a full-time contract and became, officially, a Manchester United player.
Busby assembled his backroom staff with equal care. Murphy, the fiery Welshman, was the fulcrum of much of the success of the Busby Babes as we shall see later, but trainer Tom Curry and Bert Whalley, the coach, also played key roles.
Whalley, a former United wing-half who had joined the coaching team after his playing career ended in 1947, was third in command after Busby and Murphy and in many ways appears to have been ahead of his time in terms of the psychology of dealing with young players. A handwritten letter would be delivered to each of them every Friday with a detailed report on how he thought they had played the week before, along with a description of the team they would be playing the following day and detailed insights into the modus operandi of the man they would be marking, or vice versa.
Curry had been a wing-half with Newcastle United for eight years in the Twenties and, like a later generation, lost most of his career to a world war. A product of the South Shields junior sides, he had worked with Newcastle youngsters in the club’s North-Eastern League side and his first job as a trainer was with Carlisle United, before he arrived in Manchester in 1934. Along with his ‘deputy trainer’ Bill Inglis, he wore a white coat to work, both of them resembling rather jolly cricket umpires. While Murphy snapped and snarled, they smiled and cajoled.
‘Our whole little world revolved round Jimmy Murphy, Bert Whalley and Tom Curry,’ says Scanlon. ‘The staff made it so happy, people like the laundry ladies. The older players were more reserved but they would still join in the fun, that was the secret, although it would take nothing for someone like Jack Rowley to snap at you. You had respect for the first teamers, but the kids were really in a little world of our own.’
The Babes’ surrogate fathers forgot nothing, according to Busby’s son, Sandy: ‘Tom Curry, like Bert, was a devout churchgoer and when the team went away, he would go round the lads and find out what religion they were and one of his duties was to go and find out where their nearest church was. He’d get you up in the morning. He’d even get my dad up.’
Along with Whalley, who had been taken on the last trip as a bonus, and Walter Crickmer, who had worked so long and hard with James Gibson to resurrect Manchester United, Curry was to die at Munich.
Tom Jackson, the football writer who covered United for the Manchester Evening News, and another Munich victim, is often acknowledged as the author of the title of the Busby Babes, but the credit should really go to a young sub-editor working on the newspaper at the time. Later to become one of journalism’s great sports editors, notably with the Sun, Frank Nicklin had showed a flair for alliteration even in those days and his headline above a Manchester United match report on 24 November 1951—the day United gave first-team debuts to eighteen-year-old Jackie Blanchflower and Roger Byrne—was soon almost universally adopted. Busby himself hated the name, but soon found he had to live with it.
Byrne, who was twenty-one at the time, went on to make twenty-three more appearances in the 1951-52 championship-winning side alongside the grizzled veterans of the 1948 Wembley team, and had even scored seven goals in the last six games of the season from the left wing. But two years later the self-contained grammar school boy from Gorton found himself suddenly the head prefect in a classroom of nurslings. United’s away match at Huddersfield on 31 October 1953 is often seen as the defining moment in the history of the Babes when seven players under the age of twenty-two, including a versatile defender from Northern Ireland, a clever winger from South Yorkshire and a muscular wing-half from the English Midlands, appeared in the first team in an otherwise undistinguished 0-0 draw.
Busby had begun to break up his first great side and replace it with an even greater one.
The definition of what constitutes a Busby Babe has always been loosely framed. The obituaries of Ray Wood and Johnny Berry, who made their United debuts in the early Fifties, invariably grouped them as Busby Babes, but in fact they were bought in by United, Wood from Darlington and Berry from Birmingham City.
‘Tommy Taylor was not a Babe, either,’ says John Doherty, a former United inside-forward who was certainly an original Babe. ‘You had to be born in Manchester, or reared by the club. Mark Jones was from Yorkshire, but he was a Babe; Jackie Blanchflower was Irish and he was a Babe. Jeff Whitefoot was a Babe and is still one of the youngest to play for United at sixteen. Him, Brian Birch, Bob Birkett, an outside right who played for England schoolboys, Mark Jones, they were really the first of them, Jackie Blanchflower, then Dave Pegg and me; Foulkesy [Bill Foulkes] the following year.
‘Matt and Jimmy were very choosy about who they brought in. I went to United in 1949 as a schoolboy. I was the last person ever signed by the famous Louis Rocca. I was born in Stretford, just behind the Gorsehill Hotel, and then we moved to Rackhouses. They came to my house in Baguley after they had seen me play for Manchester Boys and I was an illegal signing because I hadn’t finished school. Jeff Whitefoot was in the office and I joined him there, answering the phone, helping Les Olive with bits and pieces, training in the morning.’
By the end of 1952 the United system that had unearthed so much promising young talent was in danger of over-reaching itself. It was in a state close to overkill. The youngsters were queuing up for places and Busby and Murphy almost buried under an embarrassment of riches. The problem was, where to find them match practice. The Central League, patrolled in the main by gnarled, combative and finesse-free veterans only too happy to give callow youths a kicking they would never forget, was no place for fifteen or sixteen year olds, the reserve team a step too far. But then, the English Football Association came to the rescue.
The FA Youth Cup was the successor to the County Youth Championship, which had been set up at the end of the war as a means of regenerating lost English football talent. The competition, said the FA, would ‘give talented school leavers finding it hard to break immediately into senior football the ideal breeding ground for the footballers of the future’. It turned into something more than that for United.
The original competition had entries from some unmatchable, exotic cannon fodder, in particular Huntly and Palmers Biscuit Factory and Walthamstow Avenue, but at the business end most of the managers of the leading clubs recognized the worth of the Youth Cup and entered teams. Unfortunately for them, most of the country’s outstanding talent had already been cornered and United were to win the first five finals, played on a home and away basis, by almost embarrassing margins.
If Busby and Murphy found fulfilment in 9-3 aggregate wins over their supposedly main rivals Wolves in 1953 and an 8-2 dismissal of West Ham United over two legs four years later, Crickmer and the Old Trafford bean counters could rejoice, too, as the fans bought into this joyful peek into the club’s golden future.
Results like a 23-0 win over Walthamstow in the first season may have equated to a bunch of cruel boys pulling wings off flies, but with up to 25,000 at Old Trafford for the latter stages, the competition could be seen as a success for Manchester United in every possible way. The precocious skills on display were outrageous. The first overhead kick many of us had witnessed by any footballer was delivered by a blond-haired inside-forward in one Youth Cup game at Old Trafford and the daunting thought for most rival team managers was that this lavishly gifted sixteen year old was still two seasons away from a first-team debut. What is more, Bobby Charlton hadn’t cost the club of his choice a penny.
Today’s fans at Old Trafford speak in awed tones of the youth team of 1992 which contained Ryan Giggs, the two Nevilles, David Beckham, Paul Scholes and Nicky Butt, but supporters of an earlier vintage will happily cite the side of 1952-53 as their equals, if not betters: Clayton, Fulton, Kennedy, Colman, Cope, Edwards, McFarlane, Whelan, Doherty, Lewis, Pegg and Scanlon. All twelve played in the first team and all were sixteen or seventeen years old at the time. ‘You tell people that and they just look at you as if you’re barmy,’ says Doherty.
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