How a routine day ended in surrealism, and suffering

David Meek was the Manchester United correspondent for the Manchester Evening News from 1958 to 1995. He describes how the story of Munich came through to change a city forever.

I WAS in the office on the afternoon of the crash, another seemingly routine day, until the newswire began to bring sketchy reports of an accident involving the Manchester United team in Munich. The foreign news would come in through Reuters and PA into the wire room. The system was that they had a little hatch between the wire room and the editorial room and, when the boys put the messages through, they would slam the hatch to draw the attention of the messenger boys.

The wire room boys obviously used to read the messages to get an idea of what was happening and on that particular day, I remember them banging the hatch as loudly as they could to alert people that something out of the ordinary was coming through.

Nobody had any idea how out of the ordinary it was but it just built up from 3pm onwards. Everyone had gathered round the sub-editors’ desk, anxious to know what was going on, not least because Tom Jackson, our United reporter, was one of the journalists on the plane, so we had a personal interest as well as the general impact of the story.

Due to the sheer magnitude of the story that was unfolding before us, people began to get in the way, so Tom Henry, the editor of the paper, sent all of us home except for a little group of experienced subs who he kept behind to produce a special edition which came out at about 6pm and was sold outside our office building on Cross Street.

In those days, it was probably the way that most people found out about the crash. Even radio was not as organised as it is now, so the newspapers were the main source of information.

People in Manchester, not just the United fans, had taken the Busby Babes to heart. They had been thrilled by them. They were special, there was no doubt about it, and so the people felt it even more.

It would be easy to look back now and attribute more emotion to the days that followed than was actually the case, but with Munich, I don’t think that was the case. People talk about Manchester being stunned and, if a city can be stunned, then that was the occasion.

Going to work the next day on the train — and for a long time after it — the atmosphere was funereal. It was quiet and hushed. The crash had a tremendous impact on the city.

But while this was clearly a tragedy for United, the city of Manchester and the nation as a whole, we had also lost a colleague. Tom Jackson was one of eight journalists killed in the crash, so his death was a huge loss to those of us that had worked alongside him.

Tom had been in the Army during the war. He had worked in intelligence and had been involved in the operation to round up the Nazi war criminals, but when he first started back at the Evening News, covering Manchester United was a bit of a part-time job, combined with general reporting. That soon changed as the Busby Babes began to gather momentum and became a much bigger story.

So by the time United travelled to Belgrade for the game against Red Star, Busby’s team were big news and every national newspaper had a man with the team.

They were not youngsters. People like Henry Rose, Donny Davis and George Follows, Alf Clarke and Tom had been in the war. They were well established, but it was a great adventure for them as it was the players and the football club about going into Europe.

And Matt Busby was very paternalistic towards the reporters. I remember my first trip abroad with United, when Matt pulled me to one side and said ‘I don’t know how much travelling abroad you’ve done, but just in case you haven’t had a chance, here’s some local currency for you.’ He gave us some pocket money to spend! With Tom being killed in the crash, I was asked to cover United in the immediate aftermath. At the time, I was a political reporter with no real desire to move across to sport, but I was tasked with covering the first game after Munich, against Sheffield Wednesday at Old Trafford. It was an FA Cup tie and they produced a programme with 11 blank spaces and you had to fill in the names yourself.

It was a surreal atmosphere. We didn’t know half the team and people like Shay Brennan, who scored two of the goals that night, were just youngsters who had been drafted in.

But United won and they rode the emotional tide all the way to Wembley before losing to Bolton in the Final. It was a remarkable achievement considering the events of just three months earlier, but football is not a game for sentiment and United could not secure the victory that would have been a fitting tribute to those killed at Munich.