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

The discontent on the terraces, as it has at every football club since in similar dire situations, became more and more strident. Pressure groups organized the distribution of leaflets outside the ground demanding a new manager, an improved scouting system and new signings. And, as at every football club since, the board ignored all the entreaties and insisted they would go their own way. By the last game of the season, a 4-4 draw with Middlesbrough, most of the support had had enough and only 3,900 were scattered around a stadium that had become a sporting necropolis. In that disastrous season, Manchester United had lost twenty-seven matches, won seven and conceded 115 goals. The board finally decided that enough was enough.

The hapless manager, Herbert Bamlett, a former football league referee who went to work in a bowler hat, was summarily dismissed and secretary Walter Crickmer and chief scout Louis Rocca took over the running of the team. But the damage was almost irreversible and by the end of the 1930-31 season the club was virtually bankrupt. It was clear a miracle, and a miracle worker, was required.

Matt Busby is often cast in the role of the saviour of Old Trafford, the figure who managed to turn brackish water into splendid red wine, but even he would later admit that the recovery was begun, and sustained, by a local businessman, James Gibson. Gibson, who had made his money in refrigeration storage and knitwear, had been introduced to Crickmer by Rocca, the ubiquitous figure who was officially the club’s chief talent-spotter, but a man with power and influence at the club, too.

On 21 December 1931, the club secretary, who did not drive, caught a bus out to posh Hale Barns in leafy Cheshire to meet Gibson at his home. The potential benefactor had a Christmas gift that the incredulous Crickmer could hardly refuse: £2,000 to be placed at the club’s disposal immediately and more funds available if the board would reconstitute itself. He would also guarantee the wages of a group of increasingly discontented employees—£8 a week for the first team and fifteen shillings a week for the part-timers and ground staff—and act as guarantor for the club’s liabilities. When Crickmer hesitatingly asked what Gibson expected in return for this largesse, the answer was gratifyingly little: he should be elected president and chairman of the new board of directors with immediate effect. Apart from that, nothing, not even repayment of the debt.

Gibson was not, however, the boardroom posturer we have come to associate with so many football clubs, and this shrewd and far-sighted man got to work on the revival of the club at once. He proposed a new issue of ‘Patron’s Tickets’—an early form of debentures—to raise funds, and although the response to the scheme was lukewarm, it was enough for the new chairman to commit even more of his own funds to the cause. On the playing side, Crickmer and Rocca were able to return to their regular duties when Gibson appointed Scott Duncan as manager and, after escaping relegation in 1933-34, the long climb back to respectability began.

Duncan, a Scot from Dumbarton who wore a carnation in his buttonhole and travelled to work in white spats, seldom left his office, but after a shaky start he proved a canny operator and delegator and the following season, 1934-35, United finished fifth in the league, then put together a nineteen-match unbeaten run at the end of the 1935-36 season to earn promotion back to Division One.

Off the field, Duncan made two of the most significant signings in the club’s pre-war history with a classy insideforward called Stan Pearson joining them in 1936 and a barnstorming, confrontational striker, Jack Rowley, arriving a year later. Pearson, a local boy from Salford, was seventeen when he made his United debut and over the next seventeen years was regarded as the brains of a side that won, under Busby’s management, the FA Cup in 1948 and the First Division title in 1952.

Rowley, known as Gunner as much for his service as an anti-tank operator in the South Staffordshire Regiment during the war as his ferocious striking of a leather caseball (a club record thirty-nine goals in that championship-winning season of 1951-52), had slipped through the net of Major Frank Buckley at his home-town club Wolverhampton Wanderers, but made an indelible mark at Old Trafford with a robust and aggressive approach to the game and life in general. Old Trafford apprentices learned to live in fear of Rowley’s frequent outbursts and even Busby was to have problems with the player’s volatile temperament.

Gibson and Crickmer, meanwhile, had been building bedrock for the club that would sustain it for many years to come. Impressed by the fact that talent such as Pearson’s could be found virtually on the doorstep, and for no outlay, they continued to evolve their pre-war brainchild, the Manchester United Junior Athletic Club, to develop youth football. The MUJAC became the forerunner of one of world football’s most productive and renowned nurseries.

There were other significant advances that served future managers. Despite debts of over £25,000, United splashed out again by agreeing a tenancy at the Old Broughton Rangers rugby ground close to Manchester racecourse in Higher Broughton, a ground that was later re-christened The Cliff and became the club’s famous training headquarters for the next five decades. Fans, too, benefited from Gibson’s diligence and far-sightedness as the chairman lobbied the local Stretford MP to have trains stop on match days at the tiny Old Trafford halt on the London Midland line out of Central Station, and had steps built up from the platform to the ground itself.

