BIRTH OF THE BUSBY BABES
Incredible story of a waterlogged pitch in Wales where many of United’s finest took their first strides towards immortality
Des Green says he will never forget how the opposition’s 17-year-old captain scored a penalty in front of 3,000 spectators.
‘Mark Jones stepped up, bounced the ball a couple of times, put it down and without any backlift — and they were heavy balls then — hammered it into the net.’
Green, 82, takes a wistful moment to summarise the events on that red letter day almost a lifetime ago: ‘It was men against boys, really. They were faster, stronger and more skilful than us.’
As the 60th anniversary of the Munich air disaster approaches, the story of the destruction of perhaps the most concentrated flowering of talent english football has seen — the Manchester United side known as the ‘Busby Babes’ — will be told again and again.
eight players and three backroom staff were among those who died in the tragedy. Others were maimed beyond repair. The record shows that their last game took place on February 5, 1958, the day before the crash: a european Cup quarterfinal against red star in Belgrade, from which they were flying home, triumphant.
A dream died in the slush on that Munich runway. But when did the Babes begin to emerge? One date and location is as unexpected as it is compelling.
Today, the upper rhondda valley in south Wales is a place of peace and beauty. The coal mines that once dominated the landscape are long closed, their spoil heaps merged into the surrounding mountains. But people there don’t forget their heritage.
One relic from that time of grinding heavy industry is the football pitch at Cae Mawr, in the former pit community of Treorchy. In recent years the markings have been turned through 90 degrees to accommodate a new Co-op supermarket. But, this week, the field is as waterlogged and muddy as it was that day when United came to town on May 15, 1951.
United’s first great post-war manager, sir Matt Busby, did not care for the term ‘Busby Babes’. He knew it detracted from the pivotal roles of others, none more so than his faithful right-hand man Jimmy Murphy, a coach of genius who identified and nurtured the boys who could step up to Busby’s first team and drive it to glory.
Murphy came from Pentre, the next village down the valley from Treorchy. His father had emigrated from Ireland to work in the collieries. Murphy was not destined for the pits. His school reports describe him as an excellent student who ‘talks too much’. The boy also played the piano well. But what Murphy really excelled at was football. A wiry, tough wing half, he turned professional with West Bromwich Albion and played in the 1935 FA Cup final.
Then the war came. Murphy spent years in the north African desert and southern Italy with the royal Artillery. While his army service effectively ended his playing career, it led to a chance meeting which would change not only his life but the future of english football.
sgt Major Matt Busby came across the Welshman giving a pep talk to soldiers before an exhibition match in Bari. He was so impressed that upon his appointment to manage United later that year, Busby made Murphy his chief coach — ‘the first and most important signing I ever made’.
For the first ten years of their partnership, Murphy did not deal with the first team. His task was to develop the juniors. And so it was that the local-boy-made-good brought his unheralded prodigies to the upper rhondda to play a Pentre Boys Club select XI.
Thousands flocked to Cae Mawr. some of them even imagined the well-regarded Pentre team could give the boys from Manchester a close match. And why not? This was the Babes a little way from the cusp of greatness. Before they were even known as the Babes.
United had yet to win a post-war championship. The inaugural FA Youth Cup, a competition which Murphy’s teams would dominate for the first five seasons, would take place the following year. Duncan edwards and Bobby Charlton, the two greatest Babes, were still at school. The cataclysm of Munich was almost seven years away. Yet the nucleus was there.
AT HIs home in suburban stockport, Jimmy Murphy Jnr keeps an archive of material related to his father. Among the papers he has a copy of the Pentre match programme — price threepence — and the team photograph from that day, taken from a local newspaper cutting.
Given what was to befall a number of those present, these souvenirs have come to possess a tremendous poignancy. But they also confirm Murphy snr’s ability to assemble and develop a brilliant cadre of youth.
Times have changed. Of today’s United squad, only Jesse Lingard and Marcus rashford are regulars who came through the ranks.
In contrast, all but one of the 11 teenagers Murphy took to south Wales in 1951 — the centre forward ‘T richie’ who destroyed Pentre that day is the exception — would go on to play for the United first team or had already done so.
The match squad amassed more than 1700 senior appearances between them, seven of them winning championship medals in 1955-56. One would help lift the european Cup 17 years later. There are two more sobering statistics you cannot ignore: six of the boys you see in the photograph above — Jones, Jackie Blanchflower, ray Wood, Geoff Bent, Dennis Viollet and Bill Foulkes — would be on the plane at Munich. so too was the trainer Bert Whalley. Of these, three would be killed and another would never play again.
But in 1951 the idea of United flying to play a competitive match abroad was the stuff of dreams.
Des Green was a reserve that day. That he and three other Pentre players missed out was the cause of some discord among the Welsh lads before the game. United had asked for a quartet of promising local boys from other parts of south Wales to be allowed to turn out for Pentre. The pragmatist and talent scout supreme Murphy wanted to run the rule over them.
The souvenir programme is more diplomatic. It reads: ‘Much goodhumoured argument and banter regarding the quality of local footballers and those of Manchester have resulted in this visit of Jimmy’s prodigies. We are sure that if there is a close game, Jimmy will be as
These boys went on to play 1,700 games for United
Ask Murphy about Edwards and he would start to cry
proud as the rest of us.’ Only the game wasn’t remotely close. United’s youngsters ran out 9-1 winners.
