Lockerbie - BBC News
The town scarred by Pan Am flight 103
Today Lockerbie is a neat, handsome town which appears to be doing rather well. It stands beside the motorway linking Glasgow and Carlisle, and it is a market town for the surrounding farms. Home to 4,000 residents, it was never a remote, isolated village - but it never expected to be the centre of global terrorism and tragedy. It has changed a lot in three decades, with new factories and housing estates contributing to a slight population increase.

I’m very proud to say that I live in Lockerbie, and that the town reacted the way it did

Where families were wiped out, lives cut short and homes destroyed, there are memorials - but there is also new life. In Sherwood Crescent - the epicentre of the devastation - houses have been rebuilt alongside a modest stone of remembrance. To the west of the town is Dryfesdale Cemetery, where a visitor centre tells the story of Pan Am 103 and the Lockerbie Air Disaster Memorial stands in silent testimony to the 270 dead.

The other lasting memorial is the scholarship which every year gives two students from Lockerbie Academy the chance to study at Syracuse University. The university’s motto is “Look Back, Act Forward”. It could speak for the whole town and all those whose lives were touched by the murders. Marjory McQueen says the scholarship proves that good can come out of terrible tragedy. “I’m very proud to say that I live in Lockerbie, and that the town reacted the way it did,” she says. “I think, in a way, when something like this happens, it’s a terrible tragedy. It’s dreadful. But if you wait long enough, good comes out of it. “And anyone who comes to Lockerbie, I’m very pleased to say that they are met and are shown round. And Lockerbie will never, never forget their relatives, and how they died here.”

Visitors to the town pay tribute to the victims of flight 103

Josephine Donaldson is typical of the people in Lockerbie - proud of the way they came together, but reluctant to take credit for the part she played. Twice a year, she visits the memorial in a small act of remembrance for Nicole and Amy Elizabeth, two young women she never met but still refers to as “my girls”. “I always put the flowers on there for their birthday and the 21 December. I never told anyone, I never signed the card, I just put ‘JD’. “I just felt I had to do it. I had a son, and if that had happened in America and I never got him home, I would have hoped someone would have done the same.”