IT WAS a slaughter of the innocents. The biblical analogy stubbornly
persists even now, as you think of those eight young men called Busby Babes
losing their lives at the end of a slushy runway in Munich on February 6,
1958. Other more mature men, fathers,
grandfathers, hardened journalists, and experienced travellers had their
lives snuffed out as well, as Flight 609 bound for Manchester failed to take
off and slammed into a house, killing 23 people on board.
Yet disasters etch particular images on the memory, and the sense of a
cradle of flowering talent being inexplicably destroyed superimposes itself
on any other emotion to this day. As the news spread we became shrouded in
that deep sense of incomprehension, pain and anger which we were to
experience over and over again in the five decades since, in the wake of the
assassination of John Kennedy, the killing of John Lennon, the slaying of
Martin Luther King and the destruction of the Twin Towers. Such experiences
fail to inure you though. Each one is a fresh trauma, for which you can
never be prepared, even in an era in which terrorist atrocities are almost
expected. It was United's tragedy though which first seemed to evoke that
aura of spontaneous national mourning which greatly transcended the official
two minute silences held throughout the land afterwards. For in their
youthful exuberance, their success, the part they had played in proving that
an audacious youth development scheme was indeed the blueprint for the
future for succeeding
generations, they had seemed Olympian and invulnerable.
Like no other major domestic catastrophe that had gone before, this event
seemed to drum out a message of the fragility of life, that nature could
bestow magical gifts with the one hand and take them away so cavalierly with
the other. For there had been major incidents in the weeks before Munich.
Two months previously an aircraft had come down on the Isle of Wight on
November 15, 1957, killing 40
passengers. Even worse, there had been a major rail accident at Lewisham on
4 December, 1957, the statistics for which still stagger 90 killed and 173
seriously injured. Callous though it might now sound, these were distant
statistical horrors to many of us.
But United were part of our known culture, working-class lads who had made
good in the people's game. They were family in that sense, just kids. The
average age of the side who won the title in 1955/56 was 22; the youngest to
achieve that. They were all of the highest quality but some showed a
potential to become icons. I saw Duncan Edwards play once, striding through
the game like a young giant, squarely built, but with a delicacy of touch
and a simple self-belief, suggesting he could become the greatest of them
all. Then I flinched watching a 20-year-old Bobby Charlton, on his debut for
England at Hampden in 1958, scoring with a ferocious volley at the Mount
Florida end, which seemed in itself the harbinger of greatness, in their 4-0
thrashing of Scotland.
In the last league game before their ill-fated journey, Arsenal had scored
four goals against them. But they had scored five themselves. They clung to
a simple credo. Score more than your opponents. Their statement of the
obvious was to attack, and then attack. Even bitter opponents admired their
youthful swank. They were beginning to seem unstoppable.
That evening, as the news of the accident became clearer, we picked through
the details of the acknowledged mortalities and the rumours of survivors as
if we were looking for a relative who might have been on the passenger
inventory. Who had survived and who hadn't? United had chartered an aircraft
to take them to, and then return from, a drawn 3-3 game against Red Star
Belgrade, which saw them through 5-4 on aggregate. They stopped at Munich to
refuel. The weather was foul. Snow had fallen. Captain James Thain attempted
twice to take off and on the first run had his fingers bruised by co-pilot
Ken Rayment reaching to slam on the brakes as acceleration was not
sufficient.
After a short break in the
terminal for the passengers, they tried for a third time. The same
procedures were followed and the aircraft gathered speed.
Here are the last recorded words of Rayment as they approached the end of
the runway. "Christ, we won't make it!" They look absurdly mundane in print
until you put it into the context of men who knew exactly what that meant.
The plane crashed into a fence, then slewing crazily around, slammed into an
unoccupied house, the fusillage, wings and engine parting company in a
succession of impacts. Thain survived. Rayment did not, and was the last of
the fatalities, dying of brain injuries in a German hospital three weeks
later.
My father, who had played
football with Matt Busby in the army team organised by the great man when he
was billeted in
Edinburgh, sat up through the night after hearing the news, sipping cups of
tea, waiting to hear about "Poor Matt". We heard he was still living, but
barely. They were to read the last rites twice to the manager, but the
Bellshill man miraculously pulled through after two months in
hospital. Bobby Charlton and
Dennis Violet survived. They had swapped seats just before take-off with
Tommy Taylor and David Pegg. Taylor and Pegg died instantly. So did Geoff
Bent, Roger Byrne, Eddie Coleman, Mark Jones and Liam Whelan. Duncan
Edwards, brutally injured, defied death for 15 days then succumbed in
hospital. In our minds we seemed to fight that
battle with him, but we all lost.
Amongst the eight journalists who died inside the aircraft was Frank Swift,
former Manchester City and England goalkeeper who had the biggest pair of
hands in the history of the English game. But, even though this popular
giant had been cruelly felled, the media tended to focus, perhaps
understandably, on what they had to assume was the ending of a noble dream,
and who, on that night, was to blame, if anybody.
The Germans rushed out a report holding pilot Thain responsible, for having
overlooked the gathering of ice on the wings. It took him 10 years to clear
his name and for an official British inquiry to conclude on June 10, 1969,
"...our considered view is that the cause of the accident was slush on the
runway". It was that, not ice on the wings, which caused a fatal
deceleration of the engines. It is a verdict the German authorities have
never accepted.
But what was beyond dispute is that the British public did grow tired of the
technicalities of blame and began to marvel at the resilience of this club,
which although they were to win only one league game thereafter that season,
did reach the final of the FA Cup, only to be beaten 2-0 by Bolton
Wanderers. The rebirth of United, and the winning of the European Cup 10
years later, was a triumph of the human spirit. Nothing could compensate,
though, for the catastrophe in Munich. One possible future was snuffed out.
Its replacement has been glorious but never extinguishes the thought of how
much greater it might have been.
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