His wonderfully talented and youthful team was dubbed “the Busby Babes”. And manager Sir Matt Busby’s boldest and youngest selection was Jeff Whitefoot.
Whitefoot was a highly talented local lad who had grown up in the Cheshire village of Cheadle and been selected for England Schoolboys. Many clubs craved his signature. His father was a Manchester City supporter, but Busby arrived at his home to persuade Whitefoot to join the Manchester United staff on leaving school in 1949.
Whitefoot might have assumed it would be a long apprenticeship before any chance of first-team action. Among his early duties was messenger boy and staffing the Old Trafford switchboard. Yet such was his emerging ability as a wing back that Busby decided to give him his debut against Portsmouth in April 1950 aged only 16 years and 105 days. “Office Boy Picked” was one incredulous headline.
“I was really flummoxed, but it was OK — people were pretty kind,” he recalled. After the match he politely declined a radio appearance, saying he wanted to go to the cinema.
All seemed set fair for a glittering career in a team boasting other formidable teenage talents such as Duncan Edwards. Whitefoot played in the United teams that won the title in 1952 and 1956, and was selected for England Under-23s.
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According to a club tribute, he played the game “with a cool, seemingly casual grace which masked a sharp competitive edge”. He could pass brilliantly with both feet and was surprisingly strong in the air, despite being only 5ft 8in.
Such was the array of young talent at the club, however, that Whitefoot’s place was not guaranteed. “I had some great times at Manchester United but my chances of getting in the first team were being reduced all the time,” he recalled. His relationship with the manager deteriorated. “Matt Busby was very quiet,” Whitefoot said later, “but he could be very nasty.” After a poor performance in a game against Arsenal in 1957, in which Whitefoot had flu and “shouldn’t have played”, Busby decided that another youngster, Eddie “Snakehips” Colman was a better prospect in Whitefoot’s position. Whitefoot asked for a transfer.
Eventually Busby sent Whitefoot and his wife Ellen (“Nell”) in a taxi in January to second division Grimsby, where a former team-mate was manager. Nell was not enamoured by the wintry prospect of life in the fishing town. “I don’t know what possessed me,” he later told the author David McVay, “but I came out of the office and I’d agreed to sign. Nell was almost in tears. And we’d only been married six weeks!”
Soon afterwards he realised that his move away from Old Trafford had in fact meant a fateful escape when he heard on the radio that the Munich air disaster had killed 23 people, including eight of his former Manchester team-mates as they returned from a European match. Among the dead was Eddie Colman.
“It was very difficult to know which funeral to go to,” he recalled. “All those who died were my friends — we grew up together at the club. It was horrendous.”
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His grief intensified an increasingly miserable mood during his brief time as a Grimsby player. “The training was terrible and nobody seemed to be bothered and after a while I wasn’t either.” Consoling himself with the local speciality, cod and chips, he put on a stone in weight and became “desperate to get away”.
Salvation came in the form of a transfer to Nottingham Forest in 1958. He joined what was “a team of misfits who gelled and came together”, playing at times “fantastic football … to feet, all the time, quick and sharp”. Reports in The Times praised Whitefoot as “the complete wing-half … the inspiration of a dazzling attack”, part of a midfield that could “with a twist of the body, a tiny sidestep, or by beating a man with the ball at their feet, open up the spaces in front”.
The team’s greatest achievement was winning the 1959 FA Cup final, against Luton Town. Leading 2-0 after 30 minutes they lost a player to injury and, in the era before substitutes, had to hold on with ten men to win 2-1.
Whitefoot went on to make more than 250 appearances for Forest, moving in and out of the team as managers changed. Results were mixed but in his final full season they finished second in the First Division behind Manchester United.
He retired from playing in 1967 and needed a new way to earn a living. Although the players’ maximum wage rule had been abolished during his career he had never made more than £40 a week. He and his Forest team-mates shared a bonus of only £1,250 for winning the FA Cup, a far cry from what he called the “insane” levels of modern footballers’ pay.
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At one point an attempt was made to exploit his financial need in a betting scam when a local plumber, Derek Pavis, rang Whitefoot at home and asked “How would you like to earn £500?” explaining that he would be paid if he helped Forest lose a match. “I am not interested, not for £500 or £5,000,” Whitefoot replied, and reported Pavis to the authorities. He was later convicted under the Prevention of Corruption Act.
Whitefoot and his wife and family (they had a daughter, Judith, and a son, Peter) tried running market stalls before realising “we were useless”. They had more success running pubs, including one at Oakham in Rutland. He continued to watch football and was spotted recently at Old Trafford, aged 90.
It had, however, become “a different game altogether”. He reminisced about how on wet days “the balls shipped in water and it was bloody hard trying to get the thing in the air. I really would like to see some of the modern players having a go with a ball like that on a quagmire of a pitch and with our boots on.”
In a comment that might ring true for today’s England fans, he regretted the lack of goalmouth action. “They hardly get in the penalty area now — it’s all in the midfield and playing across the back. It’s not that interesting to watch.”
His time, he reflected, had been “the best”. It had included great moments at Nottingham Forest but also, most poignantly, years in the company of players such as Duncan Edwards, whose lives and careers were cut so tragically short. He and his fellow Busby Babes, he believed, had “set a standard for how football should be played”.
Only one of the Busby Babes, Wilf McGuinness, is left.
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Jeff Whitefoot, footballer, was born on December 31, 1933. He died on July 2, 2024, aged 90
