By Jim White
For those of a certain age, there used to be just two words of English required to ease travel anywhere in the world.
When in foreign climes, in any taxi, bar or on a long-distance bus ride, this was all that was needed to engage in conversation with a local: say “Bobby Charlton” and the other person would be immediately wreathed in smiles, stick their thumbs in the air and, with a welcoming embrace, behave as if all were well in the world.
It was not just his renown, it was not just the triumphs with which he was associated, it was not just his unblemished record. It was more what he stood for: Bobby Charlton represented an Englishness that was universally recognised and universally admired. This was the epitome of good grace, of sportsmanship, of decency. This was the ultimate football gentleman.
That was the power England’s finest ever footballer could convey: from Alicante to Zanzibar, his very name could melt the ice. And it was a power embraced for more than six decades by his club Manchester United.
For United, Charlton, the noble, dignified, exemplar of fair play, was more than just verbal shorthand. He was a living embodiment of everything the club believed they represented. His story was inextricably linked with the story of the club.
Former England and Manchester United captain, Sir Bobby Charlton. Credit: AP
A tale of redemption, recovery and ultimate triumph over tragedy, this was a narrative as romantic as any in the game. And the way he represented it – invariably with dignity, humility and understatement – served to underpin and reinforce its meaning.
Charlton gave a vivid, lifelong demonstration that class is not a product of money or privilege. Born, the middle of three sons, in the most humble circumstances in the Northumberland coalfield, he came from sporting pedigree: his mother’s brother was the legendary Newcastle forward Jackie Milburn. Both he and his elder brother Jack excelled at school football, both finding themselves in the professional game.
image of former Manchester United and England player Bobby Charlton is shown on a large shown following the news of his death at the age of 86 ahead the English Premier League soccer match between Sheffield United and Manchester United.Credit: AP
Jack went to Leeds, while Robert, as he was invariably known at home, was picked up by Manchester United, signed as a schoolboy in 1953. There, in the finest football finishing school in the country, Charlton found his mentor, the brilliant manager Matt Busby. The pair forged an instant and profound bond.
Under Busby’s tutelage he was soon in the United first team, a shy, quiet, smiling member of the most vibrant collection of youthful talent ever assembled in the game. And one that never reached its proper potential.
The plane crash in 1958 which killed eight Manchester United players, and other officials and journalists.Credit: Fairfax Media
On February 6, 1958, returning from a European Cup engagement in Belgrade, the team plane crashed at Munich. Eight players lost their lives in the wreckage. Charlton woke up in hospital, confused, shocked, but miraculously suffering only the most minor of physical injury.
In a time before the aftereffects of an accident were properly understood, before PTSD was recognised as an inevitable consequence of trauma, what was going on in his head went unconsidered: there was no thought of taking time to recuperate and reassess. The consensus was to keep calm and carry on. Charlton did just that, emerging from his hospital bed to return to Manchester and training, playing for the first team again within a month.
His determination to deliver for his lost teammates was extraordinary. Here was how he was going to recover: he would do it for them. Thus he became, almost immediately, the living embodiment of the club’s spirit of reinvention.
Fans walk past a poster of the Busby Babes on the front of Manchester United’s Old Trafford Stadium.Credit: AP
And how he achieved. An astonishing athlete, with the physique of a Greek God, throughout the 1960s he provided the midfield engine for the rebuilt United and for his national team. His drive, his presence, the manner of his passing and distribution helped return Busby’s side to a pinnacle that appeared wholly unreachable on that snowy runway in Munich.
‘This was the epitome of good grace, of sportsmanship, of decency.’
The sight of him apparently gliding across the turf, his combover flowing in the breeze, was to witness the epitome of footballing grace and style. His tireless elegance found perfect foil in the quicksilver finishing of Denis Law and the genius of George Best.
Together, they were dubbed the Holy Trinity by the United faithful. And, though Law was absent at the last, together, they achieved the ultimate: winning the European Cup in May 1968.
