THE
LOST BABES
Manchester United and the
Forgotten Victims of Munich
JEFF CONNOR

To the first Manchester United fan I ever met,

Arthur Clive Connor. And to my mother Nancy,

who had to put up with all three of us.

Table of Contents

Cover Page

Title Page

Dedication

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

INTRODUCTION

1: THE FLOWERS OF MANCHESTER

2: BLOODY KIDS

3: NEAREST AND DEAREST

4: A SMALL FIELD IN GERMANY

5: DUBLIN’S FAIR LIAM

6: DUNCANVILLE

7: WHITE ROSES, RED CARNATIONS

8: THE KNIGHTS’ TALE

9: OUT OF SIGHT, OUT OF MIND

10: FORTY-YEARS ON

11: ERIC THE READIES

12: THE TROUBLE WITH HARRY

EPILOGUE

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Praise

INDEX

Copyright

About the Publisher

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Page 1: The young prince (Popperfoto) Page 2: Roll models (PA/ Empics); Happy days (Popperfoto) Page 3: Well turned out (courtesy of Irene Beevers); Birthday Boy (Solo); Pride of Lions (Manchester Evening News) Page 4: Fear of flying (courtesy of Irene Beevers); Playing his cards right (Solo); The inseparables (courtesy of Irene Beevers) Page 5: Four of the best: Dennis Viollet (courtesy of Irene Beevers), Eddie Colman (Manchester Evening News); Mark Jones (Manchester Evening News); Roger Byrne (courtesy of Irene Beevers) Page 6: Strength in depth (PA/Empics); Happy Valley (S&G/Empics/Alpha); King Alfredo (Popperfoto) Page 7: White rose in bloom (Central Press/Getty Images); Beaten but not disgraced (Empics/Topham); Dublin’s fair Liam (Central Press/Getty Images) Page 8: The 1957 League Champions (TopFoto); The last goodbye (Getty Images); Last line-up (Popperfoto) Page 9: The aftermath (PA/Empics); The bulletin (Manchester Evening News); The stricken (Getty Images) Page 10: On the road to recovery (Manchester Evening News); Survivor (Manchester Evening News); Grounded (Empics/Topham) Page 11: The return (Getty Images); First gong: (Getty Images); They also serve (Manchester Evening News); Born again (Solo) Page 12: Safe hands (Manchester Evening News); Well saved (Popperfoto) Page 13: Memories (Action Images); Only a rose (PA/Empics); Return to Munich (Empics) Page 14: Flowers of Manchester (PA/Empics); Lest we forget (PA/Empics); Germany remembers (Man Utd via Getty Images) Page 15: Forever young (Popperfoto); Without farewell (Empics) Page 16: Roll of honour (both Empics)

INTRODUCTION

Manchester United plc can be remarkably sensitive about the subject of the Munich air disaster and, in particular, certain events—or maybe we should say lack of events—in the years following the club’s blackest day of 6 February 1958. When I first approached the company to ask for access to records and statistics from the Busby Babes’ era the first words of the assistant secretary Ken Ramsden in his office at Old Trafford were: ‘We will simply not cooperate with anything that will damage the good name of the club.’ This before I had even described the content of the proposed book. Mr Ramsden also asked me if I was ‘a fan who is trying to be a writer or a writer who is a fan’. When I told him the latter was the case, I had the overwhelming impression that he, and the Manchester United plc, would have preferred to be dealing with the former, of whom there have been many.

I was also informed that I would have to secure permission from the plc’s chief executive to talk to employees, past and present, including Mr Ramsden’s mother and aunt, who ran the laundry at Old Trafford in the Fifties. But all my e-mails and telephone calls to the then CEO, Peter Kenyon, went unanswered. Someone closely connected with the club also took it upon himself to telephone some potential interviewees in advance to warn them of me, and the subject matter I intended to broach with them. Happily, these pleas fell on deaf, and defiant, ears. It is safe to say, however, that this book was written in spite of Manchester United plc and is unlikely to be found on sale in the Old Trafford Megastore.

Over a period of three years, this book caused much soul-searching about content and motivation. At one stage work on it was halted for over twelve months, mainly because I began to believe that some of the criticisms levelled in these pages—that a number of people had sought to profit from Munich—could justifiably be applied to me. In the end, I chose to agree with a member of one of the Munich families who told me: ‘This is a story that should be told.’

Jeff ConnorEdinburghFebruary 2006

1 THE FLOWERS OF MANCHESTER

First of all, a confession. In what amounts to a small lifetime since 19 February 1958, I have only been to one football match at Old Trafford. What is more, I haven’t lived in Manchester for almost four decades and in that period have been back to the city on maybe five occasions, and never for any length of time. In many red-tinted eyes this will immediately place me in the same dubious category as Zoe Ball, Eamonn Holmes, Angus Deayton, Simon Le Bon and the millions of other surrogate fans worldwide who have chosen to attach themselves to Manchester United, the ‘part-time supporters’ reviled in terrace song and on the multitude of websites devoted to the club.

But there’s worse: when I did return to Old Trafford as an employee’s guest, in October 2002, it was to join Roy Keane’s despised corporate spectator brigade in the club’s Platinum Lounge where we scoffed, not prawn sandwiches, but paupiette of plaice, stuffed with cockles, and washed down with a bottle of Château Guirauton 2000.

The sixty-or-so current and potential sponsors dining there that night included a smattering of semi-famouses headed by Angus ‘Statto’ Loughran and Derek ‘Deggsy’ Hatton and we had been met at the doorway by the Platinum Lounge’s extremely famous, and very canny, host (‘Don’t I know your face?’ asked Paddy Crerand of me). Over coffee, a liveried waiter took my order for ‘your halftime drink, sir’ before someone remembered there was a football match on that night and I retired, in the company of executives from Boots the Chemist, Fuji Films and Ladbrokes the Bookmakers, to my comfy, padded seat in the North Stand to watch Everton dispatched 3-0.

The atmosphere, even when United scored the three goals in quick succession to secure a late victory, was curiously antiseptic, particularly among the support around me. True, clenched fists were occasionally raised selfconsciously, but no one once left their seats, even for a goal. The representatives of Fuji Films seemed more concerned with the number of times play went close to their one million pounds a year revolving trackside advertising hoarding than the quality of the football, and the only evidence of real passion came from a large Liverpudlian accompanying Deggsy, whose language was what you would expect from a large Liverpudlian in the company of Deggsy.

The evening’s entertainment had cost me £5, the price of a ticket to park my car in a vast, fenced-off area of waste ground on John Gilbert Way close by the stadium, and in the rigidly defined terms of the terraces I plainly do not qualify as a ‘supporter’, although the current plc may be happy to learn that I have stayed in a nearby hotel partowned by Manchester United, spent money in the Old Trafford Megastore, eaten three meals in the Red Café and paid two visits, at £5.50 a time, to the club museum. It all depends how you define support.

Before the subscribers to Red Issue, Red News, Totally Red and Red-whatever-else start to compile the threatening letters, let me say that despite those forty years spent elsewhere, if people ask me where I am from I always give the answer ‘Manchester’. If pressed further I may add (and a northerner’s habit of revealing only one item of information at a time has never gone away): ‘North Manchester’ and, perhaps, ‘Harpurhey’. I may also, if I sense a football audience, reveal that Beech Mount nursing home was 100 yards from where Nobby Stiles’s father ran a funeral parlour and close by the birthplace of Brian Kidd. If anyone else (and this is always the next question) demands to know where my football allegiances lie I always insist ‘United’, and if the more erudite look at the evidence of late middle age—grey hair, nascent jowls and alarming waistline—and venture a little further to enquire if I saw the famous Busby Babes in action I can truthfully reply: ‘Yes, several times.’ They are the reason why the colour red and the place-name Munich represent only one thing to me; why I still feel unreasonably happy when Manchester United win and unreasonably churlish when they lose (even though I feel little or no affinity with the current crop of players, or their manager).

This lifelong and incurable affliction is why, much to the discomfiture and embarrassment of other customers, I wept into my Guinness in a Southampton public house when the man with the flop-over hair lifted that graceless silver trophy at Wembley on a sweaty May night in 1968. And why, as extra-time approached in Barcelona in the Champions’ League Final of 1999, I was crouched behind the settee in my Edinburgh flat, out of sight of a taunting television and with a finger in each ear. The Busby Babes are the reason my fealties would have remained unchanged had they won absolutely nothing for the last forty-five years…and why, in all that time, I have only once ventured inside Old Trafford for a football match.

On the night of the Everton game, I had foolishly gone along in the hope of catching sight of shades of long ago, imagining that if I half-closed my eyes I would see Duncan Edwards belligerently pushing out his chest and tucking his jersey into his shorts before the game, Roger Byrne imperiously patrolling the touchline, David Pegg tip-toeing down the wing and Tommy Taylor rising to head another goal. But nothing, save a lone banner high in what had once been the Stretford End which read: ‘Flowers of Manchester, 1958’. In forty-five years United and Old Trafford had moved on to something I could not recognize and my return ended in a confusion of disappointment, frustration, and something close to guilt.

I have been back for other reasons, most notably on 6 February 2003, when I joined around thirty others under the Munich memorial plaque, in the shadow of Old Trafford’s impressive glass façade, to remember the eight players and three officials from the club who had died in Germany at that time, and on that date, forty-five years previously. The plaque, embedded high in a brick wall, is cast in the shape of a football field and lists the lost players: Byrne, Geoff Bent, Eddie Colman, Edwards, Mark Jones, Pegg, Taylor and Liam Whelan, alongside the names of the then club secretary, Walter Crickmer, trainer Tom Curry and coach Bert Whalley, who also perished.

As with so many ceremonial occasions, it was an afternoon replete with symbolism. I had walked down Warwick Road from Old Trafford Metrolink station in the company of a young couple from Singapore, Edmund and Kareen Chan, who were trailing a large suitcase on wheels and had asked for directions to the ground. The Chans proudly informed me that their two five-year-old sons had been christened Ryan and Roy…but they, like so many other United supporters around the world, had studied their history books, knew the story of Munich and understood the justifications for my mission.

At the ground, we wandered around the Megastore, gamely resisting the determined attempts by a lady in a red suit to assign us an MUFC credit card, and then stood in the queue behind a large group of primary school children at a supermarket-style checkout manned by an unsmiling woman with the hard-faced grace of an Albanian customs official: ‘You’re two pence short,’ she snarled at a startled five-year-old girl bearing a tiny fistful of change. In the background, a large man in a shiny black suit, and with the shaven head, gimlet eyes, curly-wurly earpiece and neatly trimmed beard of a nightclub bouncer, kept a twitchy vigil.

