Jack and Bobby: A story of brothers in conflict

CHAPTER SIX The Survivor (#ulink_17e41f76-03ac-5cb4-a728-c880eaaccf36)

‘Deep down the sorrow is there all the time. You never rid yourself of it. It becomes part of you. You might be alone and it comes back to you, like a kind of roundabout, and you weep,’ Sir Matt Busby once said, explaining how he was haunted for the rest of his life by the Munich crash.

Since the afternoon of 6 February 1958, Bobby Charlton has always been gripped by the same feelings. In a BBC interview in 2001 with Hunter Davies, he said, ‘I still think about Munich every day. I was really fond of the players who died. David Pegg and Tommy Taylor were really close to me, I think because they came from a mining background like me,’ Eamon Dunphy gave me this illustration of how the trauma of Munich remained with Bobby, even more than 30 years after the crash. ‘In 1990 I interviewed him for my book on Matt Busby. We were talking alone in a room together and when he was recalling the events of Munich, he became very upset and began to cry. The crash had such a big impact on him. He is an intelligent, sensitive man and he felt it very deeply.’

As well as the sense of loss, there was also an element of survivor’s guilt in Bobby’s reaction. ‘There was very little wrong with me physically but I could not stop thinking about the accident. I couldn’t accept it for a long time and I felt drained of all emotion. I kept asking myself, “Why me? Why should I be left?”’ he wrote in 1967.

Bobby kept focusing on such dark thoughts as he lay in the Rechts der Isar hospital, his introspection made all the deeper because, unlike most of the other victims, he received no visits from his family. Cissie had, of course, been desperate to fly out to see her beloved son, and she had actually been offered a seat on a plane specially chartered by Manchester United for the relatives of the survivors. But only three months earlier she had undergone major surgery for breast cancer. Her doctor had warned her not to travel unless Bobby was desperately ill. And because of their respective commitments with the Coal Board and Leeds United, there had never been any question of either her husband Bob or her elder son Jack going to Munich.

Before the disaster, Cissie Charlton claimed to have known, though a sense of psychic intuition, that something was about to go wrong. On the morning of that tragic flight, I was more worried than I had ever been in my life,’ she wrote later. ‘I just couldn’t settle, but neither could I explain why. A black worry had settled on me and I just couldn’t shake it off.’ Snow was falling in Ashington as well as Munich when Cissie decided to call on a neighbour to explain how anxious she was. Not long after she had waded back home through the snow, Ted Cockburn, the local newsagent, came to her yard. Cissie knew what he was about to say before he had opened his mouth.

‘It’s Bobby, isn’t it?’ she said.

‘Yes, but I wanted you to know before it went on the placards. The paper has produced our bills about Bobby being in a plane crash and I wanted to make sure you knew first before I put them up,’ said the newsagent. But, even though she had heard nothing officially, she felt she already knew what had happened to the plane.

The worst aspect for her was that the first radio and press reports to reach Ashington said that there were no survivors. Cissie desperately tried to ring Old Trafford from a call box to find out if this was true, but because of the poor weather the telephone lines had come down. Fearing that Bobby now lay dead in the Munich snow, she suddenly became hysterical in the phone booth, crying and screaming out his name, before being helped home by Cockburn.

Further south in Leeds, Jack had also received news of the tragedy. Having just finished his bath after a training session, he was standing naked in the dressing room, drying himself off, when Arthur Crowther, the club secretary, entered. Bobby Forrest, Jack’s colleague at Leeds, recalls, ‘We were joking and having a laugh when Arthur Crowther walked in, looking very serious. He said: “Quiet, I’ve got something very important to tell you. The plane carrying the Manchester team from Munich has crashed. They don’t know if there are any survivors.” An immediate, terrible silence descended on the dressing room. Inevitably, everyone looked at Jack, who turned white, truly white. You could see that he was shattered, but no-one said a word. I have never known a silence like it in my life. Nothing like it. The room was completely still. He got dressed quickly and went out.’

Jack went up to the club office to see if anyone had any more information, but Crowther was having the same difficulty as Cissie in contacting Old Trafford. Jack then decided to go back to Ashington, though, because his parents had no phone, he could not let them know he was on his way. He telephoned his new wife Pat – they had been married less than a month – to arrange to meet at the station for the grim journey north, still thinking that his younger brother was probably dead. As soon as he started talking to Pat on the phone, he burst into tears, the first time in his life he had broken down like that. On the way to the station, he called at Bobby Forrest’s house to see if there had been any further reports about the disaster on the wireless. But Bobby’s wife could give tell him no new details.

