Cissie Charlton was not only the mother of England’s most successful footballing brothers, she was also the driving force behind one of the game’s greatest comebacks.
This indomitable woman raised Jack and Bobby, the first siblings to win the World Cup, in the Northumberland mining town of Ashington, teaching them how to play football and look after themselves.
Initially, she feared her second eldest Bobby had been killed on the Munich runway on February 6, 1958.
Fraught with worry for hours after news first broke of the crash, she was eventually told of her son’s survival by the local newsagent in Ashington.
Cissie, recovering herself from a mastectomy, was then forbidden by her doctor to see Bobby recovering in a German hospital, so she missed the chartered flight with the other relatives.
But, determined to help and beat the snowstorms which had stopped trains and bus services, the next day she jumped into a newspaper delivery truck and travelled to Manchester to help out.
Cissie became an unofficial PA to stand-in manager Jimmy Murphy as he attempted to keep the club and the team running.
She became a rock for the assistant to Matt Busby, who was clinging to life in the same hospital as her son.
When the bodies of the victims were flown home from Germany, they were first kept in the club gym and Cissie would show the relatives the caskets.
She attended the funerals of players David Pegg and Eddie Colman on Bobby’s behalf.
When her son returned to England nearly a fortnight after the crash, brother Jack and his wife Pat went to Liverpool Street station in London to collect him.
Jack was in the Leeds United dressing room when he had first heard the news.
Although the club did not give him permission for time off, he travelled straight to the North East on a train with Pat to be with his mother and father.
Before they arrived at the family home, Ashington bobby Bob Turbill turned up with a telex from the Foreign Office: “Alive and well, see you later”. It was signed ‘Bobby’.
Jack later said that his brother only ever spoke to him once about the tragedy, and that was on that long car journey north from London.
Bobby spent several weeks with his parents in Ashington. His close friend Duncan Edwards died while he was there, 20 days after the crash.
Cissie tried to keep the news from him but eventually he read the signs and her mood, and she had to reveal the devastating news.
His recovery then was slow, painful and difficult.
Reporters frequently turned up at the house but he refused to do any interviews until one day Cissie reminded him he had wanted to be a reporter as a young boy.
She hoped it would galvanise him, but after he had done his first interview with the Chronicle, Bobby said he was giving up the game.
Thankfully, with some typically gentle persuasion from Cissie, a couple of chiding letters from Jimmy Murphy, and the help of the family doctor Dr McPherson, Bobby was soon on his way back to Old Trafford.