Remembering Albert Scanlon: A Fan’s Tribute

He hurtles down the muddy left touchline, shoulders square on, head down, shorts hitched up, plain white socks a blur, heavy brown lace-up football at his feet as he bursts past floundering defenders to the by-line before launching a cross into the path of an on-rushing team-mate. It could be to Bobby Charlton for a net-ripping thunderbolt, or for gaunt-faced Dennis Viollet to ghost onto and despatch into the far corner with a shimmy of the hips, or perhaps golden-haired Albert Quixall will silence the critics – again – with a volley of unstoppable power. That’s how I like to remember Albert Scanlon, one of the last of the Busby Babes, much loved survivor of the Munich Air Crash and a favourite Manchester United star of my childhood, who died on 23 December, 2009, aged 74.

I was only 11 when the aircraft bringing home the United team from a 5-4 aggregate victory over Red Star Belgrade in the European Cup crashed on take-off at Munich on 6 February 1958, ultimately killing 21 people including 8 players and three members of the coaching staff. It was a shattering event but it was also the starting point of my enduring commitment to United, drawn into the dream that the club could rise from the ashes and stand again for the highest standards of creative attacking football. Day after day I followed what had happened to the survivors, initially focussing on the mighty Duncan Edwards, who tragically died some three weeks later,but then on all the others, including Albert. To me the players became almost like family and have remained so in my affections these fifty-odd years later, even though I never knew them personally.

I’m not claiming that my story is important in relation to me, as an individual, but my experience, and the loyalty I came to feel towards United after Munich is undoubtedly part of a much wider phenomenon, the process by which the club became first a national and then an international sporting institution, revered by some, no doubt hated, envied and reviled by countless others. I don’t come from Manchester, I’m not from Salford or from Hulme, where Albert came from, and I’m not working class (although the idea that middle class interest in football started with the Premiership is plain wrong, as photos of my schoolmaster grandfather as an amateur footballer in the 1890s might indicate, not to mention his memories of going to St James’s Park in the 1900s) but I was one of the many far from Old Trafford who came to love United. What needs saying over and over again, Albert Scanlon was part of that process, for me and for many others. He helped create United as a ‘heritage’ club, even if he didn’t inherit much benefit himself.

What saddens me in particular about Albert’s passing is that, having been a vital part of United’s extraordinary recovery from tragedy, he missed out on more substantial playing success with the club and perhaps for that reason his very real contributions in the early post-Munich seasons somehow came to be largely forgotten. But not by me.

Munich Survivors

It’s almost impossible to measure the impact of the crash on the lives of those who survived, each of whom has their own story, some filled with bitterness openly declared, others bottling up festering discontent over decades.

Two of the players who emerged from the aircraft wreckage suffered such terrible injuries they never played again, Northern Ireland centre half Jackie Blanchflower and the tough little England outside right, Johnny Berry, despite endless futile attempts to regain fitness. Some of the luckier players were able to resume their careers and become footballing household names , including Blanchflower’s international goalkeeping colleague and childhood friend Harry Gregg (see my Homage to Harry Gregg), or the hardened ex-miner Bill Foulkes and, of course,Bobby Charlton, arguably the greatest player ever to represent the club. Dennis Viollet was one of those who achieved some success on his return to fitness, regaining his place in time for the ‘58 FA Cup Final, although he was transferred to Stoke City after Denis Law’s arrival at the club in 1962, missing the real glory days of the ’60s. Then there were the others, those who survived but who never quite managed to live up to the promise of their pre-Munich youth, such as the whippy Welsh winger Kenny Morgans, who, like Albert, had played in the Babes’ last match and looked a very hot prospect. Albert Scanlon was in some respects in this rather sad group, and that’s why I have always had a special fondness for him, wanting so much for him to succeed, thrilled for him when things went well, dismayed by his departure from the club in 1960, and disheartened over his gradual footballing decline and marginalisation.

