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

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      ‘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

      ‘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 СКАЧАТЬ