My Manchester United Years: The Autobiography Read online

  MY MANCHESTER UNITED YEARS

  Sir Bobby Charlton

  Copyright © 2007 Bobby Charlton

  The right of Bobby Charlton to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  Apart from any use permitted under UK copyright law, this publication may only be reproduced, stored, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, with prior permission in writing of the publishers or, in the case of reprographic production, in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency.

  First published as an Ebook by Headline Publishing Group in 2014

  Cataloguing in Publication Data is available from the British Library

  eISBN: 978 1 4722 2706 5

  HEADLINE PUBLISHING GROUP

  An Hachette UK Company

  338 Euston Road

  London

  NW1 3BH

  www.headline.co.uk

  www.hachette.co.uk

  CONTENTS

  TITLE PAGE

  COPYRIGHT PAGE

  ABOUT THE BOOK

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  DEDICATION

  PRAISE

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  PROLOGUE

  1. A CAST OF REMARKABLE RELATIVES

  2. BEACONS IN MY PAST

  3. BEGINNING THE GREAT ADVENTURE

  4. A NEW LIFE AND A NEW WATCH

  5. LEARNING TO BE A PROFESSIONAL

  6. THE FULFILMENT OF A DREAM

  7. NO INSTANT CORONATION

  8. UNDER THE SPELL OF EUROPE

  9. INDESTRUCTIBLE

  10. BELGRADE

  11. MUNICH

  12. RESURRECTION

  13. FAMILY MATTERS

  14. REBUILDING

  15. TEAM OF STARS

  16. DENIS, GEORGE AND ME

  17. UNFINISHED BUSINESS

  18. FORGING TEAM SPIRIT

  19. THE FOOTBALL TRIP OF OUR LIVES

  20. THE EUROPEAN CUP FINAL, 1968

  21. GATHERING STORM CLOUDS

  22. THE OLD MAN STEPS BACK

  23. THE BAND CAN’T PLAY FOREVER

  24. WHAT NEXT?

  25. COMING HOME

  26. THE VERY BEST OF MANCHESTER UNITED

  EPILOGUE

  CLUB STATISTICS

  INDEX

  ABOUT THE BOOK

  Bobby Charlton is Manchester United through and through. He was a member of the original Busby Babes and has devoted his career to the club, playing in 754 games over 17 years. During that period he won everything the game had to offer, played alongside some of the greats such as Best and Law, suffered devastating defeats and was involved in one of the greatest football tragedies of all time. Here, for the very first time, he tells the story of those United years.

  With his beloved Reds he tasted FA Cup victory in the emotional final of 1963, won three first division championships and in 1968 he reached the pinnacle of club success, winning the European Cup. Inevitably, such highs are balanced with no less dramatic lows, such as the 1957 European Cup semi-final, the highly charged 1958 FA Cup loss which followed only weeks after the horrors of the Munich Air disaster, and the 1969 European Cup defeat by Milan.

  He is one of the true gentlemen of football and the legacy that Bobby Charlton gives to United is beyond compare.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Sir Bobby Charlton was born in 1937 in Ashington, Northumberland. He joined Manchester United as a professional in 1954 and made his first team debut in October 1956. He was voted European Player of the Year in 1966 and won the FA Cup, three Division One championships and the European Cup with United. He joined the board of the club in 1984, a position he still holds today.

  Bobby Charlton was a key member of the victorious England World Cup side of 1966. He was awarded the OBE in 1969, the CBE in 1973 and was knighted in 1994, the first footballer to gain such an honour since Sir Stanley Matthews in 1965.

  James Lawton, who collaborated with Sir Bobby Charlton in the writing of this book, is the chief sports writer for the Independent. In 2007 he was named What The Papers Say sports writer of the year and has previously won the British sports journalist, sports columnist and feature writer of the year awards. He has written 11 books, including biographies of Lester Piggott and Malcolm Allison. He has also worked with George Cohen, Nobby Stiles, Ian St John and Joe Jordan on their highly acclaimed autobiographies.

