My Manchester United Years: The Autobiography

by Bobby Charlton

  Eventually, I was helped into a mini-truck, one that seemed to have been diverted from its normal task of shifting coal. Gregg and Foulkes came with me as we raced through the blizzard into the city hospital. There, the walking wounded were taken to a waiting room.

  Mostly, I stared at the wall. I had one small bruise on my head and I was suffering from concussion. Reality came drifting in and out, but at one of its sharpest points I noticed an orderly smiling, as if to say, it seemed to me, that all this was a routine matter and that the world would still be turning when the dawn came. But of course it wouldn’t, not for the football team that was supposed to conquer the world. I was filled with rage and it was directed at this hospital worker who seemed to understand none of that. I screamed at him. What I said exactly is, like much of that night and the days that followed, lost to me now, but I remember vividly the pain that came to me so hard at that moment. Soon after, a doctor stuck something into the back of my neck.

  My next memory is of waking the following morning in a hospital ward. In a nearby bed was a young German, who was looking at a newspaper that was spread before him. I could see from the photographs that he was reading about the crash. He spoke little English, but when he looked up and saw me he managed to say, ‘I’m sorry.’ At that moment I had to know who had gone and who had survived.

  The German lad read out the names and then, after a short pause, said, ‘Dead.’ It was a terrible roll call, and I make no excuse for repeating once again … Roger Byrne, David Pegg, Eddie Colman, Tommy Taylor, Billy Whelan, Mark Jones and Geoff Bent. How could it possibly be? It was as though my life was being taken away, piece by piece. I had invited David Pegg to my home for a North Eastern New Year, had spent so many hours in Eddie’s house in Salford, where the talk was mostly of football and soldiering; I had shared digs with Billy Whelan, and most Saturdays I would have a few beers at the Bridge Inn in Sale with Tommy Taylor, who would wait for me if I had been away with the reserves.

  It was impossible to grasp that these days were gone, that I would never see Eddie swaggering into the ground again, humming some Sinatra tune, walking on the balls of his feet – or have Mark Jones, the kindest of pros, touching my sleeve after a game and giving me some encouraging word. A game never seemed to pass without that tough Yorkshireman taking the chance to say something like, ‘Well done, son,’ or ‘That was a lovely touch.’

  There was some relief when I was moved into a ward with a few of the other survivors: the Welsh winger Kenny Morgans, goalkeeper Ray Wood, Dennis Viollet who was looking better than when I last saw him lying in the snow, Albert Scanlon the talented, unpredictable film fan from Salford, who was known to spend most Fridays using his free pass at one of the city-centre cinemas before emerging groggily into the street after gorging on Marilyn Monroe and Rita Hayworth. I wanted to shout, ‘At least we’re OK,’ but then I thought of Duncan Edwards, who was fighting for his life, and the badly injured Johnny Berry and Jackie Blanchflower, who would never play again, and that took away any such urge.

  Harry Gregg and Bill Foulkes passed through the ward on their way to what they saw as their duty to the dead, back at Old Trafford. I shivered when I thought how it must be in Manchester. We had been screened from much of the news, but then, as the days passed, you heard of the funerals and something deep inside you was grateful that you weren’t there, because it would have been so hard to say goodbye with so many eyes on you. All the time the question came pounding in: why me, why did I survive?

  When you heard how Manchester was stricken, how many people were turning up at Old Trafford, aimless in their grief but just wanting to be as close as they could to the team who had so lifted their lives, who they had seen growing up before their eyes, you felt there had to be a match as soon as possible. This was something to try to latch on to, as you might to a piece of flotsam in a wild sea. A match would help everybody, players, fans, the whole city of Manchester. A match would take away some of the horror. It was a small piece of escapism and it didn’t take you far. It couldn’t, because upstairs Duncan Edwards and Matt Busby were in oxygen tents and fighting uphill battles to stay alive.

  Eventually, I was able to see them both. I went up with my heart pounding. Later, I was told that Duncan’s fight, which lasted nearly a fortnight, was the result of freakish strength and willpower. The German doctors did all they could and then just had to shake their heads in disbelief that anyone could fight so hard against such odds.

  He was in obvious pain when I visited him, but his spirit was still as strong as ever. When he saw me he threw back his head and said, ‘I’ve been waiting for you. Where the bloody hell have you been?’ I whispered my encouragement, feeling my eyes smart while wondering all over again how it could be that this young giant of the game was so stricken while I could prepare to walk down the stairs before packing for home. Big Dunc was more than the admired team-mate and older friend who had looked after me so well when we were in National Service together in Shropshire, who went scouring the camp for a better mattress when he saw that the one I had been issued with had bits falling out. He was the embodiment of everything I admired in a footballer. He had skill and courage and tremendous power. He could do anything, play anywhere, and the world awaited the full scale of his glory.

  Once, when I was training with United in Fallowfield, at the same time as England gathered for some work en route to a game with Scotland at Hampden Park, I saw Edwards lapping the field in the company of two of the great internationals, Tom Finney and Billy Wright. The three of them chatted amiably as they jogged and I couldn’t help wondering what other teenaged footballer would look so relaxed, so confident, in the company of such stars.

  Duncan Edwards wore his own greatness lightly, but he knew it was a suit that fitted him perfectly. Maybe that was one reason why he fought so hard in that hospital in Munich. I could only pray for his survival after Jimmy Murphy took me by train to the Hook of Holland for the ferry to Harwich, where I was met by my mother Cissie and my brother Jack for the drive home to the North East. I didn’t say much on the journey back to where everything had started, and where I had to persuade myself, in the company of my own people, that football could once again occupy the core of my being.

  Of course I would know it soon enough. What would take a little longer to understand was that nothing would be quite so simple ever again. Some, including Jack, insist that Munich changed me. If it did, I like to think that eventually it was for the better, at the very least in that it told me that even when riding a miracle you still have to remember how easily you can fall. If you are very lucky, you survive, and while you’re doing it you fulfil every dream, every ambition, you ever had. This is what lies at the heart of my story, but to tell it properly, first I had to go back to Munich. Without doing that, I know I couldn’t begin to define my life.

  1

  A CAST OF REMARKABLE RELATIVES

  BECAUSE I WAS so quickly adopted by Manchester, a place I fell in love with as soon as I got over the first shock of its grimy, soot-covered buildings and whose virtues I have found myself championing in all corners of the world, sometimes I feel the need to dispel a misconception. It is that, somewhere along the way, I forgot who I once was and from where I came. I did not.

  The truth is that nothing that has happened to me, good or bad, has come near to preventing me from going back quite effortlessly beyond Munich and the day I first arrived at Old Trafford, a fifteen-year-old dressed, self-consciously, in a beautiful sea-green mac that reached down to my ankles. ‘You’ll grow into it,’ my mother reassured me as she saw me off at the railway station.

  Even now, I often return to the deepest of my roots, the ones that I suspect still claim you when all the glory-seeking is done and every game has been played. In my mind’s eye I run again in the big sand dunes scoured by the wind and dotted with the concrete pill-boxes left over from the war. Then I sit on the rocks and watch the sun disappear into the night. On other occasions I walk down the promenade w
here, on a good day, we scrape up the money for ice cream. Or I trail into the fields in the tracks of my big brother Jack when, usually under duress, he agrees to take me in pursuit of rabbits or birds’ eggs or to sit by a fishing stream or a pond.

  I also go to the pithead again with my father Robert. He buys me milk in a little gill bottle and a meat pie and leaves me in the colliery canteen before going off to collect the wages for which he has worked so hard, even when he is groggy from some bang on the head. While I wait for him I look out and I see the black-faced miners coming out of the cage, singing and joking in their happiness that the shift is over and they have returned safely, for at least another day, to the natural light and the fresh air.

  Perhaps, though, it should surprise no one who knows anything about my life, and least of all me, that invariably I stop and linger most affectionately at a moment which seemed to crystallise so much of what lay ahead.

  It wasn’t one of those small rites of passage that came so regularly out on the football field when, stride by stride, I grasped that what I wanted most was within my power whenever I had the ball at my feet, knowing instinctively it was not so hard to run it by an opponent or hit it low into the wind that seemed always to be blowing. Yet in an unforgettable way it did show me, beyond any doubt, that this indeed was where my future lay.

  It was the time James Hamilton, a man of big physical stature and even greater authority, burst into the classroom at North Hirst Primary School, a red-brick building in my home town of Ashington, and shouted, ‘Charlton, Bobby Charlton, come with me.’

  I followed the headmaster with all the usual apprehension he provoked when, while patrolling his empire, his gaze settled disapprovingly on a boy or a girl who he decided was falling below the standards of behaviour he set for all his pupils.

  He was an amiable man most of the time; he seemed to care about our lives and it was my good fortune that he loved football and realised fully the part it played in so much of the imagination of the North East. However, he inflicted the strictest discipline when someone misbehaved. He especially despised bad language and it was rare that the coarse phrase of a pupil escaped his censure. Only a few days earlier he had imposed what I considered the ultimate punishment on my friend Philip Hazell, who had been heard swearing in the schoolyard. Philip had been dropped from the football team and, as I hurried to keep up as we went down the corridor, I wondered whether I had also done something wrong and was about to share the same fate. This would have been quite ironic in that I had been trying over several days to rouse the courage to appeal against my friend’s sentence.

  Mr Hamilton stopped at a display of mining implements, picks and shovels and a helmet. I had often wondered about the purpose of this rather grim little tableau. Was it meant to encourage in all those who passed by a desire for book learning and the means to avoid the journey underground that had been forced upon almost all those of my relatives who had failed to make professional football careers? Or was it simply a statement of the inevitable, with options so limited for those who tried to look past the pits and the shipyards?

  Mr Hamilton ordered me to pick up the helmet. ‘You can put it under your arm as though it is a ball,’ he said. Then he unwrapped and handed me the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. It was a bright-red football shirt topped with lace. ‘No, it’s not red,’ he corrected me. ‘It’s crimson and it’s the finest football shirt that’s ever been made. It’s our new strip.’

  Mr Hamilton told me to put on the shirt. ‘I want you to run back into the classroom with the helmet under your arm.’

  ‘Run into the classroom?’

  ‘Aye, Bobby lad, run into the classroom. You’re the team captain. Go on. This is a great day.’

  I had to agree with him as I felt in my hand the fine material of the shirt, and in my pleasure I had no embarrassment at all. Mr Hamilton went ahead of me to the classroom. Then, as he swung open the door and I trotted in, he sang out the signature tune of Sports Report. Everyone cheered, even the girls.

  When the applause died down, Mr Hamilton announced that one of the teachers, Miss Houston, was already at work converting into shorts the satin black-out curtains which had been made redundant by the end of the war. It was so thrilling to be told we were being given our first custom-made team uniforms. The crimson shirts would replace a ragbag assembly of white ones which everyone had had to find themselves, whatever the state of repair. Our only requirement now was to get hold of red-and-white socks, which we did in various sizes and conditions and designs. In the mood of celebration there was even a pardon for Philip Hazell.

  Looking back, I see that either side of that happiest of schooldays there was no special occasion when I realised that I would not have to go down the mines, as Jack did briefly – before he tried out for the police and then signed for Leeds United. There is a picture of him taken afterwards, coming to the surface. He is wearing a helmet and the expression on his face shows how bemusing and dispiriting he had found the experience. For me, the idea that my life would be football was just an assumption that built irrevocably over the months and years, and it was maybe most publicly and explicitly encouraged in that moment when I was told to tuck the mining helmet under my arm. I saw it as the clearest sign of the future – one that would always be reinforced by the fact that I felt so much pleasure and confidence whenever I touched the ball.

