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

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