Book review: Munich air disaster occurred when football showcased community values

David Peace, who wrote 'The Damned United', has produced a dramatised account of the events before, during, and after the crash

David Peace uses multiple voices to tell the story  of the Munich air disaster in a manner that is compelling. 

• Munichs 
• David Peace 
• Faber & Faber, €14.99

The Munich air disaster was an existential tragedy for not just Manchester United but English football. 

It occurred at a time when football represented community and working class values, uniting and often distracting from hard lives.

On the afternoon of February 6, 1958, a chartered airline carrying the United team home from a European cup game came off the runway in Munich. 

Twenty-one of the travelling party of forty-four, including players, staff, and journalists, died instantly. Two more died in the days to follow.

Others, including the legendary manager Matt Busby, had to fight to stay alive. Among the dead were eight of the team known throughout football and beyond as “Busby’s Babes”.

They had won the English league in the two preceding seasons and greater things were expected. 

Duncan Edwards, who died, was spoken of with the reverence that would subsequently apply to one of the survivors, Bobby Charlton. 

Among the dead was also a young Dubliner, Liam Whelan, who was en route to immortality in an Irish jersey. 

The plane was on its third attempt at take off in weather that was heavy with snow and fog.

David Peace, who previously wrote The Damned United, has produced a dramatised account of the events before, during, and after the crash. 

He uses multiple voices to tell the story in a manner that is compelling. 

The reader can feel the freezing cold as Bill Foulkes and Harry Gregg emerge from the wreckage unscathed in the immediate aftermath, dazed and confused and before long weighed down by survivor’s guilt. 

The prose echoes through the working class warrens in Manchester and further afield as shock shakes community foundations when word filters through about death’s outrageous and random selection. 

And always, the author places the story in the context of the incomprehension of what had occurred.

June Jones heard word about the crash when she was out wheeling her son in a pram, but she repelled any suggestion that her footballer husband Mark might be among the dead. 

And when the news could no longer be kept at bay she “grabbed her son from his cot, rushed back down the stairs and out of the house, into the street, clutching their son, into the cold, fleeing from death, into the night, running to Mark”.

The story’s unlikely hero is Jimmy Murphy, Busby’s long term assistant who hadn’t travelled because he was managing his native Wales on the same night. 

He was thrust to the forefront of the club as Busby lay in an oxygen tent fighting for his life. 

In Munichs, Murphy excavates from within himself strength he never knew he had in order to shoulder the burden for club and community, for the bereaved and the survivors.

From his hospital bed, as he hovered between life and death, Busby “firmly, tightly, gripped Jimmy’s hand and in a whisper said, keep the flag flying, Jimmy, keep things going until I get back”. 

That he did, maintaining a front that was brave and controlled, squeezing howls of his own grief into snatched private moments.

The book wears its detail lightly but despair and hope compete for attention on every page. 

In the round, it is an account befitting the occasion and its aftermath. 

One small quibble concerns an extended and moving passage on Liam Whelan’s funeral in Dublin.

Peace compares the occasion to the last journeys to Glasnevin cemetery of various patriot dead, including Michael Collins and Terence MacSwiney. 

Of course the former Lord Mayor of Cork was not borne to Glasnevin but to St Finbarr’s in Cork.

 The error is negligible in the context of the exhaustive research and emotional freight that informs a rare and important book.

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