Outside, we admired the small collection of wreaths and bouquets on the pavement below the plaque, including a bunch of irises from the Whelan family of Dublin who, via their friend Beryl Townsend in Manchester, commemorate their brother Liam in the same way every year before standing, in the archetypal north-west drizzle, for a minute’s silence at the fateful time of 3.04 pm.

The mourners, for that in essence is what we were, were a curiously eclectic bunch: the Chans, a group of five middle-aged men who had plainly taken time off work to remember the heroes of their youth, and youths for whom the only memories of the Busby Babes must have come from books, word of mouth, or flickering newsreel. The five older men stood in a convivial little circle, like veteran soldiers at a reunion, and I thought of approaching them to ask them their memories of 1958.

But I knew what they would say, for I would have offered the same stolid recollections—the time-frozen analogy with the assassination of Kennedy, ‘the day Manchester stood still’ and the enduring footballing view that ‘Edwards was the greatest player I’ve ever seen’. So I didn’t. Instead, I introduced myself to a lone teenager in a United replica tracksuit shivering on the periphery of the gathering. He had skived an hour from the shop on nearby Salford Quays where he worked and was there to represent his father, who was ill and missing his first Munich remembrance day in twenty years. The boy’s age, about eighteen, begged the obvious question: no, his father never saw the Busby Babes, but his father’s father had. Then, as others around us nodded their approval, he added with a sort of defiant conviction and in the flat, back-of-the-throat vowels of Salford: ‘But they were the greatest United team ever, weren’t they?’

After the minute’s silence, Gez Mason, a well-known United fan and a member of the pressure group Shareholders United, struck up the Flowers of Manchester, the song sent anonymously to a local newspaper after the plane crash and later recorded (they wouldn’t get away with this now) by the Liverpool folk group, the Spinners. It was as our choirmaster reached the last verse and the words ‘Oh, England’s finest football team, its record truly great; Its proud success mocked by a cruel turn of fate’ that the school children trotted round the corner of the East Stand at the same time as nine smartly dressed businessmen headed in the opposite direction towards the front office and one of the ground’s ten conference suites.

The groups passed each other almost precisely where I stood with the Chans. The children clutched their Manchester United plastic bags containing junior toothbrushes decorated with the logo of Vodafone, Ryan Giggs pencil sets, David Beckham keyrings and Roy Keane posters and stopped and stood still all at once; the suits marched past, hands in pockets, without breaking stride. It was an allegorical moment and a tableau that could be seen as a pertinent illustration of the Manchester United of today: its immutable history, corporate indifference to that history, massive worldwide fanbase, and purposeful beguilement of the very young.

Afterwards, a man about my own age, eyes still wet with tears, shook my hand and thanked me for coming, for all the world like the senior relative at a funeral service. Another complained that there had been no representative of the club, and no wreath from the plc, at the ceremony. I could have explained, but didn’t, that by then I had realized one thing about Manchester United—and by Manchester United I mean the faceless grandees located somewhere behind the glass round the corner and not the intangibility that is a football club—and that is that they prefer to confront Munich and its legacy on their own terms.

By 6 pm, when I vacated the Red Café and a plastic chair with the name of Scholes stencilled across its backrest to begin the long walk back up Matt Busby Way to the station, all the bouquets, wreaths and other mementoes had been removed. The mourning, seemingly, had been officially terminated.

Our little ritual had, as always, been mirrored elsewhere. In Belgrade, surviving members of Red Star’s 1958 generation, including captain Rajko Mitic and Lazar Tasic, who scored twice in the European Cup quarter-final against United, gathered in the club museum at the Marakana stadium to pay tribute to ‘Mancester Junajteda’. Mitic made a moving speech to laud rivals of so long ago, the British Consul was there and a letter was ceremoniously read out from Old Trafford director Sir Bobby Charlton, who could not attend: ‘This is indeed a sad day for both our clubs and I very much wished to be with you…to remember those who perished on that tragic day forty-five years ago. Unfortunately, circumstances have prevented me from travelling. On behalf of Manchester United Football Club, I send you our very best wishes and our thoughts are with you all.’

On a bitingly cold wet day in Dudley, the Black Country birthplace of Duncan Edwards, fresh flowers had appeared alongside those now withered and faded and a new collection of soaked red-and-white scarves and hats decorated the player’s black marble headstone at the town’s main cemetery on Stourbridge Road. Similar tributes appeared at the resting-places of the other seven lost players in various parts of Manchester, Salford, Doncaster and Barnsley.

The Whelan family, as always, met by Liam’s grave in Glasnevin Cemetery where forty-five years previously over 20,000 Dubliners—including the six-year-old future Taoiseach Bertie Ahern—had gathered to say farewell in an extraordinary outpouring of emotion; and in Munich, close to the site of the tragedy at the village of Kirchtrudering, the trough below the carved wooden figure of Christ had been planted with fresh flowers.

I had also learned by then that, for some, annual remembrance is never enough and that the wounds of loss that have lingered for almost half a century will never heal. June Barker, widow of the genial, warm-hearted centre-half Mark Jones, has been remarried for over thirty years, but says now: ‘Mark is buried just down the road from where we live in Barnsley and I can go and see him when I want, which is two or three times a week. On 6 February I am not fit to talk to, so I go with some flowers and just sit there a while. I’m not ever going to forget him.’

In nearby Doncaster, Irene Beevers, the sister of David Pegg, visits her brother at Adwickle-Street Cemetery every other week. And every other week for the last forty-six years she has found a single, fresh, red flower—usually a rose, sometimes a carnation—in the perforated holder at the base of the grave, placed there by someone with their own reasons to remember a boy who lived, and died, in a different lifetime.

Irene Beevers has never found out who, or why.

2 BLOODY KIDS

Manchester and its battered citizens came blinking back to daylight after May 1945, to find a city, and thousands of lives, altered irrevocably by war. As one of the largest industrialized conurbations in Europe, both Manchester and its twin across the River Irwell, Salford, were inevitable targets for German bombing raids and took a fearful pounding. The onslaught may not have been as prolonged as the London Blitz, but Manchester’s teeming terraced ghettoes stretched almost as far as the city centre and the Germans could hardly miss. On the night of Sunday 22 December 1940 alone, German bombers dropped 272 tons of high explosives and over 1,000 incendiary bombs on the two cities over a twenty-four-hour period. There was another, shorter, sortie the following night and in all, the two raids destroyed thirty acres within a mile of Manchester Town Hall, damaged 50,000 houses in the city and erased some of the city’s most famous landmarks, including the Free Trade Hall and the Victoria Buildings. Within a one-mile radius of Albert Square and its Town Hall, over thirty-one acres were laid to waste. Salford lost almost half of its 53,000 homes and neighbouring Stretford 12,000.

In Manchester, Salford, Stretford and Stockport combined, the death toll was 596 with 2,320 injured, 719 seriously. Police, fire and Civil Defence services paid the price of their bravery and diligence with sixty-four dead. For many who were uncomprehending children in Manchester at the time, the memories of Christmas, 1940, are not of carols, crackers and paper decorations but of the crump of high explosives, the chatter of ack-ack guns, a skyline lit by flames and the men and women in blue uniforms and tin hats ushering them towards the nearest Anderson shelters or into dank cellars under shattered office buildings.

On 11 March 1941 the Luftwaffe bombers were back, this time with the specific targets of the Port of Manchester and the vast industrial complexes of Trafford Park. Among other contributors to the war effort, this was home to the munitions factory of Vickers and the Ford Motor Company, builders of Rolls Royce engines. The vast silos of Hovis Flour Mill holding grain imported from the United States and the bakery mills of Kemp’s and Kelloggs, had also been targeted. All of these stood less than half a mile away from the stands of Manchester United Football Club on Warwick Road North. It may be fanciful to suppose that one Heinkel 111 was crewed exclusively by Bayern Munich or Borussia Dortmund fans, but the air-craft’s bombardier did manage to fulfil the ultimate fantasies of millions of rival supporters then and since, by landing one stick squarely on Old Trafford.

By daylight next day, the stadium, hailed by the Sporting Chronicle on its opening in 1910 as ‘the most handsomest [sic], the most spacious and unrivalled in the world’, was a smouldering ruin. Shrapnel covered the terraces, the turf was badly scorched and the main stand obliterated. It was a wasteland.

Perfunctory attempts were made over the next five years to clear the rubble, employing, in the main, Italian prisoners of war bussed in from an internment camp at Tarporley, in Cheshire, but the sight that greeted the soon-to-be demobbed Company Sergeant Major Matt Busby, of the Ninth Battalion of the King’s Liverpool Regiment, when he arrived to take over as the club’s first post-war manager on 22 October 1945 was one of forbidding desolation. This was a man who was to demonstrate a mastery of the art of renewal over the next two decades, but this initial labour was one to tax the gods, let alone a thirty-six-year-old retired footballer with little experience of management.

Most historians who set out to chronicle the story of Manchester United manage to compress the period from 1878 to the time of the Scot’s arrival at the shattered ground in 1945 into a couple of sentences, such was his impact on the club, and football in general, over the next three decades. But it is worthwhile considering how appallingly mundane Manchester United was prior to the mid-Forties, if only to underpin the popular view that this was truly one of the great football managers, and one who was to create three great sides, of three distinct species, over three different eras.

The two decades before Busby’s arrival had been distinguished only by uninterrupted mediocrity—with poor results on the field, low attendances and escalating debt. It was a sequence that reached its nadir in the 1930-31 season when the club, then in the Football League Division Two, went down to six-goal defeats at the hands of Chelsea and Huddersfield. The long-suffering fans, their discontent exacerbated by the fact that local rivals Manchester City were enjoying a period of success, voted with their feet—with fewer than 11,000 watching the 7-4 home defeat to Newcastle United later in the season.

The discontent on the terraces, as it has at every football club since in similar dire situations, became more and more strident. Pressure groups organized the distribution of leaflets outside the ground demanding a new manager, an improved scouting system and new signings. And, as at every football club since, the board ignored all the entreaties and insisted they would go their own way. By the last game of the season, a 4-4 draw with Middlesbrough, most of the support had had enough and only 3,900 were scattered around a stadium that had become a sporting necropolis. In that disastrous season, Manchester United had lost twenty-seven matches, won seven and conceded 115 goals. The board finally decided that enough was enough.

The hapless manager, Herbert Bamlett, a former football league referee who went to work in a bowler hat, was summarily dismissed and secretary Walter Crickmer and chief scout Louis Rocca took over the running of the team. But the damage was almost irreversible and by the end of the 1930-31 season the club was virtually bankrupt. It was clear a miracle, and a miracle worker, was required.

