The 10-year-old Bobby Charlton first fell for the charms of Manchester United during the 1948 FA Cup final. After playing for East Northumberland Boys in the morning, he had been invited to a teammate’s house to listen on the wireless to United playing Blackpool in what proved a classic final. Though he and his pals missed much of their 4-2 win through playing football on the street outside, he later said: “It was from that day I wanted to be a footballer and join Manchester United.”
Sixty years later, on a sodden night in Moscow, after United had beaten Chelsea in the Champions League final, Charlton, his jacket wet through, led the players up to collect their medals, receiving one of his own. He had been on the club’s board since 1984, brought in as a football face to replace a retired Sir Matt Busby, and remained highly influential until the onset of dementia forced a retirement from public life.
A keeping of the faith in Alex Ferguson during the winter of late 1989 and early 1990, as an expensive team floundered, owed much to Charlton’s belief that the man who had cracked the Old Firm in Scotland with Aberdeen could deliver success. That faith would be repaid many times over, and a brief conversation between Ferguson and Charlton at the 1986 World Cup in Mexico was the germ of what became a close relationship. Both would deny that Charlton had “tapped up” the then Scotland manager as Ron Atkinson, sacked by United the following November, would claim, though Ferguson admitted Charlton had said “that if I ever decided to move to England I should let him know”.
To those fans under the age of 50, Charlton was an establishment figure, his face and Russian-styled hat constants in the directors’ box. It was his longest served role but he lived several lives at Manchester United. On New Year’s Day 1953, he signed up to become part of the greatest churn of young football talent English football had yet seen, the Busby Babes. The young Charlton, fair-haired and bequiffed, threw himself into metropolitan, cosmopolitan Mancunian life, the cinemas, cafes and dances a world away from his colliery hometown of Ashington.
“The Old Man”, Busby, had his spies everywhere but his watchful eye allowed young players to enjoy themselves within reason. Charlton described those early days knocking around with mates such as Duncan Edwards, to whom he was especially close, David Pegg, the dashing Yorkshireman popular among female fans, and Eddie Colman, all Salfordian swagger on and off the pitch, as “paradise”.
And Charlton, whose mother, Cissie, had entertained a queue of scouts back in Ashington – “They even drank from the same brew of tea without realising it” – was among the most gifted of Busby’s golden crop. John Giles, one of the finest players of the 1960s and 1970s, admitted he considered an immediate return to Ireland on catching first sight of the talent of Charlton, a couple of years older, in training.
Then came tragedy at Munich and the death of eight teammates. Tom Curry and Bert Whalley, two Busby assistants who offered fatherly guidance, also perished. And without them, Charlton’s “paradise” was lost. His return to Manchester, via convalescence from minor injuries in Ashington, brought an almost immediate change to his personality. His brother, Jack, related that a young Bobby forever sang to himself around the house but after Munich he never heard another note from “our kid”. It was in Ashington that Cissie gave him the news of Edwards’ death, 15 days after the crash. That hit hardest of all.
Without his friends around him, a 20-year-old with survivor’s guilt had huge responsibility thrust upon him, and the years after Munich, of which no mention was brooked at the Cliff training ground, were a sincere struggle for United, who flirted with relegation and rebellion against a reduced, grieving Busby.
Charlton himself often struggled for form until Busby was able to construct a second great United team, where the burden could be again shared around. By the mid-1960s, moved in from the wing where he played much of the post-Munich years, he had asserted himself as one of the finest players in world football, perhaps England’s finest of all. A midfield general of peculiar grace with a cannonball shot off either foot, he danced through an age of heavy pitches and crunching tackles. He was a winner, too. As United closed on the 1966-67 First Division title, there were wobbles but according to teammate Brian Kidd it was Charlton who steadied nerves with his instruction to “give me the ball and we’ll be all right”.
Charlton, who has died aged 86, will be eternally associated with Denis Law and George Best, alongside whom he appears on the United Trinity statue on Old Trafford’s forecourt, but the three men could hardly have been more different. Law was “Denis the King”, taken to the hearts of the Stretford End, an arch-goalscorer playing the game with a relatable combination of a smile on his face and a combustible temper that regularly exploded. Best, preternaturally gifted and beautiful to look at, would become the epitome of living fast and pissing talent up the wall but was irresistible in full flow, deserving of his status of Britain’s first football superstar.
A family man married at 22 and a playboy receiving sacks of female fan mail each morning, Charlton and Best was a most uneasy alliance. Both disapproved vehemently of the other’s lifestyle and, though publicly polite about their teammate’s footballing ability, there were also moments of tension over on-pitch matters. Yet when Best lay dying in the Cromwell hospital in November 2005, alcoholism having caught up with him, Charlton travelled to London to visit the bedside.
In the hours after Best’s death, Charlton’s tributes did not follow the generic platitudes that might be expected for someone he had never been close to. Instead, Charlton chose self-reflection to consider the passing of a player he said “was on a par, at least, with anyone you can name”. Then came a consideration of his own part in the downfall. “If, instead of being hostile to George, which I was, we had leaned a bit his way and tried to help him, who knows?”
What Charlton and Best shared was an innate shyness almost certainly incompatible with footballing greatness. Where Best sought oblivion, Charlton presented a clipped, austere public persona that led to many dismissing him as cold. He could never be the everyman personality with which big brother Jack won the hearts of the people of Ireland but it was an unfair description.
There were myriad watery-eyed tributes to friends lost at Munich as decades of anniversaries slid by. Tears followed victory in the 1966 World Cup final and were shared with Busby on the Wembley turf in the aftermath of winning the European Cup in 1968. At the celebratory banquet that followed the latter triumph, Charlton did not even reach the table. His wife, Norma, relayed that, mentally exhausted, he had been unable to rise from his hotel bed: “He’s remembering the lads who can’t be here tonight.”
When it came to football – especially Manchester United – Bobby Charlton couldn’t help flush with emotion.