The basic outlines of his career at United are easy to describe. He joined the then league champions as a local lad aged 17 in 1952 and helped win the FA Youth Cup in 1953 and again in 1954, the year he made his first team debut, qualifying him as an auththentic Busby Babe. In 6 seasons until the end of 1960, Albert made 127 first team appearances for United and scored 35 goals, a good return for an out-and-out winger. He played several times for England Under-23s but never made the higher level and, for all that he contributed to Manchester United, never won senior honours.

Albert’s return to football

Albert had suffered massive head and other injuries at Munich and missed the Phoenix-like rise of the team in the weeks following the crash, when United miraculously reached the FA Cup Final in May, ‘58 with a patched up team under assistant manager Jimmy Murphy.

Helped by a gruelling recovery plan devised by Jack Crompton, the United goalie in the 1948 FA Cup Winning team who returned to Old Trafford as a trainer after Munich, Albert recovered physically from his injuries, enabling him to return to first team action the very next season. Whether he had recovered emotionally is much harder to say, there being zero understanding of post-traumatic stress disorder at that time.

Runners-up in 1958-59: the forgotten triumph

What is astonishing is that Albert was not only fit enough to play the next season, 1958-59, he played all 42 league matches and scored 16 goals (out of a record-equalling total of 103) helping United to become runners up, 6 points behind champions Wolverhampton Wanderers. For some reason, that remarkable relative success in the season after Munich has never got much attention, as even Sir Bobby Charlton, top scorer with 29 goals, has now been acknowledging. It’s never written about, it’s not considered a significant element in the revival of United as a major force in English football, it’s just a detail in the record books, linked with routine derogatory comments about ‘Golden Boy’ Albert Quixall, the then-record £45,000 signing whom Matt Busby acquired from Sheffield Wednesday in the autumn of 1958.

This neglect is partly, perhaps, because ‘58/59 was something of a false dawn, as realistically United were never going to win the league, as even I could see as a naively hopeful 12-year old. To make it seem even less significant, the following years never lived up to the hopes raised by that runners-up position. United came: 7th, 7th, 15th,19th and 2nd before winning their first post-Munich title in 1964-65 (although they did win the FA Cup in 1963, in a side packed with new signings such as David Herd, Denis Law, Pat Crerand and skipper Noel Cantwell.)

So if things seemed to fizzle out so soon afterwards, why was that first season after Munich so significant? It was not just that it showed United could compete with the best again, important though that was, given that some actually feared United would start a relentless slide down the divisions. Nor was it only because it showed manager Matt Busby was fit again and mentally strong enough after his own grievous injuries and emotional trauma to begin the massive task of taking United back to the top. Looking back now with the benefit of hindsight United’s later success under Busby is sometimes made to seem inevitable, as if winning the European Cup ten years after the crash was simply a matter of ‘destiny’. Such impressions are utterly wrong. Just how hard the road back to success was for United, especially after the romantic aura of the ‘58 FA Cup run had worn off, never seems to be discussed or understood, obscured perhaps by the glamour of the brilliant Best-Law- Charlton era in the later Sixties. That’s why those early seasons when players like Albert Scanlon did so much to put the club back on the road merit far more attention than they get, even if no-one won any trophies. Everything was achieved against the backdrop of a tragedy no-one ever spoke of, when half a dozen players, like Albert ,were still at the club as uneasy living reminders of those who had gone, and of what might have been.

United rose from disaster not only by getting to Wembley in ‘58, which everyone remembers, they did so by living true to the very deepest traditions of the club, enshrined in the flair and attacking play of Billy Meredith and the others before World War One, and then the whole of the earlier Busby era. Under his innovative ‘tracksuit’ management they won the FA Cup in 1948, the League Championship in 1952 and then in the glorious days of the Babes, they were Champs again in 1956 and ‘57, all achieved by playing quick-witted , high-tempo, ball-playing attacking play that thrilled crowds and attracted the best , most progressive-minded young players from all over the country.

