Jack and Bobby: A story of brothers in conflict

Despite the attractions of football, pigeons, boxing and a few pints with mates, it was still a very tough life for the miners of Ashington. The pay was poor, the job insecure, the conditions dangerous. Bob Charlton worked through the 1966 World Cup semi-final not just because of his indifference towards football but also because he was worried about losing a day’s pay. In the same way, he never missed a day’s work even when seriously injured. Mike Kirkup, an Ashington local historian, a contemporary of Bobby’s and himself a former miner, gives this glimpse into the precarious existence faced by miners. ‘A miner’s cottage was tied to work at the pit. So the colliery owners could always use that as a threat. On one notorious occasion, when 13 men were killed at the Woodhorn colliery in 1916, the notices of eviction went out to the widows within just three months of this disaster. It was a pretty harsh regime.’

The actual work for the miners could hardly have been more unpleasant. Forced to toil in a dirty, dark environment more than 800 feet underground, they were so cramped that they had permanent scabs on their backs from crawling along the tunnels. Little wonder that old Bob Charlton, who started work in the mines the day after he left school at the age of just 14, once took his second son, Bobby, to the colliery and told him, ‘I don’t want you ever going down there, doing what I’ve had to do all my life to earn a living.’ But Bobby never had any intention of joining his father in the pit. ‘I was determined about that, even if I had to travel and seek my fortune elsewhere,’ he once said. What had particularly struck Bobby was the physical legacy of the job. ‘You can always tell a miner just by looking at his hands. At first glance, you might just think they were dirty, but when you looked more closely, you saw that they were full of scars, the accumulation of hundreds and hundreds of cuts made over the years.’ Similarly, Jack Charlton spent just one day underground as a 16-year-old trainee miner before handing in his notice. ‘I’ve seen it, I’ve done it, I’ve had enough. I don’t know what I’m going to do with the rest of my life, but it won’t be that,’ he told his colliery manager when he resigned his post.

Nor were there many financial rewards for a miner’s family. Bobby recalls his father going out to work every morning and checking the contents of his satchel: ‘Bait (sandwiches), bottle (water), lamp, carbide, tabs (cigarettes),’ and adding with a grin and a tap of his pockets, ‘but nae money.’ In contrast to their wealthy status today, Jack and Bobby grew up in a small house without an inside toilet or running water. The brothers, now so distant, had, as small children, to share the same bed because of the lack of space. Though Cissie provided a warm home, there were precious few luxuries. Food that we take for granted today, such as pork and chicken, was a rarity then, as Bobby once recalled. ‘It was a great celebration in the street when a pig was killed. Everyone came from all over the place and got their little share of it. I used to ask, “Why can’t we just eat it straight away?” But I was told that it had to be hung and salted, otherwise it would not keep.’

In the hardened circumstances of the time, the values of family solidarity were a vital source of support. But that is not to say that the Charltons or the Milburns were paragons of domestic virtue. One of Cissie’s grandfathers was a heavy drinker who suffered from mental instability after taking a blow from a policeman’s truncheon. When he was in one of his more savage, drunken moods, his wife was forced to flee the family home. Her own father, Tanner Milburn, was a selfish, mean, scheming rogue who would rather spend his money on gambling and alcohol than on his own family. A fly-by-night bookmaker, he also trained athletes, who were used as a means of enhancing his illegal profits. His disloyalty to his family was graphically exposed by his cynical behaviour over a major 110-yard sprint in which his own son Stan, a fine local runner, was one of the two favourites. Instead of backing his son, for whom he acted as a trainer, he struck a deal with the manager of the other favourite, whereby they agreed to share equally the £20 prize money – a vast sum in pre-war Ashington – whichever boy won. After the race, in which Stan came second, Tanner refused to give his son a penny and instead attacked him for his failure to win. Stan was so furious with his father that he threw his sprint shoes in the fire, vowing never to run again.

