Hall - Manchesters Finest: How the Munich air disaster broke the heart of a great city

One cold and bitter Thursday in Munich, Germany,Eight great football stalwarts conceded victory.Eight men will never play again who met destruction there,The flowers of English football, the flowers of Manchester.

Matt Busby's boys were flying, returning from Belgrade,This great United family, all masters of their trade;The pilot of the aircraft, the skipper Captain Thain,Three times he tried to take off and twice turned back again.

The third time down the runway disaster followed close:There was a slush upon the runway and the aircraft never rose.It ploughed into the marshy ground, it broke, it overturned,And eight of the team were killed as the blazing wreckage burned.

Roger Byrne and Tommy Taylor, who played for England's side,And Ireland's Billy Whelan and England's Geoff Bent died.Mark Jones and Eddie Colman, and David Pegg also,They all lost their lives as it ploughed on through the snow.

Big Duncan he went too, with an injury to his frame,And Ireland's Jackie Blanchflower will never play again.The great Matt Busby lay there, the father of his team;Three long months passed by before he saw his team again.

The trainer, coach and secretary, and a member of the crew,Also eight sporting journalists who with United flew.And one of them was Big Swifty, who we will ne'er forget,The finest English keeper that ever graced their net.

Oh, England's finest football team its record truly great,Its proud successes mocked by a cruel twist of fate.Eight men will never play again who met destruction there,The flowers of English football, the flowers of Manchester.

Anon.

On 6 February 1958 a BEA Elizabethan class AirspeedAmbassador charter aircraft carrying the Manchester Unitedfootball team back to England from a European Cup tie inBelgrade needed to stop at , Roger Byrne, Eddie Colman, Mark Jones,David Pegg, Tommy Taylor and Billy Whelan were killedinstantly, along with the club secretary, the first team trainer, thefirst team coach, eight sportswriters, one of the aircrew and twoother passengers. Two weeks later the aircraft's co-pilot and Duncan Edwards, one of the most promising young players everto come out of England, lost their battle for life, bringing thefinal death toll to twenty-three. Two other United players,Johnny Berry and Jackie Blanchflower, were so severely injuredthat they were never able to play again.

For people who lived in Manchester at that time, and for footballfans throughout Britain, it was one of those moments likeKennedy's assassination or 9/11 when everybody remembersexactly where they were and how they heard that terrible news. Iwas an eleven-year-old schoolboy and I'd been going to OldTrafford to watch United with my dad for two years. I'm oversixty now, but tears still come to my eyes whenever I think of themoment I first heard the news, or when I think of the words of'The ', the ballad that was writtenanonymously within weeks of the disaster.

According to a report in the . 'The Flowers of Manchester', the report said, wasone of three songs that had appeared in the Ballads and Bluesprogramme, all of them dealing with the tragic events of 6February. Each was different in mood and character, but the latefifties was the beginning of the folk revival, and they all fellwithin what was defined as the folk tradition. All three balladswere being sung at the Ballads and Blues club before the end ofFebruary, and each of them evoked a deep emotional responsefrom the audiences.

In the case of two of them, this, the Manchester Guardianwriter said, had less to do with the quality of the songs themselvesthan the tragic nature of the accident. The first,, waswritten to an American tune with words predominantly in theAmerican idiom. It had an air of the hillbilly about it which wasabout as remote from the world of Manchester football as itwas possible to get. The third song, however, was right in themainstream of the ballad tradition. It was emotional too, but itwas free from bogus sentiment; it was the eloquence of thewords that brought the tragedy vividly to life.