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... Just some cold facts about... I guess it's not what you (and I) want to know about him. Well, I must say that I never saw him alive and had no chance to realize his greatness on football pitch by seeing it with my own eyes. But as I said earlier I heard a lot about him and other 'Babes' from my dad and grandad. "Duncan Edwards was a man in football but still a boy at heart. His ability was good enough for England but his potential was good enough for Heaven" - Jackie Blanchflower, Dunc's team-mate and survivor of aircrash THE DEATH OF DUNCAN EDWARDS (The chapter From 'The Football Man' written by Arthur Hopcraft in 1968) ![]() It was not simply that very popular athletes had been killed and a brilliantly promising team destroyed. There was a general youthfulness about this particular Manchester United team which was new to the game. Manchester relished this fact. The old, often gloomy city had a shining exuberance to acclaim. These young players were going to take the country, and probably Europe too, by storm. To identify wit this procociousness, to watch people in other towns marvelling and conceding defeat, gave a surge to the spirit. Suddenly most of the team was dead. The players killed were Roger Byrne, Geoff Bent, Eddie Colman, Duncan Edwards, David Pegg, Mark Jones, Tommy Taylor, Bill Whelan. Four of them were England internation players, Byrne, Edwards and Taylor all firmly established with appearances in the England side well into double figures. Pegg had been capped once. It was the death of Duncan Edwards which gave the deepest, most lasting pain to the community. This was not because he was liked personally any more than the others, but because there was a special appeal to people's ideals about him. Walter Winterbottom, the England team manager at the time, called him 'the spirit of British football'. He meant the football that exists in children's day-dreams and good men's hopes: honest, brilliant, irresistibly strong. ![]() A youth so equipped was bound to prompt affectionate epithets from sportswriters and fans, and people cudgelled their brains to find new ones. He was Kid Dynamite, the Baby Giant, the Gentle Giant, Big Dunk, the Boy with the Heart of a Man. As the daily reports came in from the hospital in Munich, Manchester raised hope for his survival. In the second week of the crash people began to talk in their ready sentimental cliches about the Lionheart fighting his way through again. There was much banality in the words, but the longing was sincere. Then he died. Edwards was born in October 1936, in Dudley, Worcestershire. As a schoolboy of the forties and a teenager of the fifties he was part of the generation which linked the hard, sombre days of the war and rationing with the more dashing, mobile times which followed in such animated reaction. He would be in his early thirties now and, if still playing football, which is likely, assuredly an old-fashioned-looking figure among the imitating contemporaries of George Best. He had dignity on the field always, even in his teens: that senior officer kind of authority which comes to few players and then late in career, as with Danny Blanchflower, Jimmy Armfield, George Cohen. I looked through an album of photographs in Edwards's parents' home, which showed him right through his life. The face was grave, the gaze he gave at the world open and tranquil. Winterbottom's description was not fanciful, in spite of being one which any thoughtful man would hesitate to use in connection with any player. Edwards represented the kind of self-respecting modesty whis is not nurtured in the ferocity of the modern game. It has not been deliberately forced out of football; it is just not natural to the age. The album had pictures of Edwards in his street clothes, as well as in football strips, and in them the period was caught, fixed by his personality. He was bulky in those ill-fitting jackets and wide trousers with broad turn-ups. Clothes did not interest young footballers then; there was neither enough money nor a teenage-identity industry to exploit such an interest. He could have been a young miner freshly scrubbed for a night at a Labour Club dance. He did not look important, in the celebrated sense; he looked as if he mattered, and belonged, to his family and his friends. The anonymity of style was true to his generation and his kind. The situation was very different when he put his football boots on. I went to see Mr Geoff Groves, the headmaster of a secondary school in Dudly, who was one of Edwards's teachers when the boy was at primary school. Mr Groves remembered this eleven-year-old playing for the school against a neighbouring school the day after Edwards got home from a spell