My Manchester United Years: The Autobiography

by Bobby Charlton

  The money certainly wasn’t all used in players’ wages. Also, how much was being spent on the grounds? Of course that question was still being asked when the Taylor Report was published in the wake of the Hillsborough tragedy in 1989.

  I would never be militant. I would never issue ultimatums. It simply wasn’t my style. But then, perhaps inevitably, I did come to consider the differences between football and, say, show business. Mike Yarwood’s vision of me as a toff certainly had more to do with appearances than any financial reality. When he saw me on Lever Street I was on £16 a week in the winter, £14 in the summer. The rises came at the rate of £2 per union negotiation, but when the maximum reached £20 the PFA suddenly raised the stakes in a way that shocked the bosses of the Football League. The demand was for a £4 rise and the response was indignant. ‘This is ridiculous,’ said the League.

  It was at this sticking point that the pressure for a strike began to build at a greater rate, and created the atmosphere at a PFA meeting in Manchester that, looking back, I grew to believe may have been the moment that changed the whole of football.

  There were a few anti-strike speeches, and one of them was notably articulate: the argument that a strike would be ruinous to the game, and to the prospects of the players, was hammered home. It was a strong speech, but its effect was counter-productive. It brought the fierce Bolton Wanderers full back Tommy Banks to his feet. He said that while it was true we did not have to clock on at a factory or go down a mine, we did entertain thousands of people, and however hard a lad worked down the mine he didn’t have to take on Stanley Matthews. ‘Am I worth a rise?’ asked Banks. ‘Yes, I am. I was never paid enough for the number of times I was ridiculed by Mr Matthews.’ He sat down to deafening applause.

  When the £20 maximum wage limit was finally abolished in 1962, when Johnny Haynes became the first £100 a week footballer, my wages were raised to £35. By then I was an established England player.

  In my eyes it was a dramatic pay rise, but Jimmy Murphy told me how the figure had been reached. He and Matt Busby had been running through the squad list, discussing the progress of individual players and what might be their proper reward now that the maximum wage limit was being dismantled. Apparently, when they reached my name they agreed that I would probably accept whatever they offered, whether it was £20 or even £18.

  But then, according to Jimmy, Busby said, ‘No, this is not right. He has to have a proper wage.’

  Now, when I recall that Haynes, though he was a player I always admired deeply for his wonderful passing skill and his vision, was on more than three times my salary while playing for Fulham, a club famous for being charming and friendly but no great claimant for the highest honours, I see that my attitude to such a basic matter as my wage packet was maybe a little too passive.

  Comparisons with today are certainly laughable. My generation played at a time when the Football League and its member clubs saw players as workers to pamper in their travel and even their recreation, but not to be granted the employee rights that were common in other walks of life. It was like saying that football operated in a cocoon, both unique and frozen in time.

  This couldn’t go on, of course, and as I began to move away from adolescence, still believing football would be at or near the centre of my life, I came to recognise another world was going on outside its borders. It was something I had to acknowledge sooner rather than later if I was to offer Norma a good life, after rebuilding a relationship with her that, maybe because of the distractions of football, and a touch of celebrity, I had allowed to drift from what it could and should have been.

  However, in all the highs and lows and complications of the life I was making, and briefly unmaking, there was one constant, a character which revealed itself a little more each day: the dark but vital sprawl of Manchester. Its power and its energy pressed against Old Trafford, reminding me always of that purpose of football to bring a little light to those who worked in the soot and the clanging noise. There were two huge black warehouses next to the ground and two enormous chimneys, one off-white and the other dark coloured. It was one of the great advantages of playing at home, the familiarity of it and the fact that whenever you looked up you saw one of the great chimneys and you knew precisely where you were. For visiting players it was, I always thought, another part of the intimidation of the place.

