Jack and Bobby: A story of brothers in conflict

But this was hardly true. For Jack had never shown any inclination towards professional football, and, in a rare moment of self-doubt, he feared that if he took up the offer from Leeds, he might not make the grade because of his lack of talent. He saw himself as a big, gangly lad who was not really good enough. Going to Leeds risked the pain of rejection. As he once explained to Mike Kirkup, ‘The only way you could get away from Ashington was to play football. But there was always the worry that you might not make it, and would get sent home again. Then you would come back as a failure.’ Moreover, Jack loved the teenage life he had created for himself in the Northumberland countryside. If he left home for a big city like Leeds, he would no longer be able to fish and poach and shoot. Nor were his parents enthusiastic. In another illustration of how Jack felt he was excluded by his mother in favour of Bobby, he says that ‘She didn’t think I was good enough for professional football.’ Indeed, Cissie held Jack’s skills in such contempt that, when she first heard of the interest from Leeds, she felt that there had been some mistake. The club must have confused him with Bobby. ‘I was amazed because although Jack enjoyed his football, he just wasn’t the same calibre as Bobby,’ she wrote.

Due to his mother’s dismissive attitude and his own reluctance, Jack told Leeds that he was not interested. Now, with the end of his time at school approaching, he had to find a job. And the obvious one was coalmining. ‘At that time in Ashington there were only the pits; there was very little else, really,’ he recalls. So he followed his father into work at the Linton colliery. Initially, because he was serving his apprenticeship, Jack did not have to go underground. Instead, his first job was to stand by a conveyor belt for eight hours, sorting out the coal from debris as it came up from the mine. Never a patient man – except on the river – Jack found the work unbearably dull and kept asking for a move.

His badgering paid off. He was transferred to the weigh-cabin, where his task was to weigh the wagons before and after they were filled with coal, calculate the difference, then write the weight on the trucks before they were shunted into the sidings. Jack enjoyed his work there. ‘Sometimes there was a quiet period when no coal was coming down and that was great. You could draw little things with a piece of stone. It was an artist’s paradise. There were footballers, goals, nudes, everything. Some men worked there forever.’ The other great advantage for Jack was that the sidings ran out on to land full of rabbits. This provided ample scope for his homemade snares, and Jack would regularly catch three or four a day, selling them on to the other miners. ‘I usually left the pit at least two shillings richer than when I arrived.’

But it could not last. Jack was told that he had been selected to go on a 16-week training course in preparation for becoming a fully-fledged miner. As part of this induction, he was shown what work was like in the pit. Jack was appalled by the experience of his first trip underground: the cramped conditions, crawling on his hands and knees along a seam only three feet high; the noise from the explosives; the dust which went everywhere, including eyes and lungs; the gale force blasts of air from the ventilation system.

Returning to the surface, Jack handed in his resignation straight away, to the anger of the colliery manager.

‘We’ve just spent a fortune training you. If you walk away now, I’ll see that you never get another job in the pit – anywhere.’

‘I don’t want another job in the pit.’

Jack already had another option lined up. Two weeks earlier, with a sense of foreboding about the job in the colliery, he had applied to become a police cadet. Now Jack could not be regarded as one of nature’s law enforcers, and his motivation was suitably vague. ‘I was getting close to six feet in height. That, to my young mind, seemed as good a reason as any why I should try for the police.’ Impressed with Jack’s application, the Northumberland Constabulary summoned him to an interview.

But then fate, in the form of Leeds United, intervened. Despite the earlier rebuff, the club had not given up hope of attracting Jack and now another invitation arrived for a trial. This time Jack, having seen the misery of life underground, was much more receptive to the idea of becoming a professional footballer. He knew the truth, though, that Leeds’ interest was partly motivated by his close family connection with the club, with three of his uncles having been players there and one of them, Jimmy, still in the squad. ‘When I got the offer of a trial, I knew it was right nepotism,’ Jack once said.

