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One Cold and Bitter Thursday

IT WAS GETTING dark as I walked down our road on my way back from school and the street lights were already on. Heavy black clouds filled the sky. ‘Good,’ I thought, ‘snow’s on its way.’ It was certainly cold enough. I was looking forward to snowball fights, to making snowmen and big long icy slides down the middle of the road. But then I thought, ‘Oh no! What’ll happen to United’s game against Wolves at Old Trafford on Saturday?’ My dad had promised me that we’d go to the match against the league leaders but it would surely be called off if there was too much snow.

At the top of the road, just after the telephone box on the corner of Greenbrow Road, there was a row of four neat little redbrick houses followed by a pair of semis. The trouble was there was a big Alsatian dog at one of the semis. I didn’t like Alsatians; I’d heard too many stories about them turning on people and biting them, and there were quite a lot of them on our part of the estate. I walked slowly to see if it was around, because I wasn’t going to walk past it if it was. Better to take a detour than risk being attacked by it. But no, the coast was clear. Maybe it was too cold for the dog to be out. I quickened my pace, almost breaking into a run to get past the dreaded house.

After the houses there was a stretch of grass that had a long row of three-storey flats backing on to it. I used to go to some of them on a Saturday morning to collect the football pools bags for church. On the other side of the road open fields stretched all the way to the Newall Green pub and to Shenton’s Farm about half a mile away. Beyond that, country lanes weaved their way into the Cheshire countryside. After years of living in inner-city Manchester, Wythenshawe was like living out in the country. It was the garden suburb that everybody in the slums of Hulme, Ancoats and Ardwick wanted to move to.

By February 1958 we’d been living in Wythenshawe for a couple of years. We’d moved from a terraced house on Grey Mare Lane not far from Bradford Pit, three doors away from my Gran Kearney’s. Apart from the green fields and the open spaces all around us in place of the chimneys and the gasometers and the pithead winding gear I’d grown up with, the biggest change for me was the smell. We’d still get the thick pea-souper fogs out here – Wythenshawe might have been on the edge of the countryside but it wasn’t far enough away from the old industrial areas with their chimneys belching out black smoke to be clear of the smog – but the air was much fresher and there were none of the foul odours of industry. Where we’d lived in Bradford was bad some days when the wind was in the wrong direction and the stink of Clayton Aniline came drifting across our back yard. On Wastdale Road, where we now lived, the smells came from Shenton’s cows when he let them out on our field and they wandered on to our road, or from the fertilizer they used on the market garden at the end of the road.

In the summer holidays we’d play all day in the fields, making dens, slinging a rope over one of the top branches of a tree to make a swing, or playing football on the pitch that had been trampled down near the scout hut. The fields were carpeted with flowers, a blaze of shining yellow buttercups and bright white daisies, and kids would go home with great armfuls of flowers for their mams. But in the winter all that open space made it feel a lot colder than it had been when we’d lived among the tightly packed terraces and factories of Bradford and Beswick.

Wearing short trousers didn’t help. A year earlier I’d passed my eleven plus and got a place at St Bede’s, one of Manchester’s Catholic grammar schools. It was the junior seminary for the Salford Diocese, run by priests with a Monsignor as the head, and the rules were strict. In the Upper Third you were not allowed to wear long trousers. Whatever the weather you had to wear shorts, which meant chapped legs for most of the winter. How was it that the cold and the rain always seemed to get up inside your trouser legs to make your legs red raw?

On the field just opposite the flats was the pond where we used to go to catch frog spawn and fish for newts in the early summer, but that day it was frozen over. There was a jagged crack and a hole near the middle where some kid must have gone through when he’d tried sliding across it. Probably got a battering from his mother for his pains when he got home, wet and muddy and shivering.

