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

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.

3 NEAREST AND DEAREST

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.