SIR Alex Ferguson is expected to be among the mourners at a memorial service for former Manchester United correspondent David Meek who died aged 88, Colin Young writes.

Ferguson worked closely with the York-born journalist who spent much of his career at the Manchester Evening News.

He became one of the most popular and respected football writers in the history of the game and the finest exponent of the often difficult relationship between a city’s football team and the local newspaper’s football reporter.

Many of the game’s legends and United greats are expected to attend his memorial service in St Ann’s Church in Manchester on Wednesday, November 21 and honour one of its most trusted journalists.

David Meek became the Manchester Evening News’ United correspondent in the week of the Munich Air Disaster in 1958 when the paper’s Tom Jackson was among eight journalists killed in the crash.

He was 21 and the paper’s political leader writer at the time, after joining from the Yorkshire Evening Post where he had worked in the York office for three years following his National Service and a year with a paper in Melbourne, Australia.

The editor had noted his love of football after he had arranged a day off to watch United in a Wednesday afternoon FA Cup tie. The job was offered on a temporary basis.

Meek said: “Thankfully he remembered although even if I wasn’t interested I would have done it because it was an emergency. After a fortnight, the games came thick and fast, and that was it.”

At the time, the club’s manager Matt Busby was still recovering in a Munich hospital so Meek dealt with his caretaker Jimmy Murphy.

Archbishop Holgate’s Grammar School old boy Meek, whose father Wilf was The Yorkshire Evening Press’ York City correspondent for most of his lifetime and became club vice-president, not surprisingly later admitted he found the whole experience traumatic.

In an interview about his life at his home in Milton Keynes for the Irish Sunday Independent Meek recalled how difficult it was taking over from the popular and experienced Tom Jackson, who was around the same age as Busby.

Meek said: “Jimmy introduced me to Matt and it was very awkward. He was on crutches. I was relatively young, being introduced to the legend and it made a crushing impression on me.

“I could see Matt thinking ‘crikey, I have to get used to a whole new set of newspaper and media people, in addition to the colleagues, coaches and favourite players I’ve lost’.

“It was some years before I got close to him and I think that was because he found it awkward. He was obviously close to Tom Jackson and some of the other senior journalists who had served in the war and he missed them.

“He still called me ‘lad’ when I had turned 40 and I couldn’t feel aggrieved about it because it seemed so natural coming from the great man. Always called me lad.”

Meek covered United for nearly 50 years, wrote countless books and magazines on the club and continued to ghost-write Sir Alex Ferguson’s programme notes after his retirement.

He was there for the MEN through all Busby’s unsuccessful predecessors, their good years and the very bad ones, including the season United and York City were both in the old second division in 1974/75.

That meant working alongside his father Wilf in the Bootham Crescent and Old Trafford press boxes. One of the proudest moments of his life.

“It was very nostalgic,” he said. “I found it a bit awkward because my father could lose me and find me and lose me again. He had been a football reporter for years and I was just starting, yet there we were sitting side by side both working for evening papers. I enjoyed that season.

“My father was the City reporter for years. He would write his copy in longhand and we would take it into the office in Coney Street on a Sunday to give the subs a good start on the Monday morning - I will never forget that narrow entrance on the main street and the steep drop to the printworks.

“I just liked the atmosphere in Coney Street. There was a very distinctive smell of old wood and old paper. It sounds soppy but it just caught my imagination.

“I was still at school when I did the occasional game as practice for my dad, covering St Peter’s School which was famous then, and would get coverage in the Evening Press.

“We lived nearby and I’d walk round the lovely grounds to watch the rugby or cricket. And you could watch the girls from Queen Anne’s as well!”