That afternoon of Thursday, 6 February 1958 it was bitterly cold, but apart from that, it was just like any other afternoon. School had been boring as usual and we’d got some of that dreaded algebra to do for homework. We’d started doing it just after Christmas and I couldn’t make head or tail of it. Neither could my mam and dad. They’d stay up for hours with me at night trying to help me with it and make sense of it, but how could you add up and multiply letters? It didn’t make sense. We were in for another long night of scratching our heads. But who cared about algebra? These were exciting times. One of Manchester’s football teams was winning the affection of the entire British nation with their skilful displays on the pitch; Manchester United was the team. In the second half of the 1950s they were the top team in Britain, and they were my team and my dad’s team, and his dad’s team before that.

The 1950s was a time when United captured the imagination of the footballing world with the fruits of their youth policy. Every other club in the country decided they wanted to get in on the act. No longer was it necessary to live by the chequebook and the transfer system when there was so much talent to be tapped in Britain’s schools. United’s manager Matt Busby was the man behind it all. In the 1930s he’d played for Liverpool and Manchester City. After the war, their ground having been wrecked in a wartime bombing raid, United needed a young manager to try to rebuild the club, and the man they appointed was Matt Busby. Within two seasons he’d won the FA Cup, beating Blackpool 4–2 in a match that is regarded as one of the greatest ever Cup Finals. Four years later, in 1952, Busby’s first United team won the league title after finishing runners-up in all but one of the previous five seasons.

But by this time the team was getting old and new faces and younger legs were needed. Busby dismantled his championship-winning side to give youth its head, and he was handsomely rewarded with back-to-back titles in 1956 and 1957. The average age of the side that won the championship in 1955/56 was just twenty-two – a feat that had never been achieved before. The following season United entered an exciting new competition pitching the champions of the national leagues from all over Europe against one another for the prize of the European Cup, and at their very first attempt United reached the semi-final. The young team Matt Busby had built seemed destined to dominate football for many years.

On Wednesday, 5 February 1958 the team had drawn 3–3 with Red Star in Belgrade, a result that took the Reds through to the European Cup semi-final for the second season on the run. Despite the efforts of that night and the long journey home from Belgrade, it looked on form as if on Saturday against Wolves the Reds would close the four-point gap at the top of the table, putting them just one victory behind Billy Wright’s side, and ready to increase their efforts for a third successive league title. For me there was no problem. Matt Busby’s Babes were invincible. I hadn’t seen them lose a match at Old Trafford since I’d started watching them two years earlier, in the 1955/56 season. I couldn’t wait for Saturday to come, and I couldn’t wait to read Tom Jackson’s report on the Red Star match in that night’s Manchester Evening News when I got home.

Along with Alf Clarke, his opposite number on the Manchester Evening Chronicle, Tom Jackson was particularly close to Matt Busby and the whole of the United team. Both of them had a column in the United programme and both were Red through and through. There was never any pretence at objective reporting, so for me their reports were great. We were an Evening News house so my main source of information about United was Tom Jackson. It was good and it was reliable, because it was very much in United’s interest to keep the reporters on the two local papers happy and make sure they had all the latest news as well as regular access to the players.

Wastdale Road was a dead end, and our house was near the end of it. Just beyond it there was a wooden fence across the end of the road, fencing off the big market garden. Beyond that on the other side of Clay Lane was the very fine-looking redbrick chimney and boiler house of Baguley Sanatorium. My dad said it was where they burned all the bits they took out of people in operations there and at Wythenshawe Hospital, which adjoined it. Over the road from our house were the white-painted old people’s bungalows and community centre of Johannesburg Gardens. In the middle was a beautifully kept lawn with a rose garden at the top of it. Our front windows were slap bang in the middle of the gardens on the other side of the road, and my dad always said there was nowhere you could live that would have a better view than we had. We’d been lucky to get a house in Wythenshawe, and even luckier to get this particular one. My mam and dad had fancied this part of Wythenshawe, and when they were on the council waiting list they’d come out to look around here and seen this one when it was being built. As soon as they saw it they decided it was the one they wanted, and they went down to the town hall to put their name down for it.

The house itself was quite funny-looking really. For a start it was in the middle of a terrace – quite unusual for a newly built house in Wythenshawe at that time – but it also had two front doors right next to each other. The proper front door had glass in it, but then there was one next to it that we called the side door. It was in a little porch which housed the dustbin and the coal hole. It was the door we always used; the front door was for visitors. I went in through the side room, where we kept the Hoover and bikes and things like my dad’s tools.

