adminLONDON. – The afternoon light was fading and the crowd of 52 000 were dispersing as Donny Davies completed his match report.
“At Belgrade today,” it began, “in warm sunshine and on a grass pitch where the last remnants of melting snow produced the effect of an English lawn flecked with daisies, Red Star Belgrade and Manchester United began a battle of wits and courage and rugged tackling.”
The concluding sentences of the piece, which recorded a 3-3 draw and United’s 5-4 win on aggregate, were the last he would ever write. Davies was the Manchester Guardian’s chief football correspondent. A small figure in a flat cap and a muffler, he loved classical music, poetry, art, the theatre and the ballet, and read Goethe, Baudelaire and Cervantes in the original.
For 25 years his job as headmaster of a school for apprentices run by Mather and Platt, a giant Manchester engineering firm, gave him time to cover league matches on Saturdays and in the holidays.
His reports appeared under the byline “An Old International”, referring to his three amateur caps on the right wing for England on a tour of Austria, Hungary and Romania in 1914.
It was his habit to retreat to his study for three hours on a Sunday morning, left strictly undisturbed by his wife and two daughters, to compose his description of the previous day’s match. There was no such luxury that Wednesday afternoon in Belgrade — where, because floodlights had not yet been installed, the match kicked off at 2.45pm.
Like his fellow reporters who had travelled from Manchester with United’s players and staff on a chartered BEA Elizabethan airliner, he transmitted his words in time to catch the first edition of the next morning’s paper.
Less than 24 hours later, he and seven of those newspaper colleagues would be lying dead or dying in the wreckage of G-ALZU near the slush-covered runway at Munich-Riem airport.
In those days, history had given the inhabitants of the press box a different set of life experiences. Davies had joined an infantry battalion at the outbreak of the First World War, transferring to the Royal Flying Corps for pilot training in 1917.
On his second mission over the western front he was shot down near Douai and spent the rest of the war in a German POW camp, where he captained the inmates’ football team, studied languages, and read Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.
He emerged in 1918 weighing six stones and given only a few months to live by a doctor evidently unaware of the strength of his character. Another survivor of that war was Henry Rose, the flamboyant, Jaguar-driving controversialist of the Daily Express’s sports pages, who had come close to death in the trenches.
A younger man, Tom Jackson of the Manchester Evening News, served through the Second World War in the Army Intelligence Corps, latterly unmasking concentration camp officials. Rose and Jackson were killed on Flight 609 along with Davies. – The Guardian.
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