Gibson, a man who perhaps deserves a more fitting memorial than the small plaque on the railway bridge above the Old Trafford station, was a shrewd operator. The last year of the war was spent trying to persuade the Government to grant the club finance to redevelop and rebuild the ground after the bombing of 1941 and a licence was finally granted in November 1944. Gibson, who had a number of friends in high places, also managed to spark a debate at the highest level, with a motion put forward in the House of Commons that clubs affected by the war should be granted financial support. Ten clubs, including United, were in need of rebuilding work because of war damage, but it wasn’t until three years after Busby’s arrival that the club was granted £17,478 to rebuild the ground. The new manager, working in the main from offices in the cold storage plant owned by the chairman at Cornbrook, two miles north of the ground close to Chester Road, could now concentrate on another kind of rebuilding.

When Busby, and his volatile assistant Jimmy Murphy, arrived at Manchester United the club was a microcosm of the city, and Britain as a whole: insolvent, derelict and with a workforce whose best years had been lost to war. The Old Trafford dressing rooms were in a shabby Nissen hut where the south stand once stood and the ground’s training area a patch of hard-packed shale behind the Stretford End. Grass grew on the terraces, there were no floodlights and for the next four years home games had to be played at Maine Road, the ground of Manchester City. In those desperate, derelict days this was not the heresy it may seem now as Busby had played for United’s cross-town rivals and many of his players had grown up in City-supporting families on the blue side of Manchester. Nor was it an act of charity, City struck a hard bargain, demanding ten per cent of the gate receipts in an agreement signed in June 1941.

The players who came back from the war, arriving in most cases straight from demob, had lost six years of their careers and their footballing skills were in a similar state of decay to their home ground’s redundant stands.

Centre-half Allenby Chilton was a case in point. The raw-boned ex-miner had been bought, from Seaham Colliery in Co Durham, as a twenty year old in 1938 and made his debut against Charlton Athletic on 2 September the following year. A day later war was declared. Within a month Chilton had enlisted in the Durham Light Infantry where he served with distinction, twice being wounded in the fighting in France after the Normandy landings. When he arrived back at Old Trafford, he was close to thirty and his best days were over.

The other players Busby was to consider the nucleus of his side—captain Johnny Carey, Pearson, Rowley, Charlie Mitten and Johnny Morris—were all in their mid-to-late-twenties, too, and their service to Old Trafford in the future also had to be looked on as short term. Fortunately for United, every other football club in the country, and every other player, was in a similar state of disrepair. Many post-war careers were to be prolonged by dint of performing on a level playing field.

The post-war team inherited by Busby was reassuringly ordinary; the players were celebrities, but celebrities with the common touch. Many of them were married, lived in terraced houses close to the ground and few had cars. Gunner Rowley was one of the first on four wheels, buying a four-cylinder, six-seater, Flying Standard—top speed seventy miles an hour—for £300. The wing-halfs John Aston and Henry Cockburn bought a car between them. Chilton and Carey, the captain, travelled by public transport. Carey, like Roger Byrne later, was Busby’s on-field alter ego, a figure of quiet authority respected by management and team-mates alike. Strictly Catholic and teetotal, and an astute, moral individual, his obvious leadership qualities led Busby to appoint him captain at a time when some still had reservations about his playing ability. The Dubliner, who had signed for £200 from one of the city’s nursery clubs, St James’s Gate, in November 1936, was Busby’s original all-purpose player. The manager was to become noted for his willingness to try established players in different positions, using the precedents set in his own playing days. Both he and Murphy had resurrected floundering playing careers when switched from their original inside-forward positions, where invariably they had to play with back to ball, to wing-half, where the whole playing field lay in front. Carey was to perform in ten positions for United—including a game in goal—but it was as a calm, assured right-back that he was to make his name. So composed was the United captain that it was said he never got his shorts dirty. Of numerous other beneficiaries of Busby’s willingness to experiment, Chilton had been a wing-half originally, full-back John Aston an inside-forward. Bill Foulkes was a full-back before moving to the centre of defence and Byrne moved from the wing to full-back. Alongside Busby, Chelsea’s former head tinkerer Claudio Ranieri appears a model of selectoral consistency.

Carey lived close by Longford Park, bordered by King’s Road and Wilbraham Road a mile-and-a-half south of the ground, and an area that was soon a sort of mid-market ghetto for United players and management. The Irishman burned peat in the fireplace of his home at 13 Sark Road, and many of the groundstaff boys at that time can recall earning a few extra shillings for cleaning out the captain’s grate, a task, using only a wire brush, which matched the restoration of the Augean stables and which would sometimes take two or three days.

He travelled to work by bus, the other passengers soon becoming immune to the patrician-like figure seated on the top deck puffing away at his pipe. Sightings of Carey and pipe on a bus became commonplace in Manchester and at one time the number of United fans who claimed to have travelled to work with the club captain equated to the several million allegedly at the Eintracht Frankfurt v Real Madrid match at Hampden Park, Glasgow, in 1960, Jim Laker’s nineteen-wicket Test at Old Trafford cricket ground in 1956 and England’s Wembley World Cup win ten years later.

