The groups passed each other almost precisely where I stood with the Chans. The children clutched their Manchester United plastic bags containing junior toothbrushes decorated with the logo of Vodafone, Ryan Giggs pencil sets, David Beckham keyrings and Roy Keane posters and stopped and stood still all at once; the suits marched past, hands in pockets, without breaking stride. It was an allegorical moment and a tableau that could be seen as a pertinent illustration of the Manchester United of today: its immutable history, corporate indifference to that history, massive worldwide fanbase, and purposeful beguilement of the very young.
Afterwards, a man about my own age, eyes still wet with tears, shook my hand and thanked me for coming, for all the world like the senior relative at a funeral service. Another complained that there had been no representative of the club, and no wreath from the plc, at the ceremony. I could have explained, but didn’t, that by then I had realized one thing about Manchester United—and by Manchester United I mean the faceless grandees located somewhere behind the glass round the corner and not the intangibility that is a football club—and that is that they prefer to confront Munich and its legacy on their own terms.
By 6 pm, when I vacated the Red Café and a plastic chair with the name of Scholes stencilled across its backrest to begin the long walk back up Matt Busby Way to the station, all the bouquets, wreaths and other mementoes had been removed. The mourning, seemingly, had been officially terminated.
Our little ritual had, as always, been mirrored elsewhere. In Belgrade, surviving members of Red Star’s 1958 generation, including captain Rajko Mitic and Lazar Tasic, who scored twice in the European Cup quarter-final against United, gathered in the club museum at the Marakana stadium to pay tribute to ‘Mancester Junajteda’. Mitic made a moving speech to laud rivals of so long ago, the British Consul was there and a letter was ceremoniously read out from Old Trafford director Sir Bobby Charlton, who could not attend: ‘This is indeed a sad day for both our clubs and I very much wished to be with you…to remember those who perished on that tragic day forty-five years ago. Unfortunately, circumstances have prevented me from travelling. On behalf of Manchester United Football Club, I send you our very best wishes and our thoughts are with you all.’
On a bitingly cold wet day in Dudley, the Black Country birthplace of Duncan Edwards, fresh flowers had appeared alongside those now withered and faded and a new collection of soaked red-and-white scarves and hats decorated the player’s black marble headstone at the town’s main cemetery on Stourbridge Road. Similar tributes appeared at the resting-places of the other seven lost players in various parts of Manchester, Salford, Doncaster and Barnsley.
The Whelan family, as always, met by Liam’s grave in Glasnevin Cemetery where forty-five years previously over 20,000 Dubliners—including the six-year-old future Taoiseach Bertie Ahern—had gathered to say farewell in an extraordinary outpouring of emotion; and in Munich, close to the site of the tragedy at the village of Kirchtrudering, the trough below the carved wooden figure of Christ had been planted with fresh flowers.
I had also learned by then that, for some, annual remembrance is never enough and that the wounds of loss that have lingered for almost half a century will never heal. June Barker, widow of the genial, warm-hearted centre-half Mark Jones, has been remarried for over thirty years, but says now: ‘Mark is buried just down the road from where we live in Barnsley and I can go and see him when I want, which is two or three times a week. On 6 February I am not fit to talk to, so I go with some flowers and just sit there a while. I’m not ever going to forget him.’
In nearby Doncaster, Irene Beevers, the sister of David Pegg, visits her brother at Adwickle-Street Cemetery every other week. And every other week for the last forty-six years she has found a single, fresh, red flower—usually a rose, sometimes a carnation—in the perforated holder at the base of the grave, placed there by someone with their own reasons to remember a boy who lived, and died, in a different lifetime.
Irene Beevers has never found out who, or why.
Manchester and its battered citizens came blinking back to daylight after May 1945, to find a city, and thousands of lives, altered irrevocably by war. As one of the largest industrialized conurbations in Europe, both Manchester and its twin across the River Irwell, Salford, were inevitable targets for German bombing raids and took a fearful pounding. The onslaught may not have been as prolonged as the London Blitz, but Manchester’s teeming terraced ghettoes stretched almost as far as the city centre and the Germans could hardly miss. On the night of Sunday 22 December 1940 alone, German bombers dropped 272 tons of high explosives and over 1,000 incendiary bombs on the two cities over a twenty-four-hour period. There was another, shorter, sortie the following night and in all, the two raids destroyed thirty acres within a mile of Manchester Town Hall, damaged 50,000 houses in the city and erased some of the city’s most famous landmarks, including the Free Trade Hall and the Victoria Buildings. Within a one-mile radius of Albert Square and its Town Hall, over thirty-one acres were laid to waste. Salford lost almost half of its 53,000 homes and neighbouring Stretford 12,000.
In Manchester, Salford, Stretford and Stockport combined, the death toll was 596 with 2,320 injured, 719 seriously. Police, fire and Civil Defence services paid the price of their bravery and diligence with sixty-four dead. For many who were uncomprehending children in Manchester at the time, the memories of Christmas, 1940, are not of carols, crackers and paper decorations but of the crump of high explosives, the chatter of ack-ack guns, a skyline lit by flames and the men and women in blue uniforms and tin hats ushering them towards the nearest Anderson shelters or into dank cellars under shattered office buildings.
On 11 March 1941 the Luftwaffe bombers were back, this time with the specific targets of the Port of Manchester and the vast industrial complexes of Trafford Park. Among other contributors to the war effort, this was home to the munitions factory of Vickers and the Ford Motor Company, builders of Rolls Royce engines. The vast silos of Hovis Flour Mill holding grain imported from the United States and the bakery mills of Kemp’s and Kelloggs, had also been targeted. All of these stood less than half a mile away from the stands of Manchester United Football Club on Warwick Road North. It may be fanciful to suppose that one Heinkel 111 was crewed exclusively by Bayern Munich or Borussia Dortmund fans, but the air-craft’s bombardier did manage to fulfil the ultimate fantasies of millions of rival supporters then and since, by landing one stick squarely on Old Trafford.
By daylight next day, the stadium, hailed by the Sporting Chronicle on its opening in 1910 as ‘the most handsomest [sic], the most spacious and unrivalled in the world’, was a smouldering ruin. Shrapnel covered the terraces, the turf was badly scorched and the main stand obliterated. It was a wasteland.
Perfunctory attempts were made over the next five years to clear the rubble, employing, in the main, Italian prisoners of war bussed in from an internment camp at Tarporley, in Cheshire, but the sight that greeted the soon-to-be demobbed Company Sergeant Major Matt Busby, of the Ninth Battalion of the King’s Liverpool Regiment, when he arrived to take over as the club’s first post-war manager on 22 October 1945 was one of forbidding desolation. This was a man who was to demonstrate a mastery of the art of renewal over the next two decades, but this initial labour was one to tax the gods, let alone a thirty-six-year-old retired footballer with little experience of management.
Most historians who set out to chronicle the story of Manchester United manage to compress the period from 1878 to the time of the Scot’s arrival at the shattered ground in 1945 into a couple of sentences, such was his impact on the club, and football in general, over the next three decades. But it is worthwhile considering how appallingly mundane Manchester United was prior to the mid-Forties, if only to underpin the popular view that this was