So, when United were miraculously runners-up in 1958-59, they had to live up to tremendously exacting standards to retain the support of the masses, especially those like me who had been swept up in the short-lived wave of sympathy for the stricken team after Munich, now rapidly evaporating.How players lived up to those high traditions of creative play mattered at least as much at that stage as the accumulation of points, important though that was too.What impressed me, and no doubt other loyalists, was the way they managed somehow to uphold the values of the great days in conditions of utmost adversity. Of course there were times when they came off the rails, when the emotional toll of the crash sapped the confidence and motivation of key players, whether crash survivors or those forced too quickly into manhood from the ranks of the Youth teams. But when it came off, it was brilliant. And Albert Scanlon was a major part of that.His wing play was – at its best – as exciting as any of the big-name wingers you might care to think of at a club where wing play has been esteemed historically like no other.

Sadly I never saw United in the flesh in that first season, I only followed them from afar, on the radio and later on television, when ‘telerecordings’ were shown of two or three matches on BBC ‘Sport Special’ on a Saturday night, the forerunner of ‘Match of the Day’. It was the following season that I first started watching United, and Albert, in the flesh for the first time, but I was already avidly reading anything I could about United (no blogs, of course). At that time the papers had distinctly different Northern and Southern editions, catering to local sporting allegiances, which made the ever expanding coverage of United in the South, where I lived, very remarkable, and a crucial part of the process of spreading support and , as it were, ‘nationalising’ the club. United were getting as much coverage as the big London teams like Arsenal and Tottenham, and that could only be because United were still trying to play spellbinding, attacking football, attracting crowds and building their reputation as a ‘glamour club’ (how fans of other teams who hated United would spit out that tag with disgust in those days).

The picture on the wall

In those early post-Munich days I had pictures of United players plastered over my bedroom wall, some in colour from Charles Buchan’s ‘Football Monthly’ (alongside girls I fancied such as Jane Asher, star of the BBC’s ‘Juke Box Jury’, and Hayley Mills of ‘Parent Trap’ fame). By the beginning of the ‘59/ 60 season I had a smiling new colour photo of Albert, taken from a well-produced booklet published by Football Monthly, called ‘Salute to Manchester United’, the only club so honoured, an early sign of the growing market for United souvenirs. Albert had reddish hair, normally quiffed and slicked down with haircream like one of the tamer lip-curling rock’n'rollers in the Elvis Presley mode. His hair hardly seemed to move when he was playing, unless a header disrupted the carefully sculpted confection. It was parted to one side, unlike the more austere centre-parting generation that preceded the Babes, like Allenby Chilton, the skipper when Albert first played in the first team in 1954 ,a (wounded) World War II veteran like so many in Busby’s first post-war teams. None of the Babes had the style of out-and-out ’50s teenage rebels, unlike the generation coming up after Albert in the ’60s , when George Best and others began wearing their hair long and loose in the manner of ‘popular beat combos’ such as the Beatles. The Babes perhaps styled themselves more on the raffish Brylcreemed look of a Denis Compton, the swashbuckling England cricketer or some suave Dance Hall crooner.

United’s Famous 5-Man ‘W’ Formation

The basis of United’s success in those days was the creation of one of the all-time great, 5-man forward lines, playing in the old-fashioned ‘W-formation’ : Warren Bradley (outside right), Albert Quixall (inside right) , Dennis Viollet (centre forward) , Bobby Charlton (inside left) and Albert Scanlon (outside left). Behind this formation, with one or both of the inside forwards dropping back when needed, was a 3-man ‘half-back line’, and then the two full backs behind them. While United stuck with this 2-3-5 , one or two teams were flirting with the 4-2-4 line up pioneered at the 1958 World Cup by Brazil, notably West Ham United, which United began to gravitate towards as well, although Busby and Murphy were never ones for strict adherence to rigid formations in that sense. Their teams were always winger-based however, creating width and space for their fast movement and close-passing interchanging across the whole forward line. They would often work what was once described as ‘old fashioned Scottish triangular wing movements’ down the line, popping the ball around at speed, to mesmerising effect.

To give a flavour of just how good that first post-Munich team could be, here’s a match report from The Times of 20 December 1958, covering an exhilarating 3-2 victory against Chelsea at Stamford Bridge:

‘…There is pure footall in the bricks and mortar of Old Trafford. Nothing less than such deep enduring qualities could so quickly have rekindled out of Munich’s ashes some of the magic of the recent past . Once more, as a 50,000 crowd saw through the gloom and floodlights of Chelsea, there are glints of that magic….United are a team again, with an integrated plan, and with the accent on sensitive attack. Their forwards achieved their effects – with an obvious joy- by the rapier rather than the broadsword. Bradley, Quixall, Viollet, Charlton and Scanlon wove some shimmering patterns at times, quick and elusive as light, patterns based on movement and accuracy’.