The immediate problem for Jack was a logistical one. His police interview was in Morpeth on Friday afternoon, while his trial at Leeds was early the following Saturday morning. In the days before motorways, there was no physical way he could get to both places within this timescale. So Jack decided to abandon the police interview, instead travelling down on Friday to Leeds with his parents. The trial was to be the most important match of his young life. If he succeeded, a new future in soccer beckoned. If he failed, there was little chance that any other club would show an interest.

Snow was falling that Saturday morning at Elland Road as Jack ran out to play for Leeds Juniors against the Newcastle youth team. He was in his customary left-back position, and, in the difficult conditions, he was not sure he had done enough to impress. But the club thought otherwise, admiring his height and solid style. After the game he was summoned into the office of the club secretary, Arthur Crowther.

‘We’d like you to join the ground staff, Charlton.’

‘Do you really think I’m good enough?’

Of course. Why do you think we’d want you if we didn’t.’

Jack went home with his parents on Sunday to pick up his belongings, before returning to Leeds to report for duty on the Monday. Any ideas about becoming a policeman had been ditched as quickly as the career in mining. Despite barely giving the matter a thought, he had somehow become a professional footballer. His only anxiety now was whether he would succeed. What he dreaded, above all else, was being forced to return to Ashington, labelled a failure.

CHAPTER THREE The Rebel (#ulink_d6116b3e-a716-5431-b9b2-1eb8a07cae38)

Jack and Bobby might have gone to two of the biggest cities in Britain, but they had joined very different clubs. Manchester United were one of the soccer powers in the land, capturing the imagination of the public with their dynamic style and young stars. On the other hand, Leeds United were languishing in the Second Division, an ordinary side full of ordinary players. What particularly surprised Jack when he arrived at Elland Road was the shabbiness of the ground, the disrepair symbolic of the state of the ailing club. ‘I always regarded Leeds as a big club but I must confess that I had the wind knocked out of my sails when I saw the place for the first time. The terraces were made from ashes, not concrete, and there was more than a liberal sprinkling of weeds sprouting around the ground. In general the ground had a look of untidiness and at first I was disappointed. Frankly, I don’t know just what I expected but it did not quite come up to the standard I had envisaged as a youngster,’ wrote Jack in one of his testimonial programmes when he retired in 1973.

The only thing the clubs had in common was the reputation of their managers. When Bobby joined Manchester in 1953, Matt Busby had already been in charge for eight years, building teams which combined a dazzling creative flair with a powerful competitive edge. Born in a poor Lanarkshire mining village, Busby had been a highly effective wing-half for Manchester City, Liverpool and Scotland in the inter-war years, his ability to read the game making up for his lack of pace. A family man and a Catholic, he exuded a natural charisma and authority as manager, rarely having to raise his voice. His judgement of a footballer, both in terms of talent and character, was almost impeccable. All players held him in respect, the younger ones in awe. In his control of the club, there is a lot of the character of a stern devoted grandfather, making all the big decisions, ordering and disciplining in some huge, unpredictably gifted household,’ wrote Arthur Hopcraft in The Football Man. John Docherty, one of the United players of the 1950s, says of Busby: ‘There was always this impression of him being such a gentleman, but, in fact, he was as hard as fucking nails. Remember, he was from the Scottish coalfields. You don’t build great sides by being a nice guy. In private, he was a hard bastard.’

Jack’s first manager at Leeds, Major Frank Buckley, was an equally powerful figure in the football world. Unlike Busby, who could terrify a professional with just a raised eyebrow, Buckley was much more volcanic, using loud, foul-mouthed tirades to impose his will. Born in 1883, he fought in both the Boer War and the First World War, where he acquired the title of Major. He was a good enough footballer to have played for England, while his finest spell of management was at Wolves just before the Second World War. An autocrat with a flair for publicity, he captured the headlines in 1938 by announcing that he had given his players ‘monkey gland’ injections to increase their energy levels. Stan Cullis, the Wolves captain of the 1930s and later Busby’s biggest managerial rival of the 1950s, once said of Buckley’s authoritarian style: ‘He was never one of those equivocal people. He was a one-man band, who knew exactly what he wanted and where he was going’ – an approach that some might argue Jack Charlton was to adopt in his managerial career. When Jack arrived at Leeds in 1950, Buckley was past his best. But signs of the old dictatorial spirit still lingered. Bobby Forrest, who joined Leeds at the same time as Jack, recalls: ‘When we were training, Major Buckley used to sit in the old stand with a megaphone. If you did anything wrong, you’d get a real blast. The language was unbelievable. If I played a ball and it was cut out, he would scream, “You’re fucking useless, Forrest.” The residents nearby would regularly complain and eventually Leeds had to take the megaphone off him.’ Buckley could be witty as well. In one dressing-room talk he admonished his centre-forward: ‘Jesus Christ was a clever man, but if he’d played football he would never have found you.’

As a member of the ground staff, Jack also experienced the sharp end of the major’s tongue. On one occasion he was on the Elland Road pitch with another boy, carrying out the monotonous task of removing weeds and replacing them with grass seed. For once, the cold heart of the major softened, for when he saw the two lads, he promised them each five shillings for every bucket they filled with weeds. When the boys had finished, they had filled six pails, so, with characteristic impertinence, Jack walked straight up to the major’s office.

‘What the hell do you want?’

‘My 30 bob for the buckets of weeds.’

‘Get out of here! You’re already getting paid to do that work. Don’t ever let me see you up here again with your buckets.’

In fact this kind of menial task was typical of the life of the ground staff. ‘It was a hard apprenticeship,’ said Jack in a 1968 television interview. ‘You were basically a lackey, cleaning out the toilets, sweeping the terraces, painting and oiling the turnstiles, cleaning piles and piles of boots, putting studs in them, pumping up balls and brushing the car park.’

Traditionalists would say that such a routine taught the teenagers discipline, but Jack’s friend and fellow manager, Ian Greaves, thinks it was a nonsense. ‘I found it really odd the way these clubs exploited the future stars. It stuck with me for years. There is no way you could get away with that nowadays – and quite right too. You are either a cleaner or a footballer. When I became a manager, I never insulted young boys that way.’ But Jack, in a rare submission to officialdom, knuckled down, still haunted by the fear that if he did not stick at it, he would be forced to return to Ashington. As he wrote in his autobiography, ‘There was shame for the lads who were rejected. That was the fear that drove me during my first two years at Leeds. I did not regard myself as anything special when it came to playing football, otherwise I would have jumped at the first offer from Leeds and never gone near the mines. But now I had been given a second chance, I was determined that, come hell or high water, I’d take it.’

He worked just as hard on the pitch, training rigorously five days a week and playing for both the youth and third teams. Sometimes, he would even turn out twice on the same day. Such was his enthusiasm that he was willing to act as linesman if the appointed official failed to show. The thirds provided a particularly tough learning environment, because they played in the Yorkshire League, which was basically a miners’ competition. ‘I was just 16, playing against hard, fully mature men, big strong buggers who clattered into you with no quarter asked or given.’ It was the hardest league he was ever to experience in his life, and Jack says it was the making of him.

In his later years, Jack became well known for his relaxed approach to life, enjoying a pint and a cigarette most evenings. But in this mood of youthful determination, he shunned such indulgences. Living in a boarding house near Elland Road, run by Mary Crowther and her spinster daughter Laura, he ignored the nightlife of Leeds except for occasional visits to the local cinema. Astonishingly, in his first two years at the club, he went into the city centre just twice. He was good about money, too, sending home £1 out of his limited weekly earnings of just £4 10s a week. Jack was pleased to be living in digs, for it was the first time in his life that he had been able to sleep in a bed on his own. Yet he also found it odd that his mother had not asked either of her two brothers to put him up. After all, one of the supposed advantages of going to Leeds was the family connection, with Cissie having claimed that Jack ‘would be well looked after’ in Leeds.

