Goodbye Sir Bobby: Manchester unites to honour old-fashioned sort of hero
“He was internationally famous …” the Reverend Grace Thomas said, “but he was most at home with his family.” The head of the Manchester United Foundation John Shiels and the former United chief executive David Gill, who delivered eulogies, both made reference to his intense privacy. And that perhaps was the most striking aspect of the memorial service for Sir Bobby Charlton at Manchester Cathedral on Monday: he would have hated it, but he would have gone through with it because he recognised he had a responsibility to do so.
This was the public event; the family service will be held on Tuesday. The Football Association was represented by Prince William, Manchester United by a host of players, former players and managers and the wider football world by the likes of the Uefa president, Aleksander Ceferin, the England manager, Gareth Southgate, and the Manchester City chief executive, Ferran Soriano. It said much about Charlton’s international resonance that Real Madrid sent their former striker Emilio Butragueño, while a service was held in Charlton’s memory in Accra, the capital of Ghana.
But there was still space for private reflection from Charlton’s grandson William Balderston. A highlight of his youth, he said, was his grandfather’s improvised stories about two characters called Jelly and Custardy. “He was a brilliant storyteller,” he said. He was also, it turns out, terrifyingly reckless on a sledge and quite happy to indulge another grandson’s love of planespotting. But Munich hangs over everything: could he look at a plane, could he look at snow, and not think of that day?
All three speakers had tales of Charlton’s competitiveness. Gentleman he may have been, but he was also a winner, whether having a kickabout with the staff at Old Trafford, playing tennis with colleagues or dominoes with his grandchildren.
As well as the great and good of football, there was space for fans in the cathedral, contributing to the sense of a city uniting in honouring an old-fashioned sort of hero. Even as Storm Debi battered Manchester, thousands turned out to line the route as the cortege had wound through past Old Trafford, making one last visit to the ground that, since Charlton had listened to United beating Blackpool in the 1948 FA Cup final as a 10-year-old, had existed to him as a place of wonder. He signed amateur forms on 1 January 1953 and was still a director when he died last month.
Charlton never quite lost that sense of United as something magical, despite all the cynicism he encountered, all the let-downs, all the frustrations, the tragedy. When he first played there, for the youth team, Old Trafford was dominated by two huge warehouses stood next to the ground, one with a pale chimney and the other with a dark one. He spoke of how, while their gloom would intimidate opposing teams, their size and solidity became comforting for home players, emblematic of the “dark but vital sprawl” of Manchester.
The cortege had passed by the statue of the Holy Trinity – Charlton, George Best and Denis Law – held closer in bronze than, very different characters, they ever were in life. The last time the three were together was shortly before Best’s death, 18 years ago, when Charlton and Law met at Stockport station and travelled to London to visit their former teammate as he lay dying in hospital. All their previous acrimony, rendered trivial in the face of mortality, fell away. The following Saturday, before United’s league game at West Ham, Charlton put on the dark suit and the black tie again, and took his sombre place in a brief ceremony by the side of the pitch at Upton Park, another commemoration after so many.
The cortege had passed through a guard of honour comprising members of the under-18 and under-21 sides, across the stadium concourse by the clock stopped forever at the time of the tragedy, along Trinity Way and Chapel Street, where the Brown Bull, a favourite haunt of Best, used to stand, and then over Victoria Bridge to Manchester Cathedral for the final memorial service of a life that was full of them. Charlton had been too badly injured in the crash to attend the funerals of those who had died at Munich, and admitted he didn’t think he could have coped with the public expressions of grief. But he would always be there on the anniversaries or at the funerals of those who had survived. It would always be on his mind. Even as he spoke to Best on his deathbed, he said: “I whispered to him, as I had to Duncan Edwards and Matt Busby all those years before.” For him, death was Munich, and Munich was death.
In a sense his whole life was a memorial for Munich. Charlton memorialised the dead in the excellence of his football, and he did it again in the dignity of his remembrance. And at the end came his own memorial which, as the last survivor, was also, inevitably, a memorial for Munich and the ideal that was ended amid the slush and the snow.
He spoke of the 18 months before Munich, between scoring on his debut against Charlton Athletic on 6 October 1956 and the 3-3 draw at Red Star Belgrade on 5 February 1958 that secured progress to the European Cup semi-final, as “paradise”. He was playing brilliant attacking football with his contemporaries, other young lads who were not just teammates but good friends. It was carefree but successful, fun but glorious and it had already brought one league title when British European Airways Flight 609 crashed on take-off after refuelling at Munich. In a moment, paradise was lost.
Stephanie Morgans, the widow of Kenny Morgans, one of the other survivors of Munich, remembered those prelapsarian days. “There’s a couple of them who were lads,” she said, “but not Bobby.” She recalled how the Babes would all go to the same tailor on Deansgate to have suits made in whatever style Eddie Colman had decreed was fashionable. When they started listening to Frank Sinatra, they all started wearing trilbies. Again, Munich quickly intrudes: it was singing Sinatra songs, particularly Only the Lonely, that got Charlton through the days in Ashington as he recovered.
There is a sense in which everything Charlton did afterwards – from his scepticism about the systems football of the 1960s to the soccer schools he established (from which David Beckham graduated) – was an attempt to honour those days. A sense of duty was deep-rooted in his character but he seems to have felt a profound responsibility to his talent: when so many of his friends had been denied the chance to exercise their abilities, he had to use his to the utmost, which is why his reaction to the three big Wembley final successes of his career – the FA Cup in 1963, the World Cup in 1966 and the European Cup in 1968 – seems to have been of relief more than joy.
The service, perhaps, can be seen in a similar light. It was perfectly judged, from Abide With Me to Jerusalem, but for such a private and humble man, somebody his grandson said had never once given “a subtle brag or hint of pride at his outstanding achievements”, his own memorial service was perhaps the one he would have attended least willingly, that he would have regarded as one more duty to be done.