For all his sense of independence, there is no doubt that Jack deeply resented the apparent bias of his mother towards Bobby. ‘She never said she was proud of me,’ admitted Jack in 1996. ‘I was driven to try and please her. Sometimes, I would go down to the dog track and spend hours hunting through mountains of rubbish, searching for old glasses they’d thrown out. When I found some that were not too badly chipped, I’d clean them and take them home as presents for her. She would always thank me, but I suspect she then threw them away. I always knew that I was not her favourite.’
Unlike the outgoing, noisy Jack, Bobby was very shy as a child, so shy that when strangers came to the house he would hide behind his mother or run upstairs to the bedroom. Rob Storey, who grew up with them both, told me: ‘Jack wouldn’t stand for anything. You couldn’t put much on him. I don’t mean that he had an aggressive nature but if someone confronted him, he could certainly look after himself. On the other hand Bobby was much more serious, more withdrawn than Jack. He would keep himself to himself, whereas Jack would just say what he thought. In that respect, they were total opposites. Jack always seemed to be striving for what he wanted, whereas things seemed to come more easily for Bobby. Jack was a determined lad, much more determined than Bobby seemed to be.’ They were also physically very different, even when they were children. In a BBC radio interview in 1989, Cissie Charlton said: ‘When Jack was born, his granny would take him around the town to let everyone see how long he was. He was tall even when he was born. Bobby was stumpy, thickset, different altogether. They were two different people.’
Bobby was more concerned about his appearance than Jack, sometimes even wearing a tie at home, something Jack would never willingly have done. Jackie Lothian recalls: ‘Bobby was smart, polite, diplomatic; he knew how to address people properly. He was always very tidy, unlike Jack who was a scruffy bairn.’ Bobby hated being in trouble whether at school or with his parents. When he called his brothers for tea, they thought it amusing to run away, which prompted him to anger. ‘Why do you always have to be so stubborn?’ he would ask of them. He was never in playground fights with other boys, though, like both Jack and his father, he was an excellent boxer, once winning a youth competition staged in his neighbourhood.
Yet Bobby did have his playful side. He could do good impersonations, and sometimes surprised his brothers by covering himself in a sheet and pretending to be a ghost, a spectacle that became known in the Charlton household as ‘wor kid’s mad half-hour’. Using a pair of his father’s rolled up socks, he played football in the sitting room with his brother. With his greater height, Jack would usually win the aerial contest, though Bobby was almost unbeatable on the floor. Once he’d put it on the ground he’d murder me. Murder me! That’s why I like to see the ball in the air to this day,’ says Jack. Bobby was never bashful at these moments. While he was kicking the socks around, he would take his mother’s iron and use the plug as a fake microphone to provide a running commentary on the match, putting himself in the role of the great soccer stars of the time: ‘Mortensen knocks it out to Stanley Matthews. Matthews goes down the line, crosses and it’s there by Lawton. A magnificent goal,’ would be a typical passage of play in the Charlton home.
Like many reserved boys, Bobby loved to retreat into his own fantasy world of cartoon heroes and exotic fables. He adored films such as Ali Baba and Robin Hood, while he explained in a radio interview in 2001 that his favourite comic character was ‘Morgan the Mighty, a great big, strong, blond Englishman trapped on an island. The real baddies used to send in opponents for him to fight. And the theme of the story was how he ended up being the greatest fighter in the world.’ It does not take a great leap of imagination to see how Bobby, a strong, fair-haired young Englishman, might aspire to such a role.
Football was undoubtedly the greatest form of escape for Bobby, not just from the smoky drabness of Ashington, but also from a future life trapped underground. To a much greater extent than his elder brother, he fell in love with the game in his childhood. ‘From his earliest age, he was football mad,’ said his mother. When his uncles visited Ashington on a Sunday, they took Bobby out in the street or down to the beach at Newbiggin to show off his skills. Then they came home and discussed League football. ‘I listened to them talking about the matches they had played on Saturday and I heard with awe names like Frank Swift and Wilf Mannion. Particularly at that age – and I was only six – there was an unforgettable magic about it. I suppose it was then that the seed was sown in my mind that I would never be anything else but a footballer, if I was good enough,’ Bobby wrote in 1967 in his book Forward for England.
Bobby loved everything about football. He spent hours reading his soccer books, his favourite being Stanley Matthews’ Football Album. He pored over results in the back of newspapers, developing such an affection for the sports pages that he decided, if he did not make it as a footballer, he would become a football journalist, ‘that would be the next best thing, because journalists got into matches for free,’ he said. He always had some sort of ball at his feet. If he went to the cinema, he would bring a ball with him and kick it along the gutter. Similarly, he would take one if his mother sent him on an errand to the shops. Through his fascination with soccer, he formed a powerful bond with his grandfather, old ‘Tanner’ Milburn. Though Tanner was a hard, stubborn man, distrusted by many within the family, he doted on Bobby, recognizing the boy’s exceptional ability. In return, young Bobby idolized Tanner.
On many evenings during the war, the two of them went down to the local park, where Tanner still held training sessions for sprinters. Bobby got a rubdown just like the adults, his grandfather telling him, ‘You’ll never be fast unless your muscles are loose.’ Bobby then raced against the professionals in the 110 yards, having been given a 70-yard start. If Bobby won, his grandfather would be delighted, saying ‘Well done, Bobby lad, you’ll be running against a whippet yet.’ During his career, Bobby’s electric pace was one of his greatest assets – George Best, a lightning-quick player himself, says that Bobby was the only man who could beat him in sprints during training at Manchester United.
Towards the end of his life, Tanner’s eyesight was failing, so on Saturday evenings he would send Bobby to buy the local football paper and then get him to read out all the scores. ‘Even though he was dying, the most important thing was the football results,’ remembers Bobby. It was an attitude that the grandson inherited. ‘Football is my life. I eat, sleep and drink the game. When I wake up every day, I think of who we’re playing in the next match. I think of nothing else, apart from my family. I wish I could play until I was 70,’ said Bobby in an ITV documentary made when he was 30. The death of his grandfather hit him hard, for Bobby was a sensitive man who could be deeply affected by loss – as he was to show over Munich. ‘When he died, I felt as though I’d lost my best friend and there was a gap in my life which was not filled for a long time, even though I was young,’ wrote Bobby later.
Bobby was also a keen spectator. When he and Jack were babies, Cissie took them along in the pram to Ashington FC, and they would leap up at the roar of the crowd after a goal was scored. Later, they were sometimes allowed to work as ball boys at the club. Historian Mike Kirkup recalls: ‘Their uncle Stan was playing for Ashington and he let them visit him in the dressing room or bring out the water magic sponge for the trainer. During the play, they sat behind the goals, which they thought was absolutely marvellous,’ In the Charltons’ youth, though Ashington FC had dropped down from the Third Division North into the North-Eastern League, there were still some big matches at the club. Stan Mortensen, the Blackpool and England striker, played at Ashington during the war, while in an FA Cup tie in 1950 against Rochdale, 12,000 people crammed into the ground, with some of them having to sit on the roof.
It has been claimed that Bobby, as a child, was a Sunderland supporter. In her autobiography Cissie said that Bobby’s ambition was to play for the club, writing, ‘He was a great admirer of Len Shackleton’s team and would have jumped at the chance to join it.’