The Lost Babes: Manchester United and the Forgotten Victims of Munich. Jeff Connor

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СКАЧАТЬ make the next step up Busby’s youngsters were ready. Jimmy Armfield, the former Blackpool and England player, and later Leeds manager and enduring media pundit, first saw the nucleus of the Babes when playing for Blackpool Reserves in the old Central League.

      He recalls: ‘Bobby Charlton, Eddie Colman, David Pegg, Albert Scanlon, Mark Jones and Geoff Bent were all in the team, which shows how good they were at the time. United were attracting all the best schoolboys, but the thing that stuck most in my mind was the incredible crowd, around 26,000 at Old Trafford. Blackpool had a fair side and we always used to try and win the Central League but there wasn’t much chance with that sort of opposition.’

      The Babes, according to Armfield, also represented something else. ‘It was an exciting time because we were all children of the war and you could feel the country reviving. They seemed to represent that revival with their youth and energy.’

      For Albert Scanlon, the Fifties in Manchester and with United were the golden age in every way. There were the joys of a football adolescence on the field and just as many delights off it.

      ‘Old Trafford was like one happy family,’ he says. ‘Two ladies we called Omo and Daz, who were the mother and aunt of Ken Ramsden, used to do the laundry and the lads used to take all their clothes to them. “Go and tell Tommy Taylor his shirts are ready,” they would say.

      ‘Pre-season, the training was running, jumping, and the only ball we saw was a medicine ball. At training we played married men against single men and it was blood and thunder. Some lads wouldn’t want to stop, but Bill and Tom had to have their hour dinner.

      ‘Then the fog used to come on to The Cliff off the River Irwell and all you could see was this white ball. If it got too bad we played silly games, like hide and seek. Tommy Taylor, they could never find him, he was the world champion. No one knew where he was. Someone else once shinned up a flagpole. Another hid under a wheelbarrow. Here I was, little more than a schoolboy, hiding in a training ground lavatory cubicle while some of football’s biggest names tried to find me.’

      Despite some of the more bizarre training regimes, Whalley, Inglis and Curry seemed to have hit on one essential for a teenager of any era: life had to be fun.

      ‘We were all big snooker players, and there was a table at Davyhulme golf club where we would spend the Fridays before a game,’ adds Scanlon. ‘We’d see three films a week, getting in free with the little red card of rules the club gave us. That was a passport to anywhere really. Bobby Charlton used to go to the News Theatre on Oxford Road where they showed cartoons.’

      The metamorphosis from lark-happy children to serious and dedicated career opportunists on a football field came twice a week, often with a Wednesday fixture in the A team against local amateur sides and, perhaps, a Youth Cup game on a Saturday. The Babes’ precocity, however, did not go down too well with some of the other sides around at the time. Manchester United’s main rivals for honours in the mid-Fifties were Wolverhampton Wanderers, led by the elegant England captain Billy Wright and Bolton, who were, as now, the Old Trafford bogey team. Everyone feared their line-up of raw-boned Lancastrians with Fred Dibnah accents—‘when tha’s finished with him kick him over here’ their fearsome full-back Tommy Banks would enjoin his fellow Burnden Park enforcer Roy Hartle—but the disdain for golden youth was everywhere.

      ‘We played Lincoln in a pre-season game and they had a hard case called Dougie Graham at full-back who was in his thirties and on his way down,’ recalls Scanlon. ‘The ball came down on the edge of the box and as I hit it he hit me and it flew into the top corner and I didn’t know this at the time because I’m laid out. They got the sponge at me, the cold water and capsules of smelling salts and Roger Byrne says to him: “It’s a friendly and they are young lads.” And Dougie says right back: “Until he’s twenty-six he shouldn’t be in the fucking first team.”’

      At Old Trafford, too, some of the older players were to rage furiously against the dying of the light, their frustrations exacerbated by increasingly bolder young players who began to show less and less respect for reputation. One incident, late in the 1954 season, was to demonstrate perfectly the growing schism between the United past and its future.

      Eddie Lewis, a striker who had been signed as a schoolboy, weighed thirteen-and-a-half stone by the age of seventeen and had scant respect for reputations. Reg Allen, the goalkeeper signed for £12,000 from Queens Park Rangers, was similarly well built. A man who would not go out training until he had his shirt washed and ironed, and his shorts and socks washed, Allen expected respect by right.

      Albert Scanlon takes up the story: ‘In the first-team dressing room there was a cabinet on the wall and in that cupboard, a bottle of olive oil, a tin of Vaseline and a jar of Brylcreem, all used by various players for hair grooming. The Brylcreem belonged to Reg Allen and Reg had his own ideas about everything, particularly about Reg. The unwritten rule was that you didn’t touch anything of his.

      ‘But one day Eddie walks in the first-team dressing room and straight over to the cabinet where he took a dollop of Reg’s Brylcreem. “Fuck Reg!” he says. It took three people, me, Bert Whalley and Bill Inglis to get Reg off Eddie, who by then was going blue, with his tongue coming out. Reg looked at his mark again and walked out. Eddie learned his lesson all right, he never made that mistake again, but there were little things like that going on all the time.’

      It was clear the old order was on the way out; swaggering youth on its way in. ‘Bloody kids’ Allen may have christened them, but these bloody kids were perhaps the only young people of any generation, before or since, not to horrify and antagonize their elders. What is more, at an age traditionally one of uncertainty they had already discovered a purpose in life and a means to escape circumstances which, to put it mildly, were far from ideal.

       3 NEAREST AND DEAREST

      Late in 1959, the researchers for a projected twice-weekly television drama series, based around the characters in a fictional north-west of England street, began to scout locations in and around the cities of Manchester and Salford. In particular, they were looking for a suitable backdrop for the opening credits. These titles, accompanied by a mournful trombone solo and a panned shot of a mangy black cat atop a grimy row of back-to-back terraces would eventually become the most enduring and instantly recognizable in the history of British television. The series makers initially christened the new series Florizel Street, but at the suggestion of a cleaning lady at Granada television studios, who thought that name sounded too much like a detergent, later renamed it Coronation Street.

      The Street, before double glazing, Thai brides, drug abuse, kidnapping and murder arrived forty years later, was all urban banality. It offered a composite of grey, gloomy streets, gossipy neighbours, ghettos of close relatives—but oddly in the baby boomers era no children—and an existence that revolved around the local pub. Most viewers outside the city took it as an accurate portrait of inner-city Manchester.

      This world of hairnets, curlers, busty barmaids and ceramic ducks above the fireplace did not find total favour with the city’s real-life natives, however, many arguing that few of the characters in the Street possessed the traits that defined Mancunians. The actors, as the script demanded, called a spade a spade all right, and all possessed a deliberate and occasional comical manner of speaking. Some combined that odd mixture of thrift and yet generosity endemic to northerners, but Coronation Street missed one aspect of Manchester in the Fifties and early Sixties entirely: the sense of unity born out of abject, post-war circumstances. The early Street scriptwriters clearly believed that a sense of community equated to pub gossip and affairs with the neighbours. Perhaps they should have examined the real-life model in greater СКАЧАТЬ