Handwritten notes on Jimmy Jnr’s archive programme suggest Richie scored five, Blanchflower got two. Jones got his penalty and Viollet the other. Even the Pentre reply was a United own goal, scored by Foulkes, himself a parttime collier. ‘The pitch then, and now, was always heavy and muddy, but it didn’t make any difference to United,’ recalls Green. ‘They were in a different class but there was no shame in that.’
Afterwards, the Rhondda Leader reported a ‘handsome dinner’ was prepared and served at the Boys Club back in Pentre by the ladies’ committee. That night the Green family gave bedspace to Wood, Jones and Viollet.
The next day United went home, leaving as a gift some of the leather footballs they’d brought from Manchester. Pentre skipper Ken Poole was offered a trial at Old Trafford. Murphy Jnr used to holiday every summer in Pentre, where a blue plaque was unveiled at his father’s childhood home in 2009.
The Murphy home in Manchester in the 1950s was a semi-detached in College Road, Whalley Range, walking distance from Old Trafford. Most United staff lived in modest circumstances in suburban south Manchester rather than the Cheshire palaces of today.
‘Our house was owned by the club,’ Jimmy recalls. ‘If the roof leaked you phoned United and they sent someone round to fix it.
‘Every few years, they would redecorate it for you. It wasn’t bad but it wasn’t luxury. There were six children and a tiny kitchen.’
It was also the hub of a new footballing universe.
Visitors to College Road included future first-team stars Bobby Charlton and Wilf McGuinness — who would also manage United — John Doherty and Freddie Goodwin, who was a member of the ’56 and ’57 championship-winning sides.
Jeff Whitefoot, who played against Pentre, stayed with the Murphy family the night before his record-breaking United first-team debut, aged 16 years and 105 days.
‘Dad was tough and decisive. It took him five minutes to decide whether someone was good enough. His notes were written on cigarette packets and he had no time for coaching badges,’ says Murphy Jnr. ‘But his young players were considered to be part of our family and he was a father figure to so many of them.’
His father was not on the plane at Munich because he was also the manager of Wales who had a World Cup qualifying play-off against Israel at Ninian Park, Cardiff, on the day of the Belgrade game.
Murphy Snr only heard about the crash from his weeping secretary when he arrived back at Old Trafford, elated from the Welsh victory. His son recalls: ‘I was 15, just home from school and in the kitchen with my mother when the news came on the radio. Mum shouted, instinctively, “Oh God, your father!” and I said, “No Mum, he’s with the Welsh team”.’
His father flew out to Munich where he met the survivors in hospital. Among them was the grievously injured Edwards, the team’s 21-year-old colossus and the only player who made Charlton feel ‘inadequate’. Emerging from a semi-coma, Edwards turned to Murphy and asked: ‘What time is kick-off, Jimmy?’ He died 15 days after the crash.
All three United juniors who stayed at Green’s house in Pentre were on the plane. Wood and Viollet survived but Jones, the Yorkshire miner’s son with the hammer-blow penalty style, was killed.
Another member of United’s Pentre team, full back Bent, also died, as did the trainer and great friend of Murphy, Bert Whalley.
Blanchflower survived, but was too seriously injured to play again. Foulkes climbed from the wreckage to become one of the cornerstones upon which Busby and Murphy built a new United, winning the European Cup alongside fellow survivor Charlton in 1968.
Murphy retired in 1971, when United took another team back to Pentre, but continued to scout for the club until his death in 1989. His son maintains close links with the club. Aged 75, he doesn’t often go to Old Trafford, preferring to watch United’s youth and reserve teams play in the less crowded Carrington training centre, where the Jimmy Murphy Centre was opened in 2012.
There is a plaque there bearing a quote from Sir Bobby which says: ‘I learnt a lot from Matt Busby and Alf Ramsey, but everything I ever achieved in football, I owed to one man only, Jimmy Murphy — he got to my guts, he was simply sensational.’
Murphy Jnr says: ‘Sometimes someone of a certain age will call out as I pass, “Hey Jimmy, get stuck in!” because that’s what my dad used to shout to his players.
‘He would have loved Paul Scholes because he put a foot in. But his favourite player, without a shadow of a doubt, was Duncan Edwards. Dad would not talk about Munich with us. But if you asked him about Edwards he would start to cry. That is what Dad felt about him.’
Jimmy and Pamela, his wife of 52 years, will be at the Huddersfield game today when the Munich anniversary is officially marked.
Last Tuesday he and United’s assistant academy director Tony Whelan visited Yorkshire to pay their respects at the graves of the three Babes killed at Munich who hailed from the other side of the Pennines: Tommy Taylor, Jones and David Pegg. Next Sunday he will be present at the unveiling of a blue plaque at the former home in Stretford of United trainer Tom Curry, another Munich victim.
Jimmy was invited to Carrington yesterday to give a talk about his dad to the academy players and staff. His main message was: ‘Work hard and make the most of this wonderful opportunity, you never know what’s around the corner.’
He mentions Alick Jeffrey, a Doncaster Rovers starlet whom his father likened to Pele and was set to join United when he suffered a serious leg break in 1956 playing for an England youth side. ‘Don’t weep for me, think of those lads in Munich,’ Jeffrey said later. ‘If I hadn’t broken my leg, I’d probably have been on that plane.’
Another ‘what if’ was Bobby Noble, the young United full back who won a championship medal alongside Charlton, Law and Best, only to have his career ended at 21 by a car crash.
But dwarfing all these individual examples of promise unfulfilled is that of the Babes. By Munich the team had already achieved great feats, but there could have been so many more. A waterlogged pitch in the upper Rhondda is where some of them took their first giant strides towards immortality.