Matt Busby is often cast in the role of the saviour of Old Trafford, the figure who managed to turn brackish water into splendid red wine, but even he would later admit that the recovery was begun, and sustained, by a local businessman, James Gibson. Gibson, who had made his money in refrigeration storage and knitwear, had been introduced to Crickmer by Rocca, the ubiquitous figure who was officially the club’s chief talent-spotter, but a man with power and influence at the club, too.

On 21 December 1931, the club secretary, who did not drive, caught a bus out to posh Hale Barns in leafy Cheshire to meet Gibson at his home. The potential benefactor had a Christmas gift that the incredulous Crickmer could hardly refuse: £2,000 to be placed at the club’s disposal immediately and more funds available if the board would reconstitute itself. He would also guarantee the wages of a group of increasingly discontented employees—£8 a week for the first team and fifteen shillings a week for the part-timers and ground staff—and act as guarantor for the club’s liabilities. When Crickmer hesitatingly asked what Gibson expected in return for this largesse, the answer was gratifyingly little: he should be elected president and chairman of the new board of directors with immediate effect. Apart from that, nothing, not even repayment of the debt.

Gibson was not, however, the boardroom posturer we have come to associate with so many football clubs, and this shrewd and far-sighted man got to work on the revival of the club at once. He proposed a new issue of ‘Patron’s Tickets’—an early form of debentures—to raise funds, and although the response to the scheme was lukewarm, it was enough for the new chairman to commit even more of his own funds to the cause. On the playing side, Crickmer and Rocca were able to return to their regular duties when Gibson appointed Scott Duncan as manager and, after escaping relegation in 1933-34, the long climb back to respectability began.

Duncan, a Scot from Dumbarton who wore a carnation in his buttonhole and travelled to work in white spats, seldom left his office, but after a shaky start he proved a canny operator and delegator and the following season, 1934-35, United finished fifth in the league, then put together a nineteen-match unbeaten run at the end of the 1935-36 season to earn promotion back to Division One.

Off the field, Duncan made two of the most significant signings in the club’s pre-war history with a classy insideforward called Stan Pearson joining them in 1936 and a barnstorming, confrontational striker, Jack Rowley, arriving a year later. Pearson, a local boy from Salford, was seventeen when he made his United debut and over the next seventeen years was regarded as the brains of a side that won, under Busby’s management, the FA Cup in 1948 and the First Division title in 1952.

Rowley, known as Gunner as much for his service as an anti-tank operator in the South Staffordshire Regiment during the war as his ferocious striking of a leather caseball (a club record thirty-nine goals in that championship-winning season of 1951-52), had slipped through the net of Major Frank Buckley at his home-town club Wolverhampton Wanderers, but made an indelible mark at Old Trafford with a robust and aggressive approach to the game and life in general. Old Trafford apprentices learned to live in fear of Rowley’s frequent outbursts and even Busby was to have problems with the player’s volatile temperament.

Gibson and Crickmer, meanwhile, had been building bedrock for the club that would sustain it for many years to come. Impressed by the fact that talent such as Pearson’s could be found virtually on the doorstep, and for no outlay, they continued to evolve their pre-war brainchild, the Manchester United Junior Athletic Club, to develop youth football. The MUJAC became the forerunner of one of world football’s most productive and renowned nurseries.

There were other significant advances that served future managers. Despite debts of over £25,000, United splashed out again by agreeing a tenancy at the Old Broughton Rangers rugby ground close to Manchester racecourse in Higher Broughton, a ground that was later re-christened The Cliff and became the club’s famous training headquarters for the next five decades. Fans, too, benefited from Gibson’s diligence and far-sightedness as the chairman lobbied the local Stretford MP to have trains stop on match days at the tiny Old Trafford halt on the London Midland line out of Central Station, and had steps built up from the platform to the ground itself.

Gibson, a man who perhaps deserves a more fitting memorial than the small plaque on the railway bridge above the Old Trafford station, was a shrewd operator. The last year of the war was spent trying to persuade the Government to grant the club finance to redevelop and rebuild the ground after the bombing of 1941 and a licence was finally granted in November 1944. Gibson, who had a number of friends in high places, also managed to spark a debate at the highest level, with a motion put forward in the House of Commons that clubs affected by the war should be granted financial support. Ten clubs, including United, were in need of rebuilding work because of war damage, but it wasn’t until three years after Busby’s arrival that the club was granted £17,478 to rebuild the ground. The new manager, working in the main from offices in the cold storage plant owned by the chairman at Cornbrook, two miles north of the ground close to Chester Road, could now concentrate on another kind of rebuilding.

When Busby, and his volatile assistant Jimmy Murphy, arrived at Manchester United the club was a microcosm of the city, and Britain as a whole: insolvent, derelict and with a workforce whose best years had been lost to war. The Old Trafford dressing rooms were in a shabby Nissen hut where the south stand once stood and the ground’s training area a patch of hard-packed shale behind the Stretford End. Grass grew on the terraces, there were no floodlights and for the next four years home games had to be played at Maine Road, the ground of Manchester City. In those desperate, derelict days this was not the heresy it may seem now as Busby had played for United’s cross-town rivals and many of his players had grown up in City-supporting families on the blue side of Manchester. Nor was it an act of charity, City struck a hard bargain, demanding ten per cent of the gate receipts in an agreement signed in June 1941.

The players who came back from the war, arriving in most cases straight from demob, had lost six years of their careers and their footballing skills were in a similar state of decay to their home ground’s redundant stands.

Centre-half Allenby Chilton was a case in point. The raw-boned ex-miner had been bought, from Seaham Colliery in Co Durham, as a twenty year old in 1938 and made his debut against Charlton Athletic on 2 September the following year. A day later war was declared. Within a month Chilton had enlisted in the Durham Light Infantry where he served with distinction, twice being wounded in the fighting in France after the Normandy landings. When he arrived back at Old Trafford, he was close to thirty and his best days were over.

The other players Busby was to consider the nucleus of his side—captain Johnny Carey, Pearson, Rowley, Charlie Mitten and Johnny Morris—were all in their mid-to-late-twenties, too, and their service to Old Trafford in the future also had to be looked on as short term. Fortunately for United, every other football club in the country, and every other player, was in a similar state of disrepair. Many post-war careers were to be prolonged by dint of performing on a level playing field.

The post-war team inherited by Busby was reassuringly ordinary; the players were celebrities, but celebrities with the common touch. Many of them were married, lived in terraced houses close to the ground and few had cars. Gunner Rowley was one of the first on four wheels, buying a four-cylinder, six-seater, Flying Standard—top speed seventy miles an hour—for £300. The wing-halfs John Aston and Henry Cockburn bought a car between them. Chilton and Carey, the captain, travelled by public transport. Carey, like Roger Byrne later, was Busby’s on-field alter ego, a figure of quiet authority respected by management and team-mates alike. Strictly Catholic and teetotal, and an astute, moral individual, his obvious leadership qualities led Busby to appoint him captain at a time when some still had reservations about his playing ability. The Dubliner, who had signed for £200 from one of the city’s nursery clubs, St James’s Gate, in November 1936, was Busby’s original all-purpose player. The manager was to become noted for his willingness to try established players in different positions, using the precedents set in his own playing days. Both he and Murphy had resurrected floundering playing careers when switched from their original inside-forward positions, where invariably they had to play with back to ball, to wing-half, where the whole playing field lay in front. Carey was to perform in ten positions for United—including a game in goal—but it was as a calm, assured right-back that he was to make his name. So composed was the United captain that it was said he never got his shorts dirty. Of numerous other beneficiaries of Busby’s willingness to experiment, Chilton had been a wing-half originally, full-back John Aston an inside-forward. Bill Foulkes was a full-back before moving to the centre of defence and Byrne moved from the wing to full-back. Alongside Busby, Chelsea’s former head tinkerer Claudio Ranieri appears a model of selectoral consistency.

Carey lived close by Longford Park, bordered by King’s Road and Wilbraham Road a mile-and-a-half south of the ground, and an area that was soon a sort of mid-market ghetto for United players and management. The Irishman burned peat in the fireplace of his home at 13 Sark Road, and many of the groundstaff boys at that time can recall earning a few extra shillings for cleaning out the captain’s grate, a task, using only a wire brush, which matched the restoration of the Augean stables and which would sometimes take two or three days.

He travelled to work by bus, the other passengers soon becoming immune to the patrician-like figure seated on the top deck puffing away at his pipe. Sightings of Carey and pipe on a bus became commonplace in Manchester and at one time the number of United fans who claimed to have travelled to work with the club captain equated to the several million allegedly at the Eintracht Frankfurt v Real Madrid match at Hampden Park, Glasgow, in 1960, Jim Laker’s nineteen-wicket Test at Old Trafford cricket ground in 1956 and England’s Wembley World Cup win ten years later.

As a neutral, Carey could have sat out the war when hostilities broke out in 1939 but instead enlisted with the Queen’s Royal Hussars, joining several thousand of his countrymen like the rebel-rousing, folk-singing Clancy brothers, Paddy and Tom, in the fight against a greater enemy. Carey always argued that ‘a country that pays me my living is certainly worth fighting for’.

Carey ruled by democracy, leading by example on the field and, off it, prepared to let others have their say. He was well aware that that first great United side contained enough leaders and characters in their own right, notably the gifted England wing Charlie Mitten, Rowley and, in particular, Chilton. Contributions from the captain were often superfluous.

Chilton, the sort of traditional, no-nonsense stopper endemic to every Busby team, and with his square shoulders and centre-parted hair the face of a thousand cigarette cards, did much of the motivational work in the dressing room. In Busby’s early days, and after a run of poor form and even poorer results, the manager had gathered his side for a midweek pep-talk. Busby had prepared his speech well, but as he began, Chilton turned to him abruptly and said: ‘Just sit down and keep quiet. I’ll do the talking. It’s our win bonuses on the line here.’ Busby did as he was ordered, Chilton spoke, the others listened and the rot was stopped.

Initially at least, the manager had his favourites. He played golf with Carey and Morris, another dangerously outspoken character and a man who at one time considered a career as a professional golfer after a falling out and a subsequent transfer listing by Busby. Busby also relished the skills of Mitten, one of the most gifted wingers of his, or any other, generation but also cursed with an impish and headstrong streak that was to lead to his downfall. Busby adored him, and so did the Old Trafford fans beguiled by his eccentricities and occasional foibles. As the side’s leading penalty-taker Mitten would often invite a goalkeeper to point in the direction he wanted him to strike the ball and he would then oblige by sending the ball that way with the goalkeeper powerless. But Mitten was unorthodox off the field too, and after the 1948 FA Cup win accepted a £10,000 signing-on fee and a wage of £60 a week to play alongside Alfredo di Stefano for Santa Fe in Colombia, a country outside the FIFA umbrella. The transaction was carried out in typical Charlie fashion as he not only failed to inform manager or team-mates but also his wife, Betty, who had booked a family holiday in Scarborough. Mitten went to South America, saw out his contract there and came home to find himself suspended. Busby, as he had promised when Mitten first set sail on his South American adventure, unloaded him, at a profit of £20,000, to Fulham.

