The Old Un’s Notes
Oldie Towers is in mourning for Sir Roger Bannister, the first man to run a mile in under four minutes, in 1954.
He was also an eminent neurologist, Master of Pembroke College, Oxford, and our Oldie Long Distance Runner of the Year in 2015. When he graced Oldie Towers with his presence, he charmed everyone with his exceptional modesty and wit.
In his Oldie of the Year speech, he recalled running in the fathers’ race at his children’s school in the 1960s. Sir Roger didn’t bother putting on running clothes; he remembered wearing a waistcoat, fