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

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СКАЧАТЬ BEA that they could stay in a hotel. Neither of them were big drinkers, but they worked their way through a bottle of whisky that night.

      Meanwhile, Bobby was put in a small ward. Amazingly, given the carnage all around him, he was only suffering from shock and minor head injuries, which required just two stitches and a bandage. But, having collapsed once, the doctors wanted to keep him in for observation. The first Bobby knew of the extent of the disaster was the next day, from a German sitting in the bed next to him. As he later recalled in Weekend magazine, ‘The German began to read out loud from a newspaper. When he went on to say that Dave Pegg, Eddie Colman and Tommy Taylor were dead, I didn’t want to hear any more. I couldn’t believe it and I didn’t want to. I shut my ears to him but he just went on and on. I thought he would never stop. It was the worst moment of my life.’

      Bobby was kept in for a week. During that time he and the other survivors were visited by Jimmy Murphy, who would normally have been on the flight to Belgrade but instead, in his capacity as part-time manager of the Welsh national team, had been in Cardiff for a vital World Cup qualifying tie. In the absence of Matt Busby, Murphy had the daunting task of trying to rebuild the team. In an attempt to boost the morale of those who were injured, Murphy had asked Bill Foulkes and Harry Gregg to go round the wards. They saw Matt Busby in his oxygen tent, hovering on the verge of death before making an astonishing recovery, thanks partly to the medical care of Professor Georg Maurer, the Chief Surgeon of the Rechts der Isar Hospital. Gregg remembers, too, the moment when he and Murphy came to the bed of Duncan Edwards, whose injuries were so extensive that he had been given only a 50–50 chance of survival. ‘He was lying still as we approached, then he suddenly opened his eyes. “What time’s kick-off?” Jimmy, trying to hold back the tears, just whispered, “Three o’clock son, three o’clock.” Duncan replied, “Get stuck in.’” Less than a fortnight later, Edwards was dead.

      Ray Wood, who initially shared the same ward as Bobby, gave me this insight into what it was like for him in those weeks after the crash. ‘When I first woke up I saw Bobby in the bed opposite. I was absolutely freezing cold. There was a doctor beside my bed holding my hand. Now I had seen films where people have lost their leg and they think their foot is freezing. That is exactly how I felt.’ Wood’s condition worsened and he was transferred to another ward. ‘I had concussion and double vision. I could hear music playing all the time. My leg was in agony and, such was the pain, that I was drifting in and out of consciousness. I didn’t even know what day it was. When my wife turned up, I asked her, “Where did you come from?” Harry Gregg tells me that when he visited the hospital, he found me in the operating theatre, where the doctors were working on my eye. They actually had it right out of its socket, sitting on the cheekbone. Typical Harry, dear man, he says that the thought passed through his mind, “Well, Ray won’t be troubling me for the keeper’s position anymore.’”

      But for all their agonies, Ray Wood, Matt Busby – and Bobby – were the lucky ones. Of the 43 people on board the BEA Elizabethan, 23 died in the crash or soon afterwards. The tragic roll call included the co-pilot Kenneth Rayment, three Manchester United officials: Walter Crickmer (secretary), Tom Curry (trainer) and Bert Whalley (coach), and eight players: Roger Byrne, Geoff Bent, Eddie Colman, Mark Jones, David Pegg, Tommy Taylor, Billy Whelan and Duncan Edwards – ‘all my mates’ said Bobby later.

      Two subsequent inquiries by German investigators concluded that ice on the wings was the chief cause of the accident. This was a verdict fiercely disputed by Captain Thain, who spent 11 years fighting to clear his name. In the eyes of his supporters, he was vindicated in 1969 by an official British inquiry which stated that sludge on the runway was to blame. But there was little hope of his returning to work as a pilot. He had been dismissed by BEA in 1960 for his failure to check for ice, as well as for breaching airline regulations – his other technical offence had been to swap places with Kenneth Rayment on the journey back from Munich. BEA rules stipulated that, even if the co-pilot was flying the plane, the commander of the flight had to remain on the left-hand side of the cockpit. The enforcement of this requirement might seem the height of pettiness, and Thain put forward a strong defence for his behaviour. First, he pointed out that Rayment was an experienced pilot, indeed more experienced than he was in flying Elizabethans. Second, he argued that he had a better view of the instrument panels from the right hand side. But this did not wash with BEA, and for good reason. For the change of seats may have left, as Frank Taylor wrote in his book The Day a Team Died, ‘a suggestion of divided responsibility in the cockpit’, which resulted in a tragic disharmony of action. There is the possibility that in the last seconds on the runway, just as Thain was pushing the throttle for more power and trying to retract the under-carriage to achieve take-off, Rayment may have been working in exactly the opposite cause, slamming on the brakes to bring the plane to a halt.

      Whatever the cause, Munich left a gaping wound on Manchester United, which has still not healed to this day. And, emotionally, Bobby Charlton was to suffer more than most. On 14 February 1958, he was the first of the survivors to leave the hospital. But his real pain was only just beginning.

CHAPTER SIX The Survivor

      ‘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 СКАЧАТЬ