Duncan Edwards' heart-breaking yet remarkable story is one entrenched into the folklore of Manchester United and the minds of every single supporter.
Yet, even 65 years on from unjustly early death, the new biography 'Duncan Edwards: Eternal' shines new light on the life and career of a remarkable young man. Wayne Barton is the prolific author of 20 United books and he has now turned his wealth of encyclopaedic knowledge to tell the most comprehensive account of his story yet,
The book, which will be released on February 16, includes new interviews from United and English football heroes as well as unseen photographs and is written with contributions from Edwards’ friends and family.
The Manchester Evening News will publish a series of excerpts from the upcoming biography, including this one on how Edwards survived two miraculous brushes with death on the very same day:
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Barton writes:
Fear of flying is not uncommon. Duncan had not had pleasant experiences of flying, or even international travel in general. Mostly, though, the fear is in our heads, and not related to actual physical danger to our lives; and even in the 1950s, when commercial air travel was a fairly new thing, the completion of a journey without incident was common enough to take for granted. That was the case for the first part of the journey to Belgium. After refuelling, the plane was back in the air.
“On the second leg of the flight from Brussels to Bucharest, the pilot apparently got a little off course,” (Ronnie) Clayton said. “We didn’t know this at the time, but we did get a shock when one of the players exclaimed: ‘Look – out of the window!’ And – only a couple of yards away, it seemed – we saw another aircraft, bearing on its fuselage a red star. Even as we sat, wondering what was going to happen, we got the answer – in the shape of tracer bullets which began to zip across the nose of our aircraft. Suddenly the MiG (Mikoyan- Gurevich, a Soviet fighter aircraft) shot beneath our plane – and we zoomed upwards. We must have missed a midair collision by inches.
“Dunc and I, as usual, were sitting next to each other, towards the rear of the plane. Dunc turned to me and, in a voice which sounded strangely unlike his own, said: ‘You don’t look so good.’ In a faint voice I managed to answer: ‘Neither do you.’ I felt like being sick. And from the look of him Dunc’s stomach was tied in knots, too. We felt even worse when seconds later the MiG appeared again, zooming above and below us. It seemed uncomfortably close, and someone suggested that the pilot was trying to force us to land. But our own pilot wasn’t having any. Calmly, he spoke to us over the intercom: ‘There’s no need to worry.’ And he kept an even keel and stayed steadfastly on course. For 15 minutes that MiG tried everything to shake us out of our steady flight; and as we sweated through the whole ghastly performance it seemed like 15 hours. Suddenly the ordeal was over. The ‘enemy’ plane had vanished. And we breathed again.”
Upon landing, Duncan confided in Express writer Bob Pennington. Pennington asked if it would be okay to report the story – but Edwards asked him not to. It was already informally known that Duncan hated flying. Even going to Ringway Airport with Molly to watch the flights take off sometimes made him apprehensive. Whether or not this particular story would be one of embarrassment more than it might stir some political unrest was not quite certain – Duncan was due to be demobbed, and may well have had that on his mind too.
This would have been a traumatic event for anyone, and yet, it was not Duncan’s last brush with death on this day. On the evening in Bucharest, some of the players went out to the circus, where Ronnie remembered how Duncan had, “for the second time within a matter of hours... escaped death by inches”. “Duncan was finicky in a number of ways,” Ronnie called. “Finicky about his food, for example. And finicky about animals, too. They were all right, so long as they stayed their distance. Circus animals at any rate. And at that circus he was sitting too close to them for comfort. His seat was pretty near the spot where the animals made their entrance into the arena. I was sitting next to him, and felt somewhat relieved, too, when he suggested that we should move a few yards farther from the entrance. It was a good job he decided to make that move. For if he had stayed in his original seat he would have been crushed to death. As it was, he made the switch only seconds before the accident happened. For a giant spotlight toppled from its mast high above the area and crashed – smack into the seat where Dunc had been sitting. That seat was splintered into hundreds of pieces – and if Dunc had stayed there’s no doubt he would have been crushed to a pulp.”
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'Duncan Edwards: Eternal' by Wayne Barton will be released on February 16, 2023, in hardback. RRP £18.99. It can be pre-ordered with a 25 per cent discount here.