Busby’s first great United side was to provide him with a blueprint for the next, a mixture of cost-nothing locals and former apprentices, alongside one or two shrewd buy-ins, notably the Scot Jimmy Delaney. Delaney, who had won a Scottish Cup medal with Celtic in 1937, was a fragile-looking wing originally reviled as ‘Old Brittle Bones’ because of his frequent injuries. It cost Busby £4,000 to persuade Celtic to part with the player in 1946, all but £500 of which he recouped four years later when Delaney went back over the border to Aberdeen: this was the sort of business in which the parsimonious Busby delighted. As for Delaney, he was to have the last laugh on those terrace critics who had questioned his longevity, winning a third winner’s medal—seventeen years after his first—with Derry City in the Irish FA Cup Final of 1954.

Delaney was Busby’s first outright cash signing and provided him with a tutorial in football management…that the occasional shrewd buy mixed with home-grown talent equated to fiscal commonsense.

There were other lessons to be discovered by the young manager, and not just about training regimes and tactics. With so many strong-willed characters, some not much younger than himself, Busby all too often found himself teetering on the line between friendship and the autocracy demanded of a successful administrator. It was a situation he determined never to put himself in again and before long, if players had a grievance they voiced it to Carey, or later Byrne, who would pass it on to the manager. Busby’s ability to distance himself from his players when it suited him was to become a hallmark of his long reign. He was also not afraid to unload any potential trouble makers in the ranks, the ‘barrack room lawyers’ as he called them. Faced with a players’ demand for improved bonuses following the 1948 FA Cup Final, Busby met the rebels at the neutral ground of the Kardomah Café just off Piccadilly in the centre of Manchester. After ten minutes of reasoning in that calm, mellifluous brogue, the rebels capitulated. Within twelve months Morris, one of the ringleaders, had been moved on. Many more players of independent mind were to follow him out of the Old Trafford door over the next two decades.

That 1947-48 season proved to be a landmark year for United. Not only did they have permission to begin the work that would eventually enable them to move back to Old Trafford, but the FA Cup win was to be the first major honour under the chairmanship of the indulgent Gibson and the ever-improving stewardship of Busby.

Runners-up in the league for the first two years after the war, the club had also made it to Wembley to face Blackpool in an FA Cup Final still recalled as one of the finest ever. The preparation, however, was far from ideal. Sandy Busby, Matt’s son, remembers his father setting off with the team on the Friday night: ‘There was no motorway and they arrived at Wembley in the early hours of the morning to play that afternoon. Dad came home on the Sunday in a very emotional mood.’

Despite the rigours of the journey United won 4-2, taking the trophy back to Manchester for the first time since 1909. Gibson, the chairman, suffered a stroke just before the final and could not travel down to London, but the team bus drove straight to Hale Barns on its return to Manchester, and the players presented the trophy to the man whose commitment to the club had kept the football team afloat and had sustained them for nearly two decades. The trophy, in the absence of a suitable glass-fronted cabinet at Old Trafford, was kept in a wardrobe in one of the chairman’s spare bedrooms.

On 24 August 1949, United returned home to Old Trafford, established themselves as title contenders for the next two seasons and, finally, in 1951-52, won the Division One championship for the first time in over forty years.

Unfortunately for the club’s head architect, James Gibson did not live long enough to add the league championship trophy to the household silverware, as he suffered another, fatal, stroke in September 1951.

As Busby had anticipated, the title-winning season of 1951-52 proved to be the swansong for many of the postwar side and it was plain to the manager that many had long ago stepped on to the downward slope feared by every athlete. When the following season started in alarming fashion with only one win in the first five games Busby acted with decisive ruthlessness.

Albert Scanlon, one of a new wave of young local players recruited by Busby in the early Fifties, says: ‘Matt saw the writing on the wall for a lot of the old guard and the kids started coming in. Initially there were no problems. Later there were.’

The emergence of the Busby Babes was not an accident. Busby had assembled a team of scouts, under the control of a sprightly, kindly, former Old Trafford goalkeeper called Joe Armstrong, to scour Britain for talent. Armstrong became a regular fixture at schoolboy and junior games in the north of England in the late Forties and early Fifties while a small team of alter egos—all seemingly similarly small, avuncular and with faces hidden under wide-brimmed hats—performed similar functions in other parts of the country. Most of that talent, as it happened, was waiting on their doorstep and even in the mid-Forties, up to forty, bright-eyed hopefuls from the streets of Salford and Manchester would assemble for weekly trials at Old Trafford. Like many others, Scanlon wonders to this day what became of the hundreds of Billys, Stans, Georges and Harrys who walked down Warwick Road, sandshoes, socks and shorts in carrier bags, to pursue a dream. Most were never seen again, although ‘at least they can tell their grandchildren: “I once had a trial for United”,’ says Scanlon.

Busby’s rationale owed as much to a shrewd business brain and his native frugality as a desire to mould a team of willing youngsters in his own image and free of the subversive element represented by players like Mitten and Morris. These young players’ future worth to the club could be incalculable, not only in their valued skills on the field but as a valuable asset off it. Busby reasoned that if he could sign ten young professionals on the maximum salary allowed by the League, some £8 a week, it would cost the club £3,500 a year in wages: if only one of the ten made the grade he would be worth between £15-20,000 to the club on the current market values. Good business in any currency. The other nine, if the club did not retain them, would bring back almost as much between them. It all helped defray the cost of rare forays into the transfer market.

Not surprisingly, the ruthless weeding out employed by Busby produced far more failures than successes. It was only the most gifted who survived the pruning.

The recruitment process seldom varied and was typified by United’s wooing of David Pegg, a teenage left-winger from Highfields in Doncaster. In South Yorkshire, if a schoolboy was asked what he wanted to do when he grew up the invariable answer was either ‘open the batting or bowling for Yorkshire’ or ‘become a professional footballer’. Most of them finished up following their fathers down the pits. Pegg, who had been spotted as a schoolboy, was one of the few to get away.

When he was old enough to turn professional, on his seventeenth birthday, Busby invited Pegg’s father to his office at Old Trafford. Bill Pegg, a miner for forty-eight years, was not the type to have his head turned by fancy promises and with native Yorkshire caution said: ‘I want the boy to be happy Mr Busby, but suppose it doesn’t go well for him? It’s back to the pits. Do you think he will really make the grade?’ Busby replied: ‘As long as he keeps trying. That’s all I ask of any lad.’

Discipline was important, too. ‘It’s never too early or too late to wear a tie,’ Busby scolded the seventeen-year-old Pegg, who had boarded the team bus in an open-necked shirt. They called the senior players ‘Mister’, knocked on the first-team dressing-room door before entering and this orderliness was maintained in their lives away from Old Trafford, usually in the homes of a series of kindly landladies carefully screened by the club and prepared to report back to Busby on the good behaviour, or otherwise, of their young charges.

Many of them began their new lives in Manchester in the digs of the redoubtable Mrs Watson on Talbot Road close to the county cricket ground and she kept a dozen young players under her roof at any one time. Meals were served around a communal table, some—although not all—helped with the washing up and bedrooms were shared.Mrs Watson had a black-and-white television in the lounge which added to the creature comforts and helped ward off the inevitable effects of homesickness.

The married men lived in club houses, rented for around £3 a week, and most of them within a couple of miles of the ground in the King’s Road area.

Housing was one of the few bones of contention in an invariably happy environment. Some wives would pester the club constantly about having a new fireplace built or getting a wall knocked down, the most persistent being Teresa, the wife of Bill Foulkes. A succession of club officials came to dread it when Foulkes would tell them: ‘Teresa wants to come and see you.’

Until the age of seventeen, the younger players also went through the motions of pursuing a ‘second trade’ alongside their playing careers to calm the worries of parents. Bobby Charlton, for example, worked at an engineering firm, Geoff Bent was a trainee joiner, as was Pegg. None of these vocations, it goes without saying, were pursued past the day they signed a full-time contract and became, officially, a Manchester United player.

Busby assembled his backroom staff with equal care. Murphy, the fiery Welshman, was the fulcrum of much of the success of the Busby Babes as we shall see later, but trainer Tom Curry and Bert Whalley, the coach, also played key roles.

Whalley, a former United wing-half who had joined the coaching team after his playing career ended in 1947, was third in command after Busby and Murphy and in many ways appears to have been ahead of his time in terms of the psychology of dealing with young players. A handwritten letter would be delivered to each of them every Friday with a detailed report on how he thought they had played the week before, along with a description of the team they would be playing the following day and detailed insights into the modus operandi of the man they would be marking, or vice versa.

Curry had been a wing-half with Newcastle United for eight years in the Twenties and, like a later generation, lost most of his career to a world war. A product of the South Shields junior sides, he had worked with Newcastle youngsters in the club’s North-Eastern League side and his first job as a trainer was with Carlisle United, before he arrived in Manchester in 1934. Along with his ‘deputy trainer’ Bill Inglis, he wore a white coat to work, both of them resembling rather jolly cricket umpires. While Murphy snapped and snarled, they smiled and cajoled.

‘Our whole little world revolved round Jimmy Murphy, Bert Whalley and Tom Curry,’ says Scanlon. ‘The staff made it so happy, people like the laundry ladies. The older players were more reserved but they would still join in the fun, that was the secret, although it would take nothing for someone like Jack Rowley to snap at you. You had respect for the first teamers, but the kids were really in a little world of our own.’

The Babes’ surrogate fathers forgot nothing, according to Busby’s son, Sandy: ‘Tom Curry, like Bert, was a devout churchgoer and when the team went away, he would go round the lads and find out what religion they were and one of his duties was to go and find out where their nearest church was. He’d get you up in the morning. He’d even get my dad up.’

Along with Whalley, who had been taken on the last trip as a bonus, and Walter Crickmer, who had worked so long and hard with James Gibson to resurrect Manchester United, Curry was to die at Munich.

Tom Jackson, the football writer who covered United for the Manchester Evening News, and another Munich victim, is often acknowledged as the author of the title of the Busby Babes, but the credit should really go to a young sub-editor working on the newspaper at the time. Later to become one of journalism’s great sports editors, notably with the Sun, Frank Nicklin had showed a flair for alliteration even in those days and his headline above a Manchester United match report on 24 November 1951—the day United gave first-team debuts to eighteen-year-old Jackie Blanchflower and Roger Byrne—was soon almost universally adopted. Busby himself hated the name, but soon found he had to live with it.

Byrne, who was twenty-one at the time, went on to make twenty-three more appearances in the 1951-52 championship-winning side alongside the grizzled veterans of the 1948 Wembley team, and had even scored seven goals in the last six games of the season from the left wing. But two years later the self-contained grammar school boy from Gorton found himself suddenly the head prefect in a classroom of nurslings. United’s away match at Huddersfield on 31 October 1953 is often seen as the defining moment in the history of the Babes when seven players under the age of twenty-two, including a versatile defender from Northern Ireland, a clever winger from South Yorkshire and a muscular wing-half from the English Midlands, appeared in the first team in an otherwise undistinguished 0-0 draw.

Busby had begun to break up his first great side and replace it with an even greater one.

The definition of what constitutes a Busby Babe has always been loosely framed. The obituaries of Ray Wood and Johnny Berry, who made their United debuts in the early Fifties, invariably grouped them as Busby Babes, but in fact they were bought in by United, Wood from Darlington and Berry from Birmingham City.

‘Tommy Taylor was not a Babe, either,’ says John Doherty, a former United inside-forward who was certainly an original Babe. ‘You had to be born in Manchester, or reared by the club. Mark Jones was from Yorkshire, but he was a Babe; Jackie Blanchflower was Irish and he was a Babe. Jeff Whitefoot was a Babe and is still one of the youngest to play for United at sixteen. Him, Brian Birch, Bob Birkett, an outside right who played for England schoolboys, Mark Jones, they were really the first of them, Jackie Blanchflower, then Dave Pegg and me; Foulkesy [Bill Foulkes] the following year.

‘Matt and Jimmy were very choosy about who they brought in. I went to United in 1949 as a schoolboy. I was the last person ever signed by the famous Louis Rocca. I was born in Stretford, just behind the Gorsehill Hotel, and then we moved to Rackhouses. They came to my house in Baguley after they had seen me play for Manchester Boys and I was an illegal signing because I hadn’t finished school. Jeff Whitefoot was in the office and I joined him there, answering the phone, helping Les Olive with bits and pieces, training in the morning.’

By the end of 1952 the United system that had unearthed so much promising young talent was in danger of over-reaching itself. It was in a state close to overkill. The youngsters were queuing up for places and Busby and Murphy almost buried under an embarrassment of riches. The problem was, where to find them match practice. The Central League, patrolled in the main by gnarled, combative and finesse-free veterans only too happy to give callow youths a kicking they would never forget, was no place for fifteen or sixteen year olds, the reserve team a step too far. But then, the English Football Association came to the rescue.

The FA Youth Cup was the successor to the County Youth Championship, which had been set up at the end of the war as a means of regenerating lost English football talent. The competition, said the FA, would ‘give talented school leavers finding it hard to break immediately into senior football the ideal breeding ground for the footballers of the future’. It turned into something more than that for United.

The original competition had entries from some unmatchable, exotic cannon fodder, in particular Huntly and Palmers Biscuit Factory and Walthamstow Avenue, but at the business end most of the managers of the leading clubs recognized the worth of the Youth Cup and entered teams. Unfortunately for them, most of the country’s outstanding talent had already been cornered and United were to win the first five finals, played on a home and away basis, by almost embarrassing margins.

If Busby and Murphy found fulfilment in 9-3 aggregate wins over their supposedly main rivals Wolves in 1953 and an 8-2 dismissal of West Ham United over two legs four years later, Crickmer and the Old Trafford bean counters could rejoice, too, as the fans bought into this joyful peek into the club’s golden future.

Results like a 23-0 win over Walthamstow in the first season may have equated to a bunch of cruel boys pulling wings off flies, but with up to 25,000 at Old Trafford for the latter stages, the competition could be seen as a success for Manchester United in every possible way. The precocious skills on display were outrageous. The first overhead kick many of us had witnessed by any footballer was delivered by a blond-haired inside-forward in one Youth Cup game at Old Trafford and the daunting thought for most rival team managers was that this lavishly gifted sixteen year old was still two seasons away from a first-team debut. What is more, Bobby Charlton hadn’t cost the club of his choice a penny.

Today’s fans at Old Trafford speak in awed tones of the youth team of 1992 which contained Ryan Giggs, the two Nevilles, David Beckham, Paul Scholes and Nicky Butt, but supporters of an earlier vintage will happily cite the side of 1952-53 as their equals, if not betters: Clayton, Fulton, Kennedy, Colman, Cope, Edwards, McFarlane, Whelan, Doherty, Lewis, Pegg and Scanlon. All twelve played in the first team and all were sixteen or seventeen years old at the time. ‘You tell people that and they just look at you as if you’re barmy,’ says Doherty.

The Youth Cup certainly helped the learning process and when they did make the next step up Busby’s youngsters were ready. Jimmy Armfield, the former Blackpool and England player, and later Leeds manager and enduring media pundit, first saw the nucleus of the Babes when playing for Blackpool Reserves in the old Central League.

He recalls: ‘Bobby Charlton, Eddie Colman, David Pegg, Albert Scanlon, Mark Jones and Geoff Bent were all in the team, which shows how good they were at the time. United were attracting all the best schoolboys, but the thing that stuck most in my mind was the incredible crowd, around 26,000 at Old Trafford. Blackpool had a fair side and we always used to try and win the Central League but there wasn’t much chance with that sort of opposition.’

The Babes, according to Armfield, also represented something else. ‘It was an exciting time because we were all children of the war and you could feel the country reviving. They seemed to represent that revival with their youth and energy.’

For Albert Scanlon, the Fifties in Manchester and with United were the golden age in every way. There were the joys of a football adolescence on the field and just as many delights off it.

‘Old Trafford was like one happy family,’ he says. ‘Two ladies we called Omo and Daz, who were the mother and aunt of Ken Ramsden, used to do the laundry and the lads used to take all their clothes to them. “Go and tell Tommy Taylor his shirts are ready,” they would say.

‘Pre-season, the training was running, jumping, and the only ball we saw was a medicine ball. At training we played married men against single men and it was blood and thunder. Some lads wouldn’t want to stop, but Bill and Tom had to have their hour dinner.

‘Then the fog used to come on to The Cliff off the River Irwell and all you could see was this white ball. If it got too bad we played silly games, like hide and seek. Tommy Taylor, they could never find him, he was the world champion. No one knew where he was. Someone else once shinned up a flagpole. Another hid under a wheelbarrow. Here I was, little more than a schoolboy, hiding in a training ground lavatory cubicle while some of football’s biggest names tried to find me.’

Despite some of the more bizarre training regimes, Whalley, Inglis and Curry seemed to have hit on one essential for a teenager of any era: life had to be fun.

‘We were all big snooker players, and there was a table at Davyhulme golf club where we would spend the Fridays before a game,’ adds Scanlon. ‘We’d see three films a week, getting in free with the little red card of rules the club gave us. That was a passport to anywhere really. Bobby Charlton used to go to the News Theatre on Oxford Road where they showed cartoons.’

The metamorphosis from lark-happy children to serious and dedicated career opportunists on a football field came twice a week, often with a Wednesday fixture in the A team against local amateur sides and, perhaps, a Youth Cup game on a Saturday. The Babes’ precocity, however, did not go down too well with some of the other sides around at the time. Manchester United’s main rivals for honours in the mid-Fifties were Wolverhampton Wanderers, led by the elegant England captain Billy Wright and Bolton, who were, as now, the Old Trafford bogey team. Everyone feared their line-up of raw-boned Lancastrians with Fred Dibnah accents—‘when tha’s finished with him kick him over here’ their fearsome full-back Tommy Banks would enjoin his fellow Burnden Park enforcer Roy Hartle—but the disdain for golden youth was everywhere.

‘We played Lincoln in a pre-season game and they had a hard case called Dougie Graham at full-back who was in his thirties and on his way down,’ recalls Scanlon. ‘The ball came down on the edge of the box and as I hit it he hit me and it flew into the top corner and I didn’t know this at the time because I’m laid out. They got the sponge at me, the cold water and capsules of smelling salts and Roger Byrne says to him: “It’s a friendly and they are young lads.” And Dougie says right back: “Until he’s twenty-six he shouldn’t be in the fucking first team.”’

At Old Trafford, too, some of the older players were to rage furiously against the dying of the light, their frustrations exacerbated by increasingly bolder young players who began to show less and less respect for reputation. One incident, late in the 1954 season, was to demonstrate perfectly the growing schism between the United past and its future.

Eddie Lewis, a striker who had been signed as a schoolboy, weighed thirteen-and-a-half stone by the age of seventeen and had scant respect for reputations. Reg Allen, the goalkeeper signed for £12,000 from Queens Park Rangers, was similarly well built. A man who would not go out training until he had his shirt washed and ironed, and his shorts and socks washed, Allen expected respect by right.

Albert Scanlon takes up the story: ‘In the first-team dressing room there was a cabinet on the wall and in that cupboard, a bottle of olive oil, a tin of Vaseline and a jar of Brylcreem, all used by various players for hair grooming. The Brylcreem belonged to Reg Allen and Reg had his own ideas about everything, particularly about Reg. The unwritten rule was that you didn’t touch anything of his.

‘But one day Eddie walks in the first-team dressing room and straight over to the cabinet where he took a dollop of Reg’s Brylcreem. “Fuck Reg!” he says. It took three people, me, Bert Whalley and Bill Inglis to get Reg off Eddie, who by then was going blue, with his tongue coming out. Reg looked at his mark again and walked out. Eddie learned his lesson all right, he never made that mistake again, but there were little things like that going on all the time.’

It was clear the old order was on the way out; swaggering youth on its way in. ‘Bloody kids’ Allen may have christened them, but these bloody kids were perhaps the only young people of any generation, before or since, not to horrify and antagonize their elders. What is more, at an age traditionally one of uncertainty they had already discovered a purpose in life and a means to escape circumstances which, to put it mildly, were far from ideal.

3 NEAREST AND DEAREST

Late in 1959, the researchers for a projected twice-weekly television drama series, based around the characters in a fictional north-west of England street, began to scout locations in and around the cities of Manchester and Salford. In particular, they were looking for a suitable backdrop for the opening credits. These titles, accompanied by a mournful trombone solo and a panned shot of a mangy black cat atop a grimy row of back-to-back terraces would eventually become the most enduring and instantly recognizable in the history of British television. The series makers initially christened the new series Florizel Street, but at the suggestion of a cleaning lady at Granada television studios, who thought that name sounded too much like a detergent, later renamed it Coronation Street.

The Street, before double glazing, Thai brides, drug abuse, kidnapping and murder arrived forty years later, was all urban banality. It offered a composite of grey, gloomy streets, gossipy neighbours, ghettos of close relatives—but oddly in the baby boomers era no children—and an existence that revolved around the local pub. Most viewers outside the city took it as an accurate portrait of inner-city Manchester.

