Jack and Bobby: A story of brothers in conflict

This the manager did, taking off his boots and hitting the balls in his bare feet. Though he refused to admit his pain, he winced with every kick and had to limp away at the end of the session. Jack despised Lambton at this moment for his stupidity and stubbornness. For Jimmy Dunn, this sort of foolish behaviour was typical of the manager: ‘He was so bad it was comic. I could not believe he was made manager. I don’t know how he got the job. He knew nothing about tactics, nothing about playing, nothing about football. I had no respect for him. No-one did.’

Jack clashed with Lambton off the field as well. At a team dinner in a Nottingham hotel, Jack created a scene when he was asked by the waiter which starter he had chosen from the set menu. Jack, feeling particularly hungry, said he would have both melon and soup. Lambton heard the request and exploded. ‘You’re not having both. Nobody has both.’

‘What are you talking about?’ asked Jack. ‘It’s on the menu two if you want it. I can have it if I want it, can’t I?’ asked Jack.

‘No. You’ll just have one or the other. Nobody eats those things together. It just isn’t done,’ continued Lambton.

‘It is done in the best restaurants, better restaurants than this one. Now I would like both. Can I have them?’

‘No.’

‘All right. You can stick it,’ said Jack, and he walked out of the dining room in a rage. Later he told the journalist Jimmy Mossop, who, like so many, became a close friend: ‘Ignorance and dishonesty are two things I cannot tolerate. To try and con me into believing that you can’t have soup and melon together is like trying to prove I was ignorant. I reacted because I knew I wasn’t ignorant and I knew how things were done.’

There were other aspects of the club which angered Jack, such as the requirement that he sign an attendance book when he turned up for training, or the failure to clamp down on players who were drinking before matches. Perhaps what aggrieved him most were the double standards. A club rule had been imposed that only players and directors were allowed to travel on the team coach. After a game at the Valley, Charlton Athletic’s ground in south-west London, when Jack tried to get a lift for two relatives who lived in north London, he was firmly told that the rule applied. No exceptions could be made. Yet two weeks later, when Leeds were playing again in London, he found that Lambton had allowed on to the bus four people who had nothing to do with the club – they actually turned out to be waiters from the team hotel. Jack stood up and angrily confronted Lambton.

‘A fortnight ago my relatives had to miss their train and spent hours getting home. Now there’s four complete strangers sitting on our coach.’

‘It’s got nothing to do with you,’ said Lambton, ‘I make the rules around here. You do as you’re told.’

‘I won’t. You made a rule. You made me stick to it. Now you stick to it. If they’re not getting off, I am,’ said Jack, gesturing to the waiters.

‘Please yourself,’ replied Lambton.

With that, Jack made an angry exit from the bus. But then, as Jack stood on the kerbside, a Leeds director intervened. ‘Get them off the coach – and get him on.’

Lambton’s authority, always weak, had been utterly destroyed by Jack’s action. A few days later, in March 1959, a crisis meeting was called at Elland Road, involving the chairman, directors, players and manager. Knowing he was under threat, Lambton made a pathetic plea: ‘If you let me stay, we’ll have a new start.’ But it was too late. Such was the unanimous strength of feeling expressed against the manager that the club had no alternative but to sack him.

Still in his early twenties, Jack had proved that he could be a real influence in the club. Yet, he was still not an especially respected or popular figure amongst his contemporaries. For all his willingness to challenge the establishhient, he was still regarded as too bombastic and ill-disciplined to be a good professional. ‘My problems in those days were of concentration,’ he told Jimmy Mossop. ‘Training could not hold my interest. I could not concentrate on playing in practice matches. They never seemed to prove anything.’ And he had become just as wayward off the field: ‘I was boozing, staying out late and there were girls. I had a bit of a chip on my shoulder and I was causing a fair bit of aggravation at the club.’

Yet for all the problems that he experienced at this time, two crucial events happened in 1958 that were to change his life forever. First, he married. And, second, Don Revie, the most influential figure in Jack’s football career, joined Leeds United as a player.

