Jack and Bobby: A story of brothers in conflict

Just as importantly, given the influence of Cissie on the Charlton household, Armstrong made sure he cultivated her. It was the kind of role he relished as much as talent hunting, for the tiny, grey-haired, crinkle-faced Armstrong delighted in his ability to charm the working-class mothers of his young quarries. As Eamon Dunphy, journalist and ex-Manchester United youth player, puts it: ‘Joe was a delightful man with a shrewd mind and an instinctive grasp of the human condition. Women liked him. He was kindly yet flirtatious in a comforting way. Mothers were apt to be apprehensive about big city life with all its temptations. Joe understood their fears only too well.’

If Arsenal had glamour, then so did Manchester United in abundance. By the early 1950s, United had become the most exciting force in British soccer, winning the League in 1951/52 and gaining admirers across the country for their flowing style and brilliant young players like Johnny Berry, Duncan Edwards and Roger Byrne. When Bobby Chariton visited Maine Road for a schools trial match in March 1953 between East Northumberland Boys and Manchester Boys, another future United youth star, Wilf McGuinness, was in the Manchester team. ‘I was captain most of the time of everything I played in and I was a bit cocky. I saw this young lad. He came up to me after the game when we had beaten them, and said, “We may both be going to United. My name is Bobby Charlton,” and I thought, “Who the hell is Bobby Charlton?” He was very weak-looking in those days and made little impression on me. All I thought was, well, he’s not a bad little player.’

By coincidence, this was the day that Tommy Taylor, the centre-forward, signed for United from Barnsley for a British transfer record of £29,999 – Matt Busby had knocked a pound off the fee so Taylor would not be lumbered with the title of the first £30,000 player. After Bobby’s game, the local Manchester boys rushed off to see United, while Bobby had to travel home to Northumberland. As the bus took him to the rail station, he passed Old Trafford and glimpsed thousands of fans queuing eagerly to get into the ground. The whole experience only stoked the fires of his enthusiasm for the club.

Throughout his life, Bobby may have been unassuming, but he never lacked confidence in his ability. Certain that he could compete at the highest level, he therefore wanted a club which would provide him with the best training. Manchester United, he thought, fitted the bill because of its reputation for a strong youth policy. It was a policy born largely of necessity. Immediately after the war, when Matt Busby was appointed manager, the club had been desperately short of cash, largely because Old Trafford had been badly bombed by the Luftwaffe. Though the financial situation had improved by the turn of the decade, Busby was still reluctant to spend heavily in the transfer market. He preferred the acquisition of youthful excellence as the route to success, becoming particularly adept at exploiting the pool of talent available in schools football, a source largely ignored by other clubs. It is a remarkable fact that between 1951 and 1957, the golden years of the Busby Babes, United bought just one player, Tommy Taylor. So many of the other great names of that era, such as Albert Scanlon, David Pegg, Mark Jones, Wilf McGuinness and Eddie Colman, came directly from school, just as Bobby Charlton did. Ron Routledge, Bobby’s Ashington contemporary, says that Bobby’s desire to join United reflected his self-belief. ‘He said to me, just before he signed, “Ronnie, I’m going to be the best.” That is where you’ve really got to admire him. He could have gone to any other club and been quite comfortable. But he didn’t because he wanted to be with the top young players – and United had the name then because of the Busby Babes. There was no way he was ever going anywhere else.’

When he signed for United, many in the north-east expressed surprise that he had not joined Newcastle, effectively his local side. In fact, his parents even received angry mail from several Newcastle fans, complaining about the decision to allow Bobby to leave the area. But, as Bobby later explained, it was Cissie’s own cousin, ‘Wor Jackie’ Milburn, who was instrumental in ensuring that Bobby did not sign for Newcastle: ‘He came armed with an offer to give me a job on a north-eastern newspaper but he was completely honest with me. He told me it was not such a good club at that time and that, what organization there was, was inefficient. He didn’t believe in the way they treated their young players and the training was almost non-existent. They just went to the ground on Tuesday and Thursday evenings, kicked a ball around and there was no coaching.’

