Bobby and Jack Charlton: the brothers who won together but lived apart

A month after the 1966 World Cup final, Jack and Bobby Charlton returned to their Northumberland birthplace, Ashington, to be greeted as kings in a colliery town rechristened “Charltonville” for the day.

The brothers rode through town in an open-topped Rolls Royce for an evening of celebration topped off with a gala dance organised by the Ashington Mineworkers Federation. Perched in the vintage Rolls, in August 1966, the Charltons looked like returning movie stars. They were never to seem so close again.

It was through these streets in February 1958 that a local shopkeeper had run to tell Cissie Charlton, the boys’ mother, of a plane crash in the snow in Munich. Many who knew Bobby said the 23 deaths of the Munich air disaster induced in him survivor’s guilt and haunting emotional pain.

The Charlton boys who were paraded around Ashington never bonded in childhood. Jack was an outdoor type who resented having to watch out for his younger home-loving sibling. Divided by family discord in their post-playing lives, they were united by one terrible detail of their twilight years. Both succumbed to dementia and spent their final months in the shadowland of pain and memory loss.

Bobby and Jack Charlton are driven through Ashington as World Cup winners. Photograph: PA Images/Alamy

Jack Charlton died on 11 July 2020, aged 85, with lymphoma and dementia. Four months later, Bobby, then 83, was diagnosed with the same brutal illness. The most famous and respected English footballer disappeared from view, and has now joined the litany of 1966 World Cup winners to fall prey to dementia. Ray Wilson, Nobby Stiles, Martin Peters, Roger Hunt and both Charlton brothers were beset by a disease that also beset Alf Ramsey in his final years in suburban Ipswich.

The convergence of the Charlton brothers’ medical histories is a grim counterpoint to the fond memories each left behind, in ways as contrasting as their characters.

Bobby was to become the modest statesman of the English game and a stabilising presence at Manchester United, where he was a director all through Sir Alex Ferguson’s reign. Jack, resentful at not being granted an interview when Don Revie vacated the England manager’s job in 1977, was to enter folklore in exile as the Republic of Ireland’s manager, leading them to the 1988 European Championship finals and 1990 World Cup, where they reached the last eight.

Sir Bobby Charlton and Jack Charlton cruise the Thames by boat before a 1966 reunion dinner at the Tower of London in March 2006. Photograph: David Benett/Getty Images

The two boys who had learned the game under the tutelage of Cissie on the rough fields of Ashington diverged in physical shape, playing styles and personality. Jack was a rugged, combative, tall defensive enforcer. Bobby was a shorter, lighter, more floaty, creative attacking midfielder with a gift for pinpoint long-range shooting. He was the most naturally talented English footballer since Tom Finney. Jack on the other hand once said of himself: “The one thing I couldn’t do is play. But I was very good at stopping other people playing.”

Jack was the artisan, Bobby the artist, yet the casting of the older man as “Bobby Charlton’s brother” did a disservice to his playing career at Leeds United, where he spent 23 years and made a joint-record 773 appearances before retiring in 1973.

But Bobby had radiance and grace. His talent placed him in the thick of a late-60s global golden generation: Pelé, Eusébio, George Best and Johan Cruyff. Jack’s 35 England caps were eclipsed by Bobby’s 106. The polarities of talent and temperament were irrelevant though when the two walked out at Wembley on 30 July 1966, to face West Germany.

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By a quirk of family biology, the Northumbrian odd couple were 20% of the outfield unit in England’s only World Cup winning side. It was quite a claim for the working-class community of Ashington, where Jackie Milburn, Cissie’s cousin, had been the local hero until the Charltons came along.

The boast in east London has always been that West Ham provided 3/11ths of the England starting team – Bobby Moore, Geoff Hurst and Martin Peters. Statues near the old Upton Park and West Ham’s new home at the London Stadium memorialise those cockney bragging rights. Ramsey was from nearby Dagenham. Yet the story of the Charlton boys was an even more remarkable strand in England’s 4-2 extra-time win.

Jack Charlton looks in the direction of Ray Wilson, who is holding the trophy, and Bobby Charlton as England celebrate winning the World Cup. Photograph: Hulton Archive/Getty Images

At England level, Walter Winterbottom and then Ramsey imposed a lesson on Bobby that was to complete his ascent to greatness. The message was that playing his own expressive game in the tough world of the 1960s would stop him being remembered as a great team player. Ramsey made Charlton understand that only by helping out defensively and respecting the workings of the machine could he fully contribute to how England were trying to play.

