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

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brother Jack had played no role in the saga of Bobby’s move to United. There was no army of scouts after him, no club representative offering Cissie a fistful of cash for his services. Yet it is one of the strange twists of this story that Jack was actually taken on by a League club before Bobby. For most of his early years, Jack had rarely impressed anyone with his football. He was merely another competent youngster, a decent stopper of the kind that could be found throughout the north-east. He played for his school, district and YMCA side, but did not come near to his county team, never mind the England Schoolboys. In fact, he was dropped for several games from his district because of his habit of standing still, as if wondering what had happened, when he was beaten by a winger. ‘You’ll have to sharpen your wits up,’ he was told. Evan Martin says: ‘I remember watching Jack playing for the East Northumberland Juniors. He was at left-back and he was big, gangly and awkward. He did not impress me one bit.’

      Indeed, it is a remarkable fact that the man who later gained a World Cup winner’s medal could not even get in the Ashington FC junior team. Ken Prior, who grew up with Jack, explains: ‘Jimmy Denmark, the former Newcastle centre-half, came to manage Ashington and the club decided to have a junior side. So the call went out for all the budding youngsters to come to Portland Park. We had a trial and Jack did not even get picked for the final squad. I didn’t think he played too badly but he did not stand out, certainly not for his size. Jack went home, a bit upset, and after he’d gone, Jimmy Denmark said, “You know, that lad will never make a player.”’

      Yet, as he approached his 15th birthday, there was something about Jack – his size, his strength, above all his ‘Milburn’ heritage – which meant that he could attract the interest of a League club. After playing well for the Ashington YMCA Under-18 side in a match against Barkworth, he was approached by a Leeds scout, who offered him a trial at Elland Road. In his later career, Jack would sometimes maintain that he, like Bobby, was always destined to be a professional footballer. ‘Neither of us had ever considered anything but playing the game for a living,’ he told the News of the World in April 1973.

      But this was hardly true. For Jack had never shown any inclination towards professional football, and, in a rare moment of self-doubt, he feared that if he took up the offer from Leeds, he might not make the grade because of his lack of talent. He saw himself as a big, gangly lad who was not really good enough. Going to Leeds risked the pain of rejection. As he once explained to Mike Kirkup, ‘The only way you could get away from Ashington was to play football. But there was always the worry that you might not make it, and would get sent home again. Then you would come back as a failure.’ Moreover, Jack loved the teenage life he had created for himself in the Northumberland countryside. If he left home for a big city like Leeds, he would no longer be able to fish and poach and shoot. Nor were his parents enthusiastic. In another illustration of how Jack felt he was excluded by his mother in favour of Bobby, he says that ‘She didn’t think I was good enough for professional football.’ Indeed, Cissie held Jack’s skills in such contempt that, when she first heard of the interest from Leeds, she felt that there had been some mistake. The club must have confused him with Bobby. ‘I was amazed because although Jack enjoyed his football, he just wasn’t the same calibre as Bobby,’ she wrote.

      Due to his mother’s dismissive attitude and his own reluctance, Jack told Leeds that he was not interested. Now, with the end of his time at school approaching, he had to find a job. And the obvious one was coalmining. ‘At that time in Ashington there were only the pits; there was very little else, really,’ he recalls. So he followed his father into work at the Linton colliery. Initially, because he was serving his apprenticeship, Jack did not have to go underground. Instead, his first job was to stand by a conveyor belt for eight hours, sorting out the coal from debris as it came up from the mine. Never a patient man – except on the river – Jack found the work unbearably dull and kept asking for a move.

      His badgering paid off. He was transferred to the weigh-cabin, where his task was to weigh the wagons before and after they were filled with coal, calculate the difference, then write the weight on the trucks before they were shunted into the sidings. Jack enjoyed his work there. ‘Sometimes there was a quiet period when no coal was coming down and that was great. You could draw little things with a piece of stone. It was an artist’s paradise. There were footballers, goals, nudes, everything. Some men worked there forever.’ The other great advantage for Jack was that the sidings ran out on to land full of rabbits. This provided ample scope for his homemade snares, and Jack would regularly catch three or four a day, selling them on to the other miners. ‘I usually left the pit at least two shillings richer than when I arrived.’

      But it could not last. Jack was told that he had been selected to go on a 16-week training course in preparation for becoming a fully-fledged miner. As part of this induction, he was shown what work was like in the pit. Jack was appalled by the experience of his first trip underground: the cramped conditions, crawling on his hands and knees along a seam only three feet high; the noise from the explosives; the dust which went everywhere, including eyes and lungs; the gale force blasts of air from the ventilation system.

      Returning to the surface, Jack handed in his resignation straight away, to the anger of the colliery manager.

      ‘We’ve just spent a fortune training you. If you walk away now, I’ll see that you never get another job in the pit – anywhere.’

      ‘I don’t want another job in the pit.’

      Jack already had another option lined up. Two weeks earlier, with a sense of foreboding about the job in the colliery, he had applied to become a police cadet. Now Jack could not be regarded as one of nature’s law enforcers, and his motivation was suitably vague. ‘I was getting close to six feet in height. That, to my young mind, seemed as good a reason as any why I should try for the police.’ Impressed with Jack’s application, the Northumberland Constabulary summoned him to an interview.

      But then fate, in the form of Leeds United, intervened. Despite the earlier rebuff, the club had not given up hope of attracting Jack and now another invitation arrived for a trial. This time Jack, having seen the misery of life underground, was much more receptive to the idea of becoming a professional footballer. He knew the truth, though, that Leeds’ interest was partly motivated by his close family connection with the club, with three of his uncles having been players there and one of them, Jimmy, still in the squad. ‘When I got the offer of a trial, I knew it was right nepotism,’ Jack once said.

      The immediate problem for Jack was a logistical one. His police interview was in Morpeth on Friday afternoon, while his trial at Leeds was early the following Saturday morning. In the days before motorways, there was no physical way he could get to both places within this timescale. So Jack decided to abandon the police interview, instead travelling down on Friday to Leeds with his parents. The trial was to be the most important match of his young life. If he succeeded, a new future in soccer beckoned. If he failed, there was little chance that any other club would show an interest.

      Snow was falling that Saturday morning at Elland Road as Jack ran out to play for Leeds Juniors against the Newcastle youth team. He was in his customary left-back position, and, in the difficult conditions, he was not sure he had done enough to impress. But the club thought otherwise, admiring his height and solid style. After the game he was summoned into the office of the club secretary, Arthur Crowther.

      ‘We’d like you to join the ground staff, Charlton.’

      ‘Do you really think I’m good enough?’

      Of course. Why do you think we’d want you if we didn’t.’

      Jack went home with his parents on Sunday to pick up his belongings, before returning to Leeds to report for duty on the Monday. Any ideas about becoming a policeman had been ditched as quickly as the career in mining. Despite barely giving the matter a thought, he had somehow become a professional footballer. His only anxiety now was whether he would succeed. What he dreaded, above all else, was being forced to return to Ashington, labelled a failure.

      Jack

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