This world of hairnets, curlers, busty barmaids and ceramic ducks above the fireplace did not find total favour with the city’s real-life natives, however, many arguing that few of the characters in the Street possessed the traits that defined Mancunians. The actors, as the script demanded, called a spade a spade all right, and all possessed a deliberate and occasional comical manner of speaking. Some combined that odd mixture of thrift and yet generosity endemic to northerners, but Coronation Street missed one aspect of Manchester in the Fifties and early Sixties entirely: the sense of unity born out of abject, post-war circumstances. The early Street scriptwriters clearly believed that a sense of community equated to pub gossip and affairs with the neighbours. Perhaps they should have examined the real-life model in greater detail.

Archie Street in Ordsall, a few hundred yards from Trafford Wharf and within a mile of Old Trafford football stadium, was the original for those TV credits. Coronation Street, then and now, did not own a celebrity, nor a resident of any status—unless we include the philandering factory owner, Mike Baldwin—but Archie Street possessed both in the cheeky and gifted wing-half of the Busby Babes, Eddie Colman, who was born and spent all his brief life there.

Eddie was brought up by his parents, Dick and Liz, at Number 9, later to become the titular home of the Coronation Street siren Elsie Tanner, and although Archie Street didn’t have a Rover’s Return, there was an off licence, a corner shop which sold everything from newspapers to fire lighters and a church, St Clement’s, on the other side of Ordsall Park. It was from here that an army of small, well-scrubbed boys and girls set out in procession in the first week of every July through the parish on the traditional Whit Walks. In the afternoon, concerts and cricket and football matches entertained the youngsters and when a leather case-ball came out, the undoubted young star of St Clement’s was Eddie Colman.

The Colmans’ only child was nine years old when Germany raised the white flag and the bunting and banners came out in Archie Street. In a scene mirrored throughout Britain on that May day in 1945 the women of Ordsall—most of their men were still away in various theatres of war—rooted out their best floral frocks and pinnies for animpromptu knees-up. There were marches and bands and picnics on hastily erected trestle tables and in nearby Monmouth Street a celebratory bonfire was lit using the wooden legs from redundant household chairs. There were Union Jacks everywhere, fluttering alongside the Stars and Stripes and even the occasional Hammer and Sickle. Portraits of Churchill adorned house windows and V signs were painted on the sooty brick walls of the houses. The dark days were over.

Eddie had been hurried by his parents to a street shelter for much of Christmas 1940 as the Luftwaffe pulverized Salford and its surroundings, the German airmen using the shining length of the River Irwell as a flight path. In the indiscriminate bombing, 9 Archie Street survived intact although just across the Ship Canal incendiaries set ablaze the pavilion and wooden stands of Lancashire County Cricket Club and destroyed Old Trafford Baths on Northumberland Road. One parachute land mine which floated down on to a power station at Trafford Park failed to explode, and was besieged by local children trying to pinch pieces of the silk canopy.

Incredibly, within four days the civil defence and fire services had the 431 major fires in the city under control and Liz Colman’s main complaint when the all-clear sounded was about the film of dirt that had infiltrated her well-scrubbed home.

An ordeal like this merely served to reinforce a bond already made strong by the hardships of existence in Salford in the Forties and Fifties. Like every other house in the neighbourhood, 9 Archie Street did not have a bathroom and Eddie washed standing up in the kitchen sink or, on special occasions, his mother would drag the tin bath in from the hook on which it hung outside. The outside toilet was shared and young Eddie soon learned the timing of the subtle cough that would signal occupancy of the shared loo when approaching footsteps were heard on the cobbles outside.

Monday was traditionally wash day, using a tub and mangle—the Servis twin tub, labour saver of a million housewives of the future, was still beyond the family budget of most—and as the family did not possess a refrigerator it meant a daily trip to the shops for a full-time housewife like Liz Colman.

In the manner of Salford, the Colmans’ household was cheerfully matriarchal. Dad handed over his pay packet on a Friday night and mum put on one side money for the rent man, electricity and Christmas Club and then tipped him his beer and cigarette money. Eddie would be granted his sixpence a week pocket money. He was educated at Ordsall Council School, where lessons were written out in pencil in longhand atop ancient wooden desks and where a clapper bell summoned children from a dank asphalt yard to lessons. The school can boast three very distinguished old boys in the footballer and, in a later era, Allan Clarke and Graham Nash of the Hollies, one of several Manchester groups who vainly tried to emulate the fame and status of the Beatles in the Sixties. Nash, later to become even more celebrated as the twee songwriter and singer in the supergroup Crosby, Stills and Nash is still remembered in Ordsall for his performance as an Ugly Sister in the school’s version of Cinderella.

This, then, was the background and environment which shaped the personae of one of the most dazzling and beguiling of the Busby Babes. Colman’s style of play in the school team matched his character and that of the street urchins of Salford: cheeky, extrovert and yet generous (he was to score only two goals in the whole of his United career). He also went in first wicket down for Salford and Lancashire Boys’ Cricket team and it would be true to say, as with most of the Busby Babes and young sportsmen of that era, that sport provided an outlet and opportunity that upbringing did not.

Colman’s path to Old Trafford followed lines that were to be mirrored in every one of his United contemporaries: kickabouts in the street and impromptu matches on ‘red recs’—levelled rubble among the bombsites—that scarred young knees. Then schools football, lads’ football, followed finally by a tap on the door from the United scout.

He was the original local boy, in every sense of the words. Archie Street was within walking distance of Old Trafford, half a mile away, and the young player’s route to work took him up Trafford Road and over the swing bridge across the Ship Canal at Wharf Way. Often he was late, and Jimmy Murphy soon became immune to Eddie’s standard excuse that the bridge, which straddled the main Manchester and Pomona Docks, had been raised for a passing ship just as he arrived. Murphy, trying his best to look and sound exasperated, would castigate the little wing-half. But always with a smile, for he adored little Eddie.

Eddie’s gifts were obvious to Busby and Murphy from the start…the famous body swerve that earned him the nickname of Snakehips, the adroit drag-back, the push and run into space and the startling speed off the mark for a boy described by the Northern Ireland goalkeeper Harry Gregg, who joined the club from Doncaster Rovers in December 1957 as ‘a wee wag with a beer belly’. And all done with an infectious joie de vivre, like a cheeky fifthformer playing truant from school, that captured so many hearts at Old Trafford.

Duncan Edwards, his muscular partner in the middle of the park, was both bigger and more famous then and now, but Colman struck a chord in the hearts of the United support that lasts to this day. He was one of them.

The Colman wiggle could be as disconcerting and baffling to team-mates. ‘I remember the first time I played with Eddie and even now it’s hard to believe this happened,’ adds Gregg. ‘I was in goal and Eddie at wing-half and I was a wanderer. If the ball went forward twenty yards, I went forwards twenty yards if it came back twenty I came back twenty. Eddie got the ball and he does this, a wiggle, and I found myself doing the same thing.’

Despite his stature, he was not a soft touch. The fledgling footballer’s boyhood hero was Ronnie Allen, the West Bromwich Albion forward who, at 5 ft 9 in, was not only the smallest centre-forward ever to play for England but one of the few English players Eddie could look straight in the eye. In an early encounter at The Hawthorns, Allen fouled him in the clumsy manner of all forwards and Colman, who had learned never to turn the other cheek as a teenager in Ordsall, went after his illustrious opponent. As the two bantamweights squared up, it was United’s captain Roger Byrne who stepped in as a mediator, leading the irate wing-half back to his own half.

The fans’ love affair with a boy who was to make only eighty-five first-team league appearances had begun long before his first-team debut, aged nineteen, in November 1955. As part of three winning FA Youth Cup sides, one of them as captain, Colman’s skills had already become part of pub and terrace folklore before he lined up against United’s old bêtes noires Bolton at Burnden Park in 1955 for a match in which he was to make an indelible mark and astonish even seasoned campaigners including the opposing captain, Nat Lofthouse. United lost 3-1, but a new star was born and Colman’s influence on the side that won the Championship in consecutive seasons, 1955-56 and 1956-57, was immense, with his wickedly incisive passing and devastating dribbling. Busby and Murphy, wisely, made no attempt to stifle the occasional eccentricities. Nothing, it seemed, could prevent the boy from Salford from making an indelible impression on the game.

If his predecessors at Old Trafford like Carey, Chilton and Rowley had seen their careers and lives disrupted by calls to the armed services, Colman, like every other youngster in Britain between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five, found potential disruption in the National Service, that curse of youth in the Fifties. Originally set at eighteen months, the term of conscription was lengthened to two years in 1950—much to the dismay of the reluctant conscripts—at about the same time as United’s younger players were peering ahead at what they hoped would be great football careers. Instead, the dreaded medical, the ten weeks of basic training, the parade ground, psychopathic sergeant majors and the delights of spit ‘n’ polish beckoned. Worse, with the outbreak of the Korean War in that year, the unrest in Malaysia and Kenya and the EOKA terrorism campaign in Cyprus, there was a real fear that they could finish up shooting at enemy soldiers rather than the opposition goal.

The reality, however, was gratifyingly different for any servicemen of even average sporting ability and most of them never set foot outside these shores in uniform. Ronnie Cope, who joined the club from junior football in 1951 and could claim to have been one of the original Busby Babes, was called up in 1953 and expected to be posted abroad, possibly to the army of occupation in Germany.

Cope says: ‘I was on my way when an officer came along and pulled me and seven other footballers out of the ranks to start up a football team in the unit. I would play in the Army team during the week, then go home at weekends to represent United. The Army actually got permission from United for me to play. I was paid £1 a week by the Army and the same from United as a retainer plus a match fee. I was never paid the £7 a week of the contract but the club did reimburse the train fare for going back north—if we could provide a receipt.’

Colman, who served in the Royal Signals at Catterick, was also recognized by a senior officer at once, spirited away from the other ranks, and given the duty of physical training instructor combined with an ill-defined role as the camp rat-catcher. Both sinecures gave him ample time, not only to head out to the local pub with his Signals mate Peter Swan for a few beers, but to carry on playing football throughout his two years in uniform.

Others were also wrapped in services cotton wool and in the early Fifties the Army could field a team of awesome international class—and usually did. Jimmy Armfield did his National Service between 1954 and 1956 based at Lancaster, and later Aldershot, and played in a British Army team that included Bill Foulkes, Colman and Edwards. He recalls gleefully: ‘To be honest, I can’t remember us ever losing and we had a fixture list that included Glasgow Rangers and Everton and we even beat Northern Ireland, who were a very good side at that time. Eddie was a push and run player, he would shuffle and then go into space. He was a very buoyant character as well and I can remember him getting up at the front of the team bus in Germany to lead a sing-song.’

