The post-war team inherited by Busby was reassuringly ordinary; the players were celebrities, but celebrities with the common touch. Many of them were married, lived in terraced houses close to the ground and few had cars. Gunner Rowley was one of the first on four wheels, buying a four-cylinder, six-seater, Flying Standard—top speed seventy miles an hour—for £300. The wing-halfs John Aston and Henry Cockburn bought a car between them. Chilton and Carey, the captain, travelled by public transport. Carey, like Roger Byrne later, was Busby’s on-field alter ego, a figure of quiet authority respected by management and team-mates alike. Strictly Catholic and teetotal, and an astute, moral individual, his obvious leadership qualities led Busby to appoint him captain at a time when some still had reservations about his playing ability. The Dubliner, who had signed for £200 from one of the city’s nursery clubs, St James’s Gate, in November 1936, was Busby’s original all-purpose player. The manager was to become noted for his willingness to try established players in different positions, using the precedents set in his own playing days. Both he and Murphy had resurrected floundering playing careers when switched from their original inside-forward positions, where invariably they had to play with back to ball, to wing-half, where the whole playing field lay in front. Carey was to perform in ten positions for United—including a game in goal—but it was as a calm, assured right-back that he was to make his name. So composed was the United captain that it was said he never got his shorts dirty. Of numerous other beneficiaries of Busby’s willingness to experiment, Chilton had been a wing-half originally, full-back John Aston an inside-forward. Bill Foulkes was a full-back before moving to the centre of defence and Byrne moved from the wing to full-back. Alongside Busby, Chelsea’s former head tinkerer Claudio Ranieri appears a model of selectoral consistency.
Carey lived close by Longford Park, bordered by King’s Road and Wilbraham Road a mile-and-a-half south of the ground, and an area that was soon a sort of mid-market ghetto for United players and management. The Irishman burned peat in the fireplace of his home at 13 Sark Road, and many of the groundstaff boys at that time can recall earning a few extra shillings for cleaning out the captain’s grate, a task, using only a wire brush, which matched the restoration of the Augean stables and which would sometimes take two or three days.
He travelled to work by bus, the other passengers soon becoming immune to the patrician-like figure seated on the top deck puffing away at his pipe. Sightings of Carey and pipe on a bus became commonplace in Manchester and at one time the number of United fans who claimed to have travelled to work with the club captain equated to the several million allegedly at the Eintracht Frankfurt v Real Madrid match at Hampden Park, Glasgow, in 1960, Jim Laker’s nineteen-wicket Test at Old Trafford cricket ground in 1956 and England’s Wembley World Cup win ten years later.
As a neutral, Carey could have sat out the war when hostilities broke out in 1939 but instead enlisted with the Queen’s Royal Hussars, joining several thousand of his countrymen like the rebel-rousing, folk-singing Clancy brothers, Paddy and Tom, in the fight against a greater enemy. Carey always argued that ‘a country that pays me my living is certainly worth fighting for’.
Carey ruled by democracy, leading by example on the field and, off it, prepared to let others have their say. He was well aware that that first great United side contained enough leaders and characters in their own right, notably the gifted England wing Charlie Mitten, Rowley and, in particular, Chilton. Contributions from the captain were often superfluous.
Chilton, the sort of traditional, no-nonsense stopper endemic to every Busby team, and with his square shoulders and centre-parted hair the face of a thousand cigarette cards, did much of the motivational work in the dressing room. In Busby’s early days, and after a run of poor form and even poorer results, the manager had gathered his side for a midweek pep-talk. Busby had prepared his speech well, but as he began, Chilton turned to him abruptly and said: ‘Just sit down and keep quiet. I’ll do the talking. It’s our win bonuses on the line here.’ Busby did as he was ordered, Chilton spoke, the others listened and the rot was stopped.
Initially at least, the manager had his favourites. He played golf with Carey and Morris, another dangerously outspoken character and a man who at one time considered a career as a professional golfer after a falling out and a subsequent transfer listing by Busby. Busby also relished the skills of Mitten, one of the most gifted wingers of his, or any other, generation but also cursed with an impish and headstrong streak that was to lead to his downfall. Busby adored him, and so did the Old Trafford fans beguiled by his eccentricities and occasional foibles. As the side’s leading penalty-taker Mitten would often invite a goalkeeper to point in the direction he wanted him to strike the ball and he would then oblige by sending the ball that way with the goalkeeper powerless. But Mitten was unorthodox off the field too, and after the 1948 FA Cup win accepted a £10,000 signing-on fee and a wage of £60 a week to play alongside Alfredo di Stefano for Santa Fe in Colombia, a country outside the FIFA umbrella. The transaction was carried out in typical Charlie fashion as he not only failed to inform manager or team-mates but also his wife, Betty, who had booked a family holiday in Scarborough. Mitten went to South America, saw out his contract there and came home to find himself suspended. Busby, as he had promised when Mitten first set sail on his South American adventure, unloaded him, at a profit of £20,000, to Fulham.
Busby’s first great United side was to provide him with a blueprint for the next, a mixture of cost-nothing locals and former apprentices, alongside one or two shrewd buy-ins, notably the Scot Jimmy Delaney. Delaney, who had won a Scottish Cup medal with Celtic in 1937, was a fragile-looking wing originally reviled as ‘Old Brittle Bones’ because of his frequent injuries. It cost Busby £4,000 to persuade Celtic to part with the player in 1946, all but £500 of which he recouped four years later when Delaney went back over the border to Aberdeen: this was the sort of business in which the parsimonious Busby delighted. As for Delaney, he was to have the last laugh on those terrace critics who had questioned his longevity, winning a third winner’s medal—seventeen years after his first—with Derry City in the Irish FA Cup Final of 1954.
Delaney was Busby’s first outright cash signing and provided him with a tutorial in football management…that the occasional shrewd buy mixed with home-grown talent equated to fiscal commonsense.
There were other lessons to be discovered by the young manager, and not just about training regimes and tactics. With so many strong-willed characters, some not much younger than himself, Busby all too often found himself teetering on the line between friendship and the autocracy demanded of a successful administrator. It was a situation he determined never to put himself in again and before long, if players had a grievance they voiced it to Carey, or later Byrne, who would pass it on to the manager. Busby’s ability to distance himself from his players when it suited him was to become a hallmark of his long reign. He was also not afraid to unload any potential trouble makers in the ranks, the ‘barrack room lawyers’ as he called them. Faced with a players’ demand for improved bonuses following the 1948 FA Cup Final, Busby met the rebels at the neutral ground of the Kardomah Café just off Piccadilly in the centre of Manchester. After ten minutes of reasoning in that calm, mellifluous brogue, the rebels capitulated. Within twelve months Morris, one of the ringleaders, had been moved on. Many more players of independent mind were to follow him out of the Old Trafford door over the next two decades.
That 1947-48 season proved to be a landmark year for United. Not only did they have permission to begin the work that would eventually enable them to move back to Old Trafford, but the FA Cup win was to be the first major honour under the chairmanship of the indulgent Gibson and the ever-improving stewardship of Busby.
Runners-up in the league for the first two years after the war, the club had also made it to Wembley to face Blackpool in an FA Cup Final still recalled as one of the finest ever. The preparation, however, was far from ideal. Sandy Busby, Matt’s son, remembers his father setting off with the team on the Friday night: ‘There was no motorway and they arrived at Wembley in the early hours of the morning to play that afternoon. Dad