A United fan's memories of Harry Gregg

John White, Branch Secretary of Carryduff Manchester United Supporters' Club, shares his personal recollections of Harry Gregg...

Manchester United fans all over the world are mourning the passing of club legend Harry Gregg.

I had the pleasure of meeting Harry on many occasions and I recall visiting his home one evening in late 2011, when I asked him if I could have his permission to write to Manchester United and ask the club to send over a team to play a Northern Ireland XI in a testimonial game. I was unaware that Harry had not previously been given a testimonial, despite having spent ten seasons at Old Trafford, until his son, John, told me at the 20th anniversary dinner for Carryduff Manchester United Supporters Club in the Europa Hotel, Belfast on 22 March 2011.

I then wrote to Sir Alex Ferguson and he instantly agreed to send a team over to Belfast in honour of Harry at the end of the 2011/12 season. Windsor Park was full to the rafters on 15 May 2012 when Sir Alex kept his promise and brought his United side over to Belfast to pay tribute to Harry’s Manchester United career.
 
Henry “Harry” Gregg was born on 25 October 1932 in Magherafelt, County Londonderry, Northern Ireland. He played for Linfield Rangers, Linfield Swifts (also known as Windsor Park Swifts) and Irish League side Coleraine before he accepted an offer to sign for Second Division Doncaster Rovers just before his 20th birthday. 
 
He was delighted to sign for a club whose player-manager was a Northern Ireland legend, Peter Doherty. Coleraine received £2,000 for releasing him. Gregg played a total of 92 Division Two games for Rovers before Manchester United approached his club to sign him up. While Gregg was at Doncaster, Doherty was also in charge of Northern Ireland and awarded him his first international cap in a 2-1 away win over Wales in Wrexham on 21 March 1954 in a World Cup qualifying game.  
 
United’s offer of £22,000 was instantly dismissed, so Matt Busby and Jimmy Murphy drove to Doncaster to ask Gregg in person to join United. By then, he had gone on to win nine caps for Northern Ireland and was changing the way goalkeepers operated, as he was one of the first to venture out of his box to shout encouragement to his team-mates in front of him. At the time, most goalkeepers rarely left the goal line, but the innovative Gregg liked to bark orders to his defenders if he saw one or two of them out of position. 

The Old Trafford pair duly turned up at Doherty’s home just six days before Christmas to meet Gregg and discuss the terms of the transfer with Doherty and his player. Gregg liked what he heard and without a moment’s hesitation the big Irishman agreed to move to United.  A fee of £23,500 was agreed, the second time the club had broken the world record fee for a goalkeeper. Gregg received a paltry £30 from the transfer fee, but as he said himself he would have gone to United for nothing. However, Busby had the utmost faith that the young Irish international goalkeeper would be worth every penny, and Gregg did not let him down.   
 
Two days after signing Gregg, Busby gave him his debut and he put in a commanding, almost flawless, performance as United ran out 4-0 victors over Leicester City at Old Trafford in Division One on 21 December 1957.  His attitude to training and dedication to the task in hand were exactly what Busby was looking for and he retained his place in the team, playing in 18 of United’s remaining 20 league games that season, which saw them finish ninth in the table.
 
By the time of Munich, United had not lost one of the ten games since Gregg’s arrival, and everyone was in buoyant mood having qualified for the semi-finals of the European Cup the previous evening. Gregg, who had been reading The Whip by Roger MacDonald, put the book down and gazed out the window as the third attempt to take off got under way. The plane crashed into a building at the end of the runway and burst into flames. Amid the wreckage and pandemonium, he clambered out of a hole in the fuselage, repeatedly returned to the burning aircraft to rescue the survivors, despite the danger that the plane might explode at any stage.    
 
In an interview with The Times sometime after the disaster, Gregg said he could still remember how dark and silent it was after the plane crashed. “I thought I was dead until I felt the blood running down my face. I didn’t want to feel my head because I thought the top had been taken off like a hard-boiled egg. I was so confused. It was total darkness yet it was only three in the afternoon – it was hard to reconcile. The first dead person I saw, did not have a mark on him. It was Bert Whalley, the chief coach, who’d been taken with us as a bonus for developing all those great young players. At first I thought I was the only one left alive. In the distance I noticed five people running away, they shouted at me to run. At that moment, the aircraft captain came around from what had been the nose of the aircraft carrying a little fire extinguisher. When he saw me, he shouted in his best pucka English accent: ‘Run, you stupid b*****d, it’s going to explode.’”  