The other great club in the north-east, Sunderland, was never really in the running after an incident in which Bobby felt he was rebuffed by them. This happened on that frost-bitten morning in February 1953 when Joe Armstrong from United turned up to see Bobby playing for East Northumberland Boys. A scout from Sunderland was also at the match but at the final whistle, instead of going to see Bobby, he approached Ron Routledge, the East Northumberland goalkeeper, and made him an offer. According to Cissie, ‘Bobby was really hurt to have been overlooked by Sunderland that day. Later, when Sunderland joined a long queue of major clubs trying to recruit Bobby, he had his own back. This time it was Bobby who did the turning down.’ But Sunderland did not give up easily. Even when Bobby was travelling down to Manchester to sign formally for United, the Sunderland scout Charlie Ferguson followed him and got on the same train in the hope of persuading Bobby to change his mind.

Ray Wood, the former Manchester United and England goalkeeper who played throughout the 1950s with Bobby, says that Sunderland would have been absolutely the wrong club for him because of its mean spirit and lack of support for youngsters. ‘Like Bobby, I’m from the north-east and Sunderland had wanted to sign me after I had played in the County Cup Final at Roker. They were known as the Bank of England team, they were so rich. After a meeting with the manager, Bill Murray, I was offered the forms to become a professional. Before I had looked at them, he asked, “How much were your expenses?” I said about one shilling, and ten-and-a-half pence. He gave me two shillings and asked for change. I could not believe it. I didn’t sign after that. I don’t think Bobby would have done as well if he had joined Sunderland or Newcastle. Neither wanted good young players to escape but, unlike United, they never give them a proper chance to develop.’

For all the high-minded talk of youth policies, there could also have been a simpler reason why United were able to win the battle for Bobby’s signature: money. There were persistent claims that, as at some other top clubs, United offered financial rewards to the parents of talented youngsters – and this may have happened in Bobby’s case. As Ron Routledge said to me, ‘Bobby was off to United, yes, because of the youth policy, but also because of the little incentives on offer.’ Cissie denied, in her autobiography, that she or husband were ever tempted: ‘The high-pressure tactics employed by the more unscrupulous scouts included some pretty lucrative bribes. Yet the plain fact of the matter was that taking bribes was illegal and we just couldn’t bring ourselves to do it, even if they were an accepted fact of professional football life in those days. We were honest, working-class people with a very clear idea of right and wrong and no amount of money was going to change that.’

But the distinguished football writer Brian Glanville gave me a different account. ‘I was once told by Jackie Milburn, with whom I was very friendly, that Bobby was all set to join Newcastle United. The deal had been done and dusted and Bobby was going to get a newspaper job. But Manchester United ensured it did not happen. According to Jackie’s story, Cissie said to him, “I’m terribly sorry, but United offered us £750. What could I do?’” Brian Glanville continues: ‘I have put that story to Jack Charlton and he has denied it but it would hardly be a surprise if it were true. At the time there were two clubs which were absolutely notorious for suborning young players and they were Manchester United and Chelsea. Matt Busby, for all his genial, incorruptible image, was actually a very ruthless man.’ Glanville points to the example of Duncan Edwards, who was born in Dudley in the heart of the West Midlands. It would have been obvious for him to join Wolves or West Brom, both outstanding clubs in the 1950s, but instead he was enticed to Old Trafford. And, as John Kennedy wrote in his biography of Tommy Taylor, there were “rumours going around at the time of his transfer that Matt had offered all sorts of inducements to persuade Tommy”.’

Rumours about such payments were given more credence in 1979, long after Matt Busby had retired, when a Granada World in Action programme revealed the web of unscrupulousness at Old Trafford. Most of the programme focused on the actions of United’s late chairman, ‘Champagne Louis’ Edwards – father of the current chairman Martin – who made a fortune in the meat business, partly through the manipulation of local authority catering contracts, and used his wealth to gain control at Old Trafford in the 1960s. Shortly after the programme was screened, he died of a heart attack while having a bath. Granada researchers uncovered a wealth of evidence suggesting that United were in the habit of paying more than just transfer fees. Particularly damning was the testimony of John Aston, one of United’s great players of the post-war era and junior team coach since 1954, who, in a sworn affidavit, said, ‘Some of these boys were induced to sign because United offered them or their parents backhand payments. In some cases I was personally involved in obtaining cash and handing it to the families of boys.’ As Aston explained, money would be secretly raised through fictitious expense accounts, and then used to pay off families. Such was the strength of Aston’s evidence that Matt made little real effort to dispute it, while two other books repeated the claims. One, Michael Crick and David Smith’s Betrayal of a Legend, states: ‘£500 or £1,000 might be handed over in banknotes. Alternatively, the father of a promising young player might be employed as a part-time scout, though, of course, he was not expected to do anything for this,’ And Eamon Dunphy, in his brilliantly vivid and subtle biography of Sir Matt, A Strange Kind of Glory, writes: ‘Year by year, Matt Busby had found himself sucked into a moral quagmire. A few quid in an envelope to the father of a talented youngster for scouting, no bribe intended.’ This does not, of course, necessarily mean that all young players, like Bobby, were acquired through such methods, or that they would have been aware of such approaches by United. But it does put into perspective some of the sugary guff that is written about United and Busby, as if he was too virtuous ever to be involved in the more mercenary aspects of professional football.

