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

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СКАЧАТЬ Street in Ordsall, a few hundred yards from Trafford Wharf and within a mile of Old Trafford football stadium, was the original for those TV credits. Coronation Street, then and now, did not own a celebrity, nor a resident of any status—unless we include the philandering factory owner, Mike Baldwin—but Archie Street possessed both in the cheeky and gifted wing-half of the Busby Babes, Eddie Colman, who was born and spent all his brief life there.

      Eddie was brought up by his parents, Dick and Liz, at Number 9, later to become the titular home of the Coronation Street siren Elsie Tanner, and although Archie Street didn’t have a Rover’s Return, there was an off licence, a corner shop which sold everything from newspapers to fire lighters and a church, St Clement’s, on the other side of Ordsall Park. It was from here that an army of small, well-scrubbed boys and girls set out in procession in the first week of every July through the parish on the traditional Whit Walks. In the afternoon, concerts and cricket and football matches entertained the youngsters and when a leather case-ball came out, the undoubted young star of St Clement’s was Eddie Colman.

      The Colmans’ only child was nine years old when Germany raised the white flag and the bunting and banners came out in Archie Street. In a scene mirrored throughout Britain on that May day in 1945 the women of Ordsall—most of their men were still away in various theatres of war—rooted out their best floral frocks and pinnies for animpromptu knees-up. There were marches and bands and picnics on hastily erected trestle tables and in nearby Monmouth Street a celebratory bonfire was lit using the wooden legs from redundant household chairs. There were Union Jacks everywhere, fluttering alongside the Stars and Stripes and even the occasional Hammer and Sickle. Portraits of Churchill adorned house windows and V signs were painted on the sooty brick walls of the houses. The dark days were over.

      Eddie had been hurried by his parents to a street shelter for much of Christmas 1940 as the Luftwaffe pulverized Salford and its surroundings, the German airmen using the shining length of the River Irwell as a flight path. In the indiscriminate bombing, 9 Archie Street survived intact although just across the Ship Canal incendiaries set ablaze the pavilion and wooden stands of Lancashire County Cricket Club and destroyed Old Trafford Baths on Northumberland Road. One parachute land mine which floated down on to a power station at Trafford Park failed to explode, and was besieged by local children trying to pinch pieces of the silk canopy.

      Incredibly, within four days the civil defence and fire services had the 431 major fires in the city under control and Liz Colman’s main complaint when the all-clear sounded was about the film of dirt that had infiltrated her well-scrubbed home.

      An ordeal like this merely served to reinforce a bond already made strong by the hardships of existence in Salford in the Forties and Fifties. Like every other house in the neighbourhood, 9 Archie Street did not have a bathroom and Eddie washed standing up in the kitchen sink or, on special occasions, his mother would drag the tin bath in from the hook on which it hung outside. The outside toilet was shared and young Eddie soon learned the timing of the subtle cough that would signal occupancy of the shared loo when approaching footsteps were heard on the cobbles outside.

      Monday was traditionally wash day, using a tub and mangle—the Servis twin tub, labour saver of a million housewives of the future, was still beyond the family budget of most—and as the family did not possess a refrigerator it meant a daily trip to the shops for a full-time housewife like Liz Colman.

      In the manner of Salford, the Colmans’ household was cheerfully matriarchal. Dad handed over his pay packet on a Friday night and mum put on one side money for the rent man, electricity and Christmas Club and then tipped him his beer and cigarette money. Eddie would be granted his sixpence a week pocket money. He was educated at Ordsall Council School, where lessons were written out in pencil in longhand atop ancient wooden desks and where a clapper bell summoned children from a dank asphalt yard to lessons. The school can boast three very distinguished old boys in the footballer and, in a later era, Allan Clarke and Graham Nash of the Hollies, one of several Manchester groups who vainly tried to emulate the fame and status of the Beatles in the Sixties. Nash, later to become even more celebrated as the twee songwriter and singer in the supergroup Crosby, Stills and Nash is still remembered in Ordsall for his performance as an Ugly Sister in the school’s version of Cinderella.

      This, then, was the background and environment which shaped the personae of one of the most dazzling and beguiling of the Busby Babes. Colman’s style of play in the school team matched his character and that of the street urchins of Salford: cheeky, extrovert and yet generous (he was to score only two goals in the whole of his United career). He also went in first wicket down for Salford and Lancashire Boys’ Cricket team and it would be true to say, as with most of the Busby Babes and young sportsmen of that era, that sport provided an outlet and opportunity that upbringing did not.

      Colman’s path to Old Trafford followed lines that were to be mirrored in every one of his United contemporaries: kickabouts in the street and impromptu matches on ‘red recs’—levelled rubble among the bombsites—that scarred young knees. Then schools football, lads’ football, followed finally by a tap on the door from the United scout.

      He was the original local boy, in every sense of the words. Archie Street was within walking distance of Old Trafford, half a mile away, and the young player’s route to work took him up Trafford Road and over the swing bridge across the Ship Canal at Wharf Way. Often he was late, and Jimmy Murphy soon became immune to Eddie’s standard excuse that the bridge, which straddled the main Manchester and Pomona Docks, had been raised for a passing ship just as he arrived. Murphy, trying his best to look and sound exasperated, would castigate the little wing-half. But always with a smile, for he adored little Eddie.

      Eddie’s gifts were obvious to Busby and Murphy from the start…the famous body swerve that earned him the nickname of Snakehips, the adroit drag-back, the push and run into space and the startling speed off the mark for a boy described by the Northern Ireland goalkeeper Harry Gregg, who joined the club from Doncaster Rovers in December 1957 as ‘a wee wag with a beer belly’. And all done with an infectious joie de vivre, like a cheeky fifthformer playing truant from school, that captured so many hearts at Old Trafford.

      Duncan Edwards, his muscular partner in the middle of the park, was both bigger and more famous then and now, but Colman struck a chord in the hearts of the United support that lasts to this day. He was one of them.

      The Colman wiggle could be as disconcerting and baffling to team-mates. ‘I remember the first time I played with Eddie and even now it’s hard to believe this happened,’ adds Gregg. ‘I was in goal and Eddie at wing-half and I was a wanderer. If the ball went forward twenty yards, I went forwards twenty yards if it came back twenty I came back twenty. Eddie got the ball and he does this, a wiggle, and I found myself doing the same thing.’

      Despite his stature, he was not a soft touch. The fledgling footballer’s boyhood hero was Ronnie Allen, the West Bromwich Albion forward who, at 5 ft 9 in, was not only the smallest centre-forward ever to play for England but one of the few English players Eddie could look straight in the eye. In an early encounter at The Hawthorns, Allen fouled him in the clumsy manner of all forwards and Colman, who had learned never to turn the other cheek as a teenager in Ordsall, went after his illustrious opponent. As the two bantamweights squared up, it was United’s captain Roger Byrne who stepped in as a mediator, leading the irate wing-half back to his own half.

      The fans’ love affair with a boy who was to make only eighty-five first-team league appearances had begun long before his first-team debut, aged nineteen, in November 1955. As part of three winning FA Youth Cup sides, one of them as captain, Colman’s skills had already become part of pub and terrace folklore before he lined up against United’s old bêtes noires Bolton at Burnden Park in 1955 for a match in which he was to make an indelible mark and astonish even seasoned campaigners including the opposing captain, Nat Lofthouse. United lost 3-1, but a new star was born and Colman’s influence on the side СКАЧАТЬ