Cissie and Bob had their own problems. They had married just six months after they first met, at a dance in the Princess Ballroom of Ashington, and had four sons, Jack the oldest, followed by Bobby, Gordon and Tommy. There was a time when they came close to splitting up, since Cissie could find her husband intensely aggravating. ‘He embarrassed me, he annoyed me, he argued just for the sake of an argument,’ she once wrote, while Bob disliked her boasting and all the attention that she encouraged over her sons. Alan Lavelle, who went to school with the Charltons, recalls that when he was secretary of the Newbiggin working men’s club, ‘Old Bob used to come in, looking a bit down. I would say, “Bob, what’s the matter?” And he’d reply, “I just get sick of everyone asking about wor Bobby. Why can’t I just have a drink in peace?”’ In an interview with local historian Mike Kirkup, Cissie revealed how close she came to separation: ‘There was no such thing as divorce for the likes of us. If you made a mistake in your choice of man, you just stuck it out for the sake of the bairns. Me and Bob were going through a rough patch and I said to him, “I’m leaving you the minute wor Tommy is 15.” Come the day of his 15th birthday, Bob says to me, “Well, are you not leaving then?” “No,” I told him, “You’ve mellowed since then.” ‘

Bob and Cissie’s first child, Jack, was born on 8 May 1935. Reflecting her obsession with football, one of her first comments to a neighbour about her new son was, ‘Eee, the bairn’s lovely. And his feet are fine too.’ But, as a child, Jack did not just use his feet for football; he also used them to wander endlessly in the countryside around Ashington. The fields, woods and streams of Northumberland became almost a second home to him as he would walk for miles, studying wildlife, trapping small animals with his makeshift snares, and even attempting to catch fish with his bare hands before he bought his first rod. His deep attachment to rural life was formed in those long, childhood journeys. ‘I loved that landscape and I love it to this day. I have to go into cities and crowds as part of my job, but I loathe it,’ he said in 1994. Bill Merryweather, a childhood friend of Jack’s, gave me this memory: ‘He always had to be outdoors, picking up anything from mushrooms to fish. Sometimes the two of us would go out poaching at five in the morning. If it went well, we would end up with two or three rabbits. And he’s never changed from when he was a little lad. He’s still at his happiest when he’s out shooting and fishing.’

Jack developed his favourite haunts, such as a local swamp called the Sandy Desert. In winter this was a vast, festering bog. But in summer, when it had dried out, it became a large, dusty hollow, riven with cracks. Used as a rubbish dump, it always attracted a large number of rats and Jack would spend hours shooting at them with his catapult. When he was older and had acquired the right equipment, Jack would regularly spend his nights fishing off the coast at Newbiggin, a seaside village just three miles from Ashington. Jackie Lothian remembers an incident which illustrates both Jack’s bravery and his devotion to fishing. ‘When we were about 13, Jack would often cycle over to my home at Newbiggin, have a game of cards and some supper, and then go out fishing. One night Jack cast his line, and somehow the hook went right into his thumb. Another lad and I tried to get it out but couldn’t, because the sky was pitch black. Then Jack breezily said, “I’ll have to go off to hospital, so look after my things.” Off he cycled over to Ashington hospital, with the hook still in his thumb. He got it out, had the wound stitched up, and then, that very night, he cycled back and carried on fishing with us.’ Jackie Lothian says that they could be far more reckless as children than would be tolerated today. ‘I cannot believe the things we used to get up to. As a dare, for instance, we would get on the swings at Hirst Park, and push as hard as we could until we could complete a full circle, right over the top through 360 degrees. We also used to try and catch minnows in Bothal Woods, where there was a big waterfall. I suppose, looking back, it was very dangerous but we just never used to think about it.’

In such a climate, it was inevitable that accidents did happen. Once Jack and his friends were playing a chasing game at the top of an old disused windmill, when one of the boys fell out of a window on the third floor and broke his arm. Another boy broke his leg in a race through a field with Jack, when he tripped over a wire fence and was thrown through the air before landing heavily on his back. Far more serious, though, was the horrific night when Jack returned home covered in blood. Jack explained to his mother that he and his friends had been playing in a railway cutting, placing coins on the line. Tragically one of them had been hit by a train and killed. The rest of the gang had dragged the body to the nearest roadway, where they had just left it. Nothing more happened and the event gradually faded from Jack’s memory. Today, such an incident would almost certainly involve the police and social services.

