Yet the same diplomatic streak meant Bobby was doomed to fail in management when he took over at Preston. Unlike his brother, he did not have the outward strength of personality needed to cope with the endless conflicts of the manager’s job. Furthermore, because he was such a gifted footballer, playing by natural instinct, he never had to analyse the game too deeply. So when it came to tactics and patterns of play, he struggled. But Jack, with far less ability, had long been fascinated by systems, and was a qualified FA coach before he was 30. Unlike Bobby, he had no reluctance about stamping his methods on every team he organized. He knew exactly what he wanted, whether it be at Middlesbrough or Ireland, and he would brook no arguments. ‘It was Jack’s way or you didn’t play,’ says David Kelly, who served under Jack with the Republic of Ireland.
The gap between them runs far beyond football. They also have completely different interests, with Jack liking country pursuits such as shooting and Bobby preferring the more suburban activity of golf. Where Jack cultivates the image of the cloth-capped countryman, with a gun in his hands and wellingtons on his feet, Bobby is much more at ease in the director’s box, wearing a dapper suit or blazer. Despite the Munich crash, Bobby loves to travel all over the world, whereas Jack is always at his happiest in the fields of his native Northumberland. Bobby is essentially conservative in his outlook, while Jack is a staunch socialist.
This sense of difference goes right back to the brothers’ childhood in Ashington. Tellingly, Jack went to secondary school, while Bobby went to grammar school. Again, the separation of pupils along grammar and secondary lines was one of the great fault lines of working class life until the arrival of comprehensive education in the 1960s. Yet, while the gap between Bobby and Jack was undoubtedly exacerbated by their schooling, they were always travelling on different paths from their early years, since they were such very different children. Jack was the rebel, Bobby the conformist. Trouble was an alien word to Bobby. It was Jack’s middle name.
And so it remained for the rest of their lives. While on the football field their careers flourished, the rift between the brothers grew in private. This mutual antagonism was fuelled not only by the tragedy of the Munich air crash in 1958, which made Bobby even more introspective and distant, but also by a long-term feud between their closest relatives, which tore Jack and Bobby apart and left them barely on speaking terms.
Given the fascinating contours of the Charltons’ tale, it is remarkable that there has never been a comprehensive, joint biography until now. The only previous book on them was written more than thirty years ago, in 1971, by the New Zealander Norman Harris. Though it provides some compelling insights, particularly about their early lives, it is based entirely on their own testimony and uses hardly any other sources. The shelf is equally bare when it comes to separate biographies. Astonishingly, despite the deluge of books on Manchester United stars – even Dennis Viollet, winner of just two England caps, was the subject of a 333-page work in 2001 – no-one has ever attempted to write a life of England’s greatest living footballer, Sir Bobby Charlton, while Jack has been rewarded with just a thin 1994 account from journalist Stan Liversedge. Moreover, unlike Jack, who penned a bestselling autobiography in 1996, Sir Bobby has never written his own life story. Since his retirement as a player, all he has produced is one light book of soccer anecdotes.
It is my hope that, with this joint biography, I will go some way towards rectifying this strange gap in British football literature. No-one can dispute the vast contribution the Charltons have made to the soccer of our islands over the last half century. It is now right that the story behind that contribution should be told for the first time.
‘If ever I’m feeling a bit uppity, whenever I get on my high horse, I go and take another look at my dear mam’s mangle that has pride of place in the dining room of my home. The mangle has the greatest significance. It is the symbol of my beginnings. It serves as the reminder of the days when I learned what life was all about.’ These are the words with which Brian Clough, another footballer from a north-eastern family, begins his autobiography, emphasizing how much his mother meant to him.
The mother of the Charlton brothers was an equally dominant figure in their upbringing. Born Cissie (a shortening of Elizabeth) Milburn, she was the classic matriarch: strong, passionate, sociable, and outspoken, as protective of her brood as she was ambitious for them. Her husband, Bob, could hardly have been more different. A coalminer who spent his whole working life underground, he was quiet, dry, undemonstrative, but strong-willed. Indeed, it is striking how, in their personalities, Jack seems to have taken after his mother, and Bobby after his father, though, like Jack, old Bob could be quick-tempered if the mood took him. Walter Lavery, who grew up with Bobby and Jack, recalls: ‘You would go round to their house after playing in the park, and old Bob would be sitting by the fire, in his braces, just reading the paper. Cissie would be talking away, asking you all about football and school, while Bob made no contribution at all. It was not that he didn’t like his children, but just that he didn’t like the fuss.’
What made the influence of Cissie all the more powerful was the fact that football was in her blood. Her great-grandfather and grandfather, both called Jack, had played for top-class local sides in Northumberland, while her own father – yet another Jack but known universally as ‘Tanner’ Milburn – played in goal for Ashington FC when the club was in the old Third Division North in the 1920s. All four of her brothers played League football as full-backs: Jack, George and Jimmy for Leeds and Stan, the youngest of the quartet, for Chesterfield, then Leicester and Rochdale. Her cousin, ‘Wor’ Jackie Milburn, the greatest of all the family soccer stars before the arrival of her sons, won 13 England caps and three FA Cup winners’ medals as a striker with Newcastle. It is hardly a surprise, then, that Cissie herself should have become a serious football enthusiast, with an understanding of the game that surpassed most male fans. She often said that she wished she had been born a boy. ‘For years, I kicked footballs around the parks and back streets of Ashington with a bunch of lads, usually with my skirt tucked into my knickers,’ she said in her autobiography. Bobby Whitehead, who played for Newcastle and was another contemporary of Jack and Bobby’s, remembers, ‘When we played at school or in the park, there would usually be a few dads around. But there was nearly always one woman there, Cissie Charlton, who would be able to shout more loudly than most fathers. And she would travel with the school team on the bus to away games. She was so wrapped up in the game and was very knowledgeable about it.’
Cissie Charlton’s fixation with soccer might have been rare in a woman in that era, but just as odd was her husband’s total indifference to the sport, given its grip on masculine working-class culture in the north-east. Bob Charlton had absolutely no interest in football. He never went to games with his wife, never played and, in 1966, did not even watch the World Cup semi-final between England and Portugal – regarded by many as his son Bobby’s greatest-ever match – preferring to work his shift down the mine. The two sports he enjoyed were boxing and pigeon fancying. Like many miners used to back-breaking manual labour, he was a good fighter, sometimes holding his own against travelling professionals who earned their living by touring the country and setting up challenges with local men. In fact, Bob won the money to buy Cissie a wedding ring in just such a bout. Later, he would help train boxers in the area, earning the nickname ‘Boxer’. Pigeons were his other great interest. ‘I remember old Bob sitting, very quiet and still, by his loft on his allotment, where he kept his pigeons. His conversation was always limited. And he had a catapult with him. Suddenly he fired it, straight up the arse of a cat. Pigeon fanciers hate cats,’ recalls Ron Routledge, an Ashington local who went on to play League football for