That evening at Wembley was reckoned by all who saw it the perfect act of redemption. Ten years on from the crash, still under the direction of Busby, with Charlton still their leader, United had done what the manager had set out to do a decade before: proved his club to be the finest in Europe. Charlton’s tears were seen as the natural emotional reaction: he was remembering the mates he had lost in pursuit of glory.
Bobby Charlton raises the Jules Rimet trophy in the air following England’s 4-2 victory after extra time over West Germany in the World Cup Final in 1966.Credit: Hulton Archive
Two years before that triumph came the greatest day English football has seen - winning a World Cup, and on home soil. Unsurprisingly, Charlton was to the fore.
He scored twice for England in the World Cup semi-final win over Portugal in 1966 and was instrumental in the 4-2 victory over West Germany in the final where Geoff Hurst scored a hat-trick.
Hurst, the only surviving member of Alf Ramsey’s World Cup-winning side, led the tributes to his former teammate.
“Very sad news today. One of the true Greats Sir Bobby Charlton has passed away,” Hurst wrote on X/Twitter.
But there was something more to it than that. Linger longer in his company and there was a distance about him too, a detachment. Look closer in his eyes and in the slight quiver in his limbs and it was not hard to find suggestion of darkness, the hint of pain and loss.
A tribute to Sir Bobby Charlton at Stamford Bridge before the Chelsea v Arsenal match.Credit: Getty
Though he had been physically rehabilitated, behind the triumph he was thereafter plagued by survivor’s guilt. He could not face the triumphal banquet after the final. Rather than relishing his moment of glory he was hit by the crushing sense that it should have been him, not them.
In retirement, disheartened by United’s post-Busby implosion, he initially tried to become a manager. But when it didn’t work out at Preston, he returned into the fold at Old Trafford.
Wayne Rooney is presented with a trophy by Sir Bobby Charlton to mark his 500th game for Manchester United in 2015.Credit: Getty
As he had been in a playing career untarnished by dissent or violence, argument or ill behaviour, over the years Charlton was a magnificent ambassador for his club. Forever calm, reasoned, measured – rightly becoming one of the game’s first knights of the realm – he rose above the gathering maelstrom of the game, a personification of its proper values. Even as United became ever more in thrall to a fondness for commerce, he was always around, a perfect counterbalance to any idea that it had lost its connection with romance.
It was a mantle he wore without a trace of ego. For fifty years, this most recognised of public figures could go nowhere without people wanting to shake him by the hand, keen to thank him for the joy he delivered, for the goals, for the glory. In public, there was no chance of privacy. Yet, despite the relentlessness of the pursuit, to everyone he met he was invariably gracious, genial, gently self-effacing. And he was still there, an ever-present at United games even as the awful debilitation of dementia began to grip.
That is not to diminish his behind-the-scenes influence. It was he who pressed the candidacy of Alex Ferguson to become United’s manager in 1986, and then, when results insisted the Scotsman might be let go in the autumn of 1989, it was Charlton who persuasively argued he should be kept on. And he was always there in the directors’ box to share in the success after success Ferguson subsequently brought to his club. In 1999 and 2008 when his successors as United captain lifted the European Cup, he was a first-hand witness to glory.
Yet, as silverware kept coming in the Ferguson era, the pain of what he lost never diminished. It resurfaced publicly at the annual anniversary of the Munich crash. Every February he led the United memorials, the seemingly indelible link to that great broken generation. And whenever he was asked the inevitable question – who was the finest player he had ever played with – it was not Best or Law, not Bobby Moore or Gordon Banks, not even his brother Jack.
His answer was always the same. It was Duncan Edwards, cut down in the crash and the man he reckoned made him look puny. And whenever he said the name it was clear what he was thinking: he forever was certain it should have been Edwards, not him who deserved to become the international byword for United and Englishness.
That was typical of him, underestimating himself and his place in the scheme of things. For of this there can be no doubt: there was no one who could have carried the legacy of those lost with greater dignity and honour than Sir Bobby Charlton. He was, and will always be, Mr Manchester United.
Telegraph, London and Reuters