Then Gregg heard a baby crying. “The crying seemed to bring me back to reality and I shouted at the people running away to come back. But they were still shouting at me to run. I could hear the child crying and felt angry they were running away, so I shouted again, ‘Come back you stupid b*****ds,  there are people alive in here.’ For me to shout that was difficult because, at that time, I was a God-fearing man and wouldn’t normally have cursed. But the people just kept running away.” So he climbed back into the burning aircraft and found the baby: “She was beneath a pile of debris and, remarkably, she only had a cut over her eye. I scrabbled back to the hole with her and got her out.”

After Gregg handed the baby to someone close by, he returned to the smouldering wreck and pulled the baby’s mother, Vera Lukić, out of a hole in the fuselage. He then made a third trip back to the plane, ignoring cries for him not to, given the likelihood that a further explosion could occur at any time. “I began to search for Jackie Blanchflower and I shouted out his name. Blanchy and I had been friends since we played together for Ireland Schoolboys as fourteen-year-olds and I was desperate to find him.”
 
But in his frantic search for Blanchflower, he soon came across Bobby Charlton and Dennis Viollet, both of whom were unconscious. Gregg dragged his two team-mates out of the plane and laid them on the snow a short distance from the plane before resuming his search for Blanchflower and, much to his utter relief and joy, he finally found him. “When I found Blanchy, the lower part of his right arm had been almost completely severed. It was horrendous, a scene of utter devastation.”
 
Quite amazingly, Gregg overcame the shock and horror of what he had seen and played in United’s next match, on 19 February, a fifth-round FA Cup tie against Sheffield Wednesday at Old Trafford. Famously, the section in the match programme where you would normally see the team line-up was left completely blank, while Jimmy Murphy had the task of trying to find 11 players to wear the famous red shirt. He had missed the trip to Belgrade as he was in Cardiff at the time, coaching the Welsh national team for an important 1958 World Cup play-off game against Israel.  
 
Gregg told Murphy he wanted to play, as did fellow Munich survivor Bill Foulkes, and on a solemn night under floodlights at Old Trafford, a young and inexperienced Manchester United side beat their opponents 3-0. Gregg wasn’t the only player with Irish connections in the United side, for the game marked the debut of Shay Brennan. The Sheffield Wednesday players had no chance of winning the game, such was the emotion of the occasion. In the lead-up to the tie, football fans everywhere, regardless of their club affiliation, were so overcome with grief at the terrible loss of so many innocent lives in Munich that it seemed like everyone, including fans from the Steel City, was willing United on to win.  
 
Players from both sides, as well as many fans at Old Trafford that night, wore black armbands in memory of those who had died. 

Gregg was awarded an MBE in 1995 and in the summer of 2008 he was made an Honorary Graduate of the University of Ulster and awarded a Doctor of the University (DUniv) in recognition of his contribution to football. Earlier in the year, he had made a very emotional return to Munich airport for a BBC documentary entitled One Life: Munich Air Disaster, and stood at the scene of the crash that cruelly claimed the lives of eight of his team-mates 50 years earlier.

It was the first time he had been back to Munich, and during the filming of the documentary he met the son of Mrs Lukić, who had been in his mother’s womb at the time of the disaster. Zoran Lukić said to him: “I have always wanted this moment, to look into your face and say to you, ‘Thank you’. I was the third passenger you saved, but, at the time, you were not to know that.”
 
Gregg blushed slightly before responding: “You’ve nothing to thank me for. I did what had to be done without thinking about it. I’ve lived with being called a hero, but I’m not really a hero. Heroes are people who do brave things knowing the consequences of their actions. That day, I had no idea what I was doing.”  
 
In an interview with the BBC prior to the television documentary being shown on the channel, Gregg looked back at Munich and said: “I don’t want my life to be remembered for what happened on a runway. I don’t need the sheriff’s badge and I don’t want to play the hero. The wonderful thing to me about that period of time was the freshness of youth and the free spirit, the manner in which we played. I’m not a poet, but I always think: ‘They laughed, they loved, they played the game together, they played the game and gave it every ounce of life and the crowds – they thronged to see such free, young spirits.’ To me, that’s what I want to remember, that was the wonderful thing.”

Rest in peace, Harry.