The side room led into the kitchen, at this time of the year the warmest room in the house, because as well as my mam doing the cooking we had an electric fire in there as well. One bar of the electric fire was on; two would have been a bit extravagant, a bit too expensive, and it wasn’t cold enough for that. My younger sister, Joan, was sitting at the kitchen table, crayoning. My mam was cutting potatoes up into small pieces and putting them in a big pan. Good, tater ash for tea. My favourite. As she worked she sang:

I’ll take you home again, Kathleen,

Across the ocean far and wide

To where the fields are fresh and green.

I will take you home again, Kathleen.

She stopped singing and looked at me. ‘You look perished, David,’ she said. ‘The kettle’s on. You stand in front of the fire while I make you a cup of tea.’ But all I wanted to know was had the paper boy been round to deliver the News yet. As Mam poured the tea, she asked me about school and about what homework I’d got. Had I found out how to do that algebra yet? ‘But before you start on your homework,’ she said, ‘can you light the fire in the front room in time for your dad getting back from work? It’s already set. All you need to do is put a match to it and then make sure it doesn’t go out.’

I took the matches into the front room. It was freezing in there; no central heating in those days. It was so cold that there were bits of ice on the inside of the windows, and when you breathed you could see your breath freezing in front of you. I was glad my mam had already done most of the work, laying the fire. I lit the firelighters and small flames soon started to lick around them and the coal. But it was going to need a bit of a boost. I wasn’t supposed to, but I got a sheet of newspaper from under one of the cushions and held it in front of the fire to make it draw. My dad used to light the fire like this. Sometimes it would catch fire, then there would be panic to get the paper into the fire before it fell on to the rug in front of it, so I was very careful, pulling it away at the first sign of scorching.

I sat there watching the flames licking around the coal, yellow and red with purple and blue in the middle, until I heard the paper boy. As soon as the Manchester Evening News was delivered I made a beeline for it and turned to the sports pages at the back to read Tom Jackson’s report on the match in Belgrade the day before. Under the headline ‘It May Be The Spaniards Next, But United Will Never Have A Tougher Fight Than This!’ he began with: ‘Now I’m ready to wage my last Yugoslav dinar that even though it may be the strutting Spaniards of Real Madrid who Manchester United will be set to face in the semi-final of the European Cup, they will never have a tougher fight on their hands than the one they survived here against the challenge of Red Star. Believe me.’ The report went on, ‘this match that ended with the rivals gaining three goals each and United through to the last-four stage by the barest possible goal margin on aggregate had everything to send the blood running fast through the veins’.

What a great match it must have been, and what an adventure to fly what seemed to me like halfway across the world to play a football match. Some of the players themselves, it had been reported before they left for Belgrade, felt they were taking a step into the unknown by venturing beyond the Iron Curtain. I’d read one report that said right-half Eddie Colman’s mum had been so concerned that she’d made up a food parcel for him containing fruit, biscuits and a packet of tea. I tried to imagine what it would be like to travel all that way to play football, or even just to watch it. For a lad who’d never been any further from Manchester than North Wales it all sounded very distant and exotic. But that was the thing about supporting United. It wasn’t like any other football team. In those early days of the European Cup it was all a huge romantic adventure, and I followed every episode avidly. Tom Jackson’s words really conveyed the spirit of that adventure.

How else but by sheer, at times almost desperate, determination and drive, the deafening roars of 50,000 people ringing in their ears – and some remarkably strange decisions by the Austrian referee – could Red Star have pulled back three goals and got within sight of forcing a replay? It wasn’t that the United defence cracked. It wasn’t that the forwards, brilliant in the first half, faded out of the game. To my mind the pendulum swung in Red Star’s favour directly they took full toll from a penalty kick which I’m sure nine out of ten referees wouldn’t have given.

