Leo McKinstry - Jack and Bobby - A story of brothers in conflict

This chasm between Bobby and Jack covers every aspect of their lives, from the playing styles to their political outlook. In truth, it is not just that they are different, but that they are almost opposites. On the football field, for instance, Jack was the Roundhead, Bobby the Cavalier. Bobby’s entire game was focused on scoring goals, Jack’s on stopping them. Bobby’s football vocabulary was dominated by words like creative, opening, expansive and flair, whereas Jack’s was filled with terms like keeping it tight and closing them down. A 0–0 draw was a triumph for Jack, a disaster for Bobby. Where Bobby was hailed by international critics for his attacking genius, Jack was seen as the epitome of rugged English defending.

In action, Bobby was lithe and fluent, while Jack was angular and hard. Hardly a soul would pay to watch Jack Charlton play; millions did to watch Bobby. Even the most cynical professionals admit that when Bobby was in full flow, there was no more beautiful sight in football. In 1969 The Times football correspondent Geoffrey Green wrote this famous description of Bobby’s approach: ‘It is the explosive facets of his play that will remain in the memory. His thinning, fair hair streaming in the wind, he has moved like a ship in full sail. He always possessed an elemental quality; jinking, changing feet and direction, turning gracefully on the ball, or accelerating through a gap surrendered by a confused enemy.’ Contrast that lyricism with the words of Bobby Moore about Jack: ‘Some days we would be going out and I’d look at him and wonder how this big giraffe played football. We used to argue black and blue because I wanted to get the ball down and play the game and he wanted to hoof it away to safety.’ In the same way, Bobby played far more within the rules of the game. During his long career, he was only booked twice, and both of those were in dubious circumstances when he had not committed any foul but was deemed to have shown dissent. ‘He was like a giant who would kick anything. If you were in the way, you went with it. He was hard, really hard,’ says Tony Allen of Stoke and England.

Jack and Bobby were from the Milburn footballing clan of Northumberland. But their football reflected the two different sides of this family. So Jack followed in the footsteps of his four uncles, who were all uncompromising defenders with top-class clubs, and his great-grandfather Jack Milburn, who was known to local fans as ‘Warhorse’. Bobby took much more after his mother’s cousin, the great Newcastle and England striker Jackie Milburn, whose brilliant goals in the 1950s made him perhaps the most loved of all Geordie footballers.

Physically, Jack and Bobby do not look like brothers at all. ‘Bobby is handsome, whereas Jack is ugly,’ is the rather brutal verdict of former Liverpool winger Peter Thompson. Jack is gangly, 6’ 3", thin, with a long neck and telescopic legs and ‘looks like a cactus’, according to Brian Labone, his England rival for the centre-half position. Bobby is much shorter, just 5’ 9”, and, when he was a player, he was built like an athlete. ‘When we were in first in the dressing room together,’ says Bob McNab of Arsenal and England, ‘what really struck me about Bobby was his magnificent physique. We worked out at Arsenal more than at most other clubs, but it really impressed me how strong Bobby was. I could not believe what he looked like. Besides his supreme gifts as a footballer, God gave him a great body to go with it.’ In contrast, McNab claims that Jack was ‘a big, horrible bugger, not likely to win any fashion competition’.

There is just as big a contrast in their personalities. Jack is explosive, gregarious, self-confident, and voluble. A brilliant after-dinner speaker, he loves an audience and speaking his mind. ‘He would argue anything with anyone,’ says his wife Pat. Forgetful and disorganised, he cares little about his appearance and became notorious in the football world for his untidiness in both the dressing room and hotels.

Every one of these traits is absent in Bobby. A stickler for punctuality, he is always well groomed. Where Jack does not have a shy bone in his body, shyness is the word that is most frequently used about Bobby. This characteristic is sometimes regarded as aloofness, a charge often labelled at him by some hardcore Manchester United fans of today. In the football fraternity, his occasional reluctance to greet others has caused more offence than his brother’s expression of his forthright views. Former United manager Ron Atkinson has even described him as a ‘grizzlin’ old misery, a dour, very distant individual.’ The truth is that Bobby, because of his self-conscious, reserved nature, is wary of strangers and dislikes large public gatherings, much preferring the company of a small circle of trusted friends. Hearing the sound of his own voice is a delight to Jack, an anathema to Bobby.

With his fiery temper and rhinoceros hide, Jack can dish it out and take it much more easily than Bobby, who is sensitive to criticism and cannot ignore a slight. John Giles recalls, ‘I would have a blazing row with Jack on Saturday. We would even be grabbing each other by the throat, especially because Jack has a short fuse, and over the weekend I would think about it. On Monday I would come in and say, “Sorry Jack,” and he would have genuinely forgotten about it. Bobby would be different. He would take a row to heart, and might not speak for a week afterwards.’ Because of his willingness to express his opinions, Jack’s career has been littered with public controversies, perhaps most notoriously over his claim, made on television in 1970, that he had ‘a little black book’ in which he kept the names of his footballing enemies. It turned out to be a joke, for the ‘little black book’ existed only in Jack’s volatile imagination. But the row did him untold damage at the Football Association, perhaps ensuring that he was never appointed to the England management job he wanted so badly. Bobby, on the other hand, became a standard bearer for the English game, serving as a director of Manchester United and an ambassador for England’s World Cup bid in 2006.

Yet the same diplomatic streak meant Bobby was doomed to fail in management when he took over at Preston. Unlike his brother, he did not have the outward strength of personality needed to cope with the endless conflicts of the manager’s job. Furthermore, because he was such a gifted footballer, playing by natural instinct, he never had to analyse the game too deeply. So when it came to tactics and patterns of play, he struggled. But Jack, with far less ability, had long been fascinated by systems, and was a qualified FA coach before he was 30. Unlike Bobby, he had no reluctance about stamping his methods on every team he organized. He knew exactly what he wanted, whether it be at Middlesbrough or Ireland, and he would brook no arguments. ‘It was Jack’s way or you didn’t play,’ says David Kelly, who served under Jack with the Republic of Ireland.

The gap between them runs far beyond football. They also have completely different interests, with Jack liking country pursuits such as shooting and Bobby preferring the more suburban activity of golf. Where Jack cultivates the image of the cloth-capped countryman, with a gun in his hands and wellingtons on his feet, Bobby is much more at ease in the director’s box, wearing a dapper suit or blazer. Despite the Munich crash, Bobby loves to travel all over the world, whereas Jack is always at his happiest in the fields of his native Northumberland. Bobby is essentially conservative in his outlook, while Jack is a staunch socialist.

This sense of difference goes right back to the brothers’ childhood in Ashington. Tellingly, Jack went to secondary school, while Bobby went to grammar school. Again, the separation of pupils along grammar and secondary lines was one of the great fault lines of working class life until the arrival of comprehensive education in the 1960s. Yet, while the gap between Bobby and Jack was undoubtedly exacerbated by their schooling, they were always travelling on different paths from their early years, since they were such very different children. Jack was the rebel, Bobby the conformist. Trouble was an alien word to Bobby. It was Jack’s middle name.