstone dies

Bobby Johnstone was born and died in Selkirk, and played football for Selkirk FC – as well as Manchester City, Hibernian, and Scotland. He was the first player to score in two successive FA Cup Finals at Wembley, in 1955 and 1956.

Brian Glanville, writing in The Guardian on 6 September 2001, said “I recall the impressive sight of his precocious skills as a teenager when playing for a postwar British Army side at White Hart Lane, Tottenham, during his national service. This lasted from 1947-49: while initially he was sent to Yeovil, a posting to Edinburgh Castle enabled him to maintain the Hibs connection.”

Famous Five

He was a member of what became known as the ‘famous five’ forward line at Hibernian, which debuted in a 2-0 win against Queen of the South in 1949. That collection of five players came to be “regarded as the finest ever seen in Scottish football, meaning that his standing among supporters lived on long after his 19-year playing career ended in 1965,” wrote The Independent newspaper in April 2014. It continued, “There is no shortage of witnesses to the talent of a man who won two Scottish league championships with Hibernian and scored in two successive FA Cup finals for Manchester City. Johnstone’s era was the 1950s, when the drabness of post-war Britain meant that attendance records at every club were broken, and the diminutive Johnstone was one of the reasons why.”

After retiring from professional football, he set up a fish wholesale business in Lancashire before finally retiring to Selkirk very shortly before his death.