Tragedy to triumph
How one man helped rebuild United’s empire
From my boyhood, Manchester United were my team. I had the Evening Chronicle Football Pink – the edition that came out on Saturday nights – sent to boarding school so that we could chortle over Alf Clarke’s lurid match reports. He had covered United for years (after 25, they gave him a gold watch) and was supposed to have turned out for them once, when they were a man short at Grimsby.
Untrue, of course, but when, 10 years later, I found myself on the same sports staff, he still held the goalscoring record, set decades earlier, for the Manchester Wednesday League, and he had recoined the nickname Red Devils. He was big-bellied, pipe-puffing, out-of-date but undeniable.
Then, one afternoon in February 1958, I was subbing features for the Pink and a phone rang. The sports editor leaned across me to answer. It was Alf in Munich, reporting delays to their plane coming home. Within 30 minutes, he was dead, along with half the team and a generation of great northern football writers. Ten days later, I was given his job.
Sixty years is a long time, and attitudes were different. If you have just lived through a war, even as a schoolboy, you know time to weep is short, and its point is to stiffen purpose for the future. The Victorian Methodist dignity of United’s chairman Harold Hardman embodied that attitude.
We told ourselves United would recover because their football policies were correct. The dead would be honoured by a similar magic. The man who created the magical cocoon around United – one which got the remaining members of the team through that season – was Jimmy Murphy, the assistant to Sir Matt Busby, who at that point was not guaranteed to
Jimmy’s hand was in his pocket – on his rosary, I am sure – as he recited the names of the dead
survive his own injuries. Me and my Manchester Evening News oppo, David Meek, were fortunate enough to inhabit that cocoon.
We had access to buses, training sometimes, and boardroom hospitality. We knew more than we could print and were quizzed by other journalists.
We were both compromised and privileged. Of course, journalists had travelled with northern teams since the earliest days of covert professionalism. If there was a difference for us, it came in the peculiarly tragic circumstances United found themselves in, the fact that David and I were the same age as the players and Murphy’s comic paranoia about pressmen.
When he returned from visiting the Munich hospital, he was cornered by a posse of reporters.
“What’s your next move?” they demanded.
“My next move?” came the barked reply. “I’m going to p--over you!”
Not for him Busby’s mastery of spin. Yet Murphy could count a best friend among the dead journalists and greatly admired our Chronicle columnist Arthur Walmsley. On our first away trip, he brooded alone on the bus but at the hotel asked me to sit up with him. Over whisky and sugar and hot water our long friendship began.
Murphy was short, Welsh and cigarette-voiced, a doodling pianist with a rich family life. He had gentleness beneath the fire, and his genius as a coach was to make good ideas second nature. “Don’t look up before you shoot,” he told Bobby Charlton, “just put your foot through the ball.” So, goalkeepers never could predict the swerve.
What Murphy imposed was discipline, not tactical systems – although later, at the 1958 World Cup, he was to devise a masterly one for Wales. He knew that, win or lose, his makeshift United had to play the way they were used to.
He took them to Blackpool and kept them concentrated, and was helped by the fact that, of the 22 games United played after Munich, more than half were away. He persuaded them that they were still Manchester United, and it was that attitude which got them to the Cup final. Throughout this time, work had to carry on much as before.
At Old Trafford, we had direct lines to office copy-takers. On the road, phone calls for early team news would be booked to our rooms and, at the stadiums, there were hire arrangements. At Aston Villa, the hirer was missing and my phone rang in a locked box; in
Milan, for the postponed European Cup semi-final, I was offered, for a consideration to an Italian official, a phone that the Sunday Pictorial had booked but not used. I spent our phone money on a mohair suit.
Is it any wonder that what one remembers is not really football details but the people? Full-back Bill Foulkes and his Italian tailor in Soho; the youth team insideforward, Mark “Pancho” Pearson, taking our money at three card brag; the grin of centre-forward Alex Dawson; Omo and Daz, the Old Trafford laundry ladies, and Mrs Burgess, who brought cups of tea to Jimmy’s office.
Then there was Bobby calling outside-left Albert Scanlon, who came back from Munich with a flat cap over his head bandage, “the Secret Service” because he could suss out a foreign hotel in 20 minutes. I ghosted Bobby’s newspaper articles, which showed all the acuity that later saw him urge the hiring of Alex Ferguson.
There were so many other tales to tell – of theatre trips, Shirley Bassey concerts, the wrestling at Blackpool Tower, Fred Goodwin and Ian Greaves – ex-first teamers who lost their places to the Babes, singing TV jingles as the bus went down Euston Road – Jimmy showing me how to commit a nasty foul, and the brilliant Dennis Viollet clocking it and saying “naughty!”
And then Jimmy again, watching from the directors’ box, suddenly worried and appearing in the tunnel and shouting at Jack Crompton, United’s former goalkeeper who had returned to replace trainer Tom Curry, who had been killed in Munich, “Jack! Jack! They’re getting strung out!” It was a bubble, of course, and could not last, but there were moments to remember from that Cup run.
Before they beat Sheffield Wednesday in the fifth round – in the first game after the crash – Jimmy said: “Play hard for yourselves, for the lads who are dead, and for the great name of Manchester United …” Then he broke down and they went in silence to the bus.
In the quarter-final against West Bromwich Albion, they got the ball over the United line but Greaves hooked it out and nothing was given. On Cup final day itself, in hot sunshine, I remember the bus trundling down Euston Road. This time, Goodwin and Greaves did not sing their jingles. And then it was all over. Bolton beat them at Wembley and a fortnight later they were thrashed in the European Cup semi-final away leg in Milan.
The morning before we left to return home, Jimmy wanted to see Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last
Supper. He pulled me aside at the hotel and said: “Come on. I’ve asked the concierge the way,” and we hopped on a tram. As we stared at it, Jimmy’s hand was in his pocket, on his rosary I am sure, as he rehearsed the names of the dead.
As a signal to leave, he murmured: “All right, my old pal?”
All right, Jim. Once again, I wrote this for you.