On 16 June 1953 Busby finally got what he wanted, when Bobby officially signed for United, thus beginning an association with the club that lasts to this day. So highly regarded was Bobby that the Daily Mail recorded the event. ‘This may sound a minor signing but it is of major importance in a soccer world which is acutely aware of the value of developing youngsters. Charlton, the star of the England v Wales match last season, has superb positional sense and ball control.’ Before leaving for Manchester he played out his last season for Bedlington. Evan Martin recalls, ‘We had a hell of a team in 1952/53, thanks mainly to Bobby’s skills. We used to go to really hard secondary schools, like North Shields, and win easily. In the very last match of the season, we were on the coach and Bobby asked Tucker Robinson, “What’s the highest individual score this season?”

“I got three against Alnwick,” replied Tucker.

“Well, I’ll get four today.”

And he did. Two of them were 30-yard piledrivers. The goalkeeper did not even see them.’

Elder brother Jack had played no role in the saga of Bobby’s move to United. There was no army of scouts after him, no club representative offering Cissie a fistful of cash for his services. Yet it is one of the strange twists of this story that Jack was actually taken on by a League club before Bobby. For most of his early years, Jack had rarely impressed anyone with his football. He was merely another competent youngster, a decent stopper of the kind that could be found throughout the north-east. He played for his school, district and YMCA side, but did not come near to his county team, never mind the England Schoolboys. In fact, he was dropped for several games from his district because of his habit of standing still, as if wondering what had happened, when he was beaten by a winger. ‘You’ll have to sharpen your wits up,’ he was told. Evan Martin says: ‘I remember watching Jack playing for the East Northumberland Juniors. He was at left-back and he was big, gangly and awkward. He did not impress me one bit.’

Indeed, it is a remarkable fact that the man who later gained a World Cup winner’s medal could not even get in the Ashington FC junior team. Ken Prior, who grew up with Jack, explains: ‘Jimmy Denmark, the former Newcastle centre-half, came to manage Ashington and the club decided to have a junior side. So the call went out for all the budding youngsters to come to Portland Park. We had a trial and Jack did not even get picked for the final squad. I didn’t think he played too badly but he did not stand out, certainly not for his size. Jack went home, a bit upset, and after he’d gone, Jimmy Denmark said, “You know, that lad will never make a player.”’

Yet, as he approached his 15th birthday, there was something about Jack – his size, his strength, above all his ‘Milburn’ heritage – which meant that he could attract the interest of a League club. After playing well for the Ashington YMCA Under-18 side in a match against Barkworth, he was approached by a Leeds scout, who offered him a trial at Elland Road. In his later career, Jack would sometimes maintain that he, like Bobby, was always destined to be a professional footballer. ‘Neither of us had ever considered anything but playing the game for a living,’ he told the News of the World in April 1973.

But this was hardly true. For Jack had never shown any inclination towards professional football, and, in a rare moment of self-doubt, he feared that if he took up the offer from Leeds, he might not make the grade because of his lack of talent. He saw himself as a big, gangly lad who was not really good enough. Going to Leeds risked the pain of rejection. As he once explained to Mike Kirkup, ‘The only way you could get away from Ashington was to play football. But there was always the worry that you might not make it, and would get sent home again. Then you would come back as a failure.’ Moreover, Jack loved the teenage life he had created for himself in the Northumberland countryside. If he left home for a big city like Leeds, he would no longer be able to fish and poach and shoot. Nor were his parents enthusiastic. In another illustration of how Jack felt he was excluded by his mother in favour of Bobby, he says that ‘She didn’t think I was good enough for professional football.’ Indeed, Cissie held Jack’s skills in such contempt that, when she first heard of the interest from Leeds, she felt that there had been some mistake. The club must have confused him with Bobby. ‘I was amazed because although Jack enjoyed his football, he just wasn’t the same calibre as Bobby,’ she wrote.

Due to his mother’s dismissive attitude and his own reluctance, Jack told Leeds that he was not interested. Now, with the end of his time at school approaching, he had to find a job. And the obvious one was coalmining. ‘At that time in Ashington there were only the pits; there was very little else, really,’ he recalls. So he followed his father into work at the Linton colliery. Initially, because he was serving his apprenticeship, Jack did not have to go underground. Instead, his first job was to stand by a conveyor belt for eight hours, sorting out the coal from debris as it came up from the mine. Never a patient man – except on the river – Jack found the work unbearably dull and kept asking for a move.

His badgering paid off. He was transferred to the weigh-cabin, where his task was to weigh the wagons before and after they were filled with coal, calculate the difference, then write the weight on the trucks before they were shunted into the sidings. Jack enjoyed his work there. ‘Sometimes there was a quiet period when no coal was coming down and that was great. You could draw little things with a piece of stone. It was an artist’s paradise. There were footballers, goals, nudes, everything. Some men worked there forever.’ The other great advantage for Jack was that the sidings ran out on to land full of rabbits. This provided ample scope for his homemade snares, and Jack would regularly catch three or four a day, selling them on to the other miners. ‘I usually left the pit at least two shillings richer than when I arrived.’

But it could not last. Jack was told that he had been selected to go on a 16-week training course in preparation for becoming a fully-fledged miner. As part of this induction, he was shown what work was like in the pit. Jack was appalled by the experience of his first trip underground: the cramped conditions, crawling on his hands and knees along a seam only three feet high; the noise from the explosives; the dust which went everywhere, including eyes and lungs; the gale force blasts of air from the ventilation system.

Returning to the surface, Jack handed in his resignation straight away, to the anger of the colliery manager.

‘We’ve just spent a fortune training you. If you walk away now, I’ll see that you never get another job in the pit – anywhere.’

‘I don’t want another job in the pit.’

Jack already had another option lined up. Two weeks earlier, with a sense of foreboding about the job in the colliery, he had applied to become a police cadet. Now Jack could not be regarded as one of nature’s law enforcers, and his motivation was suitably vague. ‘I was getting close to six feet in height. That, to my young mind, seemed as good a reason as any why I should try for the police.’ Impressed with Jack’s application, the Northumberland Constabulary summoned him to an interview.

But then fate, in the form of Leeds United, intervened. Despite the earlier rebuff, the club had not given up hope of attracting Jack and now another invitation arrived for a trial. This time Jack, having seen the misery of life underground, was much more receptive to the idea of becoming a professional footballer. He knew the truth, though, that Leeds’ interest was partly motivated by his close family connection with the club, with three of his uncles having been players there and one of them, Jimmy, still in the squad. ‘When I got the offer of a trial, I knew it was right nepotism,’ Jack once said.

The immediate problem for Jack was a logistical one. His police interview was in Morpeth on Friday afternoon, while his trial at Leeds was early the following Saturday morning. In the days before motorways, there was no physical way he could get to both places within this timescale. So Jack decided to abandon the police interview, instead travelling down on Friday to Leeds with his parents. The trial was to be the most important match of his young life. If he succeeded, a new future in soccer beckoned. If he failed, there was little chance that any other club would show an interest.

Snow was falling that Saturday morning at Elland Road as Jack ran out to play for Leeds Juniors against the Newcastle youth team. He was in his customary left-back position, and, in the difficult conditions, he was not sure he had done enough to impress. But the club thought otherwise, admiring his height and solid style. After the game he was summoned into the office of the club secretary, Arthur Crowther.

‘We’d like you to join the ground staff, Charlton.’

‘Do you really think I’m good enough?’

Of course. Why do you think we’d want you if we didn’t.’

Jack went home with his parents on Sunday to pick up his belongings, before returning to Leeds to report for duty on the Monday. Any ideas about becoming a policeman had been ditched as quickly as the career in mining. Despite barely giving the matter a thought, he had somehow become a professional footballer. His only anxiety now was whether he would succeed. What he dreaded, above all else, was being forced to return to Ashington, labelled a failure.

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