The victory against Bilbao the previous season had been a classic of resolution and pressure evenly distributed over a game which required a 3–0 victory, and against Real Madrid we had absorbed the barbs of di Stefano, Kopa and Gento and finished the game, having clawed two goals back, pressing into the howling expectations of the Stretford End. Such recollections brought Dennis and me to another point of agreement: we were as keen as mustard to get back to England and carry on the battle.
When we landed in Munich the weather was as bad as I had ever seen it on my football travels; beneath the low clouds the sky was filled with snowflakes, and when we landed we saw there were six or seven inches of slush on the runway. However, we were assured that we would be on our way soon enough. While we had coffee in the terminal, the plane would be routinely refuelled along with everything else that needed to be done, both to the aircraft and the runway. It was nothing to do with us; our job was to play football, not debate the value of de-icing procedures or safe levels of runway slush.
The mood of the team was still happy, even bubbly, as we returned to the plane. If we had any fears they had only to do with the possibilities of delay and missing the Hardaker deadline. The airline had a job to do, they had to get us home. We had done our work for the time being.
Travelling was not pleasant in those days before the jet engine. Everything seemed to take so long, and sometimes it seemed as though you might be in the sky forever. It was also true, as I mentioned earlier, that I never enjoyed the Elizabethan aircraft. It always felt as if it was too heavy for its own good, an impression heightened by the fact that it seemed to take far too long to climb into its flight path. However, for me, and I think most of the party, there was no point of concern until after the second aborted take-off. Then the mood dipped, not in any dramatic way but quite perceptibly; certainly conversation became less chirpy and the card players were less absorbed by their game. Frank Swift, the former Manchester City and England goalkeeper, who was now a football reporter for the News of the World, demanded to know what was going on, and was told that there was a small technical problem that was being sorted out. I just assumed that there was a shortage of power, and that it was something they were working on and were determined to get perfectly right before we took off.
After a brief second coffee break in the terminal, we returned to the plane hurriedly and to assurances that everything was now fine; our home journey to Manchester would proceed without any further interruption. The issue of de-icing and clearing away the slush from the runway would later be key elements of the inquiry into what had gone wrong, along with captain James Thain’s attempts to prove that he had behaved in a perfectly professional way. For most of us in the passenger seats, however, it was still a simple matter beyond our control: the airline and airport people would make sure everything was safe.
In opening this account of my life I felt there was no alternative but to go straight to the tragedy of Munich, and so already I have touched on the salient points of the disaster, and the unshakeable emotional impact they had for me on all that would follow, down to this day – but perhaps what I haven’t so far conveyed is my sense of separation from the sickening events that unfolded so starkly. In so many ways I was part of the horror, but I was also, in the strangest way, detached; it was almost as if I was disembodied, a silent, traumatised participant in a terrible dream I could neither act in, nor escape from.
When I was first aware that there really was a problem, when the Elizabethan, even by its own standards seemed to have been roaring down the runway for an eternity, I was conscious of the quiet in the plane and that neither Dennis Viollet nor I had uttered a word since we had started on the take-off. As we went through a fence and collided with a house, I didn’t hear the semblance of a scream. There had been just a vast and empty silence in the plane. I suppose we were in shock; overwhelmed with disbelief, certainly. What could we do? We were strapped in our seats and everything was happening out of our control. The pilot was in charge. What I did was something that I suppose came instinctively: I bent my head down and braced myself for the impact. The last thing I remember, before coming round away from the plane, was the terrible rending noise of metal on metal.
Why had it happened? Was it an engine fault? It seemed to me that the slush had neutralised the power of the plane. Random thoughts and questions came in and out of my head. The pilot had been so determined to get us into the air, and in the end he couldn’t do it. Why was it so important to go off into that blizzard? Because Matt Busby had to fulfil a deadline set by the Football League?
The Old Man, we know, suffered the most terrible regrets, blaming himself for what happened, and only came back to the game, wounded, almost broken, after the fierce persuasion of his wife and all those who were closest to him. We all knew that Manchester United had become his life, and who among that group of cheery, indestructible young men who had a few hours earlier boarded the plane in Belgrade, would have questioned his instinct to take us all on the great adventure. Certainly not me as I took off my overcoat and laid it across him as he groaned in pain on the wet tarmac.
Though I had not seen the condition of my dearest friends on the team, Duncan, Eddie and David Pegg, I knew by now that there had been terrible losses. In the snow I saw one team-mate who was obviously dead, and someone told me that Roger Byrne had gone. He was said to have joked, thinly, when the plane had made its third take-off attempt. ‘It’s now or never,’ he had muttered, but if he had one of his terrible premonitions it had apparently not shown on his face.
There was smoke and grit in the cold air and a blare of sirens, and sitting beside me, having been pulled out of the seat in which, like me, he had been thrown away from the plane, Dennis Viollet was drifting in and out of consciousness. My team-mates Harry Gregg and Bill Foulkes, however, stayed conscious from start to finish, and maybe this is why, when you look at the picture of them after they played their first match after the tragedy, their eyes are far away and they are so distant from their new team-mates in a victory that had been drenched with the deepest feelings it was a possible for a football side and their fans to share.