‘Here we go again,’ I thought. ‘That’s the trouble with this European Cup. To win it you’ve not just got to beat these clever foreigners with all their tricks, you’ve got the foreign referees to contend with as well.’ From what I’d read about them they sometimes seemed to have a different rule book from the one we had. Tom Jackson confirmed this view. ‘How ironic,’ he continued, ‘that big Bill Foulkes, who had an outstanding game at right-back, should have conceded the penalty when he made what seemed to me a perfectly legitimate tackle on Red Star centre-forward Tasic. From that moment onwards the Yugoslavs were able to come back into the game with a chance of saving the match because the United players seemed dubious about going hard into the tackle in case they might be penalised further.’

I never missed reading Tom Jackson’s reports in the Evening News. It was a bit like having your mate or your mate’s dad telling you about the matches you hadn’t been to. A real Red telling you what he’d seen, and what he thought of the match. What a job it must have been, getting paid to travel all over the place to watch United and to be so well in with the club that you were almost part of it. Even better than being a train driver, and that was saying something, because that was what I really wanted to do when I grew up.

Further down the page in that night’s Evening News there was a selection of comments from the match reports that had appeared in that morning’s national newspapers. Praise for the spirit of the United players and for their performance along with criticism of the referee were the main points made by most of the football writers who’d gone with the team to report on the match. The Daily Mail said that ‘Manchester United were nearly scared into a replay by Austrian referee Karl Kainer – pronounced mud in Manchester touring circles … He would have been howled off an English ground for his niggling anti-tackling phobia.’ The Manchester Guardian described it as ‘a battle of wits and guts and rugged tackling … the Austrian referee’s performance on the whistle assumed the proportions of a flute obbligato due to the frequency with which fouls were committed by both sides’. Other papers, the Evening News said, had reported on the unbearable tension of the second half when every ounce of spirit had been wrung from United’s brave hearts and the match was described as a rough, tough tale of tempers and crazy decisions.

The Yugoslavian press had seen things very differently. ‘United were unsportsmanlike and often unscrupulous,’ Politika reported. ‘In the second half the British felled opponents in an impermissible manner. Many times we asked ourselves where was the renowned British fair play? That is only a legend. There was not a single professional trick they did not use to bring themselves out of difficult positions and were often unscrupulous when they tackled and pushed and tripped.’ I couldn’t believe those words. To me United were everything that was good about football. Attack-minded, flowing football, hard but fair – all that was best about the British game. Clearly they played football differently in other parts of the world.

We’d got used to seeing United going forward, but in this game they’d obviously been up against it in the second half. Like all true fans, though, Tom Jackson concentrated on all that had been positive about the display. ‘The real story of this full-blooded cup tie,’ he wrote, ‘is not so much how United had their backs to the wall in the second half, but how they virtually made sure of victory by an inspired forward display in the opening half. Here was the United attack in their greatest and most polished mood of the season, with Tommy Taylor the architect in chief, and the young Bobby Charlton – the best forward on the field – and Dennis Viollet the goal-snatching spearheads.’

And the defence? It was good to read in the report that they’d played brilliantly as well. ‘Those three goals against might suggest they panicked under the weight of Red Star’s heavy pressure. Not a bit of it. Gregg, Foulkes, Mark Jones and Roger Byrne never lost their heads in matching the Yugoslav forwards, who put much more bite into their play than they did in the first leg at Old Trafford. Foulkes takes top marks because he was the coolest and surest United defender all through the game.’ It was good to see Bill Foulkes getting star billing. It was usually Duncan Edwards, Roger Byrne, little Eddie Colman or one of the forwards who took the plaudits. Foulkes was as hard and solid and dependable as you’d expect of a former coal-miner, but he’d faced competition for the right-back spot and had only recently re-established himself in the team after a spell of being kept out by Ian Greaves.

Clearly it had been a good all-round team performance, another job well done in Europe. Tom Jackson summarized his report with the words, ‘That’s the story at Belgrade – a battle which will be long remembered in this European Cup which has produced so many tense and dramatic struggles for United.’

The journalists who covered United’s matches were close to the team. They flew with them to their European away matches and stayed with the team party. None were closer than Tom Jackson and Alf Clarke, and alongside his piece in the Evening News was Jackson’s interview with the captain Roger Byrne in which he gave his impressions of the match. ‘Fouls galore, but not dirty’ was his summary.