Jack and Pat found the rail trip to Ashington unbearable. Not recognizing Jack, some of the other passengers in their carriage talked blithely about the crash, even asking each other how much compensation the families of the dead victims might receive from BEA. No wonder Jack later wrote, ‘The bloody rail journey lasted ages.’ On arrival at Newcastle, Jack and Pat went to the Haymarket to catch the bus to Ashington. On their way, they saw a newspaper vendor selling late editions of the Evening Chronicle. Though he dreaded what he might find inside, Jack decided he had to buy a copy. Then, as he approached the stall, he could see a folded paper on the vendor’s arm bearing the stop press news: ‘Charlton among the survivors’. Just as Cissie had wailed in anguish in that phone box, so Jack now shouted out in joy, ‘Bloody hell, he’s OK,’ before grabbing Pat and dancing a very public jig with her.

Thinking he was the bearer of good news, Jack walked into the Ashington family home with a large grin on his face. But, by now, Cissie had heard that Bobby was alive. Just before he had fainted in Rechts der Isar hospital, Bobby had managed to contact the British Consul in Munich, requesting a message be sent to his parents informing them of his survival. It was a Northumberland copper who delivered the Foreign Office telegram with the joyous words ‘Alive and well, see you later, Bobby.’

Understandably, Cissie still wanted more news, so she decided to go to Manchester. The Charltons did not own a car, while all buses had been cancelled because of the heavy snow, so she hitched a lift to Newcastle from an early morning delivery van, and then caught the train to Manchester. Once she arrived at Old Trafford she received confirmation that Bobby was suffering from nothing more than a cut head, but she was appalled by the death toll of Bobby’s friends. Unable to travel to Munich, she tried to take her mind off the disaster by helping in the club office, dealing with the avalanche of work brought on by the tragedy. For all Cissie’s good motives, this may have been the moment when Bobby started to distance himself from her. According to Harry Gregg: ‘I don’t think Bobby was too happy about her being in the offices there. He felt she should not be there. He was slightly embarrassed by her.’

Old Trafford was in a state of shock in the wake of the disaster. Alma George, Matt Busby’s secretary, had been one of the first to hear the news that Thursday afternoon. She later recalled: ‘I was living in a nightmare. Like everyone else I was too numb to take in the awful grief. Agony piled on agony as the hours ticked by. Thousands hurried to the ground to see if they could help; the police threw a protective cordon around the relatives and friends who had lost their loved ones. Those of us left at the ground did our best to calm and console the grief stricken. But what word of sympathy could I find to comfort the bereaved?’ Perhaps the most poignant symbol of despair was the transformation of the Old Trafford gymnasium into a temporary mortuary, filled with the coffins of the players who only days earlier had been gracing the pitch outside with their youthful brilliance.

But even in the pit of darkness, the club had to find the will to continue. Fixtures had to be completed, players bought, squads trained, tickets issued. When Jimmy Murphy had visited Matt Busby in his Munich oxygen tent, the broken manager had croaked in his deputy’s ear, ‘Keep the flag flying, Jimmy.’ It was a duty that Murphy fulfilled with heroic zeal over the next few months, pulling the battered remnants of his team into a fighting unit. To the bewildered players left at Old Trafford, Murphy never showed anything but a brave face. Ian Greaves says: ‘When we got the full truth of the disaster, we just didn’t know what we were doing. There was a numbness about the place, especially when we started to go to all the funerals. But Jimmy forced us to carry on, working on us as if nothing had happened. But he had to do that. I mean, if he was going around in tears, what would the rest of us be like.’ In private, away from his responsibilities, the passion in Jimmy’s soul would engulf him in sorrow, as Harry Gregg remembered: ‘In Munich, I was walking up the stairs to my hotel room when I heard this terrible crying. At first, I couldn’t figure it out but as I got nearer I could just make out Jimmy sitting in the dark on the empty staircase, crying his eyes out. I just walked quietly away.’ During this period, Jimmy started to drink heavily, a habit which Cissie quickly recognized and understood. ‘Jimmy often said to me, “Make us a cup of tea, Cis,” and I knew what he meant. I put a little drop of tea in the cup and filled the rest with whisky. It helped him to keep going during that terrible time. But it was a pitiful sight to see him wandering around the empty football ground at night, all alone with his thoughts in the darkness,’ she wrote.