CHAPTER FOUR The Conformist (#ulink_209755d6-e5a0-5994-8e5b-6e4707a3c24e)

‘It was forbidding, in many ways, coming to such a big city but I didn’t have any fear. It was an adventure for me. I just wanted to play professional football,’ Bobby once explained. Like Jack, Bobby had rarely been away from home when he began his adventure in soccer aged just 15 in the summer of 1953. And, just as Jack had been disappointed by his first sight of Elland Road, so Bobby was surprised at the grime and ugliness of Manchester when he arrived in the city. ‘When I got off that train at Exchange Station and looked around me, I saw all the buildings completely covered in a thick layer of black. There was so much smoke belching out of all the factories and mills that it clung to the buildings. Ashington, though it was a mining town, was never like that. It wasn’t black,’ said Charlton in a recent interview.

In the 1950s Manchester was notorious for its thick smog, so dense that it frequently shrouded the city in darkness and made even the shortest journey a nightmare. Joe Carolan, who joined United in 1956, told me, ‘The pollution was unbelievable. I remember once getting off the train with some other players, and trying to walk through the centre of the city to my home. There was not a taxi, bus or car to be found anywhere because of the smog. It was so thick and black we could hardly see a thing in front of us. So we walked down the middle of the Stretford Road, and every few hundred yards, one of us would go off to the left or right to check if there was any landmark we might recognize.’

When he disembarked from the train, Bobby was met by Jimmy Murphy, Manchester United assistant manager, who was to have a bigger influence than Matt Busby over the development of Bobby Charlton as a footballer. Murphy, who never learnt to drive, took Bobby by taxi to digs run by a Mrs Watson near the Old Trafford cricket ground. Throughout the journey, as Bobby later recalled, Murphy spent the time extolling the virtues of Duncan Edwards, ‘Great left foot, great right foot, strong in the tackle, great in the air, reads the game, can play in any position, is fast and has tremendous enthusiasm.’ Bobby was in awe of Duncan before he had met him.

Unlike Jack, Bobby was not appointed a member of the club’s ground staff when he joined United. And this again highlights the difference in the treatment of Bobby and Jack. For Cissie had been quite happy for Jack to join the Leeds ground staff at 15, even if it meant tedious and degrading work. But very different standards were applied to Bobby. ‘My parents had been told that all you had to do on the ground staff was sweep up and clean toilets and all that, and my mum and dad didn’t want me to do that,’ said Bobby later. It was a classic case of favouritism, where the elder brother had to carry out duties which were seen as too demeaning for the younger.

Instead of acting as an orderly, it was arranged for Bobby to carry on with his education. Bedlington Grammar, which had strongly disapproved of Bobby’s move into League football, had persuaded his parents to transfer him to Stretford Grammar in Manchester, so he might be able to gain some GCE (General Certificate of Education) qualifications. But the move turned out to be a disastrous one for Bobby, as both his studies and his football suffered. He rose at 7.30am, got to school at 9am, and then, as soon as his classes were finished, he went to Old Trafford for three hours of training. Returning to his digs at about 9pm, he then tried to do his homework. The task was beyond him. ‘I was making a complete fool of myself in lessons; they were totally different from the work at Bedlington because the GCE papers were different. I hardly knew what time of day it was and I found myself going to bed at midnight with unfinished homework which I just could not do. I was only 15 and I was in a terrible quandary because on one hand I could not go on living like that and on the other I did not want to let down my mother,’ he wrote. As usual, he was much more concerned about his mother’s judgement than his father’s.

What made the problem worse was that Stretford Grammar had not been informed about Bobby’s decision to sign for United. Understandably, given Bobby’s talent, the school expected him to turn out for their side, while Bobby had his commitments with the Old Trafford youth teams. Conflict was inevitable. Within three weeks of the start of term, Bobby had been picked for two different matches on the same day. The moment of truth had arrived, he knew. So he rang his mother to tell her that he wanted to leave the school. Cissie proved understanding, agreeing that there was no point in struggling on at Stretford, and advised him to see the headmaster. Now Bobby was always a shy, nervous man – throughout his career at Old Trafford he hardly dared to approach the patriarchal figure of Sir Matt Busby. But he was rarely more apprehensive than the day he had to explain his situation to the headmaster. ‘Shaking like a leaf, I said I had no ambition to be an intellectual, that I was going to be a footballer and that I wanted to leave Stretford. He answered in four memorable words, “You are perfectly right.’”