But I am confident that the way we played in Belgrade, especially in the first half, we are capable of giving the best teams left in the Cup a very good run for their money. All the United players set themselves out to win the match with Red Star. I’m sure we would have done so had not our luck been out as far as the referee was concerned, especially when he gave that penalty against us. I’m told there were 37 free kicks for fouls in the match – 26 against us and 11 conceded by Red Star. From that you might think it was a dirty game, but I wouldn’t say that, even though there were one or two instances of individuals playing the man instead of the ball. When a team is able to pull back a goal or two after trailing well behind it gives them every incentive to fight all the harder. Red Star certainly gave us a fight after our forwards had produced such grand form in getting three goals ahead. They were a much better side than in Manchester and I’ve never been more pleased to hear the final whistle than I was in this game.

What a captain, and what a team to support. United were the centre of my life, and going to Old Trafford the most important thing in it. I wouldn’t dare say it at the time, because it was probably a mortal sin, but it was even more important than going to church. ‘Roll on Saturday and Wolves,’ I thought. ‘We’ll cut that lead to two points.’ Elvis was top of the charts that week with ‘Jailhouse Rock’, but I didn’t care about that. My favourite song was the ‘Manchester United Calypso’ and I was singing it to myself as I went into the kitchen to help set the table for tea.

Manchester, Manchester United,

A bunch of bouncing Busby babes,

They deserve to be knighted.

When they’re playing in your town

Take a trip to that football ground;

Take a lesson and you will see

Football taught by Matt Busby.

Oh Manchester, Manchester United,

A bunch of bouncing Busby babes,

They deserve to be knighted.

Our little back kitchen was warm, and it got warmer as my mam opened the oven to get the tater ash out. Condensation clouded the window that looked out on to our frozen back garden. The gate-legged table was set, ready for tea as soon as my dad got in from work. He always got in just before six o’clock, regular as clockwork. He worked in the office of a cotton warehouse on Dale Street in town and always finished at five o’clock. Most lads’ dads that I knew worked in engineering works, mainly in Trafford Park, but my dad had always been a clerk in the offices of the cotton traders that still dominated the centre of Manchester. He was, however, already looking for other work. By the late 1950s Manchester’s once great cotton industry was dying, and he knew the work wasn’t going to last for long. Many of the great, solid-looking Victorian warehouses that lined Portland Street, Whitworth Street and Moseley Street were already half empty.

Wages were low because there was no longer any money in the industry that had once been the foundation of Manchester’s wealth. My dad used to get £6 a week – quite a lot less than he’d have been getting if he’d done an engineering apprenticeship after he’d left school – but my mam worked wonders on it, always managing to get a good bit of meat to make a meat and potato pie or a hot pot. And there was nearly always a pudding to follow: lovely apple pie with the lightest pastry I’ve ever tasted, or a creamy rice pudding with a thick skin on the top. Tonight was no exception, but my dad was a few minutes later than usual.

The clock on the kitchen wall above the electric fire was pointing to five to six when the side door burst open and my dad came rushing into the kitchen. It was a moment when time stood still, one that is still clearly etched on my brain fifty years later. Even now I can hear the words he blurted out.

‘United have been wiped out.’

For a few seconds I didn’t understand what he was saying. Then he went on: ‘Their plane’s crashed. It’s in the stop press of the Evening News. Get into the front room and get the news on the wireless.’

The tater ash was forgotten. All of us – me, my mam, my dad and my sister – rushed into the living room where the fire I’d lit an hour earlier was blazing, taking the chill off the room. My dad went to the big radiogram in the corner and switched on the six o’clock news on the BBC Home Service, just in time to hear the chimes of Big Ben and the newsreader say, ‘Here is the news. An airliner carrying the Manchester United football team crashed in Germany this afternoon.’ We didn’t really hear the rest of the headlines: Lord Hailsham challenging Mr Thorneycroft’s suggestion that Britain was on the road to ruin; anybody allowing dark smoke to come from chimneys would be liable for a fine of up to a hundred pounds. They were all irrelevant. They just passed over our heads until the newsreader got back to the main story.

