On August 16, 1975, William Morris, a 15-year-old projectionist, loaded up The Golden Voyage of Sinbad, the last film to be shown in Scotland’s oldest purpose-built cinema.

The first multiplexes had begun to open in the towns and cities surrounding Bo’ness, West Lothian, and were drawing filmgoers who had once queued round the block to get into the town’s Hippodrome cinema.

During the next three decades — other than a brief spell as a bingo hall — the Hippodrome lay derelict. Until last night. Mr Morris, now 50, sat in the refurbished cinema as his successor projected Mamma Mia! into a theatre, which was built in 1912.

Residents voted for the hit Meryl Streep film for the reopening — a fitting choice as the Abba track of the same name was in the charts in 1975.

In the intervening years, Mr Morris married, had two children and became a director of a building services consultancy. Two days after he loaded the last film into the projector he began an apprenticeship as an electrical engineer, prompted by his experiences in the tiny projection room high above the Hippodrome stage.

The Hippodrome also radically altered the life of Christine Raeburn, 63. When she was 13 she had a part-time job selling ice cream during the intermission. On leaving the job, she was introduced to the new assistant projectionist, known to all as Willie Hippodrome. They courted for two weeks before she discovered his surname was Raeburn.

The pair were married for 40 years until his death in 2003, and had two children. “If it wasn’t for the Hippodrome, I don’t know what my life would be like,” she said. “My daughter Gillian said yesterday, ‘I’m so glad you met my dad at the Hippodrome because otherwise we would not be here.’ It just shaped my whole life.”

Funding for the £2 million refurbishment came from bodies including the Heritage Lottery Fund, Falkirk Council, Historic Scotland and the Scottish Arts Council.

The result is a grand theatre that combines some of the traditional seating, signs and fixtures with a new bar, modern chandelier and much more space. Originally, there were 510 seats in the stalls and 215 in the balcony. There are now 178.

Gareth Jones, an architect from the firm Pollock Hammond, which handled the refurbishment, said that when he began the building was “dank, dark and smelly” and suffered from dry rot.

When restorers stripped back the layers of nicotine stains covering the paintwork, they found underneath brilliant reds, greens and golds. Mr Jones said that the number of seats had been reduced to allow for more space and to fit in the bar. “Because it was built in 1912, they took quite a lot of fliers with what a cinema would be like,” he said. “A lot of things were wrong. There were no toilets and no recognition of the dangers of film.”

The cinema was built by Louis Dickson and Matthew Steele. Mr Dickson was an electrical engineer with a passion for films and had already been showing films in a the local hall while Mr Steele was a Glasgow-trained architect from Bo’ness. They rented the land from the town council for £32 10s a year and fashioned much of the Hippodrome from the rubble of homes that had previously stood there and from wood taken from the ship breaking industry, which Bo’ness was once renowned for.

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