Later, Harry Gregg said that I had been unconscious for about ten minutes, which explained why I was unaware of how I had got away from the burning wreckage, and the parts Harry and Bill had played in those first minutes following the crash. I was still dazed when Harry helped me into the minibus which rushed us through the Munich streets to the hospital. The rest of the night was pain and anger and disbelief, and that emotional eruption of mine when I thought the hospital orderly was treating so lightly the fact that our entire world had come tumbling down in a few catastrophic seconds. The injection that put me to sleep merely took me that much closer to the moment of terrible realisation that the horror would never go away.
When I awoke, the German boy reading from the newspaper, listing the dead, brought back the pounding questions that I would never be able to answer properly, the ones that asked, ‘How could I survive that? How could anyone survive? Why did I survive?’
I had a sudden desire to get in touch with home, let everybody know that I was still alive, even though that fact had been reported in every morning newspaper. I sent a message through the British embassy, saying that not only was I alive, I was without serious injuries.
Harry Gregg and Bill Foulkes came to my bedside before leaving for Manchester, and when they went away I shrank from thinking about what they faced: the funerals, the mourning, the feeling that a great city had stopped dead, and then the need to train and prepare for their next game whenever it came. I wasn’t ready for any of that, and this was confirmed when Jimmy Murphy arrived at the hospital with a full report. The newspapers had been kept away from us, but you can keep reality at bay only for so long. I found myself staring into a mirror and asking the question which would become so familiar down the days and the weeks and the years, ‘How the hell is it possible to come through all that with just a bang on the head and a small
cut?’
There was never an instinct to try to put Munich out of mind, to say that it was something terribly sad but had to be relegated to the past because how else could you deal with the present and the future? Munich was just too big, too overpowering, to permit that kind of reaction. It was something that you knew, right from the start, you had to learn to live with. It was a reality that was reinforced with every account of a funeral, every description by Jimmy Murphy of how it was at Old Trafford with the people milling around the ground.
Jimmy, typically, was the strongest presence in those days when the Old Man was surviving only with the help of an oxygen tent. He said that we had to fight for our existence – and the memory of the team-mates we had lost. He had been through a war when men had to live with the loss of so many comrades, had to fight on through the suffering and live with what was left to them. It was the same now at Manchester United, Jimmy insisted. But then later I heard that it was just a front that Jimmy put on. One day he was discovered in a back corridor of the hospital, sobbing his heart out in pain at the loss of so many young players he had adored for their talent and who he loved like sons.
Very soon it was clear that Jimmy Murphy, and everyone else at the club, needed one thing to happen more than anything. They needed another match, some sense of continuity, some belief that, however haltingly, the club was moving forward from the worst of the grief. For several days I had pushed away the idea of returning to Manchester, of picking up again the challenge of playing football, but now I felt a few stirrings, partly inspired by the courage of Harry Gregg and Bill Foulkes, partly by the fact that before I left the hospital I was able to walk up the stairs and see both Duncan and the Old Man. Both of them were so ill that it was obvious we were in danger of losing them. To lose one would be the most terrible blow; to lose both, unthinkable. Something had to be done. Their work could not be allowed just to slide away – though saying that seemed a lot easier than dredging up the effort and the will to begin the job.
When my mother and Jack collected me at the docks in Harwich, I certainly felt a sense of relief that they were taking me not to Manchester but to the North East, where I could have respite, however brief, from the challenge of facing all the new realities of United’s life and my own. Once home, I saw friends, I took some walks, and one day a photographer caught me kicking a ball in the street with some of the local kids. The worst moment was when my mother came into my room and said, ‘Duncan Edwards died, son.’
I could hardly bear it. When I’d first arrived in Manchester I’d been helped so much by my fellow players. Two of them, Eddie Colman and David Pegg, were now gone, but it had been Duncan, everyone’s great young hero, who had made a point of looking after me. In the army he had made that effort to find me a comfortable mattress, and that was just the opening statement of his friendship. One day he gave me one of his shirts, saying it fitted him a little tightly, but I suspect he had noted what passed for my wardrobe. Most important of all for a young lad who in many ways off the field wasn’t as sure of himself as he tried to pretend, he gave me his attention.
He was fantastic and I loved him.
At the time of the accident he was just beginning to think of settling down with his girlfriend, Molly Leech. There was talk of marriage and I’m sure it would have happened quite quickly.
I went to see Duncan’s mother Sarah a few years ago, shortly before she died. She was a fine, tough lady. She had known tragedy before she lost Duncan: a baby daughter had died at fourteen weeks. There was a report that she had suffered a burglary at her house in Dudley, in Worcester-shire, and when I drove down there I was amazed to see how strong she was. She told me how she had found a strange man in her house and was so incensed that she wanted to fight him. I could see Duncan in her as her eyes blazed with anger as she told me the story. Years earlier I had stood with her when they unveiled a statue to Duncan in Dudley, and the local vicar declared, ‘Talent and genius we will see again, but there will only ever be one Duncan Edwards.’ I could only murmur, ‘Amen.’