Bobby never had any doubts in his early years that he would make it as a professional. It is yet another striking difference between them: Jack the loud bombastic teenager, inwardly plagued by insecurity, and Bobby the quiet, retiring youngster who was certain of his talent. ‘I was good and I found it easy,’ he once said. After leaving Stretford Grammar, he would have loved to have become a full-time professional at Old Trafford, but his was impossible because he had not yet reached the age of 17. With his mother still reluctant for him to join the ground staff, Bobby had to find a job for a year. He therefore enrolled as an apprentice electrical engineer at the firm of Switch Gear, whose owner was a football enthusiast. If his schoolwork had been difficult, this position was just dull. Dreaming all the time of soccer, Bobby wasted his day filing pieces of metal, making tea and running errands. Like so many trapped in the dreary routine of the workplace, he indulged in clock watching, frequently going to the lavatory to gaze at the clockface on the top of Stretford Town Hall, willing the hands to speed up so he would be free to go for training.

What made up for the tedium of the job was the atmosphere in Mrs Watson’s house. He shared with seven other Busby Babes, including Billy Whelan, David Pegg and Duncan Edwards and they brought him out of his shell. He remembers: ‘At first I was a bit homesick and inclined to keep to myself but the others soon accepted me for what I was. It was good fun. Everybody ribbed everyone else and the gags rattled off like machine gun fire. Mark Jones’ idea of looking after us was to take us to a horror film in town and then march us all of five miles home. I shared a room with him for a time and then I roomed with Billy Whelan – he was like a big brother to me.’ In fact, Bobby felt a far greater affinity to Billy than he did to his real elder brother, for Billy, a devout, teetotal Catholic from Dublin, shared Bobby’s qualities of self-effacement and reticence. It is a reflection of the kindness of his fellow lodgers that they would give him articles of clothing and other presents, knowing that he was only earning £2 a week, barely half of what the ground staff apprentices were paid. Once Duncan Edwards gave me a new shirt which he said was too small for him. I don’t think it really was, but it was a very welcome addition to my sparse wardrobe,’ recalled Bobby. Albert Scanlon, the left wing who became a United professional in 1952, thinks that Mrs Watson’s was the ideal environment for Bobby. ‘When he came to Old Trafford, he was very shy and quiet, though he was a different lad if his mother turned up – he was much more open with her, and she always had such a loud, laughing presence. But Mrs Watson’s house did the world of good for him, because he was mixing with other players. They had a great social life together, going to the films in Manchester, or playing football and tennis in the park. Bobby was always comfortable with that group.’

When he reached the age of 17, Bobby was finally able to give up his hated engineering job and become a full professional with United. The morning after he had signed, he went down to the United ground full of enthusiasm. The first person he saw was the trainer, Tom Curry, who gave Bobby a response he did not expect.

‘What are you doing here? Shouldn’t you be at work?’

‘I’ve just signed my forms,’ replied Bobby, expecting a word of congratulation.

‘Stupid lad. You should have stuck to your trade. Don’t you know what a hard game football is?’

The realities of Curry’s remark were soon brought home to Bobby. Until now, at school, in Ashington, and in the county and England junior sides, he had been the dazzling star of the show. But at United, a club already awash with talent, he was just another young pro trying to make his way. Moreover, because he had never received any proper training before, Bobby had fallen into some poor habits. At the highest level, his reliance only on instinct and natural ability would not be enough. Bobby Harrop, who also joined United in 1953, told me: ‘Bobby was just another player to me when I joined United. Most of us thought we were equally good. He had his good shot and pace, but he did not seem anything exceptional. In practice matches, we were usually as good as him. He did not stand out.’ It is a point reinforced by Albert Scanlon: ‘The turnover of youngsters at Old Trafford was phenomenal. Hundreds of lads came through its gates every year, and for every one who signed as a professional they probably let 50 go. With so many good players around, it was hard for someone like Bobby Charlton to shine. When I first saw him, I knew he was good but it would be false to say I knew he’d be one of the greats. He lacked consistency and would run around, trying to do everything at 400 miles an hour.’

Fortunately, Bobby Charlton’s training was in the hands of Jimmy Murphy, one of the toughest and shrewdest taskmasters in British football. Like Busby, a practising Catholic born in a coalmining village, Murphy hailed from the Rhondda valley. He had been a ferocious wing-half for Wales and West Brom in the inter-war years before Matt brought him to Old Trafford as his assistant. Murphy could have been a great manager himself, as he proved in taking Wales to the quarter-finals of the World Cup in 1958 in Sweden, but he preferred to remain at United, turning down lucrative offers from Arsenal and continental sides. Ex-United player John Docherty says that he made the right decision: ‘Jimmy was magnificent but he was a natural number two. I think he would have found it hard to be under the constant glare of the press. He liked working with players, being with kids, knocking the shit out of you on the training ground to make you into a better footballer. All the players of my time will tell you that Jimmy Murphy was our greatest single influence, because he could make or break us.’ It is a sentiment echoed by Bobby Charlton himself, who once wrote: ‘There have been few better teachers of the game and I am greatly in his debt. Alf Ramsey helped me a lot when he became manager of England and so, of course, in many ways, did Matt Busby. But Jimmy got to my guts.’

Murphy could hardly have been a greater contrast to his serene, dignified boss. He was a man of dark Celtic passion: fiery, temperamental, aggressive, chain-smoking, foul-mouthed, ‘with a voice like a cement mixer in full throttle’, in the vivid phrase of Busby’s. ‘He shuffled these little steps,’ says John Aston, ‘a bit like Jimmy Cagney. He looked like a gangster. But he was a very warm, emotional man.’ His favourite expression, which summed up his philosophy, was ‘get stuck in’. Nobby Lawton, another contemporary of Bobby’s, gave me this memory: ‘He toughened us up, taught us to stand up for ourselves. When we played five-a-side at the training ground, Jimmy would join in and kick you to the ground. “What’s going on here?” “That’s what it’s like in professional football,” Jimmy would reply. His team talks were inspiring. After listening to one of them, I could not wait to get out on the pitch. All the managers I met in my career after Jimmy were ordinary.’

Several of Bobby’s contemporaries say that he was a favourite of Jimmy’s. But this was only because Jimmy, who was as brilliant a judge of a player as Matt Busby, knew that Bobby had a unique gift. He therefore gave individual tuition to Bobby in the evenings and on Sunday mornings, putting him through a rigorous training schedule to mould him into a true professional. In the Sun in 1975 Murphy explained: ‘Bobby was loaded with talent but it needed harnessing. He was one of the hardest pupils I ever had to work on. He had so much going for him, perhaps too much. We had to bully him.’ For example, one of Bobby’s biggest weaknesses was his love of hitting long, 50-yard balls, and then standing to admire the result. Jimmy kept drumming into him the need to be part of a cohesive team build-up, moving with other players, being prepared to make a quick pass and then getting ready for the return. ‘Keep it simple, give it to a red shirt,’ Jimmy would remind him. As Bobby explained in a Sunday Telegraph article in 1972: ‘I thought that the first thing I had to do as an inside-forward was to show how I could pass. But the full-back would cut it off and three or four people would be put out of the game. I was just showing off. Jimmy showed me the importance of the short game, that I had to work for the glory of the team, not for myself.’

Murphy also worked on building up Bobby’s stamina. On Sundays, when everyone else had a day off, Jimmy took Bobby into the middle of the training ground, then proceeded to kick balls to all four corners of the field and demand that Bobby chase them. Even when Bobby was an exhausted, breathless wreck, Murphy carried on smashing his long balls out of the centre-circle, yelling, ‘No-one has died of a heart attack on the pitch with me.’ One Sunday, Bobby had grown so sick of this routine that he dared to challenge Jimmy.

‘Why are you always on my back? Why don’t you get on to the others?’

‘Listen, son,’ said Jimmy, putting his arm around Bobby’s shoulder, ‘we’ve got a lot of good young players here. Some of them will make it; some of them won’t. We feel certain you will. That’s why we give you so much of our time. Listen and learn.’ Bobby never argued with Jimmy after that.

As a schoolboy, Bobby had been renowned for the power of his shooting and though he was naturally right-footed, he had been almost as devastating with his left. But this was another aspect of his game where Jimmy Murphy felt that there was room for improvement. Emphasizing the need for equal strength in either foot, he made Bobby spend hours kicking a ball from long range at a wall behind the Stretford End at Old Trafford. By drawing a line on the wall at a height of three feet and telling Bobby to hit below it, Jimmy taught Bobby to keep the ball down as he shot. But he never tried to stifle Bobby’s urge to shoot from long range. In an article in 1991, Bobby explained how he developed his scoring potential under Murphy’s tutelage. ‘Most of my goals came from outside the box – I was always encouraged by Jimmy Murphy to have a shot if the window of opportunity presented itself. I used to practice against a brick wall at Old Trafford. I spent my afternoons perfecting my timing and building up my confidence.’ It is a tribute to Bobby’s diligence that many of those closest to him could not even tell that he was born right-footed. His own brother Jack wrote in his autobiography, ‘People often ask me, “Which was your Bobby’s natural foot in his playing days?” And I tell them, “I simply don’t know.’”