Strike a chord? Sound like United at their best today with Giggs and Rooney in full flow? Who wouldn’t want to watch football like that?

Here’s another Times match report, this time from 7 February, 1959 (note the date, just a year after the crash). United beat Spurs 3-1 at White Hart Lane, helped by this magical goal from Albert:

‘With half an hour left it was all over when a quick movement between (Freddie) Goodwin, Viollet and Quixall sent Scanlon scorching home all alone through the middle of a riddled Spurs defence for goal number three’. The writer admired ‘United’s subtlety and fluid movement in attack’ and the ‘penetrative speed of Scanlon and Bradley down the flanks’.

As we are here commemorating Albert, let’s have a description of another of his goals, this time from the following season, in a 3-3 draw at home to Fulham , from The Daily Sketch, 7 November, 1959:

‘The outstanding forward was Albert Scanlon, United’s left winger…Scanlon bewildered Cohen by his dash when he cut inside to rocket a shot in off the post to make it 2-2′ (Yes, it was George Cohen whom Albert bamboozled, the great right back from England’s World Cup Winning team of 1966).

Press & TV coverage

These reports and many others like them come from scrapbooks I kept at the time. I have numerous cuttings from before my days as an active, match-going supporter because we used to have a coal shed outside our back door for the coal-fires in the house and the stove in the kitchen. One needed plenty of kindling paper to ‘make up the fire’ in those days and so the papers would be thrown for storage in the shed. When I became interested in United I rescued dozens of old sports pages from the ‘coal hole’, many dusted with the black stuff. Needless to say, I also started keeping reports of matches I’d seen, in person or on TV. I saw some bad defeats covered on ‘Sports Special’, including the disastrous 5-1 home defeat to Spurs on 12 September, 1959, made totally humiliating by the fact my brother was (is) a Spurs supporter. Worse was watching Newcastle demolish United 7-3 on 2 January, 1960, the worst defeat on those early years of my following United (duly described by the United-leaning Daily Mirror as a ‘ten goal thriller’). Albert played in both those embarrassing defeats, but was no more at fault than anyone else.When the cameras were there, United always seemed to get beaten. Every time that happened, I’d look for the few bright moments of magic in the gloom of defeat, from Bobby, Dennis , or from Albert. Amazingly, there was always something to raise hope for the future. Even in defeat there was just something about United.

Far better, and one of the best wins I saw on TV in those early days was a searing 5-1 away victory over Nottingham Forest on 14 December, 1959. After a bad run of results , Busby had dropped Charlton, Gregg, Bradley and Wilf McGuinness (the future United manager) in the previous match and it had worked. Here the imperious Viollet scored 3 cracking goals, one a perfectly struck volley from the edge of the box from a well-flighted cross from Scanlon, a scene captured in a nice Daily Sketch photo with arrows tracking the ball from Albert to Dennis’s boot to the back of the net. The Mirror said Scanlon, who scored one himself, had ‘a brilliant game…too fast for the slow-footed Forest full-backs’.

I still remember the glow of pride from seeing United on that occasion, which had the commentators purring. It was truly a magnificent performance, probably the best I saw in the ’50s.The trouble was, United could turn it on like that one day, and get hammered the next. How could a team that batters Forest one week get slaughtered 7-3 less than a month later?

