BIG JACK WAS OUR HERO FIRST
Our writer, a life-long Leeds United fan, on why Jack Charlton stood tallest of all his football heroes
LONG before Jack Charlton became a hero to all of Ireland, he was a hero in our house. In that, he wasn’t alone, to be fair. So too were Allan Clarke, Paul Madeley, Billy Bremner and all the players who took to the turf of Elland Road during the golden era of management by Don Revie.
Every child wants to meet their heroes and we were very lucky that we got to do so, many times – and Big Jack was the one who stood tallest of all, literally and metaphorically. My late father worshipped Leeds United, so there never was an option for the rest of us. Dad’s Auntie Kit and her husband Uncle Jack lived in Stanningley, 8km from the football stadium, and our annual holiday to see them always was in August, so we could go to the first match or two of the season. As it progressed, in the days when all matches kicked off at 3pm on Saturdays, Dad would take us on the Friday night boat from Dún Laoghaire to Holyhead, then the train to Leeds, which almost always meant two hours on a freezing bench at Manchester Piccadilly waiting for the connection.
Our spirits were always buoyed by the prospect of bacon sandwiches for breakfast in the cafeteria at Woolworth’s, then a trip downstairs to scoop up all the sweets you couldn’t buy in Ireland. After lunch, we would walk the 4km from the city centre to Elland Road, then get the bus to Auntie Kit’s for a quick tea before doing the whole journey in reverse, arriving home at 7am on Sunday.
During the annual holiday, we went to the training ground, back then adjacent to the stadium, running after the stars for autographs and pictures, and that’s when I first met Jack Charlton. Like all the others, he always had time for the fans, and time to give autographs to anyone who wanted one. It was astonishing to me that someone so famous would take time to chat, but he did.
At one stage, he owned a clothes shop in Garforth, and we went there one day and found Jack himself in the shop. My dad explained how passionate we all were about Leeds and we ended up talking for about 20 minutes. I don’t think I ever saw Dad as excited or elated before or after.
We really hit the jackpot, though, when we went to Elland Road one evening and found ourselves the only people in the car park. We were in an Irish-reg car in the early years of the Troubles, so naturally we were approached by a man who asked politely what we were doing, and Dad explained. Louis Plowman was a caretaker and groundsman, and far from showing us the exit, he offered us a private tour of the stadium and showed us the trophy room where the Charity Shield took pride of place. He and his wife, Lewie, became firm friends and we used to go to their house for tea every year thereafter.
And that’s how I often came in contact with Jack Charlton again, because Louis would smuggle us into the players’ lounge after the match, where Lewie worked the bar and passed bottles of minerals to us to keep us happy, and Dad would shoot us filthy looks if we got unruly. Jack’s playing career ended in 1973, when I was ten, and I never met the man again, but there was an almost family pride in our house when he became manager of the national team, and maybe even a bit of annoyance when everyone else claimed a slice of a man we considered almost personal property. When people would tell me they met him, I would say: ‘Yeah, so did I – 20 years ago…’
After Kit died in the early Nineties (in her own early nineties too, as it happens), I didn’t go to matches for years. Dad still did, though, and I was delighted he was there in person the day Leeds United won the last First Division title in 1992, before the Premiership (later the Premier League) was established.
I did return in 2006 and took a walk around the stadium. As I wrote at the time: ‘My mind drifts, and the car park suddenly is filled once again with Ford Granadas and Capris and Jensen Interceptors, the Sixties and Seventies version of the flash car. We
‘I don’t think I ever saw Dad as elated before’
are piling out of our two-tone Ford Anglia estate. My mother has jetblack hair and is wearing a turquoise knitted suit with black and white piping on the lapels. My younger sister Joyce is beside her in a mustard trouser suit. Anne has a psychedelic tunic dress on, over purple bell-bottom trousers, and Mark and I are in striped brown, yellow and green polo shirts. In the centre of it all is my dad, tall and strong and with his flyaway mop of hair slightly Brylcreemed to keep it in check.
‘In my mind’s eye, on the steps down from the training ground, I can see Charlton and Bremner and Clarke as they were then, the heroes of my childhood who took the time to give a kid a nice word and an autograph. I sit for ages, looking at ghosts, of the living as well as the dead, and leave only when the lump in my throat subsides.’
I had another lump in my throat on Saturday when I heard the news about Big Jack. Yes, I too loved the Republic of Ireland era, never more than the day I was in Giants Stadium to see us beat Italy – the first thing I did when I got back to my hotel was ring my dad, and the two of us, voices trembling with emotion, agreed that while Paul McGrath was the best asset on the day, it all came back to Jack.
I loved the Italia ’90 campaign too and, like the rest of the country, never will forget that euphoric summer of utter abandon and mayhem. My fondest memory of the gaffer, though, is of him wearing the white strip of Leeds United in a career that began 13 years before I was born. Long before he was Ireland’s favourite Englishman, he was ‘Wor Jack’.