|
(The following chapter was written in 1968 by Arthur Hopcraft. From 'The Football Man' - 1968 )
Anyone who was in Manchester in February 1958, particularly if he lived there, as I did, will
remember forever the stunning impact on the city of the air crash at Munich airport which killed eight
of Manchester United's players. The shoch was followed, just as it is in particularly closely tied
families after a death, by a lingering communcl desolation. No other tragedy in sport has been as
brutal or as affecting as this one.
It was not simply that very popular athletes had been killed and a brilliantly promising team
destroyed. There was a general youthfulness about this particular Manchester United team which
was new to the game. Manchester relished this fact. The old, often gloomy city had a shining
exuberance to acclaim. These young players were going to take the country, and probably Europe
too, by storm. To identify wit this procociousness, to watch people in other towns marvelling and
conceding defeat, gave a surge to the spirit. Suddenly most of the team was dead.
The players killed were Roger Byrne, Geoff Bent, Eddie Colman, Duncan Edwards, David Pegg,
Mark Jones, Tommy Taylor, Bill Whelan. Four of them were England internation players, Byrne,
Edwards and Taylor all firmly established with appearances in the England side well into double
figures. Pegg had been capped once. It was the death of Duncan Edwards which gave the deepest,
most lasting pain to the community. This was not because he was liked personally any more than the
others, but because there was a special appeal to people's ideals about him. Walter Winterbottom,
the England team manager at the time, called him 'the spirit of British football'. He meant the football
that exists in children's day-dreams and good men's hopes: honest, brilliant, irresistibly strong.
There was an extra poignancy in Edward's death in that he lived for fifteen days after the crash.
How bitterly that hurt. One of the key components in Duncan Edwards's appeal was his size. Big
men in sport are always specially compelling, whether they lumber comically or endear by their
dogged willingness. Edwards at twenty-one was a six-footer, weighing 13.5 stone, but with the
immense presence he brought to his game he had nimbleness as well as strength, flar as well as
calm.
A youth so equipped was bound to prompt affectionate epithets from sportswriters and fans, and
people cudgelled their brains to find new ones. He was Kid Dynamite, the Baby Giant, the Gentle
Giant, Big Dunk, the Boy with the Heart of a Man. As the daily reports came in from the hospital in
Munich, Manchester raised hope for his survival. In the second week of the crash people began to
talk in their ready sentimental cliches about the Lionheart fighting his way through again. There was
much banality in the words, but the longing was sincere. Then he died.
Edwards was born in October 1936, in Dudley, Worcestershire. As a schoolboy of the forties and
a teenager of the fifties he was part of the generation which linked the hard, sombre days of the war
and rationing with the more dashing, mobile times which followed in such animated reaction. He
would be in his early thirties now and, if still playing football, which is likely, assuredly an
old-fashioned-looking figure among the imitating contemporaries of George Best. He had dignity on
the field always, even in his teens: that senior officer kind of authority which comes to few players
and then late in career, as with Danny Blanchflower, Jimmy Armfield, George Cohen.
I looked through an album of photographs in Edwards's parents' home, which showed him right
through his life. The face was grave, the gaze he gave at the world open and tranquil.
Winterbottom's description was not fanciful, in spite of being one which any thoughtful man would
hesitate to use in connection with any player. Edwards represented the kind of self-respecting
modesty whis is not nurtured in the ferocity of the modern game. It has not been deliberately forced
out of football; it is just not natural to the age.
The album had pictures of Edwards in his street clothes, as well as in football strips, and in them the
period was caught, fixed by his personality. He was bulky in those ill-fitting jackets and wide
trousers with broad turn-ups. Clothes did not interest young footballers then; there was neither
enough money nor a teenage-identity industry to exploit such an interest. He could have been a
young miner freshly scrubbed for a night at a Labour Club dance. He did not look important, in the
celebrated sense; he looked as if he mattered, and belonged, to his family and his friends. The
anonymity of style was true to his generation and his kind.
The situation was very different when he put his football boots on. I went to see Mr Geoff Groves,
the headmaster of a secondary school in Dudly, who was one of Edwards's teachers when the boy
was at primary school. Mr Groves remembered this eleven-year-old playing for the school against a
neighbouring school the day after Edwards got home from a spell of ho-picking. He said: 'He
dominated the whole match. He told all the other twenty-one players what to do, and the referee
and both the linesmen. When I got home that evening I wrote to a friend and said I'd just seen a boy
of eleven who would play for England one day.'
A year later, Mr Groves said, the boy was playing 'in the style of a man, with wonderful balance and
colossal power in his shot'. Already he was showing the intelligence in his game which became
central to all he did. 'He already understood all about distribution of the ball,' said Mr Groves. 'And
he was such a dominating player that the ball seemed to come to him wherever he was.' It is one of
the distinguishing marks of the most talented players that they always seem to have the ball exactly
when they want it. Edwards was a heroic figure in Dudley long before he became a professional
player. He became captain of the England schoolboys' side, having joined it when he was thirteen,
and many of the leading clubs were clamouring for his signature. Matt Busby called at his home at 2
a.m. on the morning after his sixteenth birthday and acquired him for United. He was
sixteen-and-a-half when he played his first match for United, 6 feet tall and weighing 12 stone 6 lb.
At eighteen-and-a-half he became the youngest player ever to be picked for the full England
international side. It was the one which beat Scotland 7-2 at Wembley in April 1955, and this was
the company he was in:
Williams (Wolves); Meadows (Man City); Byrne (United); Phillips (Portsmouth); Wright (Wolves,
captain); Edwards; Matthews (Blackpool); Revie (Man City); Lofthouse (Bolton); Wilshaw
(Wolves); Blunstone (Chelsea).