Jack’s increasingly impressive performances and hard work paid off. After years of mediocrity, he was developing fast as a player. In his second year at Leeds, he was given occasional appearances in the reserve team, while in a practice match he played at centre-half and was given the job of marking the giant John Charles, the awesome Welsh international who could play up front or at the back. Jack felt he dealt with Charles quite well that day. Meanwhile, the dictatorial and profane Major Buckley, aged 69, had retired from Leeds United, his place taken by Raich Carter, the former Sunderland, Derby and England striker, whose success as a manager never matched his prowess in front of goal. Carter now had Jack’s future in his hands, for League regulations stipulated that, at the age of 17, a member of the ground staff had either to be given a contract or released. Having heard nothing, Jack walked into the secretary’s office on 8 May 1952.

‘It’s my 17th birthday today. Are you going to sign me or not?’

‘I’m afraid the first team’s in Holland, and Mr Carter has left no instructions,’ replied Arthur Crowther. Jack was now worried, feeling that the dreaded journey back to Ashington now beckoned. But the next day, he was summoned to see Raich Carter. To his immense relief, Jack was offered terms as a professional, a £10 signing-on fee, plus £14 a week, the maximum wage, more than three times the amount he was earning as an apprentice, and the highest wage of any young professional at the club.

After receiving this good news, Jack went across the road to a newsagent’s shop run by Jim Johnson.

‘Well, have you signed yet?’ asked Johnson.

‘Just now,’ replied Jack, surprised at the question.

‘Thank God for that. I’ve had scouts from other clubs, about a dozen of the buggers, in and out of here all week, wanting to know if you’d signed.’

‘What, to know if I’d signed?’ said Jack, astonished at this level of interest.

‘You, yes. They’ve been sweating on the highest line, over the road.’

Jack walked out of the shop, sensing that after all the doubts, he might at last have a real future in the game.

That feeling was only enhanced when, after a year of further progress with the reserves, he was elevated to the first team on 24 April 1953, the last day of the season. He was not yet 18 and it was only four years since he had been a struggling left-back in the East Northumberland Juniors, yet here he was, making his League debut against Doncaster Rovers, a full month before his more talented younger brother had officially signed for United. Despite his inexperience, Jack received little support from either management or players. He was merely informed that he would be at centre-half while John Charles would play centre-forward. As he recalled, ‘Incredibly, Raich Carter never came near me that day, never told me why he had put me in the team. And when I climbed aboard the first-team bus taking us to Doncaster the next day, I was left completely alone, without as much as a word from my new team-mates. I mean, nobody told me what I was expected to do, no tactical talk, nothing,’ But Jack acquitted himself well against Eddie McMorran, the Doncaster and Northern Ireland centre-forward, who himself was a player at Leeds in the late 1940s. ‘Charlton did not let his side down,’ was the verdict of the Yorkshire Post.

Soon after his League debut, Jack was called up to do his National Service. Because of his physique, he was selected for the Horse Guards and, during his two years of duty, he was based mainly at Windsor. It was through the army that Jack discovered two of the vices he had been carefully avoiding at Leeds: girls and cigarettes. Jack learnt that Windsor was a Mecca for young women, who came up from London to admire both the sights and the soldiers. For the first time in his life, he went to dances, and with his easy confidence and striking appearance, he was rarely short of female company. ‘I had a girlfriend in Slough and a girlfriend in Maidenhead, but it was never very serious,’ he later explained.

Smoking was a habit that Jack started during his years as a cavalryman. But he has always been an eccentric sort of a smoker, rarely getting through more than 10 cigarettes a day, unlike the real addict who cannot go long without lighting up. More interestingly, because he often does not have his own packet, he has become notorious in the football world for taking cigarettes off others, usually without their permission. Peter Lorimer, his colleague at Leeds, recalls: ‘The funny thing is that he did not really smoke that much, yet was always cadging fags. He would not mind who he asked, even total strangers. I have seen him on the train just reach over to the fags on another table. If the Queen Mother was sitting next to him, he would ask her if he could borrow one.’ In fact, when he was on guard duty at Windsor, Jack once went to have a cigarette break in the bushes. Finding that he was without any matches, he came out from the foliage to ask a passer-by for a light. To his embarrassment, he was face to face with Prince Philip. Jack ran faster than he usually did at Elland Road.

