The book opens with a haunting scene. As the Manchester United team file out onto the pitch, we find that they are not in their usual red strip. “They came out of the tunnel like a ghost train, all in white, into the Highbury afternoon gloom.” Matt Busby’s team are wearing black armbands, following the death of one of the club’s directors. In just under a week, four of the starting 11 that day would be dead.
While David Peace’s Munichs, published this month, centres on one of English sport’s worst tragedies — when, on 6 February 1958, a plane taking Manchester United back home from a European match crashed on take-off at Munich airport, leaving 23 passengers dead, including eight players — his setting is broader.
This is a story of Fifties England, regarded by the nostalgic as football’s golden age. It is also a story of modern England, a reflection on what we have lost.
These were the days when the game was dominated by clubs in the industrial heartlands of northern England and the Midlands. Wolverhampton Wanderers, one of the founding clubs in the Football League, won three titles that decade and beat some of Europe’s best in floodlit games televised by the BBC. TV ownership boomed in the coronation year of 1953, allowing the nation to watch two Lancashire clubs, Blackpool and Bolton Wanderers, contest that year’s FA Cup final. The sport of the industrial working class had become the national game and the country had never felt more united.
It was in the mid-Fifties, as “austerity Britain” turned into “modernity Britain”, that a young Manchester United team emerged to rival Wolves for glamour. The press began calling them “the Busby Babes”. When the Irish football broadcaster and former Manchester United player Eamon Dunphy first saw them as a youngster, he was struck by their “trim and dashing” modern V-necked red shirts. As he describes in his biography of Matt Busby, A Strange Kind of Glory, the Busby Babes were “unearthly, handsome creatures from another planet, more heroic than any movie star we’d seen or could imagine”. Football fans crowded grounds to see them play.
When news of the crash broke, millions followed the reports on their televisions. A stoical nation was broken. There was some initial cause for hope: Duncan Edwards, the 21-year-old shining star of the team, already capped by England 18 times, clung to life in hospital for 15 days. In Peace’s prose, sometimes sentimental, always heartfelt, Edwards was “a magnificent boy, always cheerful, always smiling, always ready for a laugh and a giggle; he was a lovely lad, and now he was gone”.
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