Jack and Bobby: A story of brothers in conflict. Leo McKinstry

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СКАЧАТЬ through the manipulation of local authority catering contracts, and used his wealth to gain control at Old Trafford in the 1960s. Shortly after the programme was screened, he died of a heart attack while having a bath. Granada researchers uncovered a wealth of evidence suggesting that United were in the habit of paying more than just transfer fees. Particularly damning was the testimony of John Aston, one of United’s great players of the post-war era and junior team coach since 1954, who, in a sworn affidavit, said, ‘Some of these boys were induced to sign because United offered them or their parents backhand payments. In some cases I was personally involved in obtaining cash and handing it to the families of boys.’ As Aston explained, money would be secretly raised through fictitious expense accounts, and then used to pay off families. Such was the strength of Aston’s evidence that Matt made little real effort to dispute it, while two other books repeated the claims. One, Michael Crick and David Smith’s Betrayal of a Legend, states: ‘£500 or £1,000 might be handed over in banknotes. Alternatively, the father of a promising young player might be employed as a part-time scout, though, of course, he was not expected to do anything for this,’ And Eamon Dunphy, in his brilliantly vivid and subtle biography of Sir Matt, A Strange Kind of Glory, writes: ‘Year by year, Matt Busby had found himself sucked into a moral quagmire. A few quid in an envelope to the father of a talented youngster for scouting, no bribe intended.’ This does not, of course, necessarily mean that all young players, like Bobby, were acquired through such methods, or that they would have been aware of such approaches by United. But it does put into perspective some of the sugary guff that is written about United and Busby, as if he was too virtuous ever to be involved in the more mercenary aspects of professional football.

      On 16 June 1953 Busby finally got what he wanted, when Bobby officially signed for United, thus beginning an association with the club that lasts to this day. So highly regarded was Bobby that the Daily Mail recorded the event. ‘This may sound a minor signing but it is of major importance in a soccer world which is acutely aware of the value of developing youngsters. Charlton, the star of the England v Wales match last season, has superb positional sense and ball control.’ Before leaving for Manchester he played out his last season for Bedlington. Evan Martin recalls, ‘We had a hell of a team in 1952/53, thanks mainly to Bobby’s skills. We used to go to really hard secondary schools, like North Shields, and win easily. In the very last match of the season, we were on the coach and Bobby asked Tucker Robinson, “What’s the highest individual score this season?”

      “I got three against Alnwick,” replied Tucker.

      “Well, I’ll get four today.”

      And he did. Two of them were 30-yard piledrivers. The goalkeeper did not even see them.’

      Elder brother Jack had played no role in the saga of Bobby’s move to United. There was no army of scouts after him, no club representative offering Cissie a fistful of cash for his services. Yet it is one of the strange twists of this story that Jack was actually taken on by a League club before Bobby. For most of his early years, Jack had rarely impressed anyone with his football. He was merely another competent youngster, a decent stopper of the kind that could be found throughout the north-east. He played for his school, district and YMCA side, but did not come near to his county team, never mind the England Schoolboys. In fact, he was dropped for several games from his district because of his habit of standing still, as if wondering what had happened, when he was beaten by a winger. ‘You’ll have to sharpen your wits up,’ he was told. Evan Martin says: ‘I remember watching Jack playing for the East Northumberland Juniors. He was at left-back and he was big, gangly and awkward. He did not impress me one bit.’

      Indeed, it is a remarkable fact that the man who later gained a World Cup winner’s medal could not even get in the Ashington FC junior team. Ken Prior, who grew up with Jack, explains: ‘Jimmy Denmark, the former Newcastle centre-half, came to manage Ashington and the club decided to have a junior side. So the call went out for all the budding youngsters to come to Portland Park. We had a trial and Jack did not even get picked for the final squad. I didn’t think he played too badly but he did not stand out, certainly not for his size. Jack went home, a bit upset, and after he’d gone, Jimmy Denmark said, “You know, that lad will never make a player.”’

      Yet, as he approached his 15th birthday, there was something about Jack – his size, his strength, above all his ‘Milburn’ heritage – which meant that he could attract the interest of a League club. After playing well for the Ashington YMCA Under-18 side in a match against Barkworth, he was approached by a Leeds scout, who offered him a trial at Elland Road. In his later career, Jack would sometimes maintain that he, like Bobby, was always destined to be a professional footballer. ‘Neither of us had ever considered anything but playing the game for a living,’ he told the News of the World in April 1973.

      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. СКАЧАТЬ