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

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.

According to the manager’s son, ‘In his early days Roger was a handful, an awkward bugger. He didn’t like playing at outside left, he wasn’t happy at all and at one time even asked for a transfer.

‘On the end-of-season tour of America in 1952 things got even worse. United played against a team of kickers from Mexico and Dad tells them, “These fellas will try and get you riled but just ignore it, walk away.” In the first five minutes Roger gets kicked up in the air and he whacks the next one who comes near him. Off he goes. At half-time Dad walks in the dressing room and tells him: “You’d better get changed. What did I tell you?” Roger was still a bit cocky so Dad says: “Get your gear together, you’re going back home.” That night Johnny Carey goes to my Dad’s room and tells him Roger is distraught. He’s in tears. Dad told Carey that Roger would have to stand up at a team meeting next day and apologize to his team-mates and then he can stay. He did. After that, Roger became more of a team man and then he became captain.’

Gregg insists: ‘Roger Byrne, who I played against at international level, I thought was aloof until I got to know him. Some people are leaders and he was a great captain and had no fear of Matt Busby. I don’t mean fear like a schoolboy and headmaster but in the short time I knew Roger I found he asked the questions and also answered the players’ questions. The finest pointer to that was in Belgrade on the last night. The banquet went on too long and at 12 midnight Roger wrote something on a piece of paper which was passed all the way up to Matt. He had written “You promised the lads they could go out after the do. Can we go out now?” Matt nodded his head. That was Roger Byrne.’

Sandy Busby may have been convinced that Roger Byrne would one day succeed his father, but the United captain was already looking in other directions. He had met his future wife when both were studying physiotherapy, Byrne’s chosen career post-football. Joy Cooper went to school in Audenshaw, and as a teenager an uncle had taken her to Maine Road to see United, so did know a little about football pre-Roger.

‘We met as students,’ says Joy who is now remarried to James Worth, a former schoolteacher. ‘There was an intake of students and we knew one of them played football. None of us knew any names at United and City and we looked at all these chaps and thought: “Which one is it?” And we couldn’t work it out. Roger was only studying part-time and it was going to take him six years to qualify, as he only attended in the afternoons after training in the morning.

‘By the time I went to Salford in 1951 a lot of rebuilding had gone on in the town and it was becoming more affluent and a good place to live. We were able to go out more and more. At the hospital ball I went with my girlfriend who was meeting another man and he brought Roger along, so we made up a foursome. We went out and that was it. I soon finished up going to the United home matches and the local away matches, usually with Roger’s best man, John Pickles. The wives were treated as any other supporter. After the game I waited till Roger came out to the car park.’

Although many, Matt Busby and his wife Jean included, were convinced that courtship and marriage had doused many of the fires in Roger Byrne, Joy is unwilling to claim any of the credit. ‘Matt Busby always told me he was very short-tempered before he became captain, very fiery to begin with and Jean Busby said it was me that quietened him down. We were only married six months so I can’t claim any credit for that; I think it was more a matter of giving him the responsibility and him becoming responsible.’

Even after they were married, the young bride found that football was never far away. The ceremony was at St Mary’s Church, in Droylsden in June 1957, and a honeymoon was planned for Jersey. Most of the United team, as it turned out, were there and Roger played football and cricket the whole fortnight.

‘Jean and Jackie Blanchflower had been married the weekend before us and they were there on honeymoon, so it was the same for Jean,’ says Joy. ‘We met Peter McParland there [the Aston Villa player who knocked Ray Wood out in the 1957 FA Cup Final] and Jackie and Roger got on like a house on fire with him. Jean and I were not too happy, it must be said.’

Football, and Roger’s ancillary earnings that included his lively and well-read column in the Manchester Evening News, did afford the couple some luxuries. Their club house was in upmarket Urmston and they also bought a Morris Minor—‘like hen’s teeth in those days’, according to Joy—to get to and from work, the car happily tootling along at a top speed of sixty-five miles an hour and rocketing from zero to sixty in twenty-four seconds. Once, a year before Munich, it tootled in the wrong direction on an icy Wilbraham Road and careered on to a local resident’s front lawn. The occupiers, Matt and Jean Busby, woke to find the club captain and his wrecked car in their front garden, a famous piece of Manchester United folklore.

When Roger died at Munich, two days before his twentyninth birthday, Joy had been waiting at home with news of another cause for celebration—she had fallen pregnant and their first child was on the way. A boy, later christened Roger, was born in Cottage Hospital, Urmston, thirty-eight weeks after the crash.

Most of the memories of his father have come second hand from his mother and grandparents, along with old newspaper clippings and a fine and detailed biography by Iain McCartney, but Roger Jnr can also see film of the captain of the Busby Babes in action for Manchester United whenever he chooses.

Footage of that side is extremely rare, but Joy had the original film of the 1957 Cup Final defeat against Aston Villa which features as its centre-piece the Villa winger McParland’s X-certificate assault on the United goalkeeper Wood, Blanchflower’s heroics as a replacement, and the three goals. She sent it to the North West Film Archive who restored it and sent the Byrnes a tape in return.

On a modern video with freeze-frame it is possible to capture a telling moment shortly after McParland’s charge on Wood. Duncan Edwards, characteristically hitching up his shorts as he did as a prelude to any battle, is seen looking down on the prostrate Villa player, and plainly considering reprisal. It is Roger Byrne, arms spread wide, who urges calm. The rabble-rouser of the early Fifties had plainly mellowed and matured into a special leader of men.

Within twelve months, United, England, a young mother-to-be and a distraught north of England mother and father had been robbed of a man Harry Gregg is happy to describe as ‘the nicest fellow who ever walked God’s earth’.

Jessie and Bill Byrne’s grieving went on long after Munich, but according to Joy, the arrival of a grandson helped them cope.

‘Dad had great difficulty, although Mum was very strong,’ says Joy. ‘But she was bitter about fate. There was no blame to anyone, it was just that she had lost her son, her only son. Dad never did get over it. He took it extremely badly. One thing that pulled us all through was Roger, that was one thing to live for and that made a hell of a difference to all of us. We were married six months, and in all I knew him two-and-a-half years. It’s not a long time, is it? I don’t have millions of memories, but those I do have are very good.’

The bachelor Babes inevitably had more problems filling the time between training than the married men like Byrne. When the fare offered by cinemas, cafés and snooker tables of Manchester had been exhausted, one afternoon venue which earned brief popularity, particularly on a Sunday, was Ringway Airport, south of the city on the edge of the Cheshire countryside. There, a septuagenarian waitress called Amy had taken a particular shine to the young footballers, particularly Duncan Edwards. He seemed fascinated by flying and between sips of dandelion and burdock and bites of toasted crumpet ‘the big lad’, as Amy called him, would watch the planes outside take on board their passengers, taxi out to the single runway and then head upwards into the grey Manchester sky.