That was part of Albert’s problem. Throughout his career he was dogged by the complaint that he was maddenly inconsistent. For every time he’d charge down his wing and deliver a pin-point cross there would be another when he’d beat his man only to sling the ball harmlessly into the side-netting, or way beyond his own forwards, and out of play on the far side. Just before Munich he seemed to have stepped up a notch, edging the great David Pegg out of the first team, and hence playing in the wondrous last match played by the Babes on English soil, on 1 February, ‘58 when he laid on three of United’s 5 goals in a pulsating classic, said by some to be the best ever league match .
Here I can’t resist quoting the (London) Evening News, still drooling over that classic encounter some two years later (19 December, 1960):

‘Then Scanlon whizzed down the right touch-line in a brilliant run which seemed to cover the length of the field, controlling the ball at top speed. A shrewd, low pull- back into the middle, and there was Bobby Charlton waiting to hit one of his unstoppable volleys…United two up’

Free spirit

Albert was well liked within the team, a bit of a fixer on foreign trips, with his endless resourcefulness in finding friendly locals and ex-pats to socialise with. He seems to have been a free spirit, evidently causing mild alarm to Busby and his Catholic priest friends about his ’spiritual welfare’ at a club which so much stood for family values. And that is one of the saddest things about ‘Scanny’, as his pal Harry Gregg called him. Albert and some of the other survivors reportedly became bitter about how the so-called ‘family club’ treated them, given what had happened at Munich. As he was able to carry on playing he was not entitled to insurance compensation but he felt the club was morally obligated to help him out more than they did, especially in later years when the club became one of the richest sporting institutions in the world, just when he was facing hard times and poor health. To some degree he felt pushed out of United as his form became more erratic in the later months of 1960, and he lost his place on the left wing to Bobby Charlton, who ironically didn’t want to play there either.

Even more ironically, Albert’s last game for United was in a friendly against Bayern Munich, of all teams, on 21 November 1960. In the souvenir programme he was named as ‘Bert Scanlon’ and described in the pen-portrait as ‘feared by more First Division defenders because of his penchant for unorthodox tactics’, a slightly odd sign-off in the circumstances. On the pitch that night he turned it on one last time under the Old Trafford lights in an excellent 3-1 win , delivering two ‘great’ crosses for ’stunning headers’ by Alex Dawson, as described by the ever-loyal Frank McGhee in the Mirror.

Shortly afterwards,with Busby unable to guarantee Albert regular first team football, he accepted an £18,000 move to Newcastle United, where his uncle, ex-United left-winger Charlie Mitten – the ‘Bogata Bandit’ – was manager. Charlie had been a member of the 1948 FA Cup winning team, but fell out with Busby when he accepted the offer of massively increased money to go to Colombia. Maybe Mitten had private family knowledge of Albert’s state of mind and hoped to give him a boost by bringing him to a club with enormous tradition and a huge fan base. Whatever the background it didn’t really work out for Albert , or for Mitten, who was sacked a few months later anyway. Typical Newcastle , one could say, even then.

After 22 games at Newcastle in 2 years scoring 5 goals, he dropped down to Lincoln City where he played 47 matches and netted 11 times, before spending a slightly more productive 3 years at Mansfield Town, where he scored 21 goals in 108 appearences, helping them get promotion from the 4th Division. He finally retired in 1966 at the age of 30, largely un-noticed at a time when United’s all-stars were riding to league and European glory.

Albert’s legacy

After retiring from the game he had once loved so much he had various jobs, including working as a baker, as a docker and as a night watchman. The trauma of Munich never really left him, and nor his bitterness at how United treated him. At the time of the last big commemoration of Munich, the 50th Anniversary in 2008, when the club did its utmost to mark the occasion with proper dignity and respect, Albert Scanlon seemed to come back somewhat into the fold, appearing in public with old colleagues and friends, his face etched with deep emotion, always carrying himself with enormous dignity. For me it was inexpressibly moving to see this now elderly figure who I’d admired so much as a child nearly fifty years before. Albert was taken to the Champions League Final that year with other Munich survivors, a now diminishing group, and it seems that United’s dramatic penalty shoot-out victory against Chelsea brought him real pleasure, which added to the poignancy of the occasion, deepening the mood of celebration. I would like to think that Albert felt entitled to share some of the credit for that victory.not just because as a Busby Babe he helped pioneer English involvement in the competition, but because in those crucial two years after the Munich Air Crash he was one of those who truly kept the Red Flag flying high.

By Giles Oakley

Related RoM posts by Giles Oakley:
Following United: 50 Years of Disappointment
Hitting the Fan With United (Part One): Homage to Harry Gregg