Football: Presses stopped in Manchester as Guardian man confirmed dead (original) (raw)

They stopped the presses for 10 minutes when the confirmation of Donny Davies's death reached the offices of the Manchester Guardian on the evening of February 6, 1958. The city was full of funerals in the days that followed and crowds of bystanders joined the entire staff of the newspaper as they lined the street to salute the cortege of a man whose Monday morning football essays, appearing under the byline "Old International", had entertained and instructed his readers for a quarter of a century.

Davies, who perished in the Munich air crash, was a small, smiling, cloth-capped man of Victorian virtues, a broad range of accomplishments and such literary talent that his colleague Neville Cardus called him "the first writer on soccer to rise above the immediate and quickly perishable levels of his theme and give us something to preserve. Old International was not only the best of soccer reporters; he was also something of a poet."

According to the Dean of Manchester, addressing a memorial service for the eight journalists killed in the disaster, Davies had done for football what Cardus did for cricket. Another sporting clergyman, a Methodist minister in Cumberland, expressed his admiration in a letter to the Guardian's editor. "His reports were stylish essays - cultured, humorous, a sheer delight," the Rev W Winchurch wrote. "One found in them classical allusions, quotations from Shakespeare, anecdotes, humorous examples of Lancashire dialect, as well as a perfect picture of the match and the players." Among the dozens of correspondents who offered their condolences to the paper Joseph Fox of Edgbaston asked: "Who else would have thought of an exhausted and defeated cluster of goalmouth defenders on a muddy day as 'like a stricken gun crew at Sebastopol - glorious in death'?"

Such letters came in from all over the country, mourning the loss of a man whose audience had been broadened by his weekly radio appearances on the BBC's Sports Report. "Being a woman, football does not hold a great interest for me," Mrs Dorothy Bennett wrote from Faversham, Kent, "but I always listened to Mr Davies's commentaries each week. His clever and original similes always fascinated me and I thought he must know his Bible well."

Harry Donald Davies knew many things well. He was born in Pendleton, Lancashire, in 1892, the son of an orphanage boy who, at the age of 17, had walked from Kidderminster to Manchester with nothing but sixpence in his pocket, in search of the employment that eventually took him to the position of mill manager in Bolton, where his eldest son was born. Don grew up accompanying his father to cricket and football at Burnden Park and Old Trafford, and showed his own early promise in both sports.

After leaving Bolton School he played on the right wing for Northern Nomads, the equivalent of the south's Corinthian Casuals, and won the first of his amateur international caps in 1914, when he toured Austria, Hungary and Romania with England. He had agreed to join Stoke City, who promised to cover the cost of his history degree course at Manchester University, when war broke out. Instead he signed up with the Officer Training Corps and served as an infantry lieutenant before transferring to the Royal Flying Corps.

A fortnight after receiving his wings, and after only a day in action on the Western Front, he was shot down over Douai and captured before being sent to a series of prison camps. At the last of them, Holzminden in northern Germany, he captained the camp football team, studied German and French, read Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, helped with the construction of escape tunnels and suffered so badly from a three-month gap between food parcels that on his return to England, weighing less than 6st, he was given six months to live.

"I must get a job" was his response and in 1919, while beginning to study for his university degree in the evenings, he took a teaching post at the apprentices' school run by Mather and Platt, a Manchester engineering firm. He remained there until his retirement in 1957, eventually as headmaster and finally as education officer, jobs that formed the core of his working life but also left weekends and long holidays free for sport and other diversions.

A prolific batsman and a gifted cover fieldsman, he captained Bradshaw CC in the Bolton League. After graduation he had the time to play as an amateur for Lancashire, whom he represented for several seasons. In the winters he continued to play football, and came up against George Abbott. "I first met him in 1920," Abbott wrote to the Guardian the day after the crash, "when, as a Manchester YMCA full-back, I tried, without much success, to cope with a sprightly and elusive outside-right playing for Old Boltonians in the Lancashire Amateur League.

"It was some consolation to learn after the game that this was Don Davies, who had been capped for England. We played together for three seasons, 1925-28, for Northern Nomads, during which a friendship formed between us severed only by his untimely death yesterday. He was a grand companion and a great sportsman in the very best sense of the term. May the soil rest lightly on him..."

Davies married Gertrude Quinn, also a teacher, in 1921; they had two daughters. He loved music, dance, poetry and art - he played the piano, attended Barbirolli's Sunday concerts at Belle Vue, saw Nijinsky and Pavlova, loved Shakespeare and Dickens, read Goethe and Schiller in the original, and brought prints by Albrecht Dürer back from football tours of Germany. He also stood up against oppression and is said to have been the first donor to Manchester's collection for the victims of the Fascist bombing of Guernica. For more than 30 years, too, he was active in the scouting movement. "He pushed you into things you never dreamed you could do," one of his former Rover Scouts wrote after his death, "and, thereafter, he stood on the touchline of your life shouting encouragement."

All these interests informed his writings on football, beginning in 1932 with his first piece for the Guardian, whose sports editor devised his nom de plume, and ending with his final report on Manchester United's 3-3 draw in Belgrade, in which he singled out the first of the two goals scored by the 20-year-old Bobby Charlton. "Dispossessing Costic about 40 yards from goal," he wrote, "this gifted boy leaned beautifully into his stride, made ground rapidly for about 10 yards and then beat the finest goalkeeper on the Continent with a shot of tremendous power and superb placing. There, one thought, surely goes England's Bloomer of the future."

He had almost not made the Belgrade trip. John Arlott had asked for a greater variety of assignments and was delighted when the sports editor invited him to travel with United to the second leg of their tie with Red Star in place of Davies, who had another engagement. On the Saturday before departure Arlott covered United's visit to Highbury but on the Sunday, when he telephoned the office to check his copy, he was told Old International had expressed a wish to accompany United after all. The following Thursday a disconsolate Arlott was mooching around a London bookshop when the office tracked him down, gave him the news and asked him to write Davies's obituary.

Arlott produced an appropriate piece but neither he nor the great Cardus could improve on the tribute contained in a letter to the paper's editor from a reader in Norbury, south London. "One of the most tragic deaths in yesterday's air crash was that of Old International," J M Boakes wrote. "Many people, including myself, although never having seen the Manchester United team, felt that we knew the individual types of play of these great footballers because of his outstanding descriptive writing. Byrne, Colman, Taylor, Whelan and the others are not just names to us; we can see them coming away with the ball, sweeping it through to the player gliding into open space, firing in the unstoppable shot. They will always be alive in our imaginations because he painted their movements so vividly."

Non-footballers who died

United staff: Walter Crickmer, Club secretary Bert Whalley, Chief coach Tom Curry, Trainer

Flight crew: Captain Kenneth Rayment, Co-pilot Tom Cable, Steward

Journalists: Alf Clarke, Manchester Evening Chronicle Don Davies, Manchester Guardian George Follows, Daily Herald Tom Jackson, Manchester Evening News Archie Ledbrooke, Daily Mirror Henry Rose, Daily Express Frank Swift, News of the World Eric Thompson, Daily Mail

Passengers: Bela Miklos, Travel agent Willie Satinoff, United supporter