The plane carrying Manchester United’s team aborted its first two take-offs on the icy runway in Munich on 6 February 1958. Still, the captain, James Thain, made a third attempt. Again, the plane – probably hampered by ice on its wings – couldn’t get airborne. This time it crashed through a fence and into a nearby house.
Harry Gregg, United’s goalkeeper, rescued multiple passengers. But of the 44 people on board, 20 died at the scene, and three more later. The victims included eight United players. In the following decade, a few of the survivors would resurrect the club. The novelist David Peace tackles this almost mythical story, in a historical novel that combines his familiar gifts with his familiar maddening flaws.
Peace has become almost the novelist laureate of English football. He has spent most of the last 30 years in Tokyo, and the distance seems to help him channel the northern England of his childhood. He takes professional football seriously, and views it as a working-class creation that deserves honour. His novel The Damned United (2006) reimagined football manager Brian Clough’s disastrous 44-day reign at Leeds United. Red or Dead (2013), about Liverpool manager Bill Shankly, was a flop. Overeager to sanctify Shankly’s work, Peace recounts hundreds of forgotten matches in a style of incantatory repetition over 700-plus pages. Packed with line-ups and league tables, it can read like a statistical football annual rewritten by someone studying for an MA in creative writing: “And now Liverpool Football Club were drawing two-all with Burnley Football Club. At home, at Anfield. And then Dobson glanced home a third goal for Burnley Football Club. And Liverpool were losing three-two. At home, at Anfield…”
Munichs is more disciplined. Peace, characteristically, has done his research, as witnessed in the novel’s four-page bibliography. In simple, almost childlike prose, he shifts perspective between characters. There’s fascination in the randomness of each passenger’s fate. A handful emerged from the wreckage unscratched, marked only by a permanent sorrow that hardly anybody in 1958 seemed willing to talk about. Almost the only therapy offered them in the novel is alcohol. In a country that had been through two world wars, men didn’t cry. Lord knows how the survivors coped.
Peace’s main characters include two men who would enter football’s pantheon. The Scottish manager Matt Busby had taken over United in 1945, when the club was recovering from another disaster, having been left homeless by the Luftwaffe’s bombing of Old Trafford. He built a team of mostly homegrown youngsters. “Busby’s Babes” – a phrase they disliked – won the league in the 1955-56 and 1956-57 seasons.
Busby was carried from the plane’s wreckage so close to death that the last rites were read twice. (United was a mostly Catholic club then.) In Peace’s telling, he was too weak to support anaesthesia, and so underwent several operations without. At first, his team’s destruction was hidden from him, but Busby deduced what had happened, largely by observing which players hadn’t visited his hospital bed. In a gruesome scene, he makes his wife confirm his worst fears, player by player: “Roger Byrne, asked Matt. Jean shook her head. Mark Jones, asked Matt. Jean shook her head. David Pegg, asked Matt. Jean shook her head.” Agonisingly, the brilliant young Duncan Edwards, who had made his debut for United aged 16, and initially survived the crash, died two weeks later. He was buried beside his baby sister, who died of meningitis. The parents had no other children.
In Peace’s telling, Busby is wracked by guilt by his decision to take United into the fledgling European competitions, when other English clubs had chosen not to, and by his insistence on taking so many players, including some who had no chance of playing, to the match in Belgrade. (Munich was a stopover on the way back.) In the novel, a player’s widow, her baby in her arms, confronts him: “Why did you let them all get back on that plane again, after trying twice, failing twice to take off? Why didn’t you or no one else speak up?” Busby replies, “I’m so sorry.”
Bobby Charlton was just 20 at Munich. Physically almost unscathed, he suffered what we would now call post-traumatic stress disorder. In Peace’s telling, he initially could not see the point of going on, and like Busby, decided to quit football. Wracked by survivor’s guilt, he couldn’t face attending the endless funerals. But within weeks, Charlton was playing again. In 1968, he, Busby and another survivor, Bill Foulkes, completed United’s resurrection by lifting the European Cup at Wembley. Charlton barely spoke about the crash again before his death in 2023, and when he did, was an unreliable narrator.
Peace offers memorable vignettes of the dead. Liam “Billy” Whelan is a homesick Irish boy, who asked Busby permission to skip the Belgrade trip and visit his mum in Dublin, but was refused. Tommy Taylor is a natural centre-forward who as a lad in Barnsley enjoyed jumping over garden gates from a standing start. Peace’s narrator – in a gratingly stereotypical Yorkshire dialect – tells us that when Taylor’s family visit his digs to collect “his things, his records and his clothes, there was two little black and yellow Teach Yourself books on little table there, Teach Yourself Public Speaking and Teach Yourself Maths, and it brock their hearts”.
Peace’s material is so gripping as to require no embroidery. But deadpan isn’t his way. Here he is on how loved ones remembered the dead players’ visits home: “When they left, went back to Manchester, to their digs, their other mates, it sometimes seemed they took half of the light back with them when they went, left them in the black and white, the shadows and the dark until they’d come again, back home again.” The repetition seems intended to heighten emotions, which is something this story doesn’t need. And Peace, with his fondness for nearly page-long sentences, underestimates the joy of a full stop.
The book’s other flaw is that United’s staff, players and fans are depicted as saints. This seems to be part of Peace’s mission to honour the working-class game. Of Red or Dead he said: “I want to write about a good man. And a saint. A Red Saint… Bill Shankly was one of the greatest men who ever lived.” Given the sanctified memory of what Peace calls “the Dead”, the tendency is enhanced in Munichs. Here he is describing the defender Mark Jones: “He truly was a giant of a man, but not just in stature, nor only on the pitch, but off the pitch, and with his heart, that giant-sized heart of his.” You yearn for the complex characters that novelists can create. Peace’s Charlton comes closest.
United’s fans act as a flock of angels, starting on the afternoon of the crash when they come to their club’s empty stadium in silent battalions. In the official telling of the club myth, the United community is reborn after Munich. But Peace probably gets closer to the emotional truth in this reflection, put in the head of a young reserve player chosen to replace the Dead: “Folk went on about the great spirit, all that, but it was cobblers. People barely spoke, they dared not speak, didn’t know what to say…”
Munich remains English football’s most compelling story. Peace’s Munichs occasionally does it justice.
Simon Kuper is a columnist for the Financial Times
Munichs
David Peace
Faber & Faber, 480pp, £20
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[See also: Football’s data delusion]
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This article appears in the 11 Sep 2024 issue of the New Statesman, The Iron Chancellor’s gamble