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The Lost Babes: Manchester United and the Forgotten Victims of Munich
Jeff Connor
A moving story of how a legendary football team was lost to tragedy – and how this disaster irrevocably altered the lives of the survivors and the bereaved families, and ultimately brought shame on the biggest football club in the world.The Manchester United team Matt Busby had built in the fifties from the club's successful youth policy seemed destined to dominate football for many years. Such was the power of the ‘Busby Babes’ that they seemed invincible. The average age of the side which won the Championship in 1955-56 was just 22, the youngest ever to achieve such a feat. A year later, when they were Champions again, nothing, it seemed, would prevent this gifted young team from reigning for the next decade.But then came 6 February 1958, the day that eight Manchester United players died on a German airfield in the 'Munich Air Disaster' – a date to be forever etched in the annals of sporting tragedy.Duncan Edwards, Eddie Colman, Tommy Taylor, Roger Byrne…the names were already enshrined in legend before the air crash, but Munich in many ways earned them immortality. They have never grown old.Jeff Connor traces the rise of the greatest Manchester United side of all time, alongside a vibrant portrait of England in the 1950s, but he also paints a dark picture of a club that enriched itself on the myth of Munich while neglecting the families of the dead and the surviving players. The repercussions and the toll the disaster took on so many linger to the present day.Drawing on extensive interviews with the Munich victims and players of that era, The Lost Babes is the definitive account of British football's golden age, a poignant story of the protracted effects of loss and a remorseless dissection of the how the richest football club in the world turned its back on its own players and their families.
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 (#u5dd41261-3e87-54dd-a088-c0c30c116ea6)
Title Page (#u4032b55c-1d61-56b0-8ecf-bb0100229371)
Dedication (#uc23d9114-415d-5860-b1e3-2ce15d2a3b16)
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS (#ue1359193-f3ef-584f-ba79-10c0270e2dd7)
INTRODUCTION (#u66d67af7-1859-5e07-a8b1-949b98779b4d)
1: THE FLOWERS OF MANCHESTER (#u71f053e6-203b-531f-91f8-b2d6f9ecf0da)
2: BLOODY KIDS (#u22ffa57b-8d2b-5b94-90af-e93df70b347c)
3: NEAREST AND DEAREST (#ue087800f-2502-598e-be20-3b0f92a9b04a)
4: A SMALL FIELD IN GERMANY (#u89a7ca29-88ab-5fec-a141-006d3d2ec805)
5: DUBLIN’S FAIR LIAM (#litres_trial_promo)
6: DUNCANVILLE (#litres_trial_promo)
7: WHITE ROSES, RED CARNATIONS (#litres_trial_promo)
8: THE KNIGHTS’ TALE (#litres_trial_promo)
9: OUT OF SIGHT, OUT OF MIND (#litres_trial_promo)
10: FORTY-YEARS ON (#litres_trial_promo)
11: ERIC THE READIES (#litres_trial_promo)
12: THE TROUBLE WITH HARRY (#litres_trial_promo)
EPILOGUE (#litres_trial_promo)
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS (#litres_trial_promo)
Praise (#litres_trial_promo)
INDEX (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS (#ulink_1ed3587c-4ed9-5ba5-8307-0a47ff616f69)
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 (#ulink_627f0c00-9e97-5137-aa65-57df77b3d342)
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 (#ulink_530fa364-8557-5f7d-84b5-0cb79351f82f)
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 (#ulink_1e5ac2fc-2a5e-5126-88df-55cc538e7e43)
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.
