Review by Ivor Irwin

The Men Who Were the Busby Babes by Tom Clare
D.B. Publishing # ISBN-10: 1780911580
D.B. Publishing # ISBN-13: 978-1780911588
Also available in a Kindle edition.

Christmas is here and a lot of bloggers and followers of my Manchester United column are asking me for Christmas present suggestions. Last year I went neutral picking out a couple of marvelous works which considered the life and times of a certain Brian Clough. This year, the subject matter is wont to be , in equal parts, both hallowed ground and, at the same time, something which lends itself to a kitchen’s-sink’s worth of corny cliché and inept hagiography.

The Munich air crash of February, 1958, not only robbed England of a chance of achieving true, sustained greatness in the pantheon of World Cup football, it also temporarily ruined what is now a world power in terms of commercial team sports as both a model of forward planning, success on the field of play and a commercial juggernaut up there with the New York Yankees, F.C. Barcelona, the Dallas Cowboys, Real Madrid, and the Los Angeles Lakers. Indeed, Manchester United F.C.. are so successful and so wealthy that they are hated on a comparative par as Boston Red Sox fans who hate ‘The Damned Yankees,’ (still remembering the pilfering of  a certain Babe Ruth as if it were yesterday) or like locals in vacation spots throughout Europe like Corfu, yet to forget the Nazi German regime of World War Two, and are still unwilling to do more than tolerate the modern wealthy German tourist. As a Manchester United supporter strutting my stuff all over the Americas, Europe and, naturally, the United Kingdom, since 1962, I’ve been called many names: Some witty, some obscene. Only one bothers me. The one which, even at the ripe old age of 59 and a bit past-it in the intimidation and belligerence stakes, has me still seeing red devil red. The one which the Chelsea-loving ‘Irish Mick’ at my favorite watering hole Fado knows will always get my back up and is the stock-in-trade of generations of sour-grapes-addicted  Manchester City and Liverpool F.C.. fans: “Ey, Munich!” they say. And some of them, all loaded up with Dutch courage, spread their arms out, airplane-style and making flying then crashing noises. “F*#*i&g Munichs!” they say.

I won’t describe the obvious. Suffice to say that my wife and kids can’t understand why I still let it bother me. I’m a predictable old elephant, to be sure. At any rate, this trivialization of the air crash which wiped out the best and brightest of my team is only part of the problem. As is the case with other human disasters of all kinds and sizes, whether it be 9/11, the Holocaust, the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, slavery, the assassination of Martin Luther King, Hillsborough, the Aberfan mining disaster, the Columbine high school slaughter or the beloved-of-standup-comedians Luby’s massacre, it will be trivialized. It will be trivialized simply because it taken so seriously by industry, history books, museums, books, documentaries and fictionalization. And, of course, this trivialization will be followed by the expected backlash, wherein comedians like Richard Pryor use the N word like a hammer of righteousness. Indeed my dad used to love to tell Nazi concentration camp jokes that were a hoot and shrug if someone said they thought it was in bad taste. But, again, one night years ago, I heard the Manchester City-supporting comedian Bernard Manning tell the cruelest, meanest, vilest joke about Duncan Edwards’ death I’ve ever heard. The plane, he said, had been hijacked by the ex-City goalkeeper, Frank Swift (one of the dead newspaper reporters on board) and deliberately crashed to save English football from doom. I walked out. I didn’t think it was funny then and I still don’t think it’s funny now and I’m certain Bernard Manning is rotting in hell!.

Anyway, I’m ranting. Suffice to say, the world did not need one more book about the Munich air disaster. Indeed, after the 50th anniversary of the crash in 2008, I promised I’d read no more on the subject. Truth be told, never mind Munich, there are so many bad books written by bad hack writers about United and its players, most of them full of corny clichés and the same old photos and tired old stories that, aside from a pair of favorites A Strange Kind of Glory by Eamon Dunphy and Cantona by Philippe Auclair, I usually avoid them. The only reason Tom Clare’s book received the time of day from me is his marvelous presence on the blogs. Domiciled in the giant Texas swamp city of Houston, Tom Clare, a Manc such as I, born in Collyhurst, a retired British army lifer, can be found on the blogs holding forth on all things United. And unlike so many other fair-weather United fans, Tom knows his onions and his history. Born in 1946, a true boomer, he actually remembers the Busby Babes, living and deceased, as a young fan. And, as a young fan of a very young team, coming from a time when footballers often had to work regular Summer jobs to supplement their athletes incomes, Clare, in his book, which is both a history and a memoir, comes off as both a football-crazy awed youth and a sort of mascot contemporary.

Thus, in spite of its awkward title, Tom Clare has written an extraordinary, integrity-laden book that will outlast all the others which came before it. Not only are there a number of new anecdotes, but also a rich backdrop concerning time and place that come from Clare’s lifetime immersion in the subject most of previous writers simply haven’t owned. Indeed, although there are at least sixty-odd books on United’s history, there were few that dared to tell the truth about the dark side of the club until both Harry’s Game and The Lost Babes: Manchester United and the Forgotten Victims of Munich by Jeff Connor came out.

Everybody more or less knows how the great manager Matt Busby and his brilliant assistant, Jimmy Murphy, created in Manchester United an almost invincible team in the 1950s. Having won the F.A. Youth Cup for five consecutive years, they then won the 1955-6 Championship Trophy for the first time since 1909, repeating the feat the next year. Tragedy struck, however, on the sixth of February, 1958, the plane bringing the team home from a European cup tie crashed in Munich after repeatedly and ill-advisedly attempting to take off in the midst of a blizzard. Eight Manchester United players, along with other passengers on the plane died. Britain was collectively devastated as Mark Jones, Liam Whelan, David Pegg, Jeff Bent, England’s captain,, Roger Byrne, the greatest English football player who ever lived, Duncan Edwards, Tommy Taylor and Eddie Colman were killed. Connor tells his story well. Not only that of the deceased and their families, but also those physically and mentally injured forever in the aftermath. Indeed, the tale of the dead and their families and those of the survivors and their kin is engaging, In the old class and religion riven Britain of the day, the tragedy is rendered emblematic by a club which did not take very good care of care of the families of the dead or the survivors. Many of the surviving members of the team could not play again or were too psychologically damaged to be a success in a ruthless game. Typical was Jackie Blanchflower, terribly injured in the crash, who became a cause célèbre for Britain’s gutter press when he became homeless and was tossed out of the club house very shortly after the accident, receiving virtually no compensation. United, it seemed, although it claimed to be a happy family, was as dysfunctional as most everybody else’s.

Connor’s book chronicles all this and more well. Yet an even bigger shock to the internal body politic of the great flawed mother club was Harry’s Game . The biggest hero of the crash, United’s goalkeeper big Harry Gregg, had carried scores of crash victims out of the plane’s shattered fuselage and saved a lot of lives. Unfortunately, Gregg, a plainspoken man of honor, entered upon a collision-course with one of the people he helped save,  the autocratic Matt Busby. In the months that followed the crash. critical of what he perceived to be the club’s insensitivity toward the Munich’s incident’s victims. Busby tried to be patient from his point of view with rantings of  the rebellious Northern Irishman; but when Gregg became the mouthpiece for a group of players who wanted more money and defended players on other clubs who had been involved in a betting scandal, Gregg was sold away on the cheap. The long term result of this was Gregg’s bittersweet memoir Harry’s Game. A fine read  written in the misbegotten voice of a jilted lover, it, nevertheless, created a backlash against a club which more and more liked  to present itself and its weekly retinue of 65,500 fans at Old Trafford as an ethical, virtuous working-class paragon of the best British ideals of bootstrap improvement and ambition.

A lot has changed since then. For better or worse, my beloved Manchester United is a corporate entity which has shuffled owners, board members and gone to great lengths to alter the club’s image into something more Middle Class, and success-oriented, whether it’s about packing 76,000+ fans a week into its state-of-the -art stadium, selling replica shirts and team souvenirs, keeping up a youth academy, buying some of the world’s best players, having the best manager of any soccer club in the legendary Sir Alex Ferguson, who wins championships and trophies on a regular basis. Arguably the richest sports franchise in the world, United are, for better or worse, bigger than life itself!

