Trautmann: a German Englishman in Spain
Tuesday 29 January 2008 21:10
Catalan national radio called yesterday to ask about the Munich air disaster. They're doing a one-hour documentary on the 50th anniversary next week. I told them that they would be better speaking to someone older who remembered it, but they wanted an English Spanish speaker to explain the context of the disaster. I thought they wanted a couple of minutes, but I was still speaking 28 minutes later.
I felt flattered that such a big foreign radio station were making a documentary about United. They’ll doubtless splice the interview and I’ll end up being used for six or seven minutes, ensuring that proper space can be afforded to the former Barça and Madrid players who remembered the Busby Babes.
The radio journalist I spoke to told me that former Barcelona goalkeeper Antonio Ramallets, named in the best XI of the 1950 World Cup, still holds a silent vigil on 6th February each year in honour of those who lost their lives.
Later on, I called the former Manchester City goalkeeper Bert Trautmann to speak to him about Frank Swift, another former Manchester City goalkeeper who died at Munich while covering United for The News of the World.
These days Trautmann, the German who famously didn’t realise he’d broken his neck in the 1956 FA Cup final, lives by the orange fields on the coast near Valencia. I spent a day with him a couple years ago, a fine figure of health in his mid-80s. A rare Mediterranean swell had breached his garden and Bert was doing all the hard repair work.
Bert’s life story is fascinating. Indoctrinated into Nazism from the age of eight, he was a paratrooper in WW2. He was captured and escaped from the Russians on the Eastern Front, was then captured and released by Americans on the Western Front and finally taken by the British who put him in a prisoner of war camp at Haydock, between Manchester and Liverpool.
His English still has the deep flat vowels of the South Lancashire working-class. The first player to wear Adidas in England, he told me that he had spent his life defending the English to the Germans – and the Germans to the English.
He spoke movingly about Swift and invited me to drop in next time I’m down the coast. As his wife makes the best cakes I’ve ever tasted in Spain, I’m more than keen.
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About Andy Mitten
Andy Mitten – whose great uncle Charlie Mitten starred in Matt Busby’s first great side – started
United We Stand, which he still edits, aged 15 in 1989. A regular writer for
FourFourTwo, his other credits include
The Independent,
The Mail on Sunday,
Sport,
The Guardian and
GQ in the UK plus foreign publications around the world. He has visited 85 countries in every continent, covering derby games from Israel to the Faroes, and interviewed players like Ronaldinho, Keane, Gerrard, Messi and John Gidman.
He has written or co-written 10 books including the critically acclaimed
We're the Famous Man United,
Glory Glory!, Paddy Crerand’s autobiography
Never Turn The Other Cheek and
Mad For It – From Blackpool to Barcelona, Football’s Greatest Rivalries. Manchester born and red, Andy divides his time between M16 and Barcelona.