In late July 1966, a nervous nation sat glued to their TV screens as England took on Portugal in the World Cup semi-final. But Bob Charlton — the father of the two brothers who were the lynchpins of that England team — was 360ft underground, cutting coal at Linton Colliery in Ashington. He was only told the score when he came to the surface. That vignette came to mind with the passing this month of Jack Charlton, who was always proud of his roots in the Northumberland coalfield. His life represented so much that was distinctive in Northumbrian culture — from his love of working men’s clubs to his passion for the countryside of his native county — that his death felt like a genuine watershed as that old world slips further from our grasp.
For the most perfect summation of how his Northumbrian upbringing shaped the man who became one of the greatest footballers, and football managers, of his generation, turn to the 1971 Tyne Tees TV documentary Big Jack’s Other World. It is a joyful, time-travelling 25 minutes, as Jack returns to Ashington for a weekend of whippet racing, brass bands and pints in the club. For me, it was almost exquisitely painful to watch: having grown up in Northumberland in the 1980s, I saw the glowing embers of the pit village life he describes so fondly, as well as characters who look and speak and laugh like the kind, hard-working folk I knew in places like New Hartley and Seaton Delaval.
For Northumbrians, “h’yem” (home), has a more profound meaning than just the place where one lives. It means belonging to a homeland, a heimat; it evokes the spirit of the Welsh hiraeth, or the Portuguese saudade — that sense of longing for a missing time and place.
What’s so striking about this film about Jack’s homecoming is the magnetic personality of the man himself. He’s a natural in front of camera, displaying an easy charm as he meets his old neighbours, and respectfully asks if he can have a look inside 114 Beatrice Street, the colliery row where he grew up and shared a bed with his three brothers until he left home to join Leeds United. Not only is Ashington the only English town to have three native World Cup winners — Jack and Bobby Charlton, plus the England cricketer Mark Wood — but Beatrice Street alone produced three Footballers of the Year: the Burnley and England star Jimmy Adamson grew up there, too.
When Andy Haldane, Chief Economist at the Bank of England, visited Ashington in 2018 he was struck by just how badly depleted the town had been by 40 years of decline. In a speech, he remarked that what he saw of the town’s local economy had shocked him, even as he was impressed by the warmth of its people. In his words, here was “barren economic tundra, permanently leeched of nutrients“.
But in Big Jack’s Other World, we see Ashington at perhaps its most confident and prosperous: the pits were still major employers, Station Road was the biggest shopping area between Newcastle and Edinburgh (with one of the grandest Co-op stores in the North of England), and the working men’s clubs — of which there were dozens in the district — were genuinely luxurious, and vied with each other to have the fanciest concert rooms to attract the biggest stars.
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