Thus, into the breach, steps Mr. Tom Clare. Neither a trained journalist, nor a trained academic historian or hack out for a fast buck, Clare has written what I’ll call the Post-Post-Modernist last word on the matter. How marvelous is his ambivalence? Well, how hard is it to see both Busby and his genial genius of an assistant in Jimmy Murphy without loving or hating them?
He could be as hard as bell metal in his dealings with other clubs,
or the legislators of the game, as well as with his own staff. he
was no pushover, as the authorities found out. His standing in
the British queue made him the patriach of his time… Buby
emanated substance, the quality of strength without arrogance.
No man in my experience had the ability to treat you as an equal
while leaving you with the sure knowledge that you were less
than he was…. Players did not fear his wrath, they dreaded his
disapproval.
Clare understands that time and tide are a question of balance. Each of the mini-biographies of players like Byrne, Jones, Colman, Pegg, Taylor, Edwards and Bent all have a deep substance. Nobody more than Jeff Bent, who, although a fine footballer, never quite measured up to the others in the squad. An England international as a youth, Bent might well have had a glittering career elsewhere, rather than being overshadowed as a bit-part player with the Babes. Injury-prone, he just never seemed to quite measure up. Comfortably seated down front, on the Munich flight Bent followed a nervous David Pegg to the back of the plane where Pegg insisted it was was safer. Found dead next to Colman and Pegg, poor Geoff, who had badly wanted to have a baby with his wife, never knew that he had impregnated her only days before the crash. Geoff Bent, like the old blues song, ‘Born Under A Bad Sign.’ ‘If it wasn’t for bad luck/I wouldn’t have no luck at all!”

Some of Clare’s anecdotes are pure spun gold. A practicing Catholic who made the time for prayer at least twice per day, Matt Busby’s assistant of 35 years is nowadays seen as the real paragon of the Busby Babes story. So much so, even the staid BBC made a movie about him last year. Slowly but surely put out to pasture toward the end of career by both his own boss and a bourgeois set of directors who hated  his predilection for profanity, Murphy was a loyal club man to the bitter end. Indeed, although Busby is historically seen as the first of the track suit managers after World War II, it was Murphy who, along with his brilliant lady-killer chief scout, Joe Armstrong, built the academy on and off the field. Cruel and kind in equal parts. Clare best describes him as having “a tongue that could cut teeth.” Yet, in the end, as Clare, says repeatedly, “there is nothing which recognized Jimmy Murphy’s eminent 35 years at the club.” Clichés aside, Clare raids Murphy’s memoir to talk about a game played between Busby’s Liverpool and Murphy’s West Bromwich Albion in 1939 weeks before war (and the end of their careers) began. Murphy recalled passing the red Scousers’ dressing room and hearing the soft lilt of Busby’s Lanark accent. as he signaled for him to come over. “You always need to wear two pairs of shin pads when you play against this chap,”  Busby said. Their on field combat, it seems,was like love at first sight.

Most moving of all is Clare’s empathy for those who were psychologically impaired by the crash. . Bobby Charlton, Bill Foulkes, Denis Violett and Harry Gregg played on. All four prospered, especially Bobby Charlton, although each also claims in his memoirs that they were dogged by constant depression thereafter. Less successful were Jackie Blanchflower and Johnny Berry, each too crippled by the crash to carry on actively in the game. Somewhere in the tragic middle were Albert Scanlon and Kenny Morgans, both of whom played on professionally, but were never the same as athletes. Each seems, in retrospect. to have suffered severe symptoms of what we would now refer to as PTSDA: A kind of survival-guilt-driven urge to underperform. A case in point was witnessed by my own father, Mike, a bouncer at the Cromford Club in the sixties, when he witnessed Kenny burst into tears for no apparent reason and was happy to give a ride home later. There was always something incredibly sad about this lovely man that no one could put their finger on.
How ironic then that, as I was reading this book, Morgans would pass away. Morgans, Clare said was a newcomer to the team in 1958, having displaced, at least temporarily, David Pegg on the wing. Morgans was so good on the ball, not only according to Clare and my Dad, but scores of football pundits that he was on the cusp of being the next Georgie Best or Cristiano Ronaldo. Tragically, Morgans so missed the camaraderie of his deceased teammates (and dreamed of them so often), that he lost his joy in the game, steadily seeing out his career for a number of smaller clubs, a wounded beautiful athlete, no longer capable of true self-expression.

A uniquely gifted author, Tom Clare brings a kind of unique gravitas to his book.