Munichs, by David Peace, Faber & Faber, 464 pp, £14.99, ISBN: 978-0571381166
The triumphs and tragedies of leading football clubs mean a great deal to many people. But while their fortunes, on and off the pitch, receive blanket media coverage, they rarely feature in literary fiction. One of the few authors who has approached the subject seriously is David Peace, notably in his novels The Damned Utd (2006), which details the turbulent forty-four-day tenure of Brian Clough as manager of Leeds United, and Red or Dead (2013) describing Bill Shankly’s fifteen-year reign at Liverpool. The former prompted a legal action by the ex-Leeds United player and Irish international John Giles who took issue with some of Peace’s fictional inventions and received an apology and substantial out-of-court settlement.
Peace’s new novel, Munichs, is preceded by a disclaimer which states explicitly that real people and events are used fictitiously. However, he sticks closely to the factual record for most of the book, scrupulously detailing the crash at Munich airport on February 6, 1958 of the aircraft carrying the Manchester United team returning from a European cup tie in Belgrade which cost twenty-three lives: eight players, three of the club staff, eight journalists, two crew members and two other passengers. The tragedy was amplified by the fact that this was the finest club team produced in England since the war, winner of back-to-back League championships in 1956 and ’57. Inspired by their visionary manager, Matt Busby, his young players, most in their early twenties, displayed a blend of skill, flair and confidence never seen before. Their youth led them to be dubbed the ‘Busby Babes’, a nickname their manager disliked but which stuck and underpinned a level of celebrity that transcended football.
Tragic accidents with multiple fatalities touch so many different people in so many different ways that they defy attempts to write definitive accounts. Peace deals with the multi-faceted nature of the tragedy by providing a kaleidoscopic view through the eyes of various victims, survivors, family members and observers. He takes his greatest fictional licence in reporting characters’ dialogue and thoughts and probably could not have written the book without doing so, set as it is at a time when ideals of masculinity were strongly shaped by the experience of the Second World War. Survivors were encouraged to keep a stiff upper lip, give upbeat interviews to the press and move on without making a fuss. Many of Munichs’ most moving passages evoke the unspoken guilt and torment of survivors such as Busby, Harry Gregg, Bill Foulkes and Bobby Charlton. All were deeply emotionally scarred, but within weeks of the crash the last three were back playing for United. Some who knew Charlton before the crash believed that it turned an eighteen-year-old into a middle-aged man who always seemed to carry a weight of sadness.
Among the Munichs that Peace’s novel explores is the Irish one. Bobby Charlton’s observation that ‘before Munich it was Manchester’s club, afterwards everyone felt that they owned a little bit of it’ was particularly true for Ireland. Primarily this was because one of the dead, Liam Whelan, was the most promising Irish player of his generation. A prodigiously skilled inside-forward, he was the team’s top scorer in the 1956/7 season. For all his footballing talent, he was a quiet, well-mannered young man, a teetotaller and devout Catholic. United’s assistant manager Jimmy Murphy joked with him that if he hadn’t been such a good footballer, he would have made a very fine priest. His status as an Irish sporting legend was cemented when Shamrock Rovers played Manchester United in the first round of the European Cup on September 25, 1957. Over 46,000 spectators crowded into Dalymount Park and witnessed a dazzling display from United, with Whelan, playing only a stone’s throw from his family home in Cabra, turning in a near perfect performance and scoring twice in a 6–0 victory. Many regarded the match as the finest display of football they had ever seen and it gained United new legions of Irish admirers. When this same team was destroyed at Munich months later, Ireland shared in the grief. Whelan’s funeral on February 12 was one of the largest ever seen in Dublin, more akin to that a revered national statesman than a twenty-two-year-old footballer. It was all the more remarkable for taking place in a country where there was considerable hostility to soccer, particularly English soccer, as an insidious foreign influence.