As a neutral, Carey could have sat out the war when hostilities broke out in 1939 but instead enlisted with the Queen’s Royal Hussars, joining several thousand of his countrymen like the rebel-rousing, folk-singing Clancy brothers, Paddy and Tom, in the fight against a greater enemy. Carey always argued that ‘a country that pays me my living is certainly worth fighting for’.

Carey ruled by democracy, leading by example on the field and, off it, prepared to let others have their say. He was well aware that that first great United side contained enough leaders and characters in their own right, notably the gifted England wing Charlie Mitten, Rowley and, in particular, Chilton. Contributions from the captain were often superfluous.

Chilton, the sort of traditional, no-nonsense stopper endemic to every Busby team, and with his square shoulders and centre-parted hair the face of a thousand cigarette cards, did much of the motivational work in the dressing room. In Busby’s early days, and after a run of poor form and even poorer results, the manager had gathered his side for a midweek pep-talk. Busby had prepared his speech well, but as he began, Chilton turned to him abruptly and said: ‘Just sit down and keep quiet. I’ll do the talking. It’s our win bonuses on the line here.’ Busby did as he was ordered, Chilton spoke, the others listened and the rot was stopped.

Initially at least, the manager had his favourites. He played golf with Carey and Morris, another dangerously outspoken character and a man who at one time considered a career as a professional golfer after a falling out and a subsequent transfer listing by Busby. Busby also relished the skills of Mitten, one of the most gifted wingers of his, or any other, generation but also cursed with an impish and headstrong streak that was to lead to his downfall. Busby adored him, and so did the Old Trafford fans beguiled by his eccentricities and occasional foibles. As the side’s leading penalty-taker Mitten would often invite a goalkeeper to point in the direction he wanted him to strike the ball and he would then oblige by sending the ball that way with the goalkeeper powerless. But Mitten was unorthodox off the field too, and after the 1948 FA Cup win accepted a £10,000 signing-on fee and a wage of £60 a week to play alongside Alfredo di Stefano for Santa Fe in Colombia, a country outside the FIFA umbrella. The transaction was carried out in typical Charlie fashion as he not only failed to inform manager or team-mates but also his wife, Betty, who had booked a family holiday in Scarborough. Mitten went to South America, saw out his contract there and came home to find himself suspended. Busby, as he had promised when Mitten first set sail on his South American adventure, unloaded him, at a profit of £20,000, to Fulham.

Busby’s first great United side was to provide him with a blueprint for the next, a mixture of cost-nothing locals and former apprentices, alongside one or two shrewd buy-ins, notably the Scot Jimmy Delaney. Delaney, who had won a Scottish Cup medal with Celtic in 1937, was a fragile-looking wing originally reviled as ‘Old Brittle Bones’ because of his frequent injuries. It cost Busby £4,000 to persuade Celtic to part with the player in 1946, all but £500 of which he recouped four years later when Delaney went back over the border to Aberdeen: this was the sort of business in which the parsimonious Busby delighted. As for Delaney, he was to have the last laugh on those terrace critics who had questioned his longevity, winning a third winner’s medal—seventeen years after his first—with Derry City in the Irish FA Cup Final of 1954.

Delaney was Busby’s first outright cash signing and provided him with a tutorial in football management…that the occasional shrewd buy mixed with home-grown talent equated to fiscal commonsense.

There were other lessons to be discovered by the young manager, and not just about training regimes and tactics. With so many strong-willed characters, some not much younger than himself, Busby all too often found himself teetering on the line between friendship and the autocracy demanded of a successful administrator. It was a situation he determined never to put himself in again and before long, if players had a grievance they voiced it to Carey, or later Byrne, who would pass it on to the manager. Busby’s ability to distance himself from his players when it suited him was to become a hallmark of his long reign. He was also not afraid to unload any potential trouble makers in the ranks, the ‘barrack room lawyers’ as he called them. Faced with a players’ demand for improved bonuses following the 1948 FA Cup Final, Busby met the rebels at the neutral ground of the Kardomah Café just off Piccadilly in the centre of Manchester. After ten minutes of reasoning in that calm, mellifluous brogue, the rebels capitulated. Within twelve months Morris, one of the ringleaders, had been moved on. Many more players of independent mind were to follow him out of the Old Trafford door over the next two decades.

That 1947-48 season proved to be a landmark year for United. Not only did they have permission to begin the work that would eventually enable them to move back to Old Trafford, but the FA Cup win was to be the first major honour under the chairmanship of the indulgent Gibson and the ever-improving stewardship of Busby.

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.