Shattered by the events of 6 February, Bobby could not be part of Murphy’s immediate plans for rebuilding United. As he left the Munich hospital, he was told by Murphy to go home to Ashington and only return to Old Trafford when he felt ready. But there would be a time, in the coming weeks, when he would seriously contemplate giving up football altogether. In his black mood, it seemed that the game which had been his lifeblood, his driving force, had brought him only misery and bereavement.

Unsurprisingly, Bobby could not face a plane journey back to England from Germany, so he took the train and boat to London. At Liverpool Street station, he was met by Jack and his mother, who was shocked at his dejected appearance. As Cissie later recalled, ‘When he got off the train he was a pathetic sight. He just stood beside his case looking lost. The platform was cordoned off but the station was swarming with pressmen and spectators. Jack said, “Let’s just get him away from here.’” Jack ushered Bobby and his mother into a car and then drove them north. It was during this journey that Bobby told them his disjointed, painful memories of the crash. Then he said, when he had concluded the story, ‘That’s it. I don’t want you to ask me about it again. I want to forget all about it.’ He could never, of course, forget about it, but Bobby hardly ever spoke about Munich again to his family or, indeed, to the other Manchester United players. ‘In my eight years at Old Trafford I never heard him mention the issue of Munich once,’ says the former United captain Noel Cantwell, echoing the views of all those who played with Bobby. It was a subject that no-one dared to raise with him. Only through a medium of his choosing – in a book or interview – would he talk about it.

Bobby says that it was even more difficult to cope once he arrived home. ‘The sense of the tragedy seemed nearer. The papers were full of the crash – they couldn’t leave the sensation alone in spite of the people they were hurting,’ he said later. He found it particularly difficult to deal with the horde of reporters and photographers who gathered outside the family house, 113 Beatrice Street. Initially, he refused to see any of them. But his mother explained that they were only doing their job, adding that he had once harboured ambitions to be a journalist himself. So he posed for some rather stagey pictures, in one struggling to maintain a grin as he had a cup of tea and in another kicking a football in the street with two small boys who were dressed in Sunderland and Newcastle strips.

Cissie, as always, was riot one to shy away from the limelight and she could be seen in some of the papers with a maternal arm around Bobby. But it is telling that her husband Bob had so little involvement with the public saga of the Munich air crash. All the dramatic moments of the family’s response to the crisis had Cissie, not Bob, at their centre: the frantic phonecalls, the early morning trip to Old Trafford, the receipt of the Foreign Office telegram, the collection of Bobby from Liverpool Street, the handling of the media circus in Ashington.

Upbeat news stories, which accompanied the photographs, claimed that Bobby’s first words, on walking through his front door, were ‘Mum, is there a football in the house?’ But in her autobiography, Cissie wrote that this was pure fiction. In reality, ‘After the cameramen and reporters had left, Bobby announced that he was giving up football for good. He said that he had lost all his mates and never wanted to play again.’ In his first weeks at home, there was little doubt that he was gripped by depression. He lay on the floor in his room, listening to his Frank Sinatra’s records. The late 1950s was the time when Sinatra was working at Capitol under the direction of Nelson Riddle, producing some of the most heart-breaking albums ever recorded. Songs like In the Wee Small Hours and I’ll Never Smile Again perfectly captured the desperate loneliness that had gripped Bobby.

The worst moment for him came the morning he realized that Duncan Edwards had lost his fight for life. In a contribution for Iain McCartney’s 1988 biography of Edwards, Bobby stated unequivocally that Edwards was the finest footballer he had ever seen. ‘Over the years, I have played with and against many world-class players, but in my mind Duncan Edwards is the greatest of them all. Pele and Di Stefano were marvellous, but they needed help to play. Duncan could do it all himself,’ Bobby also recalled his torment at the death of Edwards. ‘I last saw Duncan alive on the day I left hospital in Munich. He was still battling away, calling on his immense reserves of strength to defeat the inevitable. Tears stained my face as I left that room, praying he would make it. Back home in Ashington, my mother would greet me each morning with the latest newspaper reports from the hospital. Sometimes the bulletins were optimistic and my hopes grew.’

Then one morning, explained Bobby, there was no news.

‘Where’s the paper?’ he asked his mother

‘It hasn’t come yet. Now eat up your breakfast.’ She had cooked him his favourite meal of ham, egg and mushrooms.

‘I don’t want any breakfast. Duncan’s dead, isn’t he?’ He knew the truth before she had time to say yes.