Sir Stanley Matthews who was forty when he played in that match, told me that he thought Edwards
could truly be called unique. To Matthews, who learned his football in the days when, as he put it,
'they all said you had to be strong, with big, thick thighs,' Edwards's build was no surprise. 'But', he
said, 'he was so quick, and that was what made the difference. I can't remember any other player
that size who was quick like that.'
The point was emphasised eighteen months later, when Edwards, normally a left-half, was placed at
inside-left in the England team against Denmark, when the forward line was Matthews, Brooks
(Spurs), Taylor, Edwards, Finney (Preston North End). Edwards scored twice and Taylor three
times which gives an indication of the scoring power Manchester United had at their command.
The fondness Manchester United's supporters felt for this player was expressed in the common
adulation by boys but also in the quiet admiration of the kind which fathers show for successful sons
when they speak about them to neighbours, and out of the boys' hearing. In this regard for Edwards
there was often a sad sympathy for opposing players who were being crushed coldly out of the
game by him. I remember watching one of United's home matches when beside me was a spectator
in his fifties, who shouted little but nodded his head nearly all the time in deep satisfaction, letting out
occasionally an equally deep sigh which was eloquent in its pleasure. By the middle of the first half
one of the opposition's inside forwards was reacting furiously to the frustration of being treated like
a small child by Edwards, firmly but without viciousness or even very much concern. The player
threw himself several times at Edwards, eithing missing the moving body entirely or bouncing off it,
and on each occasion the man beside me sucked in his breath, shook his head and said softly: 'Nay,
lad, not with'im, not with 'im.' It was the decent, absorbed football fan like this one for whom
Winterbottom was speaking when he called Edwards the spirit of British football.
Edwards's funeral took place at St Francis's Church, Dudley, not far from his home. There were at
least 5,000 people outside the church. The vicar made it a footballer's service. He said: 'He goes to
join the memorable company of Steve Bloomer and Alex James.' Had he lived long enough
Edwards would surely have joined the company of England team captains. Instead he left a memory
of brilliance and courage and a sense of vast promise he was not allowed to fulfil.
His grave in Dudley cemetary is elaborate. The headstone has an ingrained picture of him in
footballing kit holding a ball above his head for a throw-in. An inscription reads: 'A Day of Memory,
sad to recall. Without Farewell, He Left Us All.' There are three flower stands, and one of them is in
the shape of a football. It suits the nature of his class and his neighbourhood, and it is attended with
great care by his father, a gardener at the cemetery.
His father, Mr. Gladstone Edwards, felt he had to explain why he was working at the cemetery. He
said: 'People think I came to this job because he's there. But that wasn't the reason. I had to change
my work, and I've always liked flowers and gardening. I felt I wanted to be out of doors.' Duncan
was his only child.
Neither he nor his wife could hide the depth of their loss. Nor was there any reason why they should
try. When I went to see them Duncan had been dead for nine years, and Mr Edwards, at least,
could talk about his son straightforwardly, although all the time with a quiet deliberation. He said that
even then there was still a steady trickle of visitors to Duncan's grave. There were days when twenty
people would arrive to look at it, like pilgrims. They seldom knew the gardener they stopped to talk
to was the player's father. They nearly always said the same thing: that there would never be another
Duncan. Mr Edwards added that Friday often brought the most visitors, and they were often
lorry-drivers with Manchester accents. They had stopped on their long run home from somewhere
south. The next day, of course, they would be at Old Trafford to watch the match.
In Mr and Mrs Edward's small semi-detached house the front room is kept shaded and spotless. It
was in here that Mr Edwards showed me Duncan's photograph album, and also let me open a
glass-fronted display cabinet and examine the mementoes of Duncan's life. It contained eighteen of
his caps at full international, youth and schoolboy level, to represent the eighteen times that he
played in his country's senior team. Each was kept brushed and was filled with tissue paper. On top
of the cabinet were three framed photographs of Duncan: one taken in uniform when he was in the
Army, doing his National Service, another with his fiancee and a third in which he wears a
Manchester United shirt. Beside them was a framed five pound note, which was the last present he
gave his mother. The tiny room was deominated by a portrait of Edwards in his England shirt, the
frame two feet wide by two-and-a-half feet long. The room was a shrine.
That showcase also had a copy of the order of service which was used on the day that two
stained-glass windows were dedicated to Edwards at St Francis's Church. They are close to the
font, beside a picture of a gentle Jesus which was given to the church by a mother, in memory of a
baby girl. One of the windows has Edwards down on one knee and there is a scroll running across
his chest which says: 'God is with us for our Captain.' All the survivors of the Munich crash were in
the church when the windows were dedicated by the Bishop of Worcester in August 1961. Busby
said at the service: 'These windows should keep the name of Duncan Edwards alive for ever, and
shine as a monument and example to the youth of Dudley and England.'
Edwards name is also kept in front of the people of Dudley in the title of the Duncan Edwards
Social Club, which is attached to the town football club, and in two trophies for local schools
football.
The memorials commemorate not only Duncan Edwards's football but also the simple decency of
the man. He represented thousands in their wish for courage, acclaim and rare talent, and he had all
three without swagger. The hero is the creature other people would like to be. Edwards was such a
man, and he enabled people to respect themselves more.
|
|
