Jack Charlton was the working-class anti-hero storming sport, film, music and TV - Anthony Clavane

As I was reading another tribute to the great Jack Charlton a few days ago, an email dropped into my inbox asking me to endorse a T-shirt “embracing Jack’s wider achievements”.
Many tributes have been paid to Jack Charlton. Photo: PAMany tributes have been paid to Jack Charlton. Photo: PA
Many tributes have been paid to Jack Charlton. Photo: PA

Some of you may be wondering why I have chosen, this week, to write about a footballer.

True, Charlton was a great footballer. An England World Cup winner, a Republic of Ireland giant and – most impressively of all to those who hail from the self-appointed capital of Yorkshire – the cornerstone of Don Revie’s extraordinary Leeds United side of the 1960s and early 1970s.

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

But does that justify a column in the culture section of an esteemed newspaper?

To quote the well-known Leeds United supporter Ed Miliband: “Hell yes.”

Read More
Obituary: Jack Charlton, footballer

As it happens, the article I was reading about Charlton – whose death, at the age of 85, has sparked an outpouring of grief around the globe – embraced the wider, cultural significance of one of football’s most beloved characters.

It pointed out that, in Ireland, “his imprint is everywhere”. His quotes had been turned into songs, Christy Moore had composed Joxer Goes To Stuttgart in his honour, and films, TV

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

shows and documentaries had been contrived in celebration of the adopted Irish saint.

“Jack Charlton wasn’t just a football man,” noted Ste McGovern in the Football Faithful website, “but a cultural touchstone for an entire nation… the arts reflect society at any given time and that was certainly true of the Charlton era.”

We felt the same way about him in Leeds. There are so many people, especially from my dad’s generation, who have a story about the big-hearted defender.

Almost all of them are funny ones. He spent his entire 21-year playing career at Elland Road, making a record 773 appearances and it’s little wonder the club are considering naming a stand after him.

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

The Charlton era for Loiners coincided with the moment post-industrial Leeds was discovering a new identity. As its manufacturing base disappeared it threw off the cloak of an antiquated Victorian city to cultivate the image of a thrusting, modern metropolis.

As an irascible, take-me-as-I-am, at times cantankerous, player he was the apotheosis of the working-class anti-hero storming the citadels of sport, film, pop music and television.

So it is entirely fitting that Mark Perryman, the man who emailed me about the T-shirt, is keen to commemorate Big Jack’s cultural legacy. Mark is the co-founder of Philosophy Football.

This quirky enterprise began in the 1990s with the French thinker Albert Camus, whose quote “All that I know most surely about morality and obligations I owe to football” appeared on the back of a green goalkeeper’s shirt.

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

Camus, you see, played between the sticks for Racing Universitaire d’Alger.

Since then the existentialist thoughts of Sartre, Shakespeare and Shankly – and many others – have been immortalised by the self-styled “sporting outfitters of intellectual distinction”. For the past 25 years or so, Perryman and his small team have produced 702 designs and sold more than 70,000 shirts.

It is too easy to dismiss this supposedly odd fusion of philosophy and football.

The Monty Python comics made a habit of poking fun at the idea of working-class footballers engaging with high art. Charlton’s team-mate Gary Sprake, impersonated by John Cleese, was part of a sketch featuring goalkeepers reciting poetry about the Yangtse river. Such japes.

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

And there was the match which pitted the Ancient Greeks against the Germans, with Confucius as referee. After 89 minutes of the philosophers wandering around the pitch lost in thought, a goal breaks the deadlock.

“Socrates has scored,” cries the commentator Michael Palin. “The Germans are disputing it. Hegel is arguing that the reality is merely an a priori adjunct of non-naturalistic ethics.”

Actually, that was quite funny.

When I phoned Perryman to ask him about awarding Charlton the ultimate accolade of a T-shirt, he explained: “This great man embodied Philosophy Football. He had a reach beyond football. His life was connected with things outside football, like the Anti-Nazi League. He supported the miners, enjoyed his National Service, crossed over the Irish Sea to manage another country’s team. That makes him special.”

RIP Big Jack. The original Special One.

For more stories from the YP Magazine and The Yorkshire Post features team, visit our Facebook page.

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

Editor’s note: first and foremost - and rarely have I written down these words with more sincerity - I hope this finds you well.

Almost certainly you are here because you value the quality and the integrity of the journalism produced by The Yorkshire Post’s journalists - almost all of which live alongside you in Yorkshire, spending the wages they earn with Yorkshire businesses - who last year took this title to the industry watchdog’s Most Trusted Newspaper in Britain accolade.

And that is why I must make an urgent request of you: as advertising revenue declines, your support becomes evermore crucial to the maintenance of the journalistic standards expected of The Yorkshire Post. If you can, safely, please buy a paper or take up a subscription. We want to continue to make you proud of Yorkshire’s National Newspaper but we are going to need your help.

Postal subscription copies can be ordered by calling 0330 4030066 or by emailing [email protected]. Vouchers, to be exchanged at retail sales outlets - our newsagents need you, too - can be subscribed to by contacting subscriptions on 0330 1235950 or by visiting www.localsubsplus.co.uk where you should select The Yorkshire Post from the list of titles available.

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

If you want to help right now, download our tablet app from the App / Play Stores. Every contribution you make helps to provide this county with the best regional journalism in the country.

Sincerely. Thank you.

James Mitchinson