Back in Civvy Street, or rather Archie Street, the little Salford extrovert lived life to its fullest. Dick and Liz Colman proved to be remarkably tolerant and accommodating parents and happily indulged their only son when he organized several memorable parties. Their neighbours soon became immune to the sight of most of the Manchester United first team arriving at the Colmans’ tiny terraced house to drink and dance the night away.

Eddie was also, in his own eyes at least, the club’s trendsetter. While Friday and Saturday-night best for most footballers consisted of ill-fitting jackets and wide trousers with broad turn-ups, Eddie embraced the latest fashions.

‘When I met him he turned up in a duffel coat and a peaked checked cap on and told me he was the most forward dresser of the lot,’ says Harry Gregg. Later, when the teddy-boy craze swept Britain, Colman bought a jacket with a velvet collar and bumper shoes and forsook Sinatra and Sarah Vaughan for Bill Haley and the early Elvis.

Inevitably, he occasionally came close to overstepping the mark, at least in the eyes of some of his seniors.

‘I remember David Pegg and Eddie and myself got home late one night after a party and we were down at Old Trafford next day,’ says Sandy Busby, who socialized with most of his father’s young players. ‘The state they were in. David and Eddie were trying to stay out of Dad’s way, but Dad had a habit of going in the dressing room and going for a pee and usually while he was there he would ask Tom Curry about any injuries from Saturday. He went in the loo on the left of the big bath and came out a couple of minutes later saying: “Tom, tell Pegg and Colman they can come out of the toilets now.” They were unshaven and dying. Dad knew where they had been.’

Dad always knew that. Manchester has always been a village posturing as a large city and as many famous footballers have found since, there have always been spies willing to tittle-tattle, with the hypocritical indignation of the frustrated and the plain jealous, to the hierarchy at Old Trafford. The sum of all the Babes’ misdemeanours probably added up to one week in the life of George Best, but they still had to watch their p’s and q’s when out and about in Manchester. Then they discovered girls.

‘Back in 1957, we used to dance a foot apart,’ Joni Mitchell was to sing much later in a concise summation of courtship of that era when romance was conducted with a space between girl and boy that was not always metaphorical. If they had reason to believe otherwise, most parents would ensure that daughters were home alone by 10.30 pm, that engagements lasted at least twelve months and that permission had to be given in formal fashion by the father of the potential bride.

Girls have been regarded by football managers of every generation as an unnecessary evil. Then, as now, there was no shortage of admirers willing to lead professional footballers off what their clubs would regard as the straight and narrow. By the time of Munich, however, most of the United team was spoken for. Byrne, Bent, Mark Jones, Jackie Blanchflower, Viollet, Gregg and Johnny Berry were married, Liam Whelan and Duncan Edwards engaged. Tommy Taylor and Eddie Colman were ‘going steady’. The only one who looked likely to remain a bachelor for the foreseeable future was David Pegg, the winger blessed with the dreamy-eyed, film-star looks and flashing smile, and a boy quite happy to break a few female hearts without the slightest sign of commitment.

The rituals of courtship went ahead in the hundred or so cinemas, dance halls and nightclubs that enlivened Manchester in the Fifties. The city centre had the Gaumont and Odeon cinemas on Oxford Road and the Gaiety on Peter Street where Gone with the Wind ran for over a year in front of full houses every night. The Empress in Miles Platting, once the Empress Electric Theatre, was another popular haunt while the Cinephone on Market Street was a slightly more risqué venue, earning a dubious reputation for showing ‘foreign’ films with titillating titles such as And God Created Woman or L’Amore. And for the younger, less cerebral, footballers with time on their hands in the afternoon, the masked avenger Zorro and inter-planetary hero Flash Gordon put wrongs to rights in the matinées at the News Theatre on Oxford Road.

Learning to dance properly was a social necessity, too. At the Ritz Ballroom in Whitworth Street aspirant Fred Astaires could hire a professional partner and whirl and twirl in front of a live big band, and there were specialist teachers like Tommy Rogers, who ran a studio on Oxford Road.

‘You worked your way up,’ says Sandy Busby. ‘Going to the Plaza was a big scene. That was on Saturday night. Sunday it would be Chorlton Palais and Levenshulme Palais. There was drink because you needed the Dutch courage to go up and ask a girl for a dance and most of the lads were quite shy. David Pegg was always well groomed, very, very smart. Dave, Tommy and Jackie were always big pals, they used to knock around together. They all had similar backgrounds, all working class, but always very polite, which helped with the girls. If you didn’t get a girl you’d go to the Ping Hong restaurant on Oxford Street, across from the old Gaumont picture house. The Kardomah, Espresso Bongo, Deno’s, the Continental and the Whisky a Gogo were all popular.

‘There was a members’ club called the Cromford in Cromford Court, close by the site of the Arndale Shopping Centre, a place where United’s players regularly congregated, but you had to behave because Dad would go in there. It was a good place to take girlfriends and as long as they weren’t breaking the rules, Dad was quite happy with the lads being there. He’d often send them over a drink. We would go there after the pubs closed to do a little gambling at the tables, watch the floor show, and have a good meal of scampi while it was on.’

The money to feed all this extravagance did go a long way, particularly for footballers who could earn £15 a week, some £9 above the average wage, and the equivalent of around £16,000 a year in modern currency, a sum that would be sniffed at by a Third Division apprentice today. That basic wage could be augmented by a win bonus of £2 and a ‘signing-on fee’ of £10. The captain Roger Byrne’s salary for 1957, for example, comprised a basic wage of £744 from the club, plus league match bonuses of £72, talent money of £45, European Cup bonuses of £60 and an accrued benefit sum of £150. While not actually rolling in the stuff in the manner of his 2005 counterpart Roy Keane, Byrne could be said to have been comfortably off. And unlike many before or since, he had already worked out that he could not play forever, that a footballer’s career was far from finite. He had a newspaper column in the Manchester Evening News, several minor sponsorships including a Raleigh bicycle endorsement and, in the cerebral manner that always attended his play on the football field, was already, as 1958 and his twenty-ninth birthday approached, planning for a life outside football.

According to Harry Gregg, who can be quite dogmatic about these things, Colman, Roger Byrne, Albert Scanlon, a skinny, but predatory and remarkably consistent insideforward from Moss Side called Dennis Viollet and the luckless full-back Geoff Bent were the heart of United ‘because they were really Manchester Busby Babes’.

At the time of his death, Byrne was long past any definition of Babehood, although he did fulfil the criteria demanded by Gregg. Born in the east Manchester suburb of Gorton, a village of two-up, two-down red-brick Victorian homes brightened only by the 130-acre rural oasis of Debdale Park, Roger was brought up by Bill and Jessie Byrne in a warm, sports-loving family environment. Bill Byrne worked in the furniture department at Lewis’s in Piccadilly and his highly intelligent son earned a scholarship to Burnage Grammar School.

Roger played his early football for Ryder Brow Juniors in Gorton and also boxed and played rugby for the RAF, who overlooked the future England full-back for their services football team. His future wife Joy, then Joy Cooper, remembers a ‘very good sportsman. It was touch and go whether he played cricket or football, and he was also a good golfer. He also boxed for the RAF, who strangely thought he wasn’t good enough for their football team. He was good at every sport, in fact. I loved ice skating and used to go regularly with a crowd from the hospital to the Ice Palace in Manchester. He wasn’t supposed to go, but we dragged him along one time. He had never skated before and he just put the boots on and off he went; it really annoyed everyone. We kept saying “for goodness sake, don’t fall over” but he never did.’

It was Joe Armstrong who first recognized the promise of the fifteen-year-old schoolboy in a Lancashire Amateur League fixture in 1945. Byrne and a Ryder Brow teammate, a whippet-thin winger called Brian Statham, were offered amateur forms. Byrne accepted, Statham decided to stick to his first sporting love with happy consequences for both Lancashire cricket and England.

On the football field, Byrne is now acknowledged as one of the Old Trafford greats although, as with so many players, Busby struggled to find the right position for him. His remarkable pace had made him a natural winger initially, but it was a position he despised and it was only when the United management moved him to full-back that he blossomed, as his 275 first-team appearances and thirtythree consecutive England appearances before Munich demonstrate. His calculating football brain, what would be signalled as ‘professionalism’ today, did not always sit well with rival supporters. ‘Booed Byrne Just Loved It’ screamed a Daily Mirror headline above a match report of a Manchester derby in 1957. Never averse to blatant timewasting if United were ahead with a few minutes to go, or taking up the cudgels on behalf of more timid team-mates when necessary—he was official minder to Colman and Viollet in their early days—Roger Byrne was barracked at the best grounds in England.

His talent as a full-back was hard to define, although not to the countless players he subdued, including two of the greatest England wingers, Stanley Matthews and Tom Finney. The Wizard of Dribble and the Preston Plumber seldom got much change out of Byrne.

‘Roger was very, very bright,’ says former team-mate John Doherty. ‘He couldn’t tackle, had no left foot—even though he played left full-back—was a poor header of the ball, and I have never seen a better left-back in my life. Brains and pace. Tackling was demeaning to Roger. He preferred to pinch it or make them give it him. Jimmy Murphy used to say to the full-backs: “Don’t tackle them and they will finish up giving you the ball. You have done your job once they cross the ball.” Roger was brilliant at that.’

As a member of the 1951-52 title-winning side, Byrne also retained a certain hauteur, with the gravitas and occasional intolerance of an older generation.

On one pre-season training camp, he cuffed a youthteam player called Wilf McGuinness round the ear for daring to take his chair by the hotel pool, and more than once other Jack-the-lads at United suffered fearsomely memorable bollockings, Eddie Colman in particular. They would never dare answer back.

‘Saturday night, we would go out dancing and have a few drinks,’ says Sandy Busby. ‘Sunday morning it was always Mass with Dad and then I used to go back home and then shoot off down to the ground. All the lads used to go down, particularly if you were injured. There would be a five-a-side or runs round the ground. This Sunday we had been to a party, the usual gang of Eddie, Peggy and myself. It was two or three o’clock and Eddie was there at the ground looking like death and who walks down the tunnel but Roger? He comes up to us and says: “Sandy, would you mind leaving us?” I carry on, Roger walks back up the tunnel and Eddie comes back very red and flustered. “All right?” I asked. “Roger just told me if I don’t get a grip, I’ll be out of here,” says Eddie.’

It was this respect engendered in others, along with a high moral code and a peerless football brain that convinces Sandy Busby to this day that the captain could have succeeded his father and managed Manchester United.

