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

3 NEAREST AND DEAREST (#ulink_8a49ab3a-e8bf-5280-9452-08863d02aa39)

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.