The reputation of ‘the Babes’ now spread beyond Britain’s shores. That summer, the team travelled to Switzerland for a youth tournament. They won it easily, remaining unbeaten in their seven games, scoring 21 goals and conceding just two. They won it again the following year in equally emphatic style. By this time, Bobby was a key member of the side, as Nobby Lawton, who went with him on that 1955 Swiss trip, recalls: ‘We absolutely dominated the competition. We always seemed to be about 3–0 up after 10 minutes, with Bobby getting most of the goals. I could hardly believe how good he was. He was sensational. The way he struck the ball was so much better than anyone else. His timing was beautiful. He was a superb athlete, so quick on his feet. Don’t forget that there were a hell of a lot of players who were trying to kick him. It was a very physical game when he started. People really went out to clatter him but they could not catch him. He would just skip away.’ Reg Hunter was another who went on a youth trip to Switzerland. Like so many others, he was immediately struck by Bobby’s talent: ‘My first sight of Bobby was when he was playing for the reserves against the first team, and he scored two tremendous goals. I did not know then who he was and when I asked, I was told “Bobby Charlton”. And I thought to myself, “Superb. He is really going places.” Both the goals were classic Bobby, from a distance. He seemed to glide over the ground, and all of a sudden he would be away in one flowing movement. Bobby was inspirational on those youth trips abroad. You could tell that he was a special player, destined for great things, not just by his performances on the field but also by the way Jimmy Murphy and Matt Busby looked after him. They spent a lot of time with him. He was a good leader in the youth team, though he was very quiet. But when he had to make a point on the pitch, he made it.’
Bobby’s famous body swerve, which bewitched so many opponents throughout his career, was in evidence in the youth team. Ian Greaves, who also joined United in 1953, gave me this description of Bobby in action: ‘Close your eyes, and picture Bobby Charlton with the ball, attacking a defender, dropping his shoulder, and going the other way. Now that is very simple. It is done every Saturday afternoon but never in the way Bob did. We would play against him in training every Tuesday and Thursday morning. Bob would use that trick four or five times. We knew the bloody trick was coming but we could not stop him doing it. He had this wonderful way of approaching you with the ball. You were quite confident. You were on two feet. The next thing you knew, he had sent you the wrong way. To do that at League level and at international level was remarkable. The other great feature of his play was that he was never frightened of going for goal. Some of the goals he scored led us to gasp, because he had no right to be shooting from there. He had such a powerful shot on him, especially with that left peg. If he was given half an inch of space 25 yards from goal, he was in with a chance because he had this uncanny gift of knowing where to shoot.’
Despite such prodigious talent, Bobby was not immediately selected for the first team on becoming a professional. There had been talk that after an astonishing run in the reserve and junior sides, when he hit 56 goals in 47 games, Bobby might be included in the line-up of the side that had won the First Division Championship in 1955/56. The Manchester Evening News reported on 10 April 1956: ‘Manchester United just want one more thing from Matt Busby before the end of a great championship season. They want to see shooting star Bobby Charlton in a First Division setting for the first time. Some of Charlton’s goals in the reserves have been acrobatic feats that no other English footballer would attempt.
Manager Busby is not one to keep youth – or the customers – waiting longer than necessary. He is sure to give Charlton his chance, either against Sunderland on Saturday or in the wind-up game against Portsmouth.’
But the call-up never came, and his mother, with her keen sense of her favourite’s worth, was infuriated by what she interpreted as a wilful snub to Bobby. She decided that, since both Matt Busby and Jimmy Murphy were Catholics, then religious prejudice must have been the cause of her son’s exclusion. As she wrote later, ‘I’m not the type to dwell on my thoughts, so I grabbed the bull by the horns. I went to Matt and asked him straight: “Is Bobby being left out because he isn’t a Catholic?” I could not have been more blunt. Neither could Matt. I knew from the expression on his face that I had really offended him. “How could you even think something like that? You are an intelligent woman, Cis. Don’t ever ask me anything like that again.’” In fact, Cissie had, in her blundering way, been correct in believing that there was a strong Catholic influence at Manchester United. The city’s large Irish population identified with the club; over the years many of the best young players, such as Nobby Stiles, were drawn from local Catholic schools, while Matt Busby, in the words of his biographer Eamon Dunphy, ‘was the most prominent Catholic in Manchester public life, a symbol of the faith to which he belonged, a Catholic admired and respected, around whom his co-religionists could rally’. Where she went horribly wrong was in believing that religion played any part in team selection. If it had, why would United have gone after George Best, who was brought up in a Free Presbyterian family in Belfast? It was always talent that mattered with Matt, not background.
Soon after the beginning of the next season, in October 1956, Matt proved Cissie’s error by finally giving Bobby a place in the first team in the match against Charlton Athletic. Interestingly, Bobby was just a few days from his 19th birthday when he made his League debut, whereas Jack, always regarded as the inferior footballer, had been more than a year younger when he had his first game for Leeds. But that, of course, had been in the Second Division in a much less effective side. The news of Bobby’s selection was proclaimed by Tom Jackson in the Evening News: ‘It’s happened at last. Bobby Charlton, 18-year-old “wonder boy” of Manchester United’s reserve and FA Youth Cup-winning teams and pride of the Old Trafford nursery, steps out on the big soccer parade for the first time tomorrow. Who is this boy Charlton whom Don Revie describes as “one of the most complete footballers one could ever wish to see”? Well, he’s another of the Matt Busby finds from schoolboy international football who has made great strides through United’s junior and Youth Cup teams. He’s not big physically, standing 5 feet 8 inches and weighing around 11 stone 8 pounds, but he combines a fierce shot with an uncanny positional sense.’ After a nervous start, Bobby lived up to this star billing in his debut, scoring twice with typically powerful shots in United 4–2 victory. Sir Matt Busby wrote this account of the game: ‘Bobby began his debut as if he was in his bare feet kicking a hot potato. He “got rid” too quickly, very hard but too quickly. That must have been the only spell in which Bobby Charlton was ever nervous on a football pitch. The nerves did not last many minutes. Suddenly, he began to play his own game, and his own game was slipping gracefully past two opponents as if they were stakes in the ground, putting in a good pass or whacking a terrific shot.’ A great League career had begun. It was to last another 17 years.
There were two important physical legacies for Bobby from this debut. The first was the immediate realization of how exhausting League football could be. ‘When the final whistle blew at the end of the match, my legs felt like rubber and I wondered where my next breath was coming from. I could not for the life of me understand how Stanley Matthews and Tom Finney had gone on playing for so long,’ he wrote in his 1967 book Forward for England. Now he saw why Jimmy Murphy had pushed him so hard on the training ground. The second was that he gained complete confidence in his left foot. The fact was that Bobby was not fully fit for the game against Charlton, having badly injured his right ankle playing