His despondency became only greater. Ron Routledge, the former Sunderland keeper who had grown up with him, told me how Bobby felt then. ‘He was particularly upset about Duncan Edwards. He just locked himself away. He wanted nothing to do with anyone. It was terrible. After about a fortnight of this, his mother came up to me and asked: “Has he mentioned anything to you about football?” I told her, “Not really. He seems more concerned about what’s going on in the hospital at Munich.” Then Cissie replied, “He’s said to me that he doesn’t want to play again, that he won’t go back to Old Trafford.” I wanted to do something. So I went to a local school, got a football, and said to Bobby, “Right, let’s go up the park.” He didn’t want to go but I pushed him. So we went to the park and we were there for a good three hours. I wasn’t going to leave it there. I decided I was going to keep pushing him. We did that a few more times and gradually he opened up. At first he had been really down, hated the idea of kicking a football around, but eventually he got into it, and after a few sessions, he told his mother, “Look, I want to get back. I feel like getting back to United.” But he never mentioned the crash once during our kickarounds, not once.’

Bobby was also encouraged in his return to soccer by his mother’s GP, Dr MacPherson. Apprehensive about the future and needing some tangible, physical excuse to avoid confronting it, Bobby had been reluctant to have his two stitches taken out, though his injury had healed. But eventually he was persuaded to see the doctor, who, as well as removing the stitches, took the opportunity to give Bobby some advice about the need to start his life in football again. As Bobby later explained, ‘He told me he had been in the RAF during the war and had seen his friends shot down repeatedly and that I had to learn to carry on as he had done.’ After urging Bobby to begin kicking a ball again, the doctor finished with these prophetic words: ‘I expect to see you at Wembley.’

Though Bobby now returned to Old Trafford, the scars of Munich were to stay with him forever. The crash turned out to be the pivotal moment of his life, defining his character, sharpening his relationships with both club and family, and building the footballer who was to become a world beater.

Bobby Charlton had always been a quiet young man, right back to his childhood. But the trauma of the crash greatly exacerbated his traits of shyness and reservation. The boyish exuberance which had often been displayed in his years at school and Old Trafford now disappeared, to be replaced by a streak of moody introspection. Where he had been a high-spirited, sometimes irresponsible, youth before 6 February, he now quickly matured into a serious adult. The dour, unsmiling, exterior, which was to become so much part of his public image, was formed in the aftermath of the crash. Having lost so many of his friends in one savage blow, he found it much harder to trust people.

The change in his personality was clearly seen by those around him. One of his Ashington neighbours, Ronnie Cameron, says: ‘I knew Bobby before he was famous and he was pretty straightforward, easy, polite. He used to get on very well with my mother, who said he was a gentleman. But Munich changed Bobby a lot, I thought. He was happy go lucky before that. He loved Frank Sinatra, had quite a few of his records and he used to walk around the place singing them. I never heard him singing out loud again after Munich. He became very quiet and sullen,’ At Old Trafford, others saw a new quietness about him. Albert Scanlon says, ‘Bobby did not seem to have an immediate physical reaction to the crash but he certainly grew up as a man. He became more withdrawn and said less,’ Harry Gregg adds, ‘To be nice about it, Bobby was deep and introverted, almost to the point of being surly,’ And Bobby himself, in that 1961 interview in Weekend, admitted that the crash affected him in this way: ‘I knew the road ahead would be different from the moment I woke up in the Munich hospital. I’m quieter now because I haven’t got my old mates to go out with.’

A graphic example of this darker trait was given to me by Ronnie Cope who shared a room with Bobby during a week-long United trip to Blackpool soon after the crash. ‘Bobby altered unbelievably after Munich. He never got back to being a joker, the Bobby Charlton I had known as a lad. He became more withdrawn. There were great mood swings. Some days, when we were in the hotel in Blackpool, he would wake up and he would jump on my bed, trying to wrestle with me. Yet the next day he would not even say hello, as if I was not there. It was almost as if he were having a blackout, he seemed to go so deep. You would say things to him and I am sure he would not hear you, because he would not answer. The days he didn’t speak, I just left him alone. But then he would come out of it and he could enjoy a drink and a laugh.’

Jack sensed the change keenly, particularly because in the immediate aftermath of the crash he had felt more warmth to Bobby than at any previous time in his life. The fraternal affection was at its strongest on the car trip home from Liverpool Street, as Bobby wrote later: ‘Jack didn’t say much and there were long silences during the journey. But I felt very close to him then.’ Yet this bond soon began to loosen. As Bobby brooded on the tragedy, Jack felt the shutters coming down and he came to see himself as an intruder on his younger brother’s private grief. ‘In a way,’ wrote Jack, ‘Robert was never the same lad to me after Munich. I saw a big change in our kid from that day on. He stopped smiling, a trait which continues to this day. Friends come up to me and say, “Your Bob goes around as if he has the weight of the world on his shoulders” – and I have to agree,’ In an interview in 1980, Jack said: ‘Something happened after Munich. We were very close until then, but after the plane crash, he didn’t come home as often, and there was a barrier between us that I have never been able to fathom.’

But Bobby’s change was more complex than merely a descent into taciturnity. With most of the great United side wiped out, Bobby was now the most talented player in the club. No longer just another member of the orchestra, he was now its lead violinist. Given this status, he believed he had to take on the mantle of responsibility for the performance of the team, even though he was only 20 years old. It was a burden that drove him to a new sense of involvement with the club, a new intensity in his play. For a while, he took the field like a man possessed by some inner force. ‘When he came back from Munich,’ says Reg Hunter, ‘I noticed he improved tremendously. All of a sudden he moved into brilliance. It was because he had to grow up so quickly. He was a different player altogether after the crash. He had always been quiet, never said a lot, but he was certainly much more mature after Munich, especially in the big matches. He was more involved, wanted the ball all the time, held on to it, took responsibility for everything. People came to rely on him. Before Munich he was in and out of the first team but it was very different when he returned. He took over the side, in effect.’

Bobby’s new dominance saw him quickly transformed by the press into the most exciting star in British football. His story had all the right ingredients to fascinate the media: the drama of his survival in the snow; the virtuosity of his skill on the ball; the tragic loss of team-mates; the coalmining background; the family footballing heritage; and there was also the added piquancy that, at the time of the crash, he was still a lance corporal doing his National Service in the British army with three months to go before his official demobilization, though the War Office bowed to public pressure and released him early. Some sportsmen with big egos might have revelled in all this attention, but for Bobby, with his retiring nature, it was an added burden. And the bigger a star he became, the more his caution and reticence grew. John Giles, that shrewdest of judges, who was at United from 1956 to 1963, thinks this is one of the keys to his personality. ‘Bobby changed after Munich, because he was suddenly thrust into the position of being a superstar, in the full glare of publicity all the time. I don’t think he enjoyed it. I would say it was a big culture shock for him, just as big a shock as it was later to be for George Best and David Beckham. Because he was such a conscientious lad, such a decent human being, he was not comfortable with being a star. With his talent, he would probably have achieved that status anyway during his career, but the glare of fame would not have arrived so quickly had it not been for Munich. And because he became so aware of the need to behave the right way in public, he was more withdrawn, more shy after Munich.’

The death of so many colleagues also had a profound effect on Bobby’s attitude towards both soccer and Manchester United. Though he became such a major figure at the club after Munich, he has often said that he was never again to derive the same enjoyment from playing. After February 1958 the game was more of a job than a pleasure. The carefree days had gone forever. And he felt the same way about his new team-mates at Old Trafford. He never developed the same rapport with those who arrived after the crash. Having grown up with the Babes, he always seemed to view their replacements as outsiders, not part of the true Busby tradition. It was almost like he had drawn an invisible dividing line in the dressing room between who had played with him before Munich and those who joined the club after the disaster. For Bobby, paradise had existed with Duncan and Tommy and Eddie. It had been lost on that German runway and could never be replaced. Eamon Dunphy believes this is crucial to any understanding of Bobby. ‘The key to Bobby is that he was one of the Munich lads. He went to the club as a 15 year old and became United right through. After the crash, Busby, realizing he could not build another set of Babes, started to flash the cheque book, buying in people from other clubs. Bobby was never easy with the change, in culture. He had a feeling of alienation from the new club. There was a big split between the pre – and post-Munich lads. Bobby harboured – perhaps to an unreasonable degree – a resentment against the people who had been brought in,’ For all his diplomacy, Bobby was never afraid to express his feeling that the post-1958 United sides he played in never measured up to the standards of his heroes, certainly not in terms of commitment. ‘That pre-Munich team was special in many ways,’ he said in 1973. ‘They were playing because they were dedicated to the club. I can’t honestly say that the present team is the same way. Maybe it’s me, perhaps I don’t want to believe that they are as good. But with the old team, if they were losing by three of four goals, which was not often, they’d go flat out, still try to save something, their pride in the club. We were committed to the club, the game, the gaffer. Now it’s a career. People have their minds outside the game.’ In an interview with John Roberts for his superb book about the Busby Babes, The Team That Wouldn’t Die, Bobby said: ‘For me, the football in the late 1950s was the best it’s ever been and, from a selfish football point of view, that United team could not have been lost at a worse time. The difference after Munich was the commitment of the side. The team that played before the crash had nothing to prove. Those players knew they were great. Afterwards, we had everything to prove.’