  Because The Cliff was needed for junior matches, the pitch wasn’t really good enough for the first team to work on, so sometimes we trained on a field set in the middle of the rugged, man-made landscape, beside the big Ship Canal – and when that was not available we had another works pitch next to a smaller canal. The sounds of the factories were all around us, and at the approach of lunch-time we knew what was on the canteen menu at the massive Metro-Vics plant – you could smell the spotted dick or the rice pudding.

  When it was snowing or frosty we worked wherever we could around the ground, beneath the part cover of the stands at the back of the stadium and the nearby greyhound track, and wherever you looked there was steam and smoke and industry. Part of our working background was formed by Glovers, a factory which produced huge coils of cable which were carried across the canal on a pulley and then lowered into the ships which would take them to all parts of the world, where they would go under the sea. It was exciting to see the power at work that generated the city’s wealth, and deep down I felt great pride that I was representing such a place on the football fields of England and, maybe soon, Europe.

  Some years later I saw a picture by my friend Harold Riley, the fine Salford painter who learned his art as a protégé of the great L.S. Lowry, which moved me so much that I bought it for a friend. It rekindled all the emotion which came to me when I looked at that great scene of industry, with the prows of the ships poking into a dark and gritty sky framed by cranes and chimneys and warehouses. The art of Lowry and Riley is very important to me now because I believe it is interwoven with the roots of so much of my life. When I first saw Lowry’s depiction of fans walking down to the Bolton Wanderers’ ground it took my breath away; it seemed to capture all that I had seen and felt as a boy, and then as a youth at the Broadheath factory; it described the lives of the workers and the lure of that patch of green at the football stadium. I was always reminded of that Lowry pitch when going to the ground. So many people walked to see a game, often straight from the factory after clocking off on Saturday lunch-time. It was so uplifting to see them striding out, laughing and talking and, it seemed to me, in a way coming alive.

  In this, my everyday life at Old Trafford kept strong my attachment to the North East. Up there were the mines and the shipyards, here was a massive workplace, the home of the industrial revolution, smelly but also glorious. Down the years I made extraordinary discoveries. The atom was split in Manchester University, and they also developed the first computer there. It was apparently as big as a room. Manchester had the first railway station, a hub for the nation’s industry, and the great plant of MetroVics, employing 25,000, sending out trains and viaducts into every corner of the world. When, years later, I came to act as an ambassador for the city, in an Olympic or Commonwealth Games bid, or in speaking for industry and business, I would never feel I was performing a chore, and I’m sure this was rooted in those days when I felt myself being drawn into something wider than merely a new job in a new place. Manchester set me on my way.

  8

  UNDER THE SPELL OF EUROPE

  DURING MY NATIONAL Service, when a plane flew over the camp I would look up longingly in the belief that maybe it was the boys flying off again into the new world of European football that had suddenly become the most glamorous place in the world. I imagined them joking and playing cards, and all of them filled with that zest for life you feel so strongly when you are doing something new and exciting. Those were my down days in khaki. Big Dunc, who had been such a great companion, almost a guardian, had already done his time and was at the front of the European campaign, and some days I would mutte
r to myself, ‘The army is really useless for me.’

  My salvation, in the absence of Duncan, was Company Sergeant Major White, known to me only as Chalky. He was a great football fan, had a car and was eager to make a deal. ‘You get the tickets, Bobby, and I’ll get you the leave passes and drive you up to Manchester whenever United have a home game in the European Cup.’ Chalky, like so many who played or just followed football, felt that Europe was a new dimension to the game, a place of excitement beyond the old trenches of league and cup warfare.

  Stan Cullis, the hard man of Wolves, the manager who became legendary for the demands he made on his players, was always seen as a dour figure in the game, but he commanded the greatest of respect from Matt Busby, not least for his understanding of the potential of European competition. The floodlit friendly games Wolves played against Spartak of Moscow were like electric currents running through English football and the rapturous reaction of the fans who filled the Molineux ground convinced Busby that this was part of the future. However, Alan Hardaker, the secretary of the Football League, notoriously, did not agree, and when the reigning champions Chelsea applied for permission to compete in the new European Cup he persuaded the league chairmen to turn them down flat. Busby was incensed at such narrow thinking and when United succeeded Chelsea as champions he made it clear that he would not tolerate such a restriction on his and his club’s ambitions.