  ‘Sir Bobby Charlton’s The Autobiography reveals the humanity and heartache behind the footballing legend …

  It might be expected … that this book would be dull, bland and platitudinous. Nothing could be farther from the truth. This first volume of autobiography, covering his childhood and his years with Manchester United, has an easy, flowing narrative and a host of memorable passages about key moments. The horror of the Munich air crash looms large …

  Sir Bobby is also interesting on his austere childhood in Ashington, Northumberland, where he was born into a mining family …

  Sir Bobby comes across as a man of fundamental decency. It is impossible not to be touched by his romantic devotion to his wife Norma or to Manchester United, the two great pillars of his life …

  I await with eagerness the second volume, on his England career’ Leo McKinstry, The Times

  ‘With many autobiographies you wonder what the point was, why the player merited such attention and why, having been given the publishing deal, he then dealt in evasions. Not this one. Not only is Bobby Charlton manifestly a figure whose life story should be told, but he has done so in a book of at times agonising honesty’ FourFourTwo

  ‘His story is without equal. It is the greatest story of British sport. The vivid honesty of the book is evident from the first page to the last. It is also a wise book, which cannot be said of so many other football tomes’ Jim Holden, Sunday Express

  ‘His account of the process which saw Ferguson named one of Busby’s successors at Old Trafford … is enthralling’ Scotsman

  ‘… beautifully crafted’ Daily Mail

  ‘… the Manchester United and England hero packs his account with memorable anecdotes’ Independent

  ‘… sensitive, benevolent and humble in a way that the life story of a modern superstar could never be’ The Times

  ‘… beautifully written’ Daily Telegraph

  ‘Here, certainly, is a tale somewhat more than ripe to be told – and one perhaps more worthy of telling than that of any British sportsman alive or dead’ Lancashire Evening Post

  ‘It has certainly been worth the wait: Sir Bobby Charlton: My Manchester United Years is a compelling read’ Oldham Evening Chronicle

  ‘Sir Bobby Charlton’s autobiography, like the man himself, is absolutely unique’ Yorkshire Evening Post

  For Norma, who has always given me her love and her strength

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  I HOPE THAT in the following pages I make clear my gratitude to all those who have helped me on my way through life and football. Heaven knows, the cast list is long. If I have had one ambition more than any other in this book it has been to stress that among all my other good fortune I have been so lucky in my roots and all those who have been around helping me to build on the gift to play football that was given to me so generously as a boy.

  For any man, I imagine, reawakening his past can bring both pleasure and pain and certainly if this is true I am no exception.

  For persuading me that this was a good time to tell my story, after shying away from the task for so long, I must thank the editorial director of Headline, David Wilson – and for his vision and his enthusiastic support. I’m also grateful for
the help of my friend James Lawton, who appeared at Old Trafford as a young sports writer soon after I established myself in the United team. In his company I have tried to reclaim the years and make them live again.

  In telling my story another hope is that along the way I have conveyed my thanks, above all, to the game of football which has given me so much.

  PROLOGUE

  NOW, WHEN I look back on my life and remember all that I wanted from it as a young boy in the North East, I see more clearly than ever it is a miracle. I see one privilege heaped upon another. I wonder all over again how so much could come to one man simply because he was able to do something which for him was so natural and easy, and which he knew from the start he loved to do more than anything else.

  None of this wonderment is lessened by knowing that when I played football I was probably as dedicated as any professional could be, though I claim no great credit for this. Playing was, in all honesty, almost as natural as breathing. No, the truth is that, although I did work hard at developing the gifts I’d been given, the path of my life truly has been a miracle granted to me. Why, I cannot explain. But in Munich in 1958 I learned that even miracles come at a price.

  Mine, until the day I die, is the tragedy which robbed me of so many of my dearest friends who happened to be team-mates – and of so many of the certainties that had come to me, one as seamlessly as another, in my brief and largely untroubled life up to that moment.

  Even now, fifty years on, it still reaches down and touches me every day. Sometimes I feel it quite lightly, a mere brush stroke across an otherwise happy mood. Sometimes it engulfs me with terrible regret and sadness – and guilt that I walked away and found so much. But whatever the severity of its presence, the Munich air crash is always there, always a factor that can never be discounted, never put down like time-exhausted baggage.

  I hope I do not say any of this in a maudlin or self-pitying way – how could I when I consider the lightness of the cost to me when I compare it with the price paid by the young men whose lives I shared so deeply and who so quickly had become like brothers? I confront Munich immediately only because the meaning of it, its implications, its legacy in my spirit, and the unshakeable memory of it, are still so central to my existence.

  It would be possible to list a thousand good things that have happened to me before I deal with the moment I regained consciousness and faced that hellish scene at the airfield. With my first glance I saw that one beloved team-mate was dead after suffering injuries I could never bring myself to describe – and then Sir Matt Busby groaning and holding his chest as he sat in a pool of water. I could delve into so much that has been a joy to me before I come to the sight of seven of my team-mates laid out in the snow.

  That, however, would be an evasion, a cosmetic device to obscure the truth I have lived with since 6 February 1958: that everything I have been able to achieve since that day – including the winning of the European Cup and the World Cup and being linked, inextricably, with two of the greatest players the world has ever seen, George Best and Denis Law – has been accompanied by a simple question: why me?

  Why was I able to run my hands over my body and find that I was still whole when Roger Byrne, Eddie Colman, Liam ‘Billy’ Whelan, David Pegg, Tommy Taylor, Mark Jones and Geoff Bent lay dead, and Duncan Edwards, who I loved and admired so intensely, faced an unavailing battle for his life? Why had I been picked out to inherit so much of what they, in the first surge of brilliant youth, had achieved so beautifully?

  One of the few certainties that replaced my original belief that anything could be achieved in the presence of such great footballers is that I will never stop asking that question – no more than I will be able to shed those feelings of guilt at my own survival which can come to me so suddenly at any moment, night or day.

  For many reasons it is not easy to speak of these things, not least because of the sensitivities of those who were left behind by the disaster, all those loved ones whose lives suddenly became so hollow. Even now, when I happen to meet them I suspect they are asking the question, ‘How was it that you survived and the others didn’t?’ But then something I learned beyond all else, after the first shock had been absorbed, was that whatever happens to you, whatever hurt you sustain, and however it is measured, you always have at least two options. One is to submit to the impact of such a catastrophe, the other is to draw strength from those around you, and go on.

  That I was able to take the latter course is a matter for gratitude that can never be adequately expressed, though I will do my best as my story unfolds. As the weeks and months extended into years there were so many points of support and inspiration. My team-mates and fellow survivors Harry Gregg and Bill Foulkes were the first to meet the challenge and show the way. They did it with courage and determination and their example taught me one of the greatest lessons I would learn. Then there were so many others. They ranged from my family in the North East, who reclaimed me from the hospital in Germany when I was still stunned and so dislocated, to Jimmy Murphy, Busby’s ferociously committed assistant, and my dear friend Nobby Stiles, who would share the supreme moments of my football life at the finals of the World Cup and European Cup. Most importantly, my wife Norma and our daughters, Suzanne and Andrea, gave true meaning to the rest of my life.

  Beyond such key figures, the cast which shaped my world – gave me my values and my guidance – is so vast that it touches every moment of my account of the days that were moulded by the first important discovery I made as a boy: that I would never do anything more naturally, or so well, as play football. That was the gift which was retained only miraculously in the horror of that Bavarian night.