Noel Cantwell, who joined United after 1960, bears out this point about Bobby’s disillusion. ‘It seemed, when I arrived at Old Trafford, that Bobby resented the new people that had come in. I got the feeling that he saw us as intruders. So when you were introduced to Bobby, he shook your hand, was very polite, but he stuck to his own pre-Munich crowd. He was in a group with the likes of Wilf McGuinness and Shay Brennan, the lads he’d grown up with. They were his mates, and, if we were on the bus, they would spend all their time playing cards together. But I could understand the way he wanted to be with the lads he’d known since he was young.’

For all Bobby’s mental anguish after Munich, he was not long out of the Manchester United side. The club was in the middle of perhaps the most romantic cup run in British history, having beaten Sheffield Wednesday 3–0 in a highly-charged, emotionally wrought fifth-round tie at Old Trafford on 19 February. So makeshift was the team against Wednesday that the match programme contained eleven blank spaces where the names of the Manchester players should have been.

Bobby was brought into the team for the next round, against West Bromwich Albion. Having drawn at the Hawthorns 2–2, United then had a replay at home. Such was the excitement that United were now generating, such was the willingness of the city to identify with a club still in mourning, that not only was the ground again packed to capacity, but no less than 20,000 people were locked outside. It was in this game that Bobby demonstrated how quickly he was developing. Playing on the left wing instead of his usual position as inside-left, he produced a piece of magic that was to linger in the memory of all who saw it. The match was heading towards another stalemate – this one goalless – when, in the 89th minute, Bobby received the ball from the tiny forward Ernie Taylor, who had been signed by Jimmy Murphy from Blackpool just six days after the crash. In the Daily Herald, Bobby gave this description of what happened next: ‘Before I knew it I had the ball and was flying down the wing. I seemed to be tackled a dozen times, but somehow I got past all of them, full speed ahead. Now I was coming along the byline, now I was cutting back a low centre across goal, somehow beating the entire defence. And there was Colin Webster, thundering up the middle, side-footing the ball in full stride into the empty net. They say I just kept on running and running until I reached Webster, then grabbed him and hoisted him in the air.’ Bobby later called it the greatest Cup tie he had ever played in. Frank Haydock, a United player, says of that goal: ‘It was such a wonderful move, I could not get over what he’d done, the way he beat people with both pace and the body swerve. That was a real eye-opener for me, showing what sort of player he would become.’

Though United fell behind in the League and were knocked out 5–2 on aggregate by Real Madrid in the European Cup semi-final, Bobby’s superb form ensured that the team went all the way to Wembley in the FA Cup. Bolton, however, showed none of the sentiment that had swayed the nation after Munich, winning an undistinguished match 2–0. Their cynical professionalism was summed up by their second goal, when Nat Lofthouse barged Harry Gregg into the United net. Yet United’s inadequacy had also been exposed, as Bill Foulkes recalled: Our forwards had never been in the game. Bobby, who had played so brilliantly between the disaster and Wembley was jaded on the big day. He had been required to play in too many matches – because there could be no thought of dropping him. He was too good a player to rest, and who could replace him, anyway?’ In public, Bobby said he did not really mind losing to Bolton. He was more relieved that the team had not disgraced itself, that it had achieved something for the battered manager. He wrote later, ‘What mattered was that we maintained our position in the game, the glamour and identity in being a top-class club. Matt, who had only recently come out of hospital, came to give us a pep talk at Old Trafford before the final. He couldn’t. He just cried. Those fellows who died were his family.’ In private, however, Bobby was dispirited after the Final, as Ronnie Cope recalls. ‘There was some mix-up at the ceremony and Bobby, by mistake, got a winner’s medal. Afterwards, he just threw it on the floor in the dressing room. It didn’t mean a thing to him. He had a tremendous love for United and the club was everything to him.’

Up until the Cup Final, Bobby’s form for United had led to a national clamour for him to be selected for the England team. This mood, as Bobby understood, was tinged with a degree of sympathy for what he had been through. Nevertheless, there was a genuine recognition that here was an outstanding young talent who could be one of the saviours of English football. The early and mid-1950s had been a dire period for the national side, with the successive 6–3 and 7–1 defeats by Hungary in 1953 emblematic of England’s lack of vision and organization. Bobby Charlton represented hope for the future.

