Donny Davies, the Guardian correspondent who died in the Munich air disaster | Richard Williams

Donny Davies was the son of an orphanage boy and survived a German POW camp in the first world war. In February 1958 he was among those to lose his life in the wreckage of G-ALZU

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 duffel coat, 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.

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