I took it so hard when my mother broke the news that he had died because, even though he was in terrible pain in Munich, and the doctors were not optimistic, I had had a sense that he might just make it. All the sadness flooded back when, many years after the accident, a surgeon told me that with modern technology, coupled with his fighting heart, there was no doubt that his life would have been saved.
Down the years I have tried to keep in touch with the relatives of those I was closest to at the time of the crash, particularly Sarah Edwards and the mothers of David Pegg and Eddie Colman. I also talked with Roger Byrne’s wife Joy, a very strong woman who seemed so well matched with the man I admired so much from that certain distance. I went to the Colman house in Archie Street, and in that place where I had spent so many happy hours I was overwhelmed by sadness. Eddie’s father Dick was suffering terribly and he told me that at the heart of all the pain was the fact that in Munich there had initially been some confusion in the identification of bodies. This was distressing, but here at least there was some reassurance when Eddie’s body finally came home. His pet dog had waited each day on the corner of the street, but when the coffin finally arrived he immediately ran to sit beside it.
In the North East I was shielded from the emotion that was being publicly expressed in every street and pub and corner shop in Manchester, but of course there was no protection against my own memories. I was trying to heal my feelings, and get some grasp on what happened, among my own people. I made several visits to our local doctor and I did talk with him about how I felt, but there was no truth in a report, attributed to him, that I had said I would never play football again.
The most crucial development in my recovery to the point where I felt I could play again, run out in the red shirt of Manchester United, came when the club was required to play its first game after the accident, an FA Cup fourth round tie against Sheffield Wednesday at Old Trafford. I was in a local pub with my father and a few of the lads when I realised I had to be at the match. I asked my uncle Tommy Skinner, the only member of our family to own a car, if he would drive me down. He agreed straight away. In those days, in that part of the world, you shared everything with your family – a pig, vegetables from the allotment, a car. It was a long drive down to Manchester on those old roads and I don’t suppose I was the best conversationalist, but I didn’t have to make excuses to Uncle Tommy.
The confusion before the game about who would play against Wednesday was so deep that the match programme was printed with a blank page where the United team should have been. The club had been granted special dispensation to make emergency signings, and Jimmy Murphy had invested in two of the elements he considered most vital to a successful team … some craft and some iron in defence. The craft was supplied by little Ernie Taylor, the Blackpool and England inside forward who had acted as such a brilliant manservant to Stanley Matthews in the 1953 cup final. For the hard-tackling, Jimmy opted for the extremely tough Stan Crowther, a member of the Aston Villa defence who had torn away our chance of the Double.
The emotion in and around Old Trafford was so extraordinary that, among all your other reactions, you had to feel a little sympathy for the Wednesday players. They were suddenly the team almost everyone in football wanted to see beaten.
I went into the dressing room before the game and the scene that greeted me was overwhelming. Harry Gregg and Bill Foulkes were there and, with the exception of Shay Brennan and the new recruits, they were surrounded by kids from not only the reserves but also the third team – boys like Bobby Harrop, Reg Hunter and Reg Holland who had been bumped up into the squad, although they didn’t actually play in the match. None of them would go on to have famous careers, but they had this one incredible moment in football history, and I could see on their faces as I gave each of them a hug that they were utterly committed to proving that they had every right to be at this famous club.
Shay, who was a wing half at the time, played
forward and scored two goals. When they went in you wondered if Old Trafford might be split apart by the great tide of cheers. As the night wore on, as the emotion kept hitting new levels, I said to Uncle Tommy, ‘Well, this is ridiculous, me going back to the North East from here.’ For a moment, I thought, ‘No, I’ll not go back, I will not budge from Manchester,’ but then I thought it would be better if I did return home for a couple of days. I did have some things to do there: I had to collect some clothes and I had to thank my family and all my people for the support they had given me at such a terrible time.
After the game I told Jimmy Murphy, ‘I have to come back – I’ll be here in a couple of days.’ Jimmy said the timing was up to me, but he gave me a hug and he gave me the impression he was very pleased. For me it was as though at least some of the pressure had lifted from my shoulders, and that perhaps the worst of the pain had lessened, at least to a small degree. I knew what I had to do; I had to start playing at the first possible opportunity now. I was also lucky that I could join in a crusade that took on even greater significance, given the unlikelihood that our reduced strength would enable a realistic pursuit of a third straight league title: we could make a run at the FA Cup.
The media attention was a help. It put football back into the equation. It said, in effect, that victory over Sheffield Wednesday could indeed be the starting point of recovery. Nothing then in English football was so romantic as the FA Cup; you could play quite peerlessly from August to the end of April, but if you slipped up in the old tournament you were denied a place in the last drama of the season; like the rest of the nation you had to watch the final on those small, grey television screens.
There was one great relief for me as I returned to the challenge of football. It was that I had missed the funerals of all my friends. I say this, and it is something I have thought about many times, because I just don’t think I could have coped with my feelings in a public setting. Maybe it was my youth, maybe my nature, but I have never, not one day since the tragedy happened, lost my respect for what Harry Gregg and Bill Foulkes managed to achieve in the minutes and the days and then the weeks and the months that came after.
My Manchester United Years: The Autobiography Page 14