When Kevin Keegan was dropped by England in 1982, he complained bitterly that he had only learned about the decision through the press. ‘Bobby Robson should have had the guts to tell me to my face,’ he wailed. But Keegan’s case is hardly unique. This is the – way so many players have been informed about international selection or exclusion, particularly in the pre-Ramsey days when an FA committee chose the England side. And so it was with Bobby Charlton. On one of his visits to Ashington he had been to the pictures with Jack in the late afternoon. As they came out of the cinema, Jack picked up an evening paper. There was the news, in the stop press column, that his younger brother had been selected for England. True to their natures, Jack was much more demonstrative, letting out, in his words, ‘a whoop of joy’, while Bobby just smiled. Jack says that his elation was completely genuine. ‘There was no jealousy. There couldn’t be. He was the great player of the two of us, and I never in my wildest dreams thought I was good enough to play for England. I was just proud and thrilled for him.’

Six years later when Jack contradicted his own prediction by winning his first cap for England – coincidentally against Scotland as well – Bobby’s response was very different. In April 1965 Leeds and Manchester United were playing in an FA Cup semi-final at Hillsborough as the news came through to Leeds boss Don Revie that Jack had been picked for the England squad. He told Jack after the game, a typically stormy Cup tie which Leeds won narrowly. Unable to contain his glee at the news, Jack ran along to the United dressing room to see his brother, who recalls: ‘I was sitting slumped when our kid came beaming through the door. “Go away,” I thought, “we don’t need you at this moment.” But Jack just stood there, the smile getting wider and wider. “Hey,” he said, “I’m in the England team with you.’” The announcement was greeted with a resounding silence, only broken for a moment by Bobby’s brief two words of congratulations, ‘That’s terrific,’ Then another United player said, ‘Now fuck off out of here.’ Jack then knew he could not have chosen a worse time to tell his brother, walking into the dressing room of the team he had just helped to knock out of the FA Cup. ‘But that’s the kind of tact I’m famous for,’ he once joked.

Interviewed in 1959 about his selection for England, Bobby made the predictable noises about achieving his childhood ambition. ‘This is what I have been dreaming about since I was nine. I’ve never wanted to be anything else but an England footballer,’ he told the Daily Mail. As always, Cissie loomed large in his thoughts: ‘I know who will be happiest of all – my mother,’ Interestingly, however, he said later that he was so emotionally focused on United’s Cup run that he felt indifference towards the game. ‘I went up to Scotland completely unworried, with no pre-match nerves at all.’ Now this was very different to the way Bobby Charlton was to feel throughout the rest of his career. Though a master on the field, he would usually be gripped by pre-match nerves off it. Nobby Lawton game me this description of Bobby in the dressing room before a big game: ‘At ten to three, Bobby was like a great performer, waiting in the wings, building himself up as he prepared to go out on stage. “This is me, this is what I’m good at,” you could see him saying to himself. Bobby would be shaking. That was how much he cared about his performance. That’s why he was great – every game mattered. He would often have a cigarette before the game, his hands shaking. Jimmy Murphy would sometimes put a bottle of whisky on the table in the dressing room, and Bobby and a few others would take a swig. It wasn’t like a drink, really just a gulp, Dutch courage before the conflict. He was always the same before every game at Old Trafford, very, very nervous.’

The selectors thought he would be anxious so they made him share a room with Billy Wright, the Wolves and England captain. Intriguingly, Bobby, who always had such respect for authority throughout his career, was not especially impressed with the leadership of Billy Wright, the ultimate ‘establishment’ man. ‘He was a nice fellow but I didn’t feel he had much influence as captain other than by his example as a player. There was such a turnover in those days in the team that he was reluctant to criticize players in case they thought it was his fault,’ says Bobby.