He says: ‘I used to see both of them talking quietly together and I was sure Dad was grooming Roger to take over,’ he says. Byrne was never a yes man however, confronting Busby on several occasions over the rights of players, their entitlement to bonuses and even on-field tactics. He fell out with the manager at the end of his debut season in 1951-52 over a demand for an increase in bonuses and on another occasion narrowly avoiding being thrown out of the club altogether.

According to the manager’s son, ‘In his early days Roger was a handful, an awkward bugger. He didn’t like playing at outside left, he wasn’t happy at all and at one time even asked for a transfer.

‘On the end-of-season tour of America in 1952 things got even worse. United played against a team of kickers from Mexico and Dad tells them, “These fellas will try and get you riled but just ignore it, walk away.” In the first five minutes Roger gets kicked up in the air and he whacks the next one who comes near him. Off he goes. At half-time Dad walks in the dressing room and tells him: “You’d better get changed. What did I tell you?” Roger was still a bit cocky so Dad says: “Get your gear together, you’re going back home.” That night Johnny Carey goes to my Dad’s room and tells him Roger is distraught. He’s in tears. Dad told Carey that Roger would have to stand up at a team meeting next day and apologize to his team-mates and then he can stay. He did. After that, Roger became more of a team man and then he became captain.’

Gregg insists: ‘Roger Byrne, who I played against at international level, I thought was aloof until I got to know him. Some people are leaders and he was a great captain and had no fear of Matt Busby. I don’t mean fear like a schoolboy and headmaster but in the short time I knew Roger I found he asked the questions and also answered the players’ questions. The finest pointer to that was in Belgrade on the last night. The banquet went on too long and at 12 midnight Roger wrote something on a piece of paper which was passed all the way up to Matt. He had written “You promised the lads they could go out after the do. Can we go out now?” Matt nodded his head. That was Roger Byrne.’

Sandy Busby may have been convinced that Roger Byrne would one day succeed his father, but the United captain was already looking in other directions. He had met his future wife when both were studying physiotherapy, Byrne’s chosen career post-football. Joy Cooper went to school in Audenshaw, and as a teenager an uncle had taken her to Maine Road to see United, so did know a little about football pre-Roger.

‘We met as students,’ says Joy who is now remarried to James Worth, a former schoolteacher. ‘There was an intake of students and we knew one of them played football. None of us knew any names at United and City and we looked at all these chaps and thought: “Which one is it?” And we couldn’t work it out. Roger was only studying part-time and it was going to take him six years to qualify, as he only attended in the afternoons after training in the morning.

‘By the time I went to Salford in 1951 a lot of rebuilding had gone on in the town and it was becoming more affluent and a good place to live. We were able to go out more and more. At the hospital ball I went with my girlfriend who was meeting another man and he brought Roger along, so we made up a foursome. We went out and that was it. I soon finished up going to the United home matches and the local away matches, usually with Roger’s best man, John Pickles. The wives were treated as any other supporter. After the game I waited till Roger came out to the car park.’

Although many, Matt Busby and his wife Jean included, were convinced that courtship and marriage had doused many of the fires in Roger Byrne, Joy is unwilling to claim any of the credit. ‘Matt Busby always told me he was very short-tempered before he became captain, very fiery to begin with and Jean Busby said it was me that quietened him down. We were only married six months so I can’t claim any credit for that; I think it was more a matter of giving him the responsibility and him becoming responsible.’

Even after they were married, the young bride found that football was never far away. The ceremony was at St Mary’s Church, in Droylsden in June 1957, and a honeymoon was planned for Jersey. Most of the United team, as it turned out, were there and Roger played football and cricket the whole fortnight.

‘Jean and Jackie Blanchflower had been married the weekend before us and they were there on honeymoon, so it was the same for Jean,’ says Joy. ‘We met Peter McParland there [the Aston Villa player who knocked Ray Wood out in the 1957 FA Cup Final] and Jackie and Roger got on like a house on fire with him. Jean and I were not too happy, it must be said.’

Football, and Roger’s ancillary earnings that included his lively and well-read column in the Manchester Evening News, did afford the couple some luxuries. Their club house was in upmarket Urmston and they also bought a Morris Minor—‘like hen’s teeth in those days’, according to Joy—to get to and from work, the car happily tootling along at a top speed of sixty-five miles an hour and rocketing from zero to sixty in twenty-four seconds. Once, a year before Munich, it tootled in the wrong direction on an icy Wilbraham Road and careered on to a local resident’s front lawn. The occupiers, Matt and Jean Busby, woke to find the club captain and his wrecked car in their front garden, a famous piece of Manchester United folklore.

When Roger died at Munich, two days before his twentyninth birthday, Joy had been waiting at home with news of another cause for celebration—she had fallen pregnant and their first child was on the way. A boy, later christened Roger, was born in Cottage Hospital, Urmston, thirty-eight weeks after the crash.

Most of the memories of his father have come second hand from his mother and grandparents, along with old newspaper clippings and a fine and detailed biography by Iain McCartney, but Roger Jnr can also see film of the captain of the Busby Babes in action for Manchester United whenever he chooses.

Footage of that side is extremely rare, but Joy had the original film of the 1957 Cup Final defeat against Aston Villa which features as its centre-piece the Villa winger McParland’s X-certificate assault on the United goalkeeper Wood, Blanchflower’s heroics as a replacement, and the three goals. She sent it to the North West Film Archive who restored it and sent the Byrnes a tape in return.

On a modern video with freeze-frame it is possible to capture a telling moment shortly after McParland’s charge on Wood. Duncan Edwards, characteristically hitching up his shorts as he did as a prelude to any battle, is seen looking down on the prostrate Villa player, and plainly considering reprisal. It is Roger Byrne, arms spread wide, who urges calm. The rabble-rouser of the early Fifties had plainly mellowed and matured into a special leader of men.

Within twelve months, United, England, a young mother-to-be and a distraught north of England mother and father had been robbed of a man Harry Gregg is happy to describe as ‘the nicest fellow who ever walked God’s earth’.

Jessie and Bill Byrne’s grieving went on long after Munich, but according to Joy, the arrival of a grandson helped them cope.

‘Dad had great difficulty, although Mum was very strong,’ says Joy. ‘But she was bitter about fate. There was no blame to anyone, it was just that she had lost her son, her only son. Dad never did get over it. He took it extremely badly. One thing that pulled us all through was Roger, that was one thing to live for and that made a hell of a difference to all of us. We were married six months, and in all I knew him two-and-a-half years. It’s not a long time, is it? I don’t have millions of memories, but those I do have are very good.’

The bachelor Babes inevitably had more problems filling the time between training than the married men like Byrne. When the fare offered by cinemas, cafés and snooker tables of Manchester had been exhausted, one afternoon venue which earned brief popularity, particularly on a Sunday, was Ringway Airport, south of the city on the edge of the Cheshire countryside. There, a septuagenarian waitress called Amy had taken a particular shine to the young footballers, particularly Duncan Edwards. He seemed fascinated by flying and between sips of dandelion and burdock and bites of toasted crumpet ‘the big lad’, as Amy called him, would watch the planes outside take on board their passengers, taxi out to the single runway and then head upwards into the grey Manchester sky.

4 A SMALL FIELD IN GERMANY

For the majority of the Busby Babes, the first trip abroad, and their first flight, was to an international youth tournament in Zurich in May 1954. The party was led by Busby and Murphy, supported by Bert Whalley and Arthur Powell, a groundsman who was also a qualified St John’s Ambulanceman. Among the fifteen players were Edwards, Charlton, Pegg, Scanlon, Colman and Whelan. This was the nucleus of the effervescent young team who had won the FA Youth Cup for the first of five times the previous season.

Zurich was a voyage of discovery in many ways. The players had to cope with the logistics of applying for a passport for the first time, packing a suitcase to cope with the demands of a week away from home and attempt to cope with the Swiss currency. Busby had also, with a nod towards his chain-smoking staff, Powell and Murphy, warned of the penalties of attempting to bring too many packets of duty-free cigarettes back through Customs, and the perils of foreign foods.

The departure point was Ringway Airport, the forerunner of Manchester International, and named after the road close by the original site in Wythenshawe. Ringway had been opened in 1938, but it was not until 1952 that the airport began twenty-four-hour operations and by 1954 it was handling over 163,000 passengers annually. Air travel, however, remained a massive adventure outside the compass of many…and far from the magic carpet ride it is today.

The departure lounge at Ringway was adorned with vases on the window ledges and chairs with Lloydloom plastic backs and sides and, until passengers passed through the door marked Departures and stepped on to the runway tarmac, it was also exclusively all-smoking. Three civilians working in shifts manned the radar station and the method of communication between control tower and incoming and outgoing aircraft was by hand-held telephones.

On board, travellers were cosseted by bilingual air stewardesses (two languages at least were the main qualification before female airline staff were forced to look, and dress, like uniformed Barbie dolls) and in those pre-hijack days food was dished up with silver service. Inside the cabin, most aircraft used on commercial flights featured a collapsible mid-cabin table with chairs facing both fore and aft, a boon to families with children. Later, these tables were to prove just as useful to Manchester United and its enduring, and highly competitive, card school, of which Harry Gregg was the acknowledged Amarillo Slim.

The flight to any city in Europe took little longer than it does today, because in skies almost free of traffic there was no necessity to climb to altitude. The flightpaths to Europe were seldom above 5,000 feet and cabins were not pressurized. The journey gave United’s young travellers the opportunity to learn the realities of this new form of travel—that some were good fliers but others chronically bad.

Scanlon, Pegg and Colman revelled in the great adventure while Edwards, despite his schoolboyish fascination with the concept on his day trips to Ringway, found the experience terrifying. Like his captain Byrne, another notoriously bad traveller, he was well aware of the high-profile problems with the Comets of the British Overseas Aircraft Corporation which had culminated in a series of fatal crashes in 1953-54 and resulted in the loss of 111 lives in all. Much nearer home, and just eleven months before Munich, a BEA Viscount Discovery had demolished a row of houses on Shadow Moss Road in Wythenshawe on its approach to Ringway, with all twenty-seven passengers killed. These disasters, coming in the early days of commercial flights, did nothing to allay the players’ fears that this was a form of transportation to be tolerated, and occasionally feared, rather than enjoyed. Paying customers, too, plainly needed unqualified faith in pilots and groundstaff.

That first airborne adventure, however, went without a hitch and United’s week in Switzerland proved a resounding success. They began the tournament in less than convincing fashion with a 0-0 draw against FC Young Fellows, a Zurich club side, but decisive wins over Bern and Red Star earned them the silverware in resounding fashion. The Yugoslavs, in particular, simply could not handle the seventeen-year-old Edwards who had made his first-team debut twelve months earlier and who, within a year, would become a fully fledged England international. The brawny teenager, with hapless opponents bouncing off him like small-arms fire off a tank, helped himself to a hattrick. Boys against a man-boy.

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