Sir Charlton wasn't defined by the tragedy showed just how extraordinary he was

When Bobby Charlton, 20, awoke on the Munich airfield, still strapped to his airline seat, with debris all around him, the plane broken up and the blizzard still swirling, he turned to his side to see a team-mate lying dead.

Dennis Viollet, the team's centre forward, who was nearby, started to come round and, bewildered, asked what was going on. 'Dennis,' replied Charlton. 'It's dreadful.'

In an age in which post-traumatic stress wasn't understood and survivors' guilt would have been considered an indulgence, Charlton dealt with much of this alone.

A post-war generation of men who were familiar with sudden death - Charlton's doctor related how he had flown RAF sorties the day after watching a mate die - would have advised it was best to simply get on with things. In Charlton's case, that meant returning to be the figurehead of Manchester United and England and winning World and European Cups.

Yet whenever you met the amiable and imposing Sir Bobby Charlton in later life, the legend of English football, it was hard not occasionally to stop and recall the horrors he must have seen.

'There was very little wrong with me physically but I could not stop thinking about the accident,' Charlton once said. 'I felt drained of all emotion. Why me? Why should I be left?'

There were 23 fatalities on that Munich runway from the aborted take-off of the plane taking the United team home from their European Cup quarter-final in Belgrade. Many were among Charlton's closest friends, such as the great Duncan Edwards, who had taken Charlton under his wing when he arrived at the club and again when they did national service together.

Or the likes of David Pegg and Tommy Taylor, with whom he had shared digs as a United apprentice.

Charlton would have