  Everyone told me I could play well, and I was not so modest that I didn’t realise it quickly enough for myself. The game, after all, was so deep in the blood of my mother’s family and if I ever forgot that, my grandfather, Tanner, my mother’s father, was for a while there to remind me.

  Tanner was the head of the Milburn football clan. Four of his sons played professionally, George for Chesterfield, Jack for Leeds, Jimmy for Bradford and Stan for Chesterfield and Leicester, and – shining above all else in family pride – his nephew and my second cousin Jackie was moving towards the height of his career as the greatest legend in the history of Newcastle United.

  Long after Tanner died, it was suggested to me that he was not universally popular in Ashington. Some considered him a hard and sometimes ruthless man who made plenty of enemies as a trainer of professional sprinters, a stable that included my Uncle Stan. He was, some said, the toughest of taskmasters if one of his charges disappointed him. However, it was a side he never showed to me. I adored him and was always aware of his presence. He seemed to be at my shoulder constantly, encouraging me, pointing out things I should know if I was going to go beyond mere promise.

  His role as an overseer of my life, a protector, was established very early. Though Ashington was hit by only one wartime bomb landing on the ice-rink, which was miraculous when you considered how much industry lay between us and the fifteen miles to Newcastle, we always went to Tanner’s home down the street when the air-raid warning sounded. It was a bigger, more substantial house and for me my grandfather’s presence was reassuring. When the all-clear came we would grope through the dark back to our house and when we did this I always felt that maybe we were leaving a little safety behind.

  I was entranced by Tanner’s competitive world, which often involved ferocious betting, and was fascinated by the intensity with which he trained Stan. In the summer I would go with them to miners’ galas, when Stan gave away at least eight or nine yards in the handicap sprint. Sometimes in training he would give me a fifty-yard start and let me win. The whole ritual was thrilling as they laid out the string to mark the sprinting lanes. Then Tanner would bring Stan to a fine boiling point, and there would be the explosion of the start.

  Along the way there was so much to see in the sideshows, people trying to break free of ropes that had been tied in ‘unbreakable’ knots and fighting to get out of sacks. As a young man my father had always been drawn to such occasions and it was claimed, though not by him, that he won the money for my mother’s engagement ring in a boxing booth at a fair. Certainly I knew he was a strong man and I could easily imagine him faring
well in bare-knuckle days. His nickname was Boxer. He was a miner, of course, and that for me has always announced a man’s toughness. I went down a pit once, in Salford, long after I had established myself as a player. I descended eight tiers and I hated every minute of it. I was spitting up black stuff for about a week afterwards. Naturally the experience made me think of my father. I was down there for an hour. He went down every day of his working life; once, I remember, he took just one night off after he had been hit by a buggy which left one side of his face twice the size of the other.

  Tanner would watch me from the other side of the railings as I played football in the schoolyard and afterwards he would analyse my play; sometimes I would see him conferring intently with Mr Hamilton or the football master, Norman McGuinness. Before he fell ill and became bedridden I always felt his eyes on me when I played. It gave me, I’m sure, an edge of commitment as I tried to maintain the standards he laid down. Famously, my mother is credited with driving on Jack and particularly me in our football careers, and it is true that she was passionate in her desire that we made the best of any talent we had, but some of the stories about her training and coaching me are exaggerated. It was Tanner, weathered by the wind and the rain in which he spent so much time, who painted for me most vividly the possibilities that awaited if I worked hard enough.

  He never tired of repeating his most basic message. If you had enough talent, which he repeatedly assured me I did, anything was possible. All I had to do was work at something which I most wanted to do. ‘If you are good enough, lad,’ he would say, ‘there is nothing you can’t do – not if you look after yourself, not if you give it everything you have.’ Tanner sowed the seeds of my ambition so diligently it would always be one of my regrets that, as I began to find success beyond the boundaries of our neighbourhood, I was never able to take him to a great football occasion, perform well and then say, ‘Thank you for all that you taught me; today I played for you.’