On February 6th 1958 Manchester United were returning home from a victorious European Cup match when the aircraft landed at Munich to refuel.

Twice it tried to take off in the snow and slush on the runway and twice the pilot aborted take-off. On the third attempt the aircraft ploughed off the runway and smashed into a house before bursting into flames. Twenty three people, including eight of the Busby Babes, died.

At the time Nobby Stiles, who later became one of England’s World Cup winners, was a 15-year-old youth-team player at the club and cleaned the boots of his heroes, Duncan Edwards, Eddie Colman and Roger Byrne.

He was sitting in the dressing room with team-mates when the trainer told them that the plane had crashed, but no-one realised the seriousness of the situation. It was only on the way home, on the bus, that he learnt the truth.

Here, in his own words, he describes the range of emotions that assaulted him that tragic day when “the world went crazy”.

“I grabbed a copy off the newspaper seller and thought how strange it was to see the faces of Roger Byrne, Geoff Bent, Eddie Colman, Mark Jones, David Pegg, Tommy Taylor, and Billy Whelan staring out of the front page. They belonged on the back page.

“But they were dead. Coly was dead. He couldn’t be dead. I cleaned his boots. None of them could be dead, but especially not Coly. But that’s what the Chronicle was saying in big black headlines.

“I felt sick. We’d been laughing about this crash back in the dressing room, saying maybe somebody had broken a leg, maybe the big chance had come for one of us.

“I got on the Collyhurst bus, and now I didn¹t hear anything going on around me. Everything seemed normal enough. The streets and the shops looked just the same. The sun was presumably still up there behind the low, leaden sky, and I guessed the moon would take its place in a few hours time.”

He knew no-one would be at home so he went into a church.

“Then I prayed and prayed. Prayed that the Chronicle had got it wrong ­ or played the sickest practical joke in the history of newspapers.

“I prayed and I wept, and I rocked back and forth in the pew. It could have been an hour or two, I don’t really know. There was no one else in the church. Then I went home.

“The lads were dead, or so I’d read, but people still had to work. I put the dinner in the oven, as my mum had told me to do that morning, in that other life.”

Stiles, interviewed for a leather-bound 850-page opus on Manchester United that goes on sale today, then had to deal with the funerals.

He recalls: “That’s all we seemed to be doing for weeks, going to funerals. I served on the altar at the requiem masses. Not Coly’s, though. Coly was dead. It was devastating. I had given his boots their last shine. I would never again see him moving so smoothly, so quickly, upfield.

“For a while it seemed that the only thing that kept Manchester going was that Duncan Edwards was still alive.

“He fought for his life for 15 days and then his great heart gave out. At his funeral back in Worcestershire, the vicar said that we would see great talent again, even genius, but there would only be one Duncan Edwards.”

Nine years after the tragedy, Stiles sat next to Sir Bobby Charlton, one of the survivors on an aircraft that took the team from Los Angeles to Hawaii.

He remembers that Sir Bobby was asleep. “You wouldn’t have thought an earthquake would have disturbed him, but the moment the plane moved away from the blocks he was wide awake.

“Shay and I were asleep soon enough, but when the stewardess nudged us awake as we began the descent to Honolulu, we saw that Bobby was still wide awake.

“He had the same expression on his face as he’d had when we roared down the runway in LA. It really wasn’t so much an expression as a mask. I would never know what went on behind that mask on the flight across a massive stretch of the Pacific. But then, how could I?”

The opus, which weighs 37kg and measures 50cm by 50cm, includes 2,000 pictures, many of which are published for the first time.

In the book, which costs £3,000, Charlton recalls how the captain aborted two take offs at Munich.

For more information or to buy the United Opus, go to www.krakenopus.com or call 0207 213 9587.