The Lost Babes: Manchester United and the Forgotten Victims of Munich

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.