Antoin Murphy from Dublin wrote this in today's Irish Times ... it reminds us that the majority of those who died were not directly associated with Man Utd ... and how long term was the impact of the disaster:
Many people remember Kennedy's assassination in Dallas. My memory, indeed my nightmare, was that afternoon in Munich on February 6th, 1958, when, in the words of Frank Taylor, "a team died". That was the afternoon when the horrible news came through to our home that the plane carrying the Manchester United team, the famous Busby Babes, had crashed in Munich.
My father was the chief sports reporter with Independent Newspapers at the time. His name was WP Murphy, affectionately known to many soccer supporters as Waste Paper Murphy.
This was Dublin of the 50s when wit was one of the few assets that kept people laughing as the economy moved through the throes of a frightful recession marked by annual rates of emigration of 60,000. Few people had televisions but soccer was followed with great passion.
Manchester United, then as today, had a huge support base among Irish supporters. Soccer was going through a high in Dublin at that time for, the year before, there had been the famous 1-1 draw against the might of England at Dalymount Park, a game which Ireland should have won but for Johnny Atyeo's last-minute goal to draw the game for England - my father describing the after-effects of this goal with the line "the silence could be heard in O'Connell Street".
He had regularly travelled to Old Trafford to report on United and was a good friend of Sir Matt Busby and his Welsh-born assistant, Jimmy Murphy. More particularly, he was a good friend of all the English journalists aboard that fatal flight.
These were colleagues whom he regularly met on his travels. Indeed, in the early 1950s I have memories of him heading off for matches in England laden down with brown paper parcels tied up with string. These I discovered contained the finest meat from Buckley's of Moore Street which he brought over for his journalistic friends who were still enduring food rationing across the water.
The journalists liked to travel at the back of the plane, apparently to be close to the bar, and it was that part of the plane that took the full brunt of the crash, with the result that eight out of the 11 journalists on board died.
They included such well-known figures as Frank Swift, the former Manchester City and England goalkeeper recycled as a journalist, Alf Clarke of the Manchester Evening Chronicle, Don Davies of the Manchester Guardian and the famous Henry Rose of the Daily Express.
I remember meeting most of them in the press box in Dalymount Park as they typed out their stories and rang them through to their offices. Rose was an incredible extrovert. I remember crowds of Dubliners milling around the press box after games and giving Henry "the bird". Henry would rise and, like a conductor, direct the noise of the crowd. Ironically, Henry was a non-drinker but he still sat with his colleagues at the back of the plane.
As the names of the journalists killed in the crash came through, my father felt their losses acutely but there was one name missing, that of his very good friend, Frank Taylor, who reported for the News Chronicle and Daily Dispatch. His name did not appear among the survivors.
There was, however, a mysterious name, that of Andrew MacDonald, listed as a survivor. No one knew who he was. Was he a member of the crew or a Manchester United supporter?
It transpired that Frank Taylor, when brought to the hospital had, in his confused state, given his son's name, Andrew MacDonald, and the German doctors recorded him under that name. When the news filtered through that Frank, although badly injured, was alive, it was one of the rare pieces of good news of that harrowing week.
Frank, who spent many months in hospital, would later write a book, The Day a Team Died. In a way it was the wrong title because it was not just the team but nearly the whole of the Manchester soccer journalistic corps that died also.
It was a frightful week in that cold month of February 1958. There was to be good news later in 1958 as Northern Ireland reached the quarter-finals of the World Cup in Sweden with one of the Munich escapees, Harry Gregg (who rescued a number of people including a baby from the wreckage of the plane), playing in goal for them.
My father was one of two journalists - the other being Malcolm Brodie of the Belfast Telegraph - with the team. I remember him describing the touring party, saying that it consisted of the team, a couple of reserves, the manager, the masseur, two journalists and a couple of supporters. They would all travel in the same bus together across Sweden - quite a contrast to the fleets of planes accompanying World Cup squads today.