One of the great falsehoods about Bobby’s shooting, beloved of hysterical commentators, was that he was able to ‘pick his spot’ in the goal. The truth is that all he tried to do was hit the ball on target and hope that, occasionally, one of his shots might be wide of the keeper. Again, it was Jimmy Murphy who was responsible for this approach. ‘I was given a lovely piece of advice by Jimmy. He said, “The goals don’t move. You know the general direction they are in and so, if you get the space, just smack the ball towards them.” The principle was sound. I just concentrated on making the proper contact and then hoped that the ball would scream into the net. Sometimes it did, sometimes it didn’t.’

As well as working on his technique, Jimmy Murphy also tried to educate Bobby out of some of his more immature behaviour on the field. John Docherty recalls, ‘Bobby had this habit of indulging in gestures, or shouting at himself, if he had hit a bad ball or was disappointed with his play. Jimmy would say to him: “What’s all this arm waving? We know you hit a crap ball. Now just get on with the game.” And Jimmy told me, “That’s the schoolboy coming out. He throws a tantrum because he doesn’t want people to think that he can’t do better. As soon as we can get rid of that, we’ve got a chance with him.’”

For all Jimmy Murphy’s tutelage, it should not be thought that Manchester United had attained perfection in its coaching. In truth, the system was disorganized and the facilities poor, particularly at the United training ground, The Cliff. Wilf McGuinness recalls: ‘Looking back, it was bloody awful. The floodlights were dreadful, you could hardly see. The training kit was the worst imaginable. It was never washed, no-one knows what disease could have spread all over the place. When you arrived you just grabbed what you could from the table. Those big woollen sweaters, and the shoes, big heavy things. Afterwards you’d get in the bath – 40 of you – it was black within two minutes. When you got out you’d have to have a cold shower to get the muck off.’ Equally disturbing were the informal practice matches organized by the players themselves on an old plot of land at Old Trafford, wedged between the back of the stadium and the railway line. These sessions were epics of almost gladiatorial savagery. Anyone who could not take a pummelling would not last long. ‘Oh, those games were rough,’ remembers Joe Carolan. ‘We would be kicking the hell out of each other. Jeff Whitefoot once got cut very badly on his head and all the trainer, Tom Curry, did was give him a towel. That’s the way it was. Bobby was as brave as anyone. He gave as good as he got.’

Increasingly tough and skilful, Bobby soon began to work his way up the hierarchy of United. He had started in the fifth team, which played in the Altrincham League and, thanks largely to Bobby’s shooting, regularly scored 15 or 20 goals a game. He then graduated into the ‘A’ team, which was effectively the thirds. As Bobby recalled: ‘They played in the Manchester Amateur League. You were 16 and this was open-age football with big dockers and guys from factory teams kicking lumps out of you. But it was another fantastic education.’ In May 1954, Bobby was elevated to Manchester’s youth team. With names like Duncan Edwards, Eddie Colman and David Pegg – and now Bobby Charlton and Wilf McGuinness – it was by far the best junior team in the country, winning the FA Youth Cup five years in succession from 1953 to 1957. The fluent approach, based on Busby’s philosophy of skill and simplicity of movement, captivated the public. Huge crowds would gather to see the young players – now christened the ‘Busby Babes’ – wherever they went. 30,000, for instance, turned out at Molineux for the second leg of the 1954 Youth Cup Final against Wolves.

