The new paperback edition of a book dedicated to Jimmy Murphy, who began Manchester United’s rebuild after the Munich disaster, is reviewed by Eric Brown…
BY ERIC BROWN
On February 6, 1958, I returned home as usual from an uneventful day at school to discover my mother waiting anxiously on the doorstep of our terraced house.
Before I had even opened the front gate, she shouted: “Come in quickly, Manchester United’s plane has crashed.”
That was how I first heard news of Britain’s worst team disaster, in Munich, where the aircraft carrying United’s party home from a European Cup tie with Red Star Belgrade had crashed on takeoff.
The stop-over disaster on a snowy Munich runway not only decimated First Division champions United but also England’s international team and the upper echelons of English football journalism.
Captain Roger Byrne, forward Tommy Taylor and dynamic wing-half Duncan Edwards were cruelly lost to England’s forthcoming World Cup bid less than five months away in Sweden.
Edwards, just 21, would surely have also played in the 1962 World Cup and claimed a winner’s medal in 1966. He still features regularly when senior football buffs are asked to name their “best-ever” England XI.
Edwards’ United colleagues Geoff Bent, Eddie Coleman, Mark Jones, David Pegg and Liam Whelan also died, along with Walter Crickmer, Tom Curry and Herbert Whalley of United’s backroom staff.
Journalists who perished were Tom Jackson (Manchester Evening News), George Follows (Daily Herald), Archie Ledbrooke (Daily Mirror), Henry Rose (Daily Express), H. D. Davies (Manchester Guardian), Alf Clarke (Manchester Evening Chronicle) and Frank Swift, the former England goalkeeper representing the News of the World.
Tears mingled with Manchester rain and flowed freely into city gutters as funeral followed funeral for weeks.
Realisation dawned that the “Busby Babes” must be reconstructed. The first faltering steps were taken at an Old Trafford still reeling from their losses, even as manager Matt Busby lay fighting for his life in a Munich hospital oxygen tent.
Specially relaxed transfer regulations allowed Busby’s assistant Jimmy Murphy to begin the repair job by signing tricky inside forward Ernie Taylor from Blackpool. Stan Crowther arrived from Aston Villa two hours before an FA Cup tie with Sheffield Wednesday. He had already played in the competition for Villa, but United received special dispensation to select him.
Later, corn-haired Albert Quixall arrived from Sheffield Wednesday and David Herd from Arsenal, while Murphy promoted young players to regular team places such as crash survivor Bobby Charlton.
Murphy missed the ill-fated trip to perform clashing managerial duties with Wales and returned to Old Trafford unaware that the team he and Busby built had been destroyed. His heroic solo role at the helm while Busby gradually recovered was absolutely vital to re-establishing United as a major force. Just how he accomplished this is revealed in a new paperback edition of “Manchester United 1958-68: Rising from the Wreckage.”
Murphy kept a patched-up United ticking over until, rejoined by Busby, the trio of Denis Law, George Best and Charlton inspired United to further glories. The repair job climaxed with a fine European Cup win over Benfica at Wembley in 1968, which concluded with Busby and Charlton in a tearful embrace as they recalled fallen colleagues.
Those 10 years from the destructive slush of a Munich runway to European euphoria at Wembley are recalled in minute detail by Iain McCartney, author of several Manchester United books and for more than 30 years the head of Manchester United Collectors Club.
As chief of the club’s Graves Society, he located over 800 previously “forgotten” graves of United players and officials.
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