of ho-picking. He said: 'He dominated the whole match. He told all the other twenty-one players what to do, and the referee and both the linesmen. When I got home that evening I wrote to a friend and said I'd just seen a boy of eleven who would play for England one day.' ![]() Williams (Wolves); Meadows (Man City); Byrne (United); Phillips (Portsmouth); Wright (Wolves, captain); Edwards; Matthews (Blackpool); Revie (Man City); Lofthouse (Bolton); Wilshaw (Wolves); Blunstone (Chelsea). Sir Stanley Matthews who was forty when he played in that match, told me that he thought Edwards could truly be called unique. To Matthews, who learned his football in the days when, as he put it, 'they all said you had to be strong, with big, thick thighs,' Edwards's build was no surprise. 'But', he said, 'he was so quick, and that was what made the difference. I can't remember any other player that size who was quick like that.' The point was emphasised eighteen months later, when Edwards, normally a left-half, was placed at inside-left in the England team against Denmark, when the forward line was Matthews, Brooks (Spurs), Taylor, Edwards, Finney (Preston North End). Edwards scored twice and Taylor three times which gives an indication of the scoring power Manchester United had at their command. ![]() Edwards's funeral took place at St Francis's Church, Dudley, not far from his home. There were at least 5,000 people outside the church. The vicar made it a footballer's service. He said: 'He goes to join the memorable company of Steve Bloomer and Alex James.' Had he lived long enough Edwards would surely have joined the company of England team captains. Instead he left a memory of brilliance and courage and a sense of vast promise he was not allowed to fulfil. His grave in Dudley cemetary is elaborate. The headstone has an ingrained picture of him in footballing kit holding a ball above his head for a throw-in. An inscription reads: 'A Day of Memory, sad to recall. Without Farewell, He Left Us All.' There are three flower stands, and one of them is in the shape of a football. It suits the nature of his class and his neighbourhood, and it is attended with great care by his father, a gardener at the cemetery. His father, Mr. Gladstone Edwards, felt he had to explain why he was working at the cemetery. He said: 'People think I came to this job because he's there. But that wasn't the reason. I had to change my work, and I've always liked flowers and gardening. I felt I wanted to be out of doors.' Duncan was his only child. Neither he nor his wife could hide the depth of their loss. Nor was there any reason why they should try. When I went to see them Duncan had been dead for nine years, and Mr Edwards, at least, could talk about his son straightforwardly, although all the time with a quiet deliberation. He said that even then there was still a steady trickle of visitors to Duncan's grave. There were days when twenty people would arrive to look at it, like pilgrims. They seldom knew the gardener they stopped to talk to was the player's father. They nearly always said the same thing: that there would never be another Duncan. Mr Edwards added that Friday often brought the most visitors, and they were often lorry-drivers with Manchester accents. They had stopped on their long run home from somewhere south. The next day, of course, they would be at Old Trafford to watch the match. ![]() That showcase also had a copy of the order of service which was used on the day that two stained-glass windows were dedicated to Edwards at St Francis's Church. They are close to the font, beside a picture of a gentle Jesus which was given to the church by a mother, in memory of a baby girl. One of the windows has Edwards down on one knee and there is a scroll running across his chest which says: 'God is with us for our Captain.' All the survivors of the Munich crash were in the church when the windows were dedicated by the Bishop of Worcester in August 1961. Busby said at the service: 'These windows should keep the name of Duncan Edwards alive for ever, and shine as a monument and example to the youth of Dudley and England.' Edwards name is also kept in front of the people of Dudley in the title of the Duncan Edwards Social Club, which is attached to the town football club, and in two trophies for local schools football. The memorials commemorate not only Duncan Edwards's football but also the simple decency of the man. He represented thousands in their wish for courage, acclaim and rare talent, and he had all three without swagger. The hero is the creature other people would like to be. Edwards was such a man, and he enabled people to respect themselves more. And to know more visit pages below:
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