Jack later said that his two years of National Service were amongst the happiest of his life, especially because the budding manager in him emerged. In an interview in 1994, Jack said, ‘My spell in the army did me the world of good. When I was with the Guards at Windsor I really began to enjoy myself. I was made captain of the army football team, the first private to be given such an honour in the history of the Guards. For about a year I organized the training and everything we needed. I made sure that I got myself and all the lads the cushy jobs. We had all the time off we needed, no guard duty and a late breakfast everyday. Because we had a couple of other professionals like me, we had a good team and we did bloody well. We flew to Germany and won the Cavalry Cup.’

Due to the amount of football he played in the army, Jack turned out only occasionally for Leeds reserves when he was on leave, while he made a solitary appearance for the first team – in August 1954 against Lincoln City. But the army had a profound effect on his character. Jack had gone into the Horse Guards as a diligent young apprentice, only too grateful just to be part of the Elland Road squad. He returned the captain of an army cup-winning side, certain of his own leadership abilities and used to ordering around other players. In short, he had become a rather brash, presumptuous young man. And, now he was available again, that could only spell problems with the other Leeds professionals and officials. The next few years at Elland Road were to be filled with so many clashes that it frequently looked like Jack would be forced to leave the club.

Albert Nightingale, the Leeds striker in this period, told me: ‘I know he was only starting his career but he was terribly confident about himself, even arrogant. He used to give real stick to the players around him if anything went wrong, even to me – and I was in the forward line. Big Jack did not care what he said to anyone, he was that cocky. He would not speak to you properly. If you were having a bad game, he would lose his head and start swearing at you. He would bad-mouth players on the pitch, and that would lead to a lot of rows. Nobody liked him really. His head was too big for his shoulders. Because he was always shouting at them, people found it difficult to play with him. And, though he was a strong character, he was only a 50–50 footballer, decent in the air but not much skill on the ground. He was mean as well, never spent two ha’pennies. It was a joke in the team, the way he never put his hand in his pocket. But Big Jack took it all in his stride.’ John Charles, the star of that Leeds team, was frequently infuriated with Jack’s attitude. On one occasion, Leeds were playing Fulham and John Charles was playing centre-forward. With just 10 minutes left and Leeds 1–0 up, Buckley decided to bring Charles back to strengthen the defence. ‘Fuck off back up the field,’ said Jack when the Welshman arrived. Charles was so annoyed that, in the bath afterwards, he grabbed Jack and pushed him right under the water. ‘That will bloody show him,’ he said. Another time, when Jack questioned an instruction, Charles pinned him against the wall and said, ‘Listen, I’ll give you a bloody hammering next time.’

Bobby Forrest, who also played with Jack and became a good friend, recalls: ‘He was always outspoken. He never worried about having a go at anyone, never held anything back. He let you know if he thought you’d done wrong. With his quick temper, he encouraged mickey-taking. Because he had a long neck, some of us nicknamed him “Turkey”. I remember we played up at Sunderland on Boxing Day and we stayed in a hotel in Seaburn the night before. Jack was, typically, the last one down to the dining room that evening, and while we were waiting for him, I had gone into the kitchen, where there was a turkey with its head chopped off. So I grabbed the head and put it on Jack’s plate. When he came in and saw this, he was absolutely furious. He really lost his temper. All the lads started laughing so he picked it up and threw it at me. But I ducked and it went crashing into a table behind, where a couple were quietly having their Christmas dinner.’