  I need to go back before Munich now if I am to provide any insight into what was the central drama of my life, something which informed, inevitably, all that came after. I need to try to recreate the sheer, uncomplicated thrill that came with being a member of this young team. A team which, perhaps more than any other in the history of the game, was filled not only with talent but with what seemed a grace which came from some unchartable source, something beyond even the planning and the vision of the great Busby.

  We felt nothing was beyond us as we talked so animatedly and laughed on that journey home from Belgrade, where we had played with great maturity to reach the semi-finals of the European Cup. In two days we were to face Wolves in another game of vital importance, one which could well prove decisive in our pursuit of a third straight league title. The sky was low and filled with snow as we landed in Munich for refuelling, but we saw little or no reason to doubt that our own horizons stretched out quite seamlessly.

  It was a mood which so cheerfully overcame a long and irksome journey, as most of our travelling was in those days. In less optimistic circumstances I might have been more conscious of my dislike for this particular aircraft bearing us down through the low clouds, a chartered British European Airways Elizabethan. Since the first time I had flown in one, I had been made uneasy by the length of time it took to get airborne. The plane seemed to need an age to get off the ground. The Elizabethan felt like a heavy aircraft, one that needed a long runway and plenty of time to produce sufficient speed. It was all right after you had completed the ascent. You were reassured then by the steady throb of the engines. The first time I experienced a take-off in the plane I found myself saying, under my breath, ‘This is a long one.’

  When we put down in Munich you couldn’t help noticing all the slushy snow on the runway, and as we had coffee in the terminal I imagined they would be clearing it away. Today, I suppose, it would take just a few minutes. There was no tension as we talked eagerly about the days ahead. We were, after all, the team who could apparently do anything. In the last few days we had beaten Arsenal in what some said was the most spectacular game ever seen at Highbury, and in Belgrade we had been equal to anything thrown at us by the tough and skilful players of Red Star. Now we were in the hands of an airline which surely knew, just as we did in our own world, what t
hey were doing.

  Even after two aborted take-offs, and a second visit to the terminal for another coffee, as far as I was concerned the spell was scarcely broken. Some players had changed seats, moved to places which they considered safer, but doing that never occurred to me or my companion on the leg from Belgrade, Dennis Viollet. Later, though, when I stood on the cold field in a state of disbelief and shock, I was glad that I had decided to keep on my overcoat. Why did I do that, why was it that I was able to remove the coat and place it on Busby as he waited on the wet tarmac desperately in need of medical assistance?

  By the third attempt at take-off, conversation had dwindled almost to nothing. Dennis and I no longer talked about the growth of the team and the possibilities offered by the Wolves game. I looked out of the window and as I did so I was suddenly conscious of the silence inside the plane. Outside, the snowy field flew by, but not quickly enough it seemed. I knew it was too long when I saw the fence and then we were on the house. There was an awful noise, the grind of metal on metal. Then there was the void.

  When I came to, I was on the ground, outside the wrecked plane, but still strapped into my seat. Dennis had been pulled out of his seat and was lying beside me, conscious but obviously hurt. Later, I learned that Harry Gregg and Bill Foulkes had helped to get some of the injured out of the plane.

  I could hear sirens blaring and then Dennis said, ‘What’s the matter, Bobby, what’s gone on?’ Instantly I regretted my reply, which was, ‘Dennis, it’s dreadful.’ He was not in a good condition and at that point I should have protected him from the worst of the truth, but as the horror was overwhelming me, I suppose I was removed from rational thought. I saw the bodies in the snow, though one small and passing mercy was that I didn’t recognise among the dead either of my closest friends, Eddie Colman, who with his family had befriended me so warmly in my early days at Old Trafford, and David Pegg from Yorkshire, who shared my roots in the mining community. In addition to my seven, ultimately eight, fallen team-mates, the carnage that confronted my still blinking and dazed eyes had robbed another fourteen, and in time fifteen, souls of their lives – a combination of team officials, journalists, flight personnel and a travelling supporter, who, like us all, had been expected home that evening.