Original Dub wrote:As usual, it has kicked off rightly with my rag mates.
As anyone any material on how the families were ignored by that shithouse club?
Try this for a taster mucka:-
A new book by journalist Jeff Connor has at last given them their say - and their stories show there is a far darker side to the legacy of Munich for Manchester United, thoroughly undermining the image of a caring club.
The Munich crash was one of Britain's worst-ever sporting disasters with United and England losing many of their finest players.
YET it is a rich paradox that Munich was perhaps the making of Manchester United.
Before 1958, they were just another English football club, little different to others such as Arsenal, Tottenham Hotspur or Wolverhampton Wanderers. But after 1958, because of the tragic death toll, their name had a unique resonance.
The sympathy lavished on the club led to a worldwide following. The international support was made all the more powerful when United rose like a phoenix from the ashes to dominate English football in the mid-Sixties and win the European Cup with a team including George Best exactly a decade after Munich.
The horror of Munich became the central part of the romantic narrative about Manchester United, a tale of heroism defeating adversity.
The fact that the two most dominant figures at United in the mid-Sixties, Matt Busby and captain Bobby Charlton, were both survivors of the crash only added to the club's appeal.
But while the club may have exploited the disaster to enhance its image - the club's museum at Old Trafford, for example, is filled with imagery from the disaster, including mementos left by the dead players the truth is that families of many of the victims were shamefully neglected.
'To my mind, Munich killed not only a lot of the players who were on that flight, but some of the survivors, too,' says Albert Scanlon, one of the surviving footballers from that fatal journey.
'Families have been destroyed and people thrown out on the street.' At the time of the crash, United were one of the most exciting teams in Europe.
Uninhibited and youthful, with an average age of just 22 when they won the league title in 1956, they captured the climate of freedom that was spreading across Britain in the late Fifties, as the gloom of the immediate post-war era lifted. Rationing was out, rock 'n' roll was in.
'Most of our people have never had it so good,' said the Tory Prime Minister Harold Macmillan in July 1957, just seven months before the Munich crash - words that epitomised the heady atmosphere of the day.
Many of the United stars who died in the snowy wastes of Germany were part of the new generation.
TOGETHER, the team was known as the 'Busby Babes', a soubriquet that reflected their youth and their manager's devotion to open, attacking football. 'Go out there and enjoy it,' was one of Busby's instructions to his players.
The demise of that glorious group in 1958 might have spelt the end of United, but the will of one young man ensured that it was the beginning of a new, golden era.
Busby's assistant, the hard-nosed Welshman Jimmy Murphy - who had, in his manager's words, 'a voice like a cement mixer' - inspired incredible devotion from his young charges.
In the immediate aftermath of Munich, Murphy held the club together, fighting back to build a makeshift side which included the inexperienced, the unknown and the has-been.
Somehow, while Busby was fighting for his life and then recovering from his death-threatening wounds, Murphy was able to ride a tidal wave of popular sympathy to drag his team to the FA Cup Final at Wembley.
They lost to Bolton, but Murphy had shown that United would survive.
And in the subsequent decades, the club has gone on to become the biggest and richest in the world, with support stretching from Manchester to Malta and as far as Malaysia.
Yet the families of those directly affected by Munich, the widows and the survivors, have shared none of the riches - there was no compensation in those days.
Jackie Blanchflower, for example, who smashed his pelvis, damaged his internal organs and almost lost his right arm in the crash, was forced to lead a sad, twilight existence after Munich ended his career, working as a bookmaker and a pub landlord.
Despite his wife, Jean, being pregnant, he was kicked out of his Manchester United club house soon after the crash, when it became obvious he would never play again.
Once, when he tried to get a ticket for a match at Old Trafford, he was turned away. The only offer he had from the club was as a workman loading pies onto the lorries of the company run by chairman Louis Edwards.
'Jackie always told me that he was living like an animal,' says Munich survivor Harry Gregg. Blanchflower died in 1998, partly from kidney failure resulting from the long-term injuries incurred at Munich.
Busby, the remarkable survivor of the crash, rightly won international admiration for his battle in overcoming his injuries to rebuild the club.
But, as Connor's book reveals, in the process of restoring glory, he was extremely ruthless and showed little empathy for his fellow survivors.
'Matt basically cut us off,' says Albert Scanlon, who was initially given up for dead at Munich. 'He made a promise and never kept it. He told me that financially I would be all right.' But five years after leaving Old Trafford, and struggling to earn his living, he recalled: 'I saw Matt outside the ground and he didn't want to know.' After a succession of poorly paid jobs, Scanlon now lives in a damp council flat, in which he has no telephone and has to feed coins into a meter to keep the electricity running.
Others lost out after Munich, such as Kenny Morgans, who was moved on without ceremony to the Welsh club Swansea and subsequently lived in poverty.
Similarly, Johnny Berry, who suffered serious head injuries, saw his family evicted from their house, owned by the club, within months of the disaster. The news of his sacking came in the post.
He went on to work as a labourer and worked in his brother's sports clothing business, but he never really recovered from the experience of Munich and died in 1994.
'My father went away to play football as one man and returned as a completely different person,' says his son, Neil.
'The Munich air crash changed the life of my family for ever. We were all traumatised by it and suffered indescribable private grief.' The bitterness felt by Berry's widow, Hilda, is shared by many who went through the disaster.
When the club opened its museum, for instance, some of the families donated souvenirs, including shirts and medals.
Yet while the museum raises about £1.3 million a year at Old Trafford, the families are charged to see their own heirlooms. 'Most of dad's stuff is in there, but if I want to go and see the exhibition, I have to pay a fiver,' says Laurie Blanchflower, the son of Jackie.
Such were the depths of resentment that in 1997, the families launched a campaign to get some compensation from United.
The reaction from the club's then chairman, Martin Edwards, to one of the campaign organisers, former United player John Docherty, was: 'But why now, after all this time?' Docherty replied: 'Because they are skint, that's why.'
Yet even though a testimonial match held by the club on the 40th anniversary of the disaster raised almost £1million, the way the proceeds were distributed led only to further grievances.
The families each received £47,000, but this was less than half the sum paid to Eric Cantona, the French former United star, as a one off fee and expenses for the game.
'It has all been so much PR b******t,' was the verdict of Harry Gregg.
Some of these reactions are perhaps unfair. After all, the disaster took place in an era without compensation or counselling, when people were expected to bear hardship with fortitude. 'We won't have none of this blubbering,' said the father of David Pegg at his son's funeral.
Football in the Fifties, with its low wages and harsh working conditions, reflected those austere values. Yet there is no doubt that, as the game has become infinitely richer, the families of the Munich victims have suffered a raw deal.
It is undeniable that their agony helped to turn United into a temple of wealth, but they shared none of it. All they are left with are the memories of their beloved.
June Baker, the widow of another United player, the warm-hearted, genial Mark Jones, says of her weekly pilgrimages to his graveside 'On the 6th of February, I am not fit to talk to, so I go with some flowers and just sit there a while. I'm not ever going to forget him.' For all its present tribulations, with uneven form and disciplinary problems on the field and boardroom rows off it, Manchester United is still the wealthiest, most successful club in the world.
That rise to global stature was started in the desolation of Munich.
Old Trafford owes a huge debt to the men who lost their lives on that wretched February afternoon.
Some would say, it is a debt that has never been properly paid.
by Original Dub » Wed Feb 06, 2013 8:28 am 
