were other lessons to be discovered by the young manager, and not just about training regimes and tactics. With so many strong-willed characters, some not much younger than himself, Busby all too often found himself teetering on the line between friendship and the autocracy demanded of a successful administrator. It was a situation he determined never to put himself in again and before long, if players had a grievance they voiced it to Carey, or later Byrne, who would pass it on to the manager. Busby’s ability to distance himself from his players when it suited him was to become a hallmark of his long reign. He was also not afraid to unload any potential trouble makers in the ranks, the ‘barrack room lawyers’ as he called them. Faced with a players’ demand for improved bonuses following the 1948 FA Cup Final, Busby met the rebels at the neutral ground of the Kardomah Café just off Piccadilly in the centre of Manchester. After ten minutes of reasoning in that calm, mellifluous brogue, the rebels capitulated. Within twelve months Morris, one of the ringleaders, had been moved on. Many more players of independent mind were to follow him out of the Old Trafford door over the next two decades.
That 1947-48 season proved to be a landmark year for United. Not only did they have permission to begin the work that would eventually enable them to move back to Old Trafford, but the FA Cup win was to be the first major honour under the chairmanship of the indulgent Gibson and the ever-improving stewardship of Busby.
Runners-up in the league for the first two years after the war, the club had also made it to Wembley to face Blackpool in an FA Cup Final still recalled as one of the finest ever. The preparation, however, was far from ideal. Sandy Busby, Matt’s son, remembers his father setting off with the team on the Friday night: ‘There was no motorway and they arrived at Wembley in the early hours of the morning to play that afternoon. Dad came home on the Sunday in a very emotional mood.’
Despite the rigours of the journey United won 4-2, taking the trophy back to Manchester for the first time since 1909. Gibson, the chairman, suffered a stroke just before the final and could not travel down to London, but the team bus drove straight to Hale Barns on its return to Manchester, and the players presented the trophy to the man whose commitment to the club had kept the football team afloat and had sustained them for nearly two decades. The trophy, in the absence of a suitable glass-fronted cabinet at Old Trafford, was kept in a wardrobe in one of the chairman’s spare bedrooms.
On 24 August 1949, United returned home to Old Trafford, established themselves as title contenders for the next two seasons and, finally, in 1951-52, won the Division One championship for the first time in over forty years.
Unfortunately for the club’s head architect, James Gibson did not live long enough to add the league championship trophy to the household silverware, as he suffered another, fatal, stroke in September 1951.
As Busby had anticipated, the title-winning season of 1951-52 proved to be the swansong for many of the postwar side and it was plain to the manager that many had long ago stepped on to the downward slope feared by every athlete. When the following season started in alarming fashion with only one win in the first five games Busby acted with decisive ruthlessness.
Albert Scanlon, one of a new wave of young local players recruited by Busby in the early Fifties, says: ‘Matt saw the writing on the wall for a lot of the old guard and the kids started coming in. Initially there were no problems. Later there were.’
The emergence of the Busby Babes was not an accident. Busby had assembled a team of scouts, under the control of a sprightly, kindly, former Old Trafford goalkeeper called Joe Armstrong, to scour Britain for talent. Armstrong became a regular fixture at schoolboy and junior games in the north of England in the late Forties and early Fifties while a small team of alter egos—all seemingly similarly small, avuncular and with faces hidden under wide-brimmed hats—performed similar functions in other parts of the country. Most of that talent, as it happened, was waiting on their doorstep and even in the mid-Forties, up to forty, bright-eyed hopefuls from the streets of Salford and Manchester would assemble for weekly trials at Old Trafford. Like many others, Scanlon wonders to this day what became of the hundreds of Billys, Stans, Georges and Harrys who walked down Warwick Road, sandshoes, socks and shorts in carrier bags, to pursue a dream. Most were never seen again, although ‘at least they can tell their grandchildren: “I once had a trial for United”,’ says Scanlon.
Busby’s rationale owed as much to a shrewd business brain and his native frugality as a desire to mould a team of willing youngsters in his own image and free of the subversive element represented by players like Mitten and Morris. These young players’ future worth to the club could be incalculable, not only in their valued skills on the field but as a valuable asset off it. Busby reasoned that if he could sign ten young professionals on the maximum salary allowed by the League, some £8 a week, it would cost the club £3,500 a year in wages: if only one of the ten made the grade he would be worth between £15-20,000 to the club on the current market values. Good business in any currency. The other nine, if the club did not retain them, would bring back almost as much between them. It all helped defray the cost of rare forays into the transfer market.
Not surprisingly, the ruthless weeding out employed by Busby produced far more failures than successes. It was only the most gifted who survived the pruning.
The recruitment process seldom varied and was typified by United’s wooing of David Pegg, a teenage left-winger from Highfields in Doncaster. In South Yorkshire, if a schoolboy was asked what he wanted to do when he grew up the invariable answer was either ‘open the batting or bowling for Yorkshire’ or ‘become a professional footballer’. Most of them finished up following their fathers down the pits. Pegg, who had been spotted as a schoolboy, was one of the few to get away.
When he was old enough to turn professional, on his seventeenth birthday, Busby invited Pegg’s father to his office at Old Trafford. Bill Pegg, a miner for forty-eight years, was not the type to have his head turned by fancy promises and with native Yorkshire caution said: ‘I want the boy to be happy Mr Busby, but suppose it doesn’t go well for him? It’s back to the pits. Do you think he will really make the grade?’ Busby replied: ‘As long as he keeps trying. That’s all I ask of any lad.’
Discipline was important, too. ‘It’s never too early or too late to wear a tie,’ Busby scolded the seventeen-year-old Pegg, who had boarded the team bus in an open-necked shirt. They called the senior players ‘Mister’, knocked on the first-team dressing-room door before entering and this orderliness was maintained in their lives away from Old Trafford, usually in the homes of a series of kindly landladies carefully screened by the club and prepared to report back to Busby on the good behaviour, or otherwise, of their young charges.
Many of them began their new lives in Manchester in the digs of the redoubtable Mrs Watson on Talbot Road close to the county cricket ground and she kept a dozen young players under her roof at any one time. Meals were served around a communal table, some—although not all—helped with the washing up and bedrooms were shared.Mrs Watson had a black-and-white television in the lounge which added to the creature comforts and helped ward off the inevitable effects of homesickness.
The married men lived in club houses, rented for around £3 a week, and most of them within a couple of miles of the ground in the King’s Road area.
Housing was one of the few bones of contention in an invariably happy environment. Some wives would pester the club constantly about having a new fireplace built or getting a wall knocked down, the most persistent being Teresa, the wife of Bill Foulkes. A succession of club officials came to dread it when Foulkes would tell them: ‘Teresa wants to come and see you.’
Until the age of seventeen, the younger players also went through the motions of pursuing a ‘second trade’ alongside their playing careers to calm the worries of parents. Bobby Charlton, for example, worked at an engineering firm, Geoff Bent was a trainee joiner, as was Pegg. None of these vocations,
