Flicking through a paper for the first time in months, Johnny Berry turned to sport and was confused.
The Busby Babe was looking at the Manchester United line-up, but where were his teammates?
Three months earlier, Johnny had miraculously survived the Munich air crash that killed 23 people, including eight United players.
But Johnny had no memory of the disaster. No clue United’s all-conquering team, touted to dominate European football for years, were all but gone.
His son Neil Berry, 73, says: “He must’ve been the last person in Britain to know about it. Dad was in a coma for almost three months.
“When he returned to Manchester he still had no idea what had happened – he thought he’d been in a car crash.”
Johnny was continuing his recovery in hospital when he saw the newspaper. Neil says: “The nurse and doctor were brought in to explain. He went through the team – name by name – and the doctor said if they were alive or dead. It must’ve been very tough.”
The disaster, which shocked the world, happened on the afternoon of February 6, 1958, as the team returned from a match against Red Star Belgrade.
The team’s plane, with 44 on board, crashed while making its third attempt to take off from a slush-covered Munich runway. United stars Roger Byrne, 28, Eddie Colman, 21, Mark Jones, 24, Duncan Edwards, 21, Billy Whelan 22, Tommy Taylor, 26, David Pegg, 22, and Geoff Bent, 25, all lost their lives. Johnny, 31 at the time, and team-mate Jackie Blanchflower, 24, were so badly injured they never played football again.
Neil, who was just eight, says the memories are so raw and real that he still gets upset talking about it.
He was used to his dad packing his suitcases and leaving for matches. “We didn’t have a family Christmas ever because in those days they played on Christmas Day. Even the away matches in England they would go off on the train and often stay overnight. It was just his job. My dad used to go to the game on a push bike because there were no buses. He borrowed the bike off a neighbour as we couldn’t afford one.”
But the day of the disaster was different. Neil was playing marbles after school and his mum Hilda shouted for him to come in.
“I thought I was going to get a telling off for something because I was usually allowed to play out until teatime.
“But my mother said she had just heard on the radio the plane my father was on had been involved in a crash.
“I thought this was tremendously exciting news. I imagined him and all the other players falling from the sky in parachutes wearing their football kit, which was more exciting than being a footballer I thought.”
Hilda became more and more anxious and other friends and players’ wives gathered at the Berrys’ home in Davyhulme to wait for news from the TV and radio. Neil says: “I still thought that they would fly home on another plane and be able to play on Saturday.”
Players’ names were read out on the news through the night as either being dead or alive. The Berrys had to wait six hours until Johnny was confirmed as a survivor.
"Hilda flew to Munich the next day to be at the bedside of her husband, who had been given the last rites in German and was not expected to live. He had a broken skull, jaw, elbow, pelvis and leg. The three brothers went to stay with family friends.
Neil was put up by former United star Harry McShane, whose son Ian would become star of the BBC series Lovejoy, until his aunt Gwen Williams arrived to take them back to her home in Folkestone, Kent. Retired headteacher Neil says the truth of the crash did not sink in until he saw cinema newsreel about it with his aunt.
He says: “I saw pictures of the United party in hospital, including manager Matt Busby in an oxygen tent.
“I heard them mention my father was in a coma. So I asked my aunt what this meant and she told me he was asleep. I took that to mean that it was night-time in Germany. I now knew that many of the young men who had played with me, given me chocolate bars, been so kind, were now dead.”
It would be three months before Johnny was well enough to return to Manchester to continue his recovery. Neil says: “He went away to play football as one man and returned as a completely different person. He
suffered a complete change in his personality.
“He was never able to drive or concentrate for any length of time. As he grew older his injuries caused him increasing pain but he still never complained.”
Johnny would open a sports shop with his brother Peter, also a former professional footballer.
But the shadow of Munich loomed large. Neil says: “My mother loved dad dearly, but she told me he wasn’t the man she married. The Munich air crash changed the life of my family forever.
"We were all personally traumatised by it and suffered indescribable grief. At one time we were nearly destroyed by it.”
Johnny, part of the league title-winning sides of 1952, 56 and 57, died of cancer in 1994, aged 68.
Later this month, at Ewbanks in Surrey, his winners’ medals are expected to make £80,000 at auction.
Johnny: The Forgotten Babe, by Neil Berry, is available on Amazon.