The reputation of ‘the Babes’ now spread beyond Britain’s shores. That summer, the team travelled to Switzerland for a youth tournament. They won it easily, remaining unbeaten in their seven games, scoring 21 goals and conceding just two. They won it again the following year in equally emphatic style. By this time, Bobby was a key member of the side, as Nobby Lawton, who went with him on that 1955 Swiss trip, recalls: ‘We absolutely dominated the competition. We always seemed to be about 3–0 up after 10 minutes, with Bobby getting most of the goals. I could hardly believe how good he was. He was sensational. The way he struck the ball was so much better than anyone else. His timing was beautiful. He was a superb athlete, so quick on his feet. Don’t forget that there were a hell of a lot of players who were trying to kick him. It was a very physical game when he started. People really went out to clatter him but they could not catch him. He would just skip away.’ Reg Hunter was another who went on a youth trip to Switzerland. Like so many others, he was immediately struck by Bobby’s talent: ‘My first sight of Bobby was when he was playing for the reserves against the first team, and he scored two tremendous goals. I did not know then who he was and when I asked, I was told “Bobby Charlton”. And I thought to myself, “Superb. He is really going places.” Both the goals were classic Bobby, from a distance. He seemed to glide over the ground, and all of a sudden he would be away in one flowing movement. Bobby was inspirational on those youth trips abroad. You could tell that he was a special player, destined for great things, not just by his performances on the field but also by the way Jimmy Murphy and Matt Busby looked after him. They spent a lot of time with him. He was a good leader in the youth team, though he was very quiet. But when he had to make a point on the pitch, he made it.’

Bobby’s famous body swerve, which bewitched so many opponents throughout his career, was in evidence in the youth team. Ian Greaves, who also joined United in 1953, gave me this description of Bobby in action: ‘Close your eyes, and picture Bobby Charlton with the ball, attacking a defender, dropping his shoulder, and going the other way. Now that is very simple. It is done every Saturday afternoon but never in the way Bob did. We would play against him in training every Tuesday and Thursday morning. Bob would use that trick four or five times. We knew the bloody trick was coming but we could not stop him doing it. He had this wonderful way of approaching you with the ball. You were quite confident. You were on two feet. The next thing you knew, he had sent you the wrong way. To do that at League level and at international level was remarkable. The other great feature of his play was that he was never frightened of going for goal. Some of the goals he scored led us to gasp, because he had no right to be shooting from there. He had such a powerful shot on him, especially with that left peg. If he was given half an inch of space 25 yards from goal, he was in with a chance because he had this uncanny gift of knowing where to shoot.’

Despite such prodigious talent, Bobby was not immediately selected for the first team on becoming a professional. There had been talk that after an astonishing run in the reserve and junior sides, when he hit 56 goals in 47 games, Bobby might be included in the line-up of the side that had won the First Division Championship in 1955/56. The Manchester Evening News reported on 10 April 1956: ‘Manchester United just want one more thing from Matt Busby before the end of a great championship season. They want to see shooting star Bobby Charlton in a First Division setting for the first time. Some of Charlton’s goals in the reserves have been acrobatic feats that no other English footballer would attempt.

Manager Busby is not one to keep youth – or the customers – waiting longer than necessary. He is sure to give Charlton his chance, either against Sunderland on Saturday or in the wind-up game against Portsmouth.’

But the call-up never came, and his mother, with her keen sense of her favourite’s worth, was infuriated by what she interpreted as a wilful snub to Bobby. She decided that, since both Matt Busby and Jimmy Murphy were Catholics, then religious prejudice must have been the cause of her son’s exclusion. As she wrote later, ‘I’m not the type to dwell on my thoughts, so I grabbed the bull by the horns. I went to Matt and asked him straight: “Is Bobby being left out because he isn’t a Catholic?” I could not have been more blunt. Neither could Matt. I knew from the expression on his face that I had really offended him. “How could you even think something like that? You are an intelligent woman, Cis. Don’t ever ask me anything like that again.’” In fact, Cissie had, in her blundering way, been correct in believing that there was a strong Catholic influence at Manchester United. The city’s large Irish population identified with the club; over the years many of the best young players, such as Nobby Stiles, were drawn from local Catholic schools, while Matt Busby, in the words of his biographer Eamon Dunphy, ‘was the most prominent Catholic in Manchester public life, a symbol of the faith to which he belonged, a Catholic admired and respected, around whom his co-religionists could rally’. Where she went horribly wrong was in believing that religion played any part in team selection. If it had, why would United have gone after George Best, who was brought up in a Free Presbyterian family in Belfast? It was always talent that mattered with Matt, not background.