A British European Airways charter plane carrying the Manchester United football team crashed after taking off from Munich Airport, at about three o’clock this afternoon. The weather was said to be poor at the time. BEA stated about half an hour ago that the plane was carrying a crew of six, and thirty-eight passengers – including a baby. They say they believe there are about sixteen survivors, including some of the crew. A Reuters report from Munich says that survivors include the Manchester United players Gregg, Foulkes and Charlton. Reuters says that two other survivors are Mr Peter Howard, a Daily Mail photographer, and his assistant Mr Ellyard, both from Manchester.

As the unemotional BBC voice listed all the members of the United party who had gone to Belgrade, the sports writers who were believed to be on board and others who had been booked to travel on the plane, the fact that my dad’s words were right drove home like a hammer blow. If the report was saying that Gregg, Foulkes and Charlton had survived, surely the rest of the team had been wiped out; but there was very little information at this stage, as the newsreader confirmed: ‘Those are the names of nearly all the thirty-eight passengers believed to be on board. It is not possible to say yet what has happened to most of them.’ Other than that he was able to say that the plane was an Elizabethan, that it had landed at Munich to refuel and should have arrived in Manchester about an hour ago. The Lord Mayor of Manchester, it was reported, had spoken of his deep grief at this terrible tragedy. He concluded by saying that yesterday United had drawn 3–3 with Red Star Belgrade, putting them into the European Cup semi-finals for the second season running, and that they had been without question the most successful postwar English side, before moving on quickly to the next item about the Commons debating an Opposition motion attacking the Government’s industrial and social policies.

We didn’t want to know about the rest of the news. Not interested. My dad went over to the radiogram and switched it off. We were in a state of shock. It was as if we’d just been told that members of our own family had been killed in a terrible accident. You felt you knew all of those players. They brought us joy and pleasure and excitement on the football field every week; the sense of loss was indescribable. But more than that, there was a sense of disbelief. It was hard to comprehend what we’d just heard; it couldn’t have happened; but if it was on the BBC it had to be true.

We trooped back into the kitchen in silence. I was in tears as my mam served the tater ash. Good as it was, no one had any appetite for it, nor for the apple pie she’d made to follow it.

We wanted to know more. We were desperate for more details. But what we’d heard on the six o’clock news was all we were going to get that evening; no more information, and nowhere to get any. By this time the paper shop over the fields at Greenbrow Road shops was shut, and even if it hadn’t been it wouldn’t have had the late city editions of the News or the Chron. We didn’t have a television, but for those who did, there was no more on the six o’clock television news than there had been on the radio. Coverage then was a far cry from the rolling channels and live satellite feeds of today.

Everybody who was in Manchester at that time remembers the moment when they first heard the news. My wife’s cousin, Mary Morris, was living in Chorlton on Medlock, not far from the city centre. ‘I remember it was snowing, very cold that afternoon,’ she told me.

I’d just come in from school, and at the time my mam used to have the couch in the middle of the room in front of an open fire we used to have in them days. It was always there lit when we got in from school. My brother James was already in and he was sitting there in front of the fire. My mam had made a cup of tea because it was cold, and she was upstairs changing the bed, ready to do the washing the next day. It was about ten past or quarter past four and we both sat down with the television on and all of a sudden the programme was interrupted with a news flash saying news had just come in that the plane carrying Manchester United had crashed. I remember getting up straight away and running to the bottom of the stairs, shouting to tell my mam. So she left what she was doing upstairs and came down. Then we sat there, the three of us, just listening to different things that were coming through about what actually happened. When my dad came in he said, ‘I know, it’s all over town, everyone’s talking about it.’ So all four of us just sat there and we couldn’t say anything. I don’t even think we had our tea because it was just so much of a shock.

Norman Williams was one of the real diehards who had been watching United since the 1935–36 season. He was at home in Droylsden when he first heard the news. He was a postman but he was off work because he’d broken his leg while on his way to Highbury to watch United the previous Saturday. ‘I was reclining in my