RESTING IN PIECES

There is not a lot new to say about Munich '58, but most newspapers have had a good try this week - and it has not made edifying reading.
Survivors and families have been wheeled out for various anniversaries almost non-stop down the years, most of them with little complaint and with the infinite patience which has become their trademark. The occasion of the 50th anniversary, tomorrow, found them under ghoulish siege.
Bobby Charlton, Harry Gregg, Albert Scanlon, Bill Foulkes and even Kenny Morgans (the forgotten survivor as most of the tabloids labelled him quite justifiably) have all repeated, interminably, what they have said so many times in the past about the crash.
So have the sons of Johnny Berry and Roger Byrne, the daughter of pilot Captain James Thain, the brother of Liam Whelan and the sister of David Pegg. As you would expect from humble and gracious people, their recollections have been both measured and moving.
Inevitably, however, given the age we live in there have been other casualties - most notably those items foreign to most tabloids, the facts. To take the worst of many:
The Daily Mail on Saturday spread a fine piece by Geoffrey Wheatcroft across two of its feature pages, accompanied by a photograph of "the Busby Babes boarding the flight to Munich from which many of them would never return".
Very dramatic, except that among others on the plane steps were assistant manager Jimmy Murphy and trainer Jack Crompton who were not on the last tragic flight. Nor were Ian Greaves, Alex Dawson and Wilf McGuinness among the more recognisable of the players on the picture. The blond quiff of Albert Quixall, who was signed after Munich, also stands out.
Most of us found an error of this magnititude and such basic incompetence hard to credit in a national newspaper and rang the Daily Mail to tell them so. Some of us also posted comments on the newspaper's website. It goes without saying that none of these were published - although a new, correct, photograph did materialise magically there today.
Among the others, the Daily Express still, as I write, has a picture on its website of a youthful Albert Scanlon "who died after the plane crashed" - despite a reader's correction posted underneath.
The Sun, inevitably, weighed in with a piece from an eye witness "exonerating" Captain Thain after he had been blamed by the German authorities for not de-icing the aircraft's wings.
In fact, the pilot was cleared 40 years ago by a subsequent British inquiry who decided that slush on the runway was the cause.
The quotes from the German rescuer eye witness were simply lifted straight from Stanley Stewart's excellent book, Air Disasters, first published in 1986.