Soon after the beginning of the next season, in October 1956, Matt proved Cissie’s error by finally giving Bobby a place in the first team in the match against Charlton Athletic. Interestingly, Bobby was just a few days from his 19th birthday when he made his League debut, whereas Jack, always regarded as the inferior footballer, had been more than a year younger when he had his first game for Leeds. But that, of course, had been in the Second Division in a much less effective side. The news of Bobby’s selection was proclaimed by Tom Jackson in the Evening News: ‘It’s happened at last. Bobby Charlton, 18-year-old “wonder boy” of Manchester United’s reserve and FA Youth Cup-winning teams and pride of the Old Trafford nursery, steps out on the big soccer parade for the first time tomorrow. Who is this boy Charlton whom Don Revie describes as “one of the most complete footballers one could ever wish to see”? Well, he’s another of the Matt Busby finds from schoolboy international football who has made great strides through United’s junior and Youth Cup teams. He’s not big physically, standing 5 feet 8 inches and weighing around 11 stone 8 pounds, but he combines a fierce shot with an uncanny positional sense.’ After a nervous start, Bobby lived up to this star billing in his debut, scoring twice with typically powerful shots in United 4–2 victory. Sir Matt Busby wrote this account of the game: ‘Bobby began his debut as if he was in his bare feet kicking a hot potato. He “got rid” too quickly, very hard but too quickly. That must have been the only spell in which Bobby Charlton was ever nervous on a football pitch. The nerves did not last many minutes. Suddenly, he began to play his own game, and his own game was slipping gracefully past two opponents as if they were stakes in the ground, putting in a good pass or whacking a terrific shot.’ A great League career had begun. It was to last another 17 years.

There were two important physical legacies for Bobby from this debut. The first was the immediate realization of how exhausting League football could be. ‘When the final whistle blew at the end of the match, my legs felt like rubber and I wondered where my next breath was coming from. I could not for the life of me understand how Stanley Matthews and Tom Finney had gone on playing for so long,’ he wrote in his 1967 book Forward for England. Now he saw why Jimmy Murphy had pushed him so hard on the training ground. The second was that he gained complete confidence in his left foot. The fact was that Bobby was not fully fit for the game against Charlton, having badly injured his right ankle playing against Manchester City reserves three weeks earlier. Though the swelling had gone down, the ankle was still giving him real discomfort on the eve of his debut. But so determined was Bobby to play that when Matt asked, ‘How’s the ankle?’ he lied and said, ‘It’s great.’ That was enough for Busby. So Bobby went into the match virtually carrying his right foot – and did so for the next fortnight. He maintains, however, it was an invaluable experience, as he told George Best’s biographer, Joe Lovejoy: ‘It was enforced practice really. I probably would not have done it without the injury, but it did improve my left peg a lot. My “other” foot was never that bad, but it’s amazing how, when you’ve only got one to use, your whole technique – your timing, your positional sense and your thinking – has to change.’

Bobby had actually taken the field that October afternoon as Lance Corporal Charlton, for by 1956 he was in the middle of his National Service. When he had been summoned to join the army, he had been told by Busby to apply for the Royal Army Ordnance Corps. This was because their base was in Shrewsbury, not too far from Manchester, so Bobby could still play at weekends. But when he had finished his basic RAOC training at Portsmouth, he received his orders to go out to Malaya, where the British Army had been fighting a long campaign against the communist insurrection led by Ching Peng. The threat to young servicemen was very real, for almost 500 of them lost their lives during this 12-year conflict. In a sense of panic, Bobby phoned Old Trafford to explain his predicament. He was told not to worry: ‘We are certain your orders are to travel to Shropshire, not Malaya. It will be sorted out,’ the club informed him. Manchester United obviously had friends at the top of the War Office. The next day, Bobby was instructed to take the train to Shrewsbury.

After his initial bout of anxiety, Bobby spent two uneventful but physically demanding years at the RAOC barracks there, humping around shells, equipment and crates of bullets. ‘I didn’t like the army simply because it seemed to be interfering with my progress as a footballer,’ he said later. But this was hardly true. Bobby was allowed almost as much leave as he wanted to play for United. Furthermore, he was part of a brilliant army team which would have beaten most sides in the First Division. Its players included internationals like Dave Mackay, Cliff Jones, Graham Shaw, Alex Parker and the England keeper Alan Hodgkinson. Above all there was Duncan Edwards, who happened to be serving in the same Shrewsbury depot as Bobby. Just as he had done at Mrs Watson’s digs in Manchester, the giant, kindly Duncan looked after Bobby. ‘Duncan was a year older than I was and he took charge of me the moment I arrived in the army camp. He had my billet arranged and everything. When he showed me to the billet, he noticed there was a spring sticking out of the bed. “We can’t have that,” he said. It was a great big iron bed, but he hoisted it over his shoulder, mattress, frame and all, and went off in search of a better one for me,’ recalled Bobby.