It’s not every day you can say you remember where you were fifty four years ago, but today I can. I was on a freezing, foggy, school football pitch in Wolverhampton and I can remember the exact patch of grass, rimed with white frost, which I stared at bleakly when they told me The Busby Babes were dead. The Manchester United plane, bringing the team back from a match in Belgrade, had crashed in Munich while attempting to take off after a refueling stop, killing most of the shockingly young and astonishingly gifted squad, while leaving us a lingering hope that Duncan Edwards, the gifted gift to English football, might survive. Sadly he didn’t, and our hopes that our generation might escape death also died.
It’s odd to say of a school consisting of boys whose fathers had been killed in the war that this was our first experience of death, but this was a very personal death. Though we of course were Wolves fans, nonetheless we loved all the young Manchester stars who played for England, and the thought that one day, even for the brightest and the gifted, death could spring out of nowhere and snatch you away, was a hard lesson.
Three years later, the death of Buddy Holly, also in a plane crash, would complete the process; even our rock and roll heroes could die. True Love Ways released in the UK after his death, with its strings and mournful wailing sax, somehow seemed to be about that, and we listened with tears in our eyes.
Now, my generation are accustomed to death. We walk in its shadow. We are the bulging group on the edge of the runway, wondering who’s next. Send not to ask, it tolls for thee.
So always look on the bright side of death….
And a fond farewell to all our former heroes.

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