Jack Charlton has always been known as a rebel, an individualist, no great respecter of either authority or convention. And so it was in his childhood. At the age of just two, he caused some embarrassment to his family by wandering out of the house, dressed only in his nappy, to join a passing funeral procession. The sight of Jack, without any trousers, toddling proudly behind the Salvation Army band, has become part of Ashington legend. ‘I was forever getting into scrapes,’ Jack admits. Once a baker drove from Ashington to Gosforth and, when he arrived, he was surprised to find young Jack stowed away in the back of his van. On another occasion, he stole a cauliflower from a neighbour’s back garden. Then he had the cheek to walk round to the front and try and sell it back to him. ‘As a schoolboy, like most of us, he was a bit of a rascal, stealing from orchards, pinching vegetables. He was a real Jack the lad,’ says Bobby Whitehead.

‘From the time he could walk, Jack was full of devilment. I would often say to myself, “God give me strength.” He was a livewire,’ wrote Cissie in her autobiography. The spirit of rebellion applied in the classroom as well as the countryside. Jackie Lothian recalls: ‘He was certainly not frightened of anyone at school. The teachers were on top of you all the time and there was no answering back – except from Jack, of course. He was a likeable lad, but he would put you in your place if he didn’t like what you said. He could have been more successful at school if he had put his mind to it, and I remember he was interested in history, especially the local history of the area. But he did not really care about bookwork; he wanted to be away in the fields all the time.’ One of Jack’s school reports stated: ‘Jack would do better at school if he kept his mind on his work instead of looking out the window all the time.’

Jack was in trouble for much more than daydreaming one day, after he shot another pupil, Bernadette Reed. With typical impetuosity, Jack had taken it into his mind to bring his father’s rifle – used for game shooting – into school. Having fired the gun towards a nearby church, he then watched as the bullet hit a fence and ricocheted into the face of the unfortunate young Bernadette, who suffered a grazed eye. Jack was given a severe reprimand by his headmaster and was then frogmarched by Cissie to apologize to Bernadette’s father. Yet there was a surprising response at the Reed household.

‘This is the lad who shot your daughter,’ said Cissie when she and Jack turned up on the Reeds’ doorstep.

‘So you’re interested in guns, son?’

‘Well, er, yes,’ said Jack.

‘So am I. Come inside and I’ll show you what I’ve got.’

Predictably, the man who became a tough defender with Leeds was also a good boxer in his youth, winning both official bouts in the school gym and unofficial ones in the schoolyard. In a Daily Telegraph interview in 1994, he recalled: ‘I was the best fighter in the street for my age and there was a lad from the next street who was the best fighter in his. We called him “Skinny” Harmer. When I went to school at five, he was in the same class as me and I thought a fight was imminent. But we never, ever fought. We avoided each other in case we got beat.’ In another echo of the adult Jack Charlton, who made a fortune in his shrewd handling of money, particularly during his spell as Ireland manager, the young Jack had a host of money-making schemes. These included: a paper round organized like a military operation; deliveries for a nearby grocery store; and the collection – from local collieries – of unused timber, which he then chopped up and sold for firewood.

But perhaps the most interesting parallel with today is that, as young brothers, Bobby and Jack did not get on with each other. Some of their contemporaries claim that this was because of the age difference between them. Bobby Charlton was born on 10 October 1937, two-and-a-half years after Jack’s arrival. ‘When you’re young, the gap in years tends to count much more,’ says Walter Lavery, ‘so Bobby and Jack did not really mix much. They had different pursuits and different friends.’ Bobby also takes this view. ‘Though it appears now we are the same age, he’s actually a good deal older than me, so we just did not spend a lot of time together when we were growing up,’ he said in 1968.

The reality, however, was down more to a clash of temperaments. Jack was the adventurer, ever eager to plough his own furrow, while Bobby was far keener to stay at home reading or playing football. Jack knew that his younger brother never shared his interest in the countryside, so he hated to bring Bobby along on his wanderings – and he only did so at the instruction of his mother. What particularly annoyed him was when the infant Bobby messed himself or demanded to be taken home when he grew bored or tired. As Cissie wrote, ‘Jack wanted to be off on his own, not nurse-maiding someone who was regarded as the family’s fair-haired favourite. If I still insisted and made Jack take Bobby with him, he often gave Bobby a swift clout before they got very far and that usually sent him running home in tears, while Jack went on his own sweet way himself.’

With his usual diplomacy, Bobby has claimed that he enjoyed these trips, speaking fondly of his bike rides into the woods to go bird-nesting with Jack or the times they went to the ‘lovely coast’ of Newbiggin to pick up coal that had been washed ashore from the mines which ran under the sea. But he has also admitted: ‘Like most elder brothers, Jack regarded me as a pest when we were kids, especially when I’d plead to go with him to pick potatoes or on fishing trips. “He’s not coming,” Jack would say defiantly. “You take him,” my mother would reply. From then on it would be nothing but moans, and there are people who will suggest that he’s never stopped moaning. He never tried to conceal his darker moods and once his mind was made up, nothing would alter it.’ Jack’s memory is similar: ‘Bobby was more of a mother’s boy. He was never a bloke to get out into the country and he still isn’t. I took him fishing a couple of times but he was no good. I had to keep changing worms for him. He’d wave to me from 100 yards down the river, and I’d have to trudge all the way back and change the bait, because he just hadn’t got a clue.’ On another occasion, Bobby and Jack were playing in separate matches at the Hirst Miners’ Welfare ground. Towards the final whistle of his game, Jack was penalized for committing a foul in his own box. Bobby got to hear of the incident, and when Jack arrived home, Bobby teased him about it. ‘Fancy giving away a penalty like that,’ said Bobby, sitting on the edge of a chair in the living room. Without breaking his stride, Jack gave Bobby an almighty smack on the back of his head, sending his younger brother crashing to the ground. ‘Jack got thumped for that, but it wasn’t about to change him,’ recalled Bobby.

For all his sense of independence, there is no doubt that Jack deeply resented the apparent bias of his mother towards Bobby. ‘She never said she was proud of me,’ admitted Jack in 1996. ‘I was driven to try and please her. Sometimes, I would go down to the dog track and spend hours hunting through mountains of rubbish, searching for old glasses they’d thrown out. When I found some that were not too badly chipped, I’d clean them and take them home as presents for her. She would always thank me, but I suspect she then threw them away. I always knew that I was not her favourite.’

Unlike the outgoing, noisy Jack, Bobby was very shy as a child, so shy that when strangers came to the house he would hide behind his mother or run upstairs to the bedroom. Rob Storey, who grew up with them both, told me: ‘Jack wouldn’t stand for anything. You couldn’t put much on him. I don’t mean that he had an aggressive nature but if someone confronted him, he could certainly look after himself. On the other hand Bobby was much more serious, more withdrawn than Jack. He would keep himself to himself, whereas Jack would just say what he thought. In that respect, they were total opposites. Jack always seemed to be striving for what he wanted, whereas things seemed to come more easily for Bobby. Jack was a determined lad, much more determined than Bobby seemed to be.’ They were also physically very different, even when they were children. In a BBC radio interview in 1989, Cissie Charlton said: ‘When Jack was born, his granny would take him around the town to let everyone see how long he was. He was tall even when he was born. Bobby was stumpy, thickset, different altogether. They were two different people.’

Bobby was more concerned about his appearance than Jack, sometimes even wearing a tie at home, something Jack would never willingly have done. Jackie Lothian recalls: ‘Bobby was smart, polite, diplomatic; he knew how to address people properly. He was always very tidy, unlike Jack who was a scruffy bairn.’ Bobby hated being in trouble whether at school or with his parents. When he called his brothers for tea, they thought it amusing to run away, which prompted him to anger. ‘Why do you always have to be so stubborn?’ he would ask of them. He was never in playground fights with other boys, though, like both Jack and his father, he was an excellent boxer, once winning a youth competition staged in his neighbourhood.

Yet Bobby did have his playful side. He could do good impersonations, and sometimes surprised his brothers by covering himself in a sheet and pretending to be a ghost, a spectacle that became known in the Charlton household as ‘wor kid’s mad half-hour’. Using a pair of his father’s rolled up socks, he played football in the sitting room with his brother. With his greater height, Jack would usually win the aerial contest, though Bobby was almost unbeatable on the floor. Once he’d put it on the ground he’d murder me. Murder me! That’s why I like to see the ball in the air to this day,’ says Jack. Bobby was never bashful at these moments. While he was kicking the socks around, he would take his mother’s iron and use the plug as a fake microphone to provide a running commentary on the match, putting himself in the role of the great soccer stars of the time: ‘Mortensen knocks it out to Stanley Matthews. Matthews goes down the line, crosses and it’s there by Lawton. A magnificent goal,’ would be a typical passage of play in the Charlton home.

Like many reserved boys, Bobby loved to retreat into his own fantasy world of cartoon heroes and exotic fables. He adored films such as Ali Baba and Robin Hood, while he explained in a radio interview in 2001 that his favourite comic character was ‘Morgan the Mighty, a great big, strong, blond Englishman trapped on an island. The real baddies used to send in opponents for him to fight. And the theme of the story was how he ended up being the greatest fighter in the world.’ It does not take a great leap of imagination to see how Bobby, a strong, fair-haired young Englishman, might aspire to such a role.

Football was undoubtedly the greatest form of escape for Bobby, not just from the smoky drabness of Ashington, but also from a future life trapped underground. To a much greater extent than his elder brother, he fell in love with the game in his childhood. ‘From his earliest age, he was football mad,’ said his mother. When his uncles visited Ashington on a Sunday, they took Bobby out in the street or down to the beach at Newbiggin to show off his skills. Then they came home and discussed League football. ‘I listened to them talking about the matches they had played on Saturday and I heard with awe names like Frank Swift and Wilf Mannion. Particularly at that age – and I was only six – there was an unforgettable magic about it. I suppose it was then that the seed was sown in my mind that I would never be anything else but a footballer, if I was good enough,’ Bobby wrote in 1967 in his book Forward for England.

Bobby loved everything about football. He spent hours reading his soccer books, his favourite being Stanley Matthews’ Football Album. He pored over results in the back of newspapers, developing such an affection for the sports pages that he decided, if he did not make it as a footballer, he would become a football journalist, ‘that would be the next best thing, because journalists got into matches for free,’ he said. He always had some sort of ball at his feet. If he went to the cinema, he would bring a ball with him and kick it along the gutter. Similarly, he would take one if his mother sent him on an errand to the shops. Through his fascination with soccer, he formed a powerful bond with his grandfather, old ‘Tanner’ Milburn. Though Tanner was a hard, stubborn man, distrusted by many within the family, he doted on Bobby, recognizing the boy’s exceptional ability. In return, young Bobby idolized Tanner.

On many evenings during the war, the two of them went down to the local park, where Tanner still held training sessions for sprinters. Bobby got a rubdown just like the adults, his grandfather telling him, ‘You’ll never be fast unless your muscles are loose.’ Bobby then raced against the professionals in the 110 yards, having been given a 70-yard start. If Bobby won, his grandfather would be delighted, saying ‘Well done, Bobby lad, you’ll be running against a whippet yet.’ During his career, Bobby’s electric pace was one of his greatest assets – George Best, a lightning-quick player himself, says that Bobby was the only man who could beat him in sprints during training at Manchester United.

Towards the end of his life, Tanner’s eyesight was failing, so on Saturday evenings he would send Bobby to buy the local football paper and then get him to read out all the scores. ‘Even though he was dying, the most important thing was the football results,’ remembers Bobby. It was an attitude that the grandson inherited. ‘Football is my life. I eat, sleep and drink the game. When I wake up every day, I think of who we’re playing in the next match. I think of nothing else, apart from my family. I wish I could play until I was 70,’ said Bobby in an ITV documentary made when he was 30. The death of his grandfather hit him hard, for Bobby was a sensitive man who could be deeply affected by loss – as he was to show over Munich. ‘When he died, I felt as though I’d lost my best friend and there was a gap in my life which was not filled for a long time, even though I was young,’ wrote Bobby later.

Bobby was also a keen spectator. When he and Jack were babies, Cissie took them along in the pram to Ashington FC, and they would leap up at the roar of the crowd after a goal was scored. Later, they were sometimes allowed to work as ball boys at the club. Historian Mike Kirkup recalls: ‘Their uncle Stan was playing for Ashington and he let them visit him in the dressing room or bring out the water magic sponge for the trainer. During the play, they sat behind the goals, which they thought was absolutely marvellous,’ In the Charltons’ youth, though Ashington FC had dropped down from the Third Division North into the North-Eastern League, there were still some big matches at the club. Stan Mortensen, the Blackpool and England striker, played at Ashington during the war, while in an FA Cup tie in 1950 against Rochdale, 12,000 people crammed into the ground, with some of them having to sit on the roof.