A graphic example of this darker trait was given to me by Ronnie Cope who shared a room with Bobby during a week-long United trip to Blackpool soon after the crash. ‘Bobby altered unbelievably after Munich. He never got back to being a joker, the Bobby Charlton I had known as a lad. He became more withdrawn. There were great mood swings. Some days, when we were in the hotel in Blackpool, he would wake up and he would jump on my bed, trying to wrestle with me. Yet the next day he would not even say hello, as if I was not there. It was almost as if he were having a blackout, he seemed to go so deep. You would say things to him and I am sure he would not hear you, because he would not answer. The days he didn’t speak, I just left him alone. But then he would come out of it and he could enjoy a drink and a laugh.’
Jack sensed the change keenly, particularly because in the immediate aftermath of the crash he had felt more warmth to Bobby than at any previous time in his life. The fraternal affection was at its strongest on the car trip home from Liverpool Street, as Bobby wrote later: ‘Jack didn’t say much and there were long silences during the journey. But I felt very close to him then.’ Yet this bond soon began to loosen. As Bobby brooded on the tragedy, Jack felt the shutters coming down and he came to see himself as an intruder on his younger brother’s private grief. ‘In a way,’ wrote Jack, ‘Robert was never the same lad to me after Munich. I saw a big change in our kid from that day on. He stopped smiling, a trait which continues to this day. Friends come up to me and say, “Your Bob goes around as if he has the weight of the world on his shoulders” – and I have to agree,’ In an interview in 1980, Jack said: ‘Something happened after Munich. We were very close until then, but after the plane crash, he didn’t come home as often, and there was a barrier between us that I have never been able to fathom.’
But Bobby’s change was more complex than merely a descent into taciturnity. With most of the great United side wiped out, Bobby was now the most talented player in the club. No longer just another member of the orchestra, he was now its lead violinist. Given this status, he believed he had to take on the mantle of responsibility for the performance of the team, even though he was only 20 years old. It was a burden that drove him to a new sense of involvement with the club, a new intensity in his play. For a while, he took the field like a man possessed by some inner force. ‘When he came back from Munich,’ says Reg Hunter, ‘I noticed he improved tremendously. All of a sudden he moved into brilliance. It was because he had to grow up so quickly. He was a different player altogether after the crash. He had always been quiet, never said a lot, but he was certainly much more mature after Munich, especially in the big matches. He was more involved, wanted the ball all the time, held on to it, took responsibility for everything. People came to rely on him. Before Munich he was in and out of the first team but it was very different when he returned. He took over the side, in effect.’
Bobby’s new dominance saw him quickly transformed by the press into the most exciting star in British football. His story had all the right ingredients to fascinate the media: the drama of his survival in the snow; the virtuosity of his skill on the ball; the tragic loss of team-mates; the coalmining background; the family footballing heritage; and there was also the added piquancy that, at the time of the crash, he was still a lance corporal doing his National Service in the British army with three months to go before his official demobilization, though the War Office bowed to public pressure and released him early. Some sportsmen with big egos might have revelled in all this attention, but for Bobby, with his retiring nature, it was an added burden. And the bigger a star he became, the more his caution and reticence grew. John Giles, that shrewdest of judges, who was at United from 1956 to 1963, thinks this is one of the keys to his personality. ‘Bobby changed after Munich, because he was suddenly thrust into the position of being a superstar, in the full glare of publicity all the time. I don’t think he enjoyed it. I would say it was a big culture shock for him, just as big a shock as it was later to be for George Best and David Beckham. Because he was such a conscientious lad, such a decent human being, he was not comfortable with being a star. With his talent, he would probably have achieved that status anyway during his career, but the glare of fame would not have arrived so quickly had it not been for Munich. And because he became so aware of the need to behave the right way in public, he was more withdrawn, more shy after Munich.’
The death of so many colleagues also had a profound effect on Bobby’s attitude towards both soccer and Manchester United. Though he became such a major figure at the club after Munich, he has often said that he was never again to derive the same enjoyment from playing. After February 1958 the game was more of a job than a pleasure. The carefree days had gone forever. And he felt the same way about his new team-mates at Old Trafford. He never developed the same rapport with those who arrived after the crash. Having grown up with the Babes, he always seemed to view their replacements as outsiders, not part of the true Busby tradition. It was almost like he had drawn an invisible dividing line in the dressing room between who had played with him before Munich and those who joined the club after the disaster. For Bobby, paradise had existed with Duncan and Tommy and Eddie. It had been lost on that German runway and could never be replaced. Eamon Dunphy believes this is crucial to any understanding of Bobby. ‘The key to Bobby is that he was one of the Munich lads. He went to the club as a 15 year old and became United right through. After the crash, Busby, realizing he could not build another set of Babes, started to flash the cheque book, buying in people from other clubs. Bobby was never easy with the change, in culture. He had a feeling of alienation from the new club. There was a big split between the pre – and post-Munich lads. Bobby harboured – perhaps to an unreasonable degree – a resentment against the people who had been brought in,’ For all his diplomacy, Bobby was never afraid to express his feeling that the post-1958 United sides he played in never measured up to the standards of his heroes, certainly not in terms of commitment. ‘That pre-Munich team was special in many ways,’ he said in 1973. ‘They were playing because they were dedicated to the club. I can’t honestly say that the present team is the same way. Maybe it’s me, perhaps I don’t want to believe that they are as good. But with the old team, if they were losing by three of four goals, which was not often, they’d go flat out, still try to save something, their pride in the club. We were committed to the club, the game, the gaffer. Now it’s a career. People have their minds outside the game.’ In an interview with John Roberts for his superb book about the Busby Babes, The Team That Wouldn’t Die, Bobby said: ‘For me, the football in the late 1950s was the best it’s ever been and, from a selfish football point of view, that United team could not have been lost at a worse time. The difference after Munich was the commitment of the side. The team that played before the crash had nothing to prove. Those players knew they were great. Afterwards, we had everything to prove.’
Noel Cantwell, who joined United after 1960, bears out this point about Bobby’s disillusion. ‘It seemed, when I arrived at Old Trafford, that Bobby resented the new people that had come in. I got the feeling that he saw us as intruders. So when you were introduced to Bobby, he shook your hand, was very polite, but he stuck to his own pre-Munich crowd. He was in a group with the likes of Wilf McGuinness and Shay Brennan, the lads he’d grown up with. They were his mates, and, if we were on the bus, they would spend all their time playing cards together. But I could understand the way he wanted to be with the lads he’d known since he was young.’
For all Bobby’s mental anguish after Munich, he was not long out of the Manchester United side. The club was in the middle of perhaps the most romantic cup run in British history, having beaten Sheffield Wednesday 3–0 in a highly-charged, emotionally wrought fifth-round tie at Old Trafford on 19 February. So makeshift was the team against Wednesday