Ramsey’s utilitarian outlook was that of a realist who knew Brazil had transformed international football. England would fall back on what they knew, with the former Ipswich manager as the unflinching organiser.

Bobby Charlton was at the mission’s core. He was receptive, obedient and deeply committed, all virtues the England manager went searching for at a time when keeping players out of the pub was almost a tactical skill. Bobby was seldom inclined to challenge the authority of “The General”, as Ramsey’s Tottenham Hotspur teammates had known him.

Jack was another matter. To Ramsey he appeared cocky and insubordinate. The England manager’s most acid put-down of his giant centre-back was to remind him that international teams weren’t always built from the best players: a reminder, to Jack, that he was in the side for qualities other than natural ability.

Jack Charlton puts an arm around Bobby at an England training session in March 1965. Photograph: Mirrorpix/Getty Images

Bobby found Ramsey’s contrived officer class brusqueness forbidding. When the England players persuaded him to confront the boss over his choice of World Cup training ground at Roehampton – the squad were staying an hour’s drive away in Hendon – Bobby returned from the meeting ashen. “Boys, don’t ever let me do that again,” he said after Ramsey had dismissed him with trademark coldness.

And yet in the final in ‘66 Jack was arguably more influential than the younger brother who had shone against Portugal in a gleaming 2-1 semi-final win. With heavy symbolism, Bobby had scored both goals while Jack gave away the 82nd-minute penalty that left England sweating on their lead for the last eight minutes.

Bobby Charlton, not Eusébio, was the star of that show, but a shock was coming. For the final, Ramsey made him man-mark the young Franz Beckenbauer. An oddity of that game is that the best players on each side were mutually nullified by their managers. Jack was more conspicuously engaged in a range of tasks: tackling, heading, blocking and bollocking, a defensive leadership task that came naturally to such a blunt speaker.

After the final whistle Jack said to Bobby: “Well, what about that kidda. What about that.”

And Bobby told him: “Jackie, our lives are never going to be the same.”

Years later Jack refused to nominate 1966 as the pinnacle of his career, explaining that he’d felt like a latecomer to a group dominated by Ramsey’s favourites, one of whom was Bobby. Instead the older Charlton settled on Leeds United’s title win in 1969.

By then Bobby was a European Cup winner as well as world champion, and part of the Holy Trinity of Best, Law and Charlton, the measure by which all Manchester United’s forward lines are judged. Bobby was in the stratosphere. Jack was an intimidating stalwart of Revie’s outlaw vibe at Leeds, though some of their play was exhilarating too.

The breakdown in their relationship was caused by friction between Cissie Charlton and Norma, Bobby’s wife. On Desert Island Discs in 1996, Jack spoke about the rupture: “I couldn’t understand why there was a rift between Bobby and my mother. Suddenly he stopped going home. I don’t know why.” Asked by Sue Lawley whether the damage was irreparable, Jack replied: “I think so.”

Sir Bobby Charlton receives the Lifetime Achievement Award from Jack during the BBC Sport Personality of the Year awards in December 2008. Photograph: David Davies/PA

In his autobiography in 2007, Bobby broke his silence: “My wife is a very strong character and does not suffer fools gladly. I am not suggesting my mother was a fool. There was a clash and it just never went away really.

“Jack came out in the newspapers saying things about my wife that were absolutely disgraceful. Nonsense. Ask anybody that ever met my wife: ‘hoity-toity’ is not a word they’d use. My brother made a big mistake. I don’t understand why he did it. He could not possibly have known her and said what he said.”

The feud was put aside for Ray Wilson’s funeral in 2018. But the two weren’t fully reconciled. Their lives ran down parallel tracks that converged beautifully on a honeyed day in 1966, but then diverged again, as if to remind the world that sibling bonds are fragile and conditional. Now the scourge of dementia has made them equal in death.

Jack Charlton has his place in football’s Elysium. “Our kid,” as he called his younger brother, arrives now cast in his own special light. If the spirit of English football had to be expressed by the recital of a single name, it would be: Bobby Charlton.