  Hardaker argued there was already enough competition, and that the European Cup would be an unnecessary distraction from the league and the FA Cup, but United were the flagship of English football and Busby had a vision which could not be obscured. It was inevitable that in the end he would win the battle. In the aftermath, Hardaker almost immediately pushed through a new competition, the League Cup. It made a nonsense of his resistance to Europe, and soon enough he must have felt like the little Dutch boy with his finger in the hole in the dyke as European football came in on a flood of anticipation.

  Chalky duly drove me to Manchester to watch United’s first home game in the European Cup, that 10–0 dismantling of Anderlecht, and there were times when we looked at each other, shook our heads and murmured, ‘Unbelievable.’ It was a wet and dreary night and the Maine Road floodlights had feeble candlepower, but my club-mates created a glow of their own. Dennis Viollet could not be contained as he scored his four goals and David Pegg simply ravaged the right side of the Belgian champions’ defence.

  Before leaving camp in Shrewsbury, I had run the usual gauntlet of NAAFI canteen debate. In the army you live with so many different kinds of people – and so many varieties of football support. The fans of Liverpool and Manchester City, Arsenal, Celtic and Rangers were all questioning United’s prospects in the new arena of Europe. ‘You may be the champions of England,’ they said, ‘but this is going to be much more difficult. This is Europe.’

  Even though I said, ‘Well, why don’t we wait and see,’ I had my own concerns. For this game, United had a 2–0 lead from the first leg in Brussels, but Belgium was one of the weaker European nations. Reports and flashes of film were showing that leading clubs like Real Madrid and Barcelona in Spain and Juventus, Milan and Internazionale in Italy were operating at a much higher level than most of the opposition they were facing from other parts of Europe.

  Much of this worry melted away in the rain of Maine Road, however. I knew that Duncan Edwards, Tommy Taylor, Dennis Viollet, Eddie Colman, Roger Byrne and Johnny Berry were excellent players, but this was probably the time I realised quite how good they truly were. As Chalky drove me back to the army along empty roads – there were so few cars in those days you never had to worry about traffic jams, even after the biggest games – my head was filled with the future. United had produced more than a spree of goals. They had played with a power and a majesty which was quite stunning, especially when you considered the age of the team. The ‘veteran’ captain, Byrne, was still just twenty-seven, and Duncan, the best player, the one who was already providing evidence that he might soon be the greatest in the world, was still short of his twentieth birthday.

  When we returned to the camp in the early hours of the morning, I could hardly wait for breakfast, not just for the bacon and eggs but also the chance to enjoy massive bragging rights. Naturally, the jocks and the scousers, the geordies and the cockneys were keen to rubbish the quality of Anderlecht – ‘What kind of team gives up ten goals, man? What kind of bloody game was that?’ was the reaction of most – but I pointed out, as coolly as I could, that what Chalky and I had seen was something quite special. ‘No one could have stood up to that performance,’ I claimed.

  Yet the hecklers were not without some seeds of truth. The going would get tougher soon enough, and it was no doubt true that the deficiencies of Anderlecht had inadequately represented the depth of the European challenge. Certainly that was the theory of the press after the next game at Old Trafford, one which sent Chalky and me back to Shropshire in a much less exultant mood. Another claim of the press was that United, and not least Duncan, might be getting a little big for their boots. The press box detected a touch of damaging arrogance in the performance against Borussia Dortmund.

  Dennis Viollet was again dynamic, scoring twice in the first half, and with David Pegg adding another before half time, United again looked at least one class above the opposition. However, the second half was a completely different matter as the Germans scored twice, and made the away leg in Dortmund a much more formidable challenge than anyone had imagined when the draw was made. It was a huge relief two weeks later when the news reached the camp: United had held out in a goalless but fiercely fought game.

  Confirmation that United were indeed performing in a theatre much tougher than it first appeared was swift. It came in the cold of Northern Spain, where Bilbao, the Spanish champions who had qualified alongside the holders Real, confirmed the fierce competitive instinct of the Basques. After the game, there were pictures – disturbingly prophetic, it would turn out – of the United lads clearing snow away from their plane for the return flight to Manchester. No doubt there was an urge to retreat from the scene of defeat as quickly as possible.

  The Basques had hit United with three goals in the first half, then came again with two more after Tommy Taylor and Viollet led a comeback early in the second half. At 5–2, the exit door had swung wide open, but then Billy Whelan breathed back some life five minutes from the end. The passionate crowd was stunned by the United resistance, but it didn’t take away any of our foreboding.

  Chalky again pointed his little car towards Manchester, and for the second leg we were in the stand. Afterwards, I was agog for the detail that lay behind the magnificent recovery, a classically patient performance which, I learned, was partly the result of a typical Busby contribution in the dressing room. At half time United had been still two goals away from their target of a 3–0 win, and no doubt the mountaintop would have seemed even more impossibly far away if Viollet, in the form of his life, creating danger whenever he received the ball in an advanced position, had not scored just two minutes before the break. The Old Man, however, concealed any alarm he might have felt. ‘Boys,’ he said, just as he would say so many times in my hearing, ‘do not panic. Play the game as you know how. Make your passes and do your running, but, above all, keep your patience. If you can do that, we will get there.’ He was right, and gloriously so.

  There were eighteen minutes left when Tommy Taylor scored the second, and just six when he made the life-giving third for Johnny Berry. There was a great eruption in the ground – part of it being a celebration of value for money by those of the fans who had paid as much as £11 – well above the average weekly wage – for tickets with the face value of seven shillings and sixpence. The United players who showed their competitive nerve, who announced that they were indeed ready and equipped to compete at the highest level of European football, were still five years away from the end of the maximum wage. This was something to think about when they heard the news that Bilbao had been o
n £200 a man to win the chance of deposing their mighty and much hated masters in Madrid. However, the glory of playing for Manchester United – and winning a dramatic match – still outweighed all else.

  The effect of the result swept beyond the boundaries of the city. Manchester and so much of the rest of English football had burst into new life. Matt Busby had declared that this was the future of the game and here, in this match, beyond the celebration of the goals orgy against Anderlecht, was the hardest evidence that he was right. United versus Bilbao had produced the best of football, some brilliant skill and a razor edge of competition. Charges that United had got above themselves were promptly withdrawn. You could only guess at the reaction of Alan Hardaker, the man who had tried so hard to slam the door on Europe – and at the same time wonder why he had been so dead set against pushing back the boundaries of English football.

  Some years later, I had what might have been a small glimpse into some of his attitudes when I was on a bus filled with club chairmen who, at least in theory, were supposed to be the league secretary’s bosses. Hardaker was the last to get on. When he got to the top of the steps, he looked round and said to no one in particular that he was reminded of some film on TV he had seen the night before. It had shown pigs being taken to market. Most of the chairmen laughed, and one said, ‘What a character!’ Presumably he had received a similar reaction from his employers when he announced, ‘I wouldn’t hang a dog on the word of a professional footballer.’

  I cannot judge Hardaker or his overall contribution to English football, but in that flash of ‘humour’ when he boarded the bus what I saw in his joke to the club chairmen was more than a hint of arrogance. Did a team like Manchester United in Europe somehow lessen his power? It wasn’t really my concern, and by then I was able to reflect that the issue was closed: Europe was part of the fabric of English football, and unquestionably the area of greatest challenge and excitement.