SIR BOBBY CHARLTON was a dashing cavalier on the football field, but he has often been seen as a diffident, even dour, personality away from it.

“A grizzlin’ old misery,” was how he was once described by the former manager Ron Atkinson. Sir Bobby is the very opposite of his voluble elder brother Jack, who loves the sound of his own voice and revels in controversy.

In contrast, Sir Bobby is shy, uncomfortable with his celebrity status and awkward on the public stage. And where Jack has long displayed a rebellious streak, his younger brother is the ultimate establishment figure, a director of Manchester United and global ambassador for English football.

It might be expected, therefore, that his book would be dull, bland and platitudinous. Nothing could be farther from the truth.

This first volume of autobiography, covering his childhood and his years with Manchester United, as a player and in the boardroom, has an easy, flowing narrative and a host of memorable passages about key moments. The horror of the Munich air crash in February 1958, when most of the brilliant young United team was wiped out, looms large. Charlton, who vividly describes how the tragedy unfolded on a snow-filled runway on a bleak Bavarian afternoon, admits that he has been haunted by the disaster since, through a mix of survivor’s guilt and a sense of loss at the deaths of so many of his closest friends in football.

“Sometimes I feel it quite lightly,” he writes, “A mere brush stroke across an otherwise happy mood. Sometimes it engulfs me with terrible regret and sadness.”

As he explains, the trauma forced him to grow up quickly as, still aged only 20, he had to take on responsibility for galvanising the remnants of the side.

Sir Bobby is also interesting on his austere childhood in Ashington, Northumberland, where he was born into a mining family. He inherited his talent from his mother’s side – most of her nearest male relatives were professional footballers, Jackie Milburn, the dazzling Newcastle United and England striker being the most famous. Charlton, who confesses to an awkward and later fractious relationship with his football-mad mother, Cissie, is eager to demolish the myth that her coaching had a big influence on him. Uncles and schoolmasters played a bigger role, he says.

It is refreshing, however, that Charlton avoids the sort of false modesty that litters too many sporting autobiographies. There are no sentences beginning: “Imagine my surprise when I was selected for the Northumberland Under14s . . .” From an early age, he was destined for a career in football.

Sir Bobby comes across as a man of fundamental decency. It is impossible not to be touched by his romantic devotion to his wife Norma or to Manchester United, the two great pillars of his life. Because of his old-fashioned chivalry, he admits that it was difficult to write about his bitter feud with Jack, which has left the brothers barely on speaking terms. As he accepts, it would have been dishonest to write an autobiography without touching on this subject. What shines through is his anger at the way that Cissie refused to accept Norma into the family.

Jack, relishing the role of the dutiful son, took his mother’s side, while Bobby stood by his wife. But he does not reveal the full depths of the rift, perhaps because he is unaware of them. I was recently told that when his father was dying of cancer in 1982, he said on his deathbed to Cissie that if “wor Bobby” sent flowers for the funeral, they should be thrown on the fire.

Charlton has greatly benefitted from having the distinguished sports writer James Lawton as co-author. Lawton helped to produce the brilliant, often poignant, autobiographies of those 1966 World Cup stars George Cohen and Nobby Stiles. The same skill is on display again, not only in the rich commentaries of Manchester United’s glory days, particularly the 1968 European Cup victory, but also in the pen-portraits of United players of his time.

There are a number of hilarious descriptions of the clumsiness of Nobby Stiles, whose Inspector Clouseau-like touch could create mayhem. Once, sharing a hotel room with Charlton, he demolished a radio, pulled the curtains off the wall, and sent a bathroom shelf crashing to the ground, all in five minutes.

My only regret, as someone who has researched Sir Bobby’s life, is that he does occasionally pull his punches. He is, perhaps, too generous about George Best, who treated him – and everyone else at United – with disgraceful contempt in the early 1970s.

He has nothing to say about the match-fixing scandal of the early 1960s, in which United were implicated, and his coverage of the club’s decline after 1968 is a little thin. Nor is he revealing about Sir Matt Busby, the architect of the club’s postwar revival, a complex, contradictory character, who carried a whiff of a Catholic godfather about him.

But for anyone who loves football, this book cannot be ignored. I await with eagerness the second volume, on his England career.

THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY My Manchester United Years by Sir Bobby Charlton

Headline, £20; 388pp

Buy the book here for the offer price of £18 (free p&p)

The Bobby dazzler

For those who never saw Bobby Charlton play, his style was beautifully captured in Arthur Hopcraft’s classic The Football Man, published in 1968

The flowing line of Charlton’s football has no disfiguring barbs in it, but there is a heavy and razor-sharp arrowhead at its head. It is the combination of the graceful and the dramatic which makes him so special. There are few players who affect a crowd’s responses as much as he does. Something extraordinary is expected of him the moment he receives the ball. He can silence a crowd instantly, make it hold its breath in expectation. A shot from Charlton, especially if hit on the run from outside the penalty area, is one of the great events of the sport, not because it is rare, which it is not, but because the power of it is massive and it erupts out of elegance; he is never clumsy or desperate in movement; he can rise very close to the athletic ideal. . . .

Charlton makes his own rules for dealing with a football. He is a player to admire, but not for younger ones to copy. When he strikes the ball he often has his head up high, instead of looking down over the ball as the coaches teach. He will flick at it with the outside of his left foot when leaning back looking at the sky. When players on his own side are unaccustomed to him they often find that the ball comes to them, having miraculously been “bent” around some obstructing opponent, spinning violently and therefore difficult to control; only the best can take advantage of such passes, as Denis Law, Best and Jimmy Greaves (in the international side) all have.

Times Recommends

• Superfreakonomics by Steven D Levitt and Stephen J Dubner
• The Times picks the 50 best paperbacks of 2009
• Vincent van Gogh’s letters show the soul of the artist