Harry Gregg arrived in Manchester in December 1957. At the time, no football manager had paid more for a goalkeeper but Matty Busby felt the totemic Tobermore man would be an essential part of the team he was building at Old Trafford.
Gregg had just turned 25 a couple of months earlier, a relative wise head in an otherwise precociously young and talented team which had already earned the moniker of the Busby Babes.
Two months later, Gregg would be pulling some of his team-mates from the wreckage of a plane and nothing would ever be the same again.
The plane crash in Munich on February 6 1958 which killed eight members of the heralded Manchester United team of the day, as well as journalists and club officials, is the subject of Munichs, a novel by David Peace, author of the Damned United and Red or Dead.
The team had been returning from a European Cup tie against Red Star in Belgrade when it stopped in the German city for refuelling.
After repeated attempts to take off, it eventually crashed and the result was a tragedy which took with it not only those players who had graced football pitch across England and Europe, but also a world which would be forever lost.
Peace’s previous novels have been based around iconic figures such as Brian Clough and Bill Shankly, the former heavily influenced by the latter and Shankly himself attributes much of his successes at Huddersfield and more famously Liverpool with the trail blazed by his fellow Scot, Matt Busby.
Huddersfield looms large in Peace’s past and present. When we spoke, he was visiting his elderly mother in the Yorkshire town on a trip home from Tokyo where he now lives.
As a supporter of Huddersfield Town, Peace’s father first clapped eyes on the Busby Babes in 1953 and was amazed by what he saw.
“My grandad saw Huddersfield back in the 20s when they won the championship,” Peace said.
“My dad, he just followed my grandfather and that’s how the book came about.
“He was at Huddersfield in 1953 when Matt Busby brought one of the first line-ups of the so-called Busby Babes.
“They came to Huddersfield in 1953 and my dad was 16 and it was Duncan Edwards’s second league game and Duncan was only 17. It just made a huge impression on my dad.
“Later, he moved to London to do teaching training and he was at their last game before [going to Belgrade], before Munich
“So I kind of grew up, although we were all Huddersfield Town fans, with my dad saying the Busby Babes were the greatest team he’d ever seen and Duncan Edwards was the greatest player he’d ever see.”
That last game before the fateful trip across Europe was against Arsenal and serves as a prologue to the novel and the image of United team, clad in an all-white kit, gives those players an almost ethereal air.
It evokes Philip Larkin’s poem MCMXIV (1914) and the line ‘Never such innocence, Never before or since.’
The novel primarily deals with the fallout of the crash and how it affected the individuals who were left to pick up the pieces, rebuild Manchester United and somehow subdue the trauma they had experienced.
In what could be regarded as football’s 9/11, everything is divided into what was before and what came after, from the mundanity of fulfilling football fixtures to facing up to the stark loss of the vitality and promise of young men in their prime, ready to conquer the world.
Northern Ireland goalkeeper Gregg carried that trauma right up to his death four years ago and his is one of the many strands which is weaved through the book.
A widely regarded hero of Munich, much like those who turned back into the burning Twin Towers in 2001, Gregg turned back to the wreckage, defying instructions to run, and pulled out team-mates and two-year-old Vesna Lukic and her mother.
“It’s an incredible story,” said Peace.
“He’d not been long in the Manchester United side. He joined United from Doncaster Rovers, I think in the December before Munich, so not that long and so he’d not even been long in the team, but the courage he showed that day…
“It ended up being a bit of a kind of sore point between him and Bill Foulkes because Foulkes ran.
“But they were told to run because the plane was going to explode. But Harry Gregg, he hears the wee baby and he goes back in.
“It’s an incredible story and also I think then, the way he and Bill Foulkes, two weeks later, they’re running out at Old Trafford to play Sheffield Wednesday.”
That they managed to carry on and field a team was down largely to Busby’s assistant Jimmy Murphy who had been doubling up as manager of his native Wales at the time of the crash and was overseeing their qualification for the 1958 World Cup when Munich happened.
Peace feels that the entire story of Munichs and how the club survived would not been possible without Murphy.
“It was by chance that Jimmy Murphy was not on that flight. I think the whole history of Manchester United may have been different,” he said.
“God forbid, Jimmy Murphy had been killed in that flight. I don’t think Manchester United could have continued in the way that they did.
“That Torino team was wiped out by in a plane crash [in 1949] before Munich and they’ve never really to this day recovered from it.
“It was really Murphy who kept them going and outside of the Manchester United’s supporters, I think people don’t realise that.
“Jimmy Murphy managed to take United to the FA Cup final just two months after the crash. It’s incredible, two to three months later, to be in the final of the FA Cup.”
Gregg and Murphy bore the scars internally, as many did in the days, weeks and months following the crash, but long term, the affect on football as a whole was seismic.
“One of the reasons I wrote the book as a non-Manchester United supporter was that, when I went back and did the research, I think people forget but it was something that affected the whole country, regardless of whether you support them or even if you’re interested in football or not,” Peace said
“It wasn’t only Duncan Edwards, it was so many great players. People forget as well. Roger Byrne was the England left-back said Tommy Taylor was the England forward.
“The England team were really devastated by the loss of Munich as well.
“The Babes were a phenomena anyway, but I think there’s an argument as well that because of Munich, the Babes were revered anyway but after Munich, Manchester United became the team that people who don’t really follow football support.
“It may possibly have been the time when people started to stop just supporting teams on regional proximity. So I think lots of things changed after that.”
Munichs marks a third foray into the world of football for Peace and he believes mining the many details behind some of the biggest characters and chapters in the game is a hugely fruitful pursuit.
“Sport and football, it’s just constant narratives and stories. To me it’s just a gold mine,” he said.
“I just don’t understand why more people don’t write novels and dramas about it.
“It’s like the old Roy of the Rovers thing. Roy of the Rovers was supposedly based on Bobby Charlton and he played for Melchester and it’s like ‘why bother?’ because I think the real stories are the fascinating stories.
“What I try to do is, I read the non-fiction books and I try to make it more immediate and more dramatic for the reader.”
And so, if he is looking back to this era in another 10 or 20 years’ time, what are the big stories he might consider basing a novel on?
“I mean Manchester United is the gift that keeps on giving. If you count the caretakers, they’ve had eight managers in the last 11 years, it’s like Game of Thrones. There’s just so many stories.”