Bobby Forrest also remembers what Jack was like as a footballer in the 1950s: ‘In his later career, he was so strong in the air, but in his first years, it was very different. It was striking the number of times in practice that he would try to head the ball and it would just shoot straight up instead of in the direction he wanted. There was no way, when I first saw him, that I would have ever thought he might one day become an England player.’ But, unlike some, Bobby was fond of Jack. ‘For all his confidence and hardness on the field, there was never an edge to him. He was just one of the lads, good for a laugh.’ Jimmy Dunn, the Scottish-born defender, speaks of both Jack’s resilience and his interest in money-making schemes, what Jack has always called his ‘little earners’. ‘Jack would stand no bloody nonsense. He could be bloody hard and was never intimidated by anyone at all. He was tough, confident, a strong devil. I got quite close to him. During the summer, when we reported for training and the team were building up a sweat in the hot weather, Jack and I would buy several litres of pop from over the road, then charge each player tuppence for a drink.’

Jack himself admits that, on his return from National Service, he could be a pain, though he put a lot of the blame on the organization of Leeds. He told the author Rick Broadbent: ‘I thought I knew a thing or two because I’d been away and I’d suggest things; but they’d just say, “Stop moaning and get on with it – this is how we do it.” The thing is, we didn’t have any coaching in Leeds in those days. A day’s training would consist of turning up, running the long side of the pitch and walking the short side. For variety, they’d say turn around and go the other way. Then we’d go to the tarmac car park and play seven-a-side. Nobody taught you anything and nobody learned anything. It was ridiculous and I got bloody fed up with it.’ The point about training is reinforced by Albert Nightingale: ‘Did we ever go through manoeuvres or tactics? Did we heck. We never practised anything in training.’

In such an atmosphere, it was predictable that Jack should clash with his managers. He regarded Raich Carter as a poor coach, and was not afraid to say so. ‘We never had any team talks and we never had a run-down on the opposition. Leeds was not what I would call a professional club in those days,’ he wrote later. To be fair to Jack, most other Leeds players shared this low opinion of Carter, who was unable to relate to his squad. Team captain Tommy Burden, for instance, left the club in 1954 following a bitter fallout with Carter. In a dressing-room row after a defeat by Bury, Burden was furious that Carter blamed the Leeds keeper for a goal conceded from a free-kick. ‘I said to him, “You’re the one who’s bloody well to blame.” I always felt that Raich suffered from thinking that there were no players any better than him.’ John Charles said of Carter: ‘He was very opinionated. He had the view, “I do it this way, so you do it this way.” He loved himself. He would take the credit for what you’d done.’

Even in the face of such failings, Raich Carter had a strong enough side to win promotion from the Second Division in the 1955/56 season. But within a year, he had been forced to sell John Charles, the player around whom this success had been built. Transferred to Juventus for a world record fee of £65,000 in April 1957, Charles benefited hugely from the move, gaining an international reputation, a trio of Italian championship medals and the award of European Footballer of the Year. Jack Charlton also benefited for, with Charles gone, his place as centre-half now seemed secure. The transfer, however, was highly damaging to Leeds. Without the dominant figure of Charles in defence or attack, the club struggled in the First Division. Carter complained that he was not allowed to use the revenue from the deal to rebuild his side with new players, but by December 1958, the board had lost faith in him and he was sacked.

Bill Lambton, the man who replaced Carter, commanded even less authority amongst the players. A former goalkeeper with Nottingham Forest, Exeter City and Doncaster Rovers, he had been appointed by Raich Carter in 1957 as part of the Elland Road backup staff. Almost as soon as he took over, his inadequacy as a manager was brutally exposed. His unorthodox training routines were regarded as absurd, his tactical advice negligible. Jack said later with typical honesty: ‘Lambton wasn’t a player, he wasn’t a coach, he wasn’t anything.’ One of Lambton’s bizarre ideas was to ask the players to wear running spikes during five-a-side matches. ‘It was so silly. No-one would go near anyone else. I couldn’t see the purpose,’ recalls Bobby Forrest. During a practice session on a windy day, the players complained that the balls had been pumped up too hard, making them difficult to kick. Lambton came on to the pitch and announced: ‘Nonsense. Good players should be able to kick balls like that in their bare feet and not hurt themselves.’

‘Well, go on then, show us,’ said Jack.