Bobby had an excellent first game for England, making the first goal and scoring the last in a 4–0 win at Hampden. His strike came in the 85th minute, when he hit a thunderous volley from a cross by Tom Finney. So impressed was Scottish goalkeeper Tommy Younger at this shot that he actually ran out of his area to congratulate Bobby, something that would be unimaginable today. ‘Well done, son, that was a fantastic goal,’ he said. Players on both sides were amazed at Bobby’s spectacular effort. Tommy Docherty, later to be Charlton’s last manager at United, recalls: ‘It was one of the greatest goals ever seen at Hampden. I was on the receiving end. Bobby left me flat-footed as he met a cross from my Preston teammate Tom Finney. The ball came in at hip height and Bobby caught it on the volley. Our goalkeeper was still diving when the ball hit the net.’ Bryan Douglas, the Blackburn winger, says, ‘I can remember Bobby’s debut as if it were yesterday. That goal of his showed me what he was all about – two wonderful feet and a great temperament. He did not need to be near a goal to score. He could fire them in from anywhere. I once watched him in training, cracking ball after ball into an empty net. I could see that it just gave him a thrill to see the ball rocketing into the goal.’ In praising such shooting, Douglas also exposes the absurdity of the idea that Bobby ever ‘picked his spot’. He continues. ‘Bobby was always modest about his skill, honest as well. I remember once playing against him in a League game. There was a throw-in, he dummied, let the ball run past him, and then he hit it from about 30 yards with his left foot. When I complimented him on this fabulous goal, he said, “Well, I just hit it. I knew the goal was somewhere over there.’” Bobby was just as successful in his second game for England at Wembley against Portugal. Every time he received the ball a roar went around the ground and he scored twice in England’s 2–1 triumph, both his goals from long-range shots. But already critics in the England set-up were privately expressing reservations about his workrate.

From these dizzy heights, Bobby’s performances went into swift decline. It was as if he had been running on adrenalin after Munich, and now, as the end of the season approached, he was suffering from delayed shock. ‘Jaded’ was the word that Bill Foulkes used about Bobby’s appearances in the Cup Final and the international against Yugoslavia. Albert Scanlon said to me: ‘The press had build up this romantic image of Bobby, the player who had emerged from the debris of Munich to appear in the Cup Final and become an international. It was in a reaction to all this publicity that he lost his confidence.’ Bobby admits that, ever since the calamity, he had been feeling under unrelenting pressure. ‘I was just an ordinary footballer, yet every move I made was watched. I can’t remember whether I wondered if my best days were already behind. I just went out and played, never in touch with the pace of the game, playing in little spurts, hating every minute.’ It was this idea that he could only play ‘in little spurts’ that was to cause Bobby particular aggravation in the coming months.

But the biggest problem facing Bobby now was that England were due to play in Belgrade, the scene of his last United game before the Munich disaster. Bobby was never a tough player in the conventional, hard man, David Batty, sense – ‘he couldn’t tackle a fish supper,’ in the words of John Docherty – but he was never lacking in true moral courage. It is a tribute to his bravery that, only three months after Munich, he was willing to undertake the same journey to Belgrade that had resulted in the deaths of so many of his colleagues. Arsenal must be wishing that Dennis Bergkamp, who has never been through any experience to match Bobby’s ordeal, could show the same fortitude. ‘I don’t feel like flying again but I realize to achieve my ambitions I shall have to face it again in the future,’ Bobby said just after the disaster.

What made Bobby’s first flight after Munich all the more of a strain was not only the media attention on him in London, but also the difficulties the plane experienced on the way out to Yugoslavia. On a scheduled stop in Zurich, there was a hold-up of around three hours before the BEA Vickers Viscount could take off again. Bobby must have felt a shudder of disbelief when he heard the loudspeaker announcement, ‘the flight from London to Belgrade will be delayed owing to a technical fault’ – almost exactly the same phrase that had been used just 15 minutes before the doomed third take-off attempt on 6 February. Yet no matter what agonies he was feeling, he never once flinched. Instead, as the England team waited at the Swiss airport, he carried on drinking lemonade and writing postcards. It was a different story once he was on board again, as Bernard Joy recorded in the Evening Standard: ‘It was distressing sitting immediately behind him. He fidgeted, sweated profusely and constantly looked back, seeking assurance and diversion,’ Johnny Haynes, the Fulham midfield general who was also on that trip, has nothing but admiration for Bobby’s gumption. ‘It must have been difficult for him. But, to his great credit, he knew that the more quickly he got back in the air, the better. Yes, he was nervous when we were flying again but once he got out of the plane, he was a different person. You could almost see the physical relief all over him. He had done it. And I don’t think flying ever bothered him that much again.’

Apart from the problems of travel and the memories of Munich, Bobby also hated Belgrade itself, because of the oppressive trappings of communist dictatorship – ‘too many policemen and soldiers for my liking’. The result was as bad anything else about the trip. England were thrashed 5–0 by Yugoslavia, one of the worst defeats of the post-war era, and Bobby himself admits that his own performance was ‘a nightmare’. The stifling heat was one reason why the England players performed so badly, as Ronnie Clayton told me: ‘Bobby’s reputation took a dent after that game in Yugoslavia but that was true of a few of us because we played in 95 degrees heat in the shade. After a quarter of an hour, we were flagging. It was a terribly difficult game. Everyone was off form, not just Bobby.’