The emotional impact of the tragedy was felt across the island. Two survivors, Harry Gregg and Jackie Blanchflower, were established Northern Ireland internationals. Gregg showed remarkable heroism in returning to the burning wreckage to rescue the injured, while Blanchflower suffered fearful injuries and never played football again. Among those deeply affected were the seven-year-old Martin McGuinness in Derry and the six-year-old Bertie Ahern in Dublin, who became lifelong United supporters. Forty years later, when engaged in the tortuous negotiations that led to the Good Friday Agreement, both would occasionally break the ice with British and unionist counterparts by discussing the club’s fortunes.
Munichs is situated in a world sharply different from today’s. In 1958 professional footballers received a maximum weekly wage of £20 (£5 a week more than the average industrial wage) and were bound by restrictive contracts that effectively made them indentured servants. Young unmarried players lived with their parents or in digs and took the bus to training. While they were heroes to many, they were approachable and down-to-earth figures who rubbed shoulders with supporters in local shops, pubs and cinemas. Peace vividly portrays the effect of their deaths on close-knit working class communities, bewildered by the loss of their most celebrated sons. In the immediate aftermath, clubs and supporters throughout England pledged their solidarity with United, contributed generously to relief funds and offered to help in any way they could. But some of those most affected were jolted into a belief that the game had simply exploited these young men and given them a tawdry fame rather than a secure and dignified living. As the coffin of twenty-four-year-old Mark Jones was lowered into the ground, his pregnant young wife cast a cold eye on the dozens of red and white floral tributes that surrounded the grave and wondered what football had ever done for him.
Peace’s novel is no exercise in nostalgia for a simpler, more decent world. It unflinchingly records the way in which the demands of professional sport and its bitter rivalries quickly reasserted themselves. Once the shock of the disaster receded, offers of assistance melted away and United were strictly warned off when they came looking for players to replace those they had lost. Although many managers expressed their hope that the club would recover from the disaster, they were determined that it would not be at their own expense and exhorted their players to show no sentiment or sympathy when they faced United’s patched-up XI.
Even before the crash, the club’s image and ethos had been looked on with some suspicion in a game characterised by the conformity and conservatism of British working class culture. Youngsters were not supposed to be that good, but were expected to serve their time and show due deference to their elders and betters before making anything of themselves. ‘Hollywood United’ received rather too much press coverage for some people’s liking. In parts of the country where lingering anti-Catholic prejudice remained, United, the club mostly supported by Manchester’s Irish and Catholic communities, was regarded as a Catholic mafia; few thought it a coincidence that Busby, assistant manager Murphy, and chief scout Joe Armstrong were all practising Catholics. There was a widespread belief (exaggerated, but perhaps not entirely without foundation) that Catholic priests acted as an unofficial scouting network for the club. In certain quarters the tragedy produced an ill-concealed Schadenfreude – at times not concealed at all. The fervent partisanship and anonymity of the football stadium combined to give voice to some ugly sentiments. Within weeks of the crash survivors were being abused by some opposing supporters, laying the foundations for the ritualised ‘tragedy chanting’ that continues to this day. For the rest of his career the United goalkeeper Harry Gregg would regularly hear the taunt of ‘You should have died at Munich’ from spectators behind his goal.
Manchester United too showed its own share of callousness, particularly in its treatment of players who survived the crash. Those judged to be useful, such as Charlton and Gregg, were kept on the books but survivors who failed to regain their earlier form were quietly transferred. Seriously injured players such as Johnny Berry and Jackie Blanchflower were discarded even more unceremoniously after receiving notice to quit houses owned by the club. Promises that they would be looked after financially went unfulfilled.
For those nostalgic about English football before the advent of the Premier League and its crass commercialism, Peace’s novel is a reminder that the professional game has always been more of a business than a sport, and one ruthlessly prepared to exploit the devotion and loyalty of employees and customers in pursuit of profit and success. Football clubs have always been less inclined to support the living than valorise the dead, who can be safely consigned to commemorative anniversaries and Halls of Fame. Peace carefully avoids such comforting sentimentality and his compelling exploration of the grief and pain of the living gives Munichs its power and veracity.
1/2/2025
James Quinn is a former managing editor of the Royal Irish Academy’s Dictionary of Irish Biography. His research interests include the social and cultural history of sport, especially association football. His No Foreign Game: Association Football and the Making of Irish Identities was published last year by Merrion Press.
