As well as the sense of loss, there was also an element of survivor’s guilt in Bobby’s reaction. ‘There was very little wrong with me physically but I could not stop thinking about the accident. I couldn’t accept it for a long time and I felt drained of all emotion. I kept asking myself, “Why me? Why should I be left?”’ he wrote in 1967.
Bobby kept focusing on such dark thoughts as he lay in the Rechts der Isar hospital, his introspection made all the deeper because, unlike most of the other victims, he received no visits from his family. Cissie had, of course, been desperate to fly out to see her beloved son, and she had actually been offered a seat on a plane specially chartered by Manchester United for the relatives of the survivors. But only three months earlier she had undergone major surgery for breast cancer. Her doctor had warned her not to travel unless Bobby was desperately ill. And because of their respective commitments with the Coal Board and Leeds United, there had never been any question of either her husband Bob or her elder son Jack going to Munich.
Before the disaster, Cissie Charlton claimed to have known, though a sense of psychic intuition, that something was about to go wrong. On the morning of that tragic flight, I was more worried than I had ever been in my life,’ she wrote later. ‘I just couldn’t settle, but neither could I explain why. A black worry had settled on me and I just couldn’t shake it off.’ Snow was falling in Ashington as well as Munich when Cissie decided to call on a neighbour to explain how anxious she was. Not long after she had waded back home through the snow, Ted Cockburn, the local newsagent, came to her yard. Cissie knew what he was about to say before he had opened his mouth.
‘It’s Bobby, isn’t it?’ she said.
‘Yes, but I wanted you to know before it went on the placards. The paper has produced our bills about Bobby being in a plane crash and I wanted to make sure you knew first before I put them up,’ said the newsagent. But, even though she had heard nothing officially, she felt she already knew what had happened to the plane.
The worst aspect for her was that the first radio and press reports to reach Ashington said that there were no survivors. Cissie desperately tried to ring Old Trafford from a call box to find out if this was true, but because of the poor weather the telephone lines had come down. Fearing that Bobby now lay dead in the Munich snow, she suddenly became hysterical in the phone booth, crying and screaming out his name, before being helped home by Cockburn.
Further south in Leeds, Jack had also received news of the tragedy. Having just finished his bath after a training session, he was standing naked in the dressing room, drying himself off, when Arthur Crowther, the club secretary, entered. Bobby Forrest, Jack’s colleague at Leeds, recalls, ‘We were joking and having a laugh when Arthur Crowther walked in, looking very serious. He said: “Quiet, I’ve got something very important to tell you. The plane carrying the Manchester team from Munich has crashed. They don’t know if there are any survivors.” An immediate, terrible silence descended on the dressing room. Inevitably, everyone looked at Jack, who turned white, truly white. You could see that he was shattered, but no-one said a word. I have never known a silence like it in my life. Nothing like it. The room was completely still. He got dressed quickly and went out.’
Jack went up to the club office to see if anyone had any more information, but Crowther was having the same difficulty as Cissie in contacting Old Trafford. Jack then decided to go back to Ashington, though, because his parents had no phone, he could not let them know he was on his way. He telephoned his new wife Pat – they had been married less than a month – to arrange to meet at the station for the grim journey north, still thinking that his younger brother was probably dead. As soon as he started talking to Pat on the phone, he burst into tears, the first time in his life he had broken down like that. On the way to the station, he called at Bobby Forrest’s house to see if there had been any further reports about the disaster on the wireless. But Bobby’s wife could give tell him no new details.
Jack and Pat found the rail trip to Ashington unbearable. Not recognizing Jack, some of the other passengers in their carriage talked blithely about the crash, even asking each other how much compensation the families of the dead victims might receive from BEA. No wonder Jack later wrote, ‘The bloody rail journey lasted ages.’ On arrival at Newcastle, Jack and Pat went to the Haymarket to catch the bus to Ashington. On their way, they saw a newspaper vendor selling late editions of the Evening Chronicle. Though he dreaded what he might find inside, Jack decided he had to buy a copy. Then, as he approached the stall, he could see a folded paper on the vendor’s arm bearing the stop press news: ‘Charlton among the survivors’. Just as Cissie had wailed in anguish in that phone box, so Jack now shouted out in joy, ‘Bloody hell, he’s OK,’ before grabbing Pat and dancing a very public jig with her.
Thinking he was the bearer of good news, Jack walked into the Ashington family home with a large grin on his face. But, by now, Cissie had heard that Bobby was alive. Just before he had fainted in Rechts der Isar hospital, Bobby had managed to contact the British Consul in Munich, requesting a message be sent to his parents informing them of his survival. It was a Northumberland copper who delivered the Foreign Office telegram with the joyous words ‘Alive and well, see you later, Bobby.’
Understandably, Cissie still wanted more news, so she decided to go to Manchester. The Charltons did not own a car, while all buses had been cancelled because of the heavy snow, so she hitched a lift to Newcastle from an early morning delivery van, and then caught the train to Manchester. Once she arrived at Old Trafford she received confirmation that Bobby was suffering from nothing more than a cut head, but she was appalled by the death toll of Bobby’s friends. Unable to travel to Munich, she tried to take her mind off the disaster by helping in the club office, dealing with the avalanche of work brought on by the tragedy. For all Cissie’s good motives, this may have been the moment when Bobby started to distance himself from her. According to Harry Gregg: ‘I don’t think Bobby was too happy about her being in the offices there. He felt she should not be there. He was slightly embarrassed by her.’
Old Trafford was in a state of shock in the wake of the disaster. Alma George, Matt Busby’s secretary, had been one of the first to hear the news that Thursday afternoon. She later recalled: ‘I was living in a nightmare. Like everyone else I was too numb to take in the awful grief. Agony piled on agony as the hours ticked by. Thousands hurried to the ground to see if they could help; the police threw a protective cordon around the relatives and friends who had lost their loved ones. Those of us left at the ground did our best to calm and console the grief stricken. But what word of sympathy could I find to comfort the bereaved?’ Perhaps the most poignant symbol of despair was the transformation of the Old Trafford gymnasium into a temporary mortuary, filled with the coffins of the players who only days earlier had been gracing the pitch outside with their youthful brilliance.
But even in the pit of darkness, the club had to find the will to continue. Fixtures had to be completed, players bought, squads trained, tickets issued. When Jimmy Murphy had visited Matt Busby in his Munich oxygen tent, the broken manager had croaked in his deputy’s ear, ‘Keep the flag flying, Jimmy.’ It was a duty that Murphy fulfilled with heroic zeal over the next few months, pulling the battered remnants of his team into a fighting unit. To the bewildered players left at Old Trafford, Murphy never showed anything but a brave face. Ian Greaves says: ‘When we got the full truth of the disaster, we just didn’t know what we were doing. There was a numbness about the place, especially when we started to go to all the funerals. But Jimmy forced us to carry on, working on us as if nothing had happened. But he had to do that. I mean, if he was going around in tears, what would the rest of us be like.’ In private, away from his responsibilities, the passion in Jimmy’s soul would engulf him in sorrow, as Harry Gregg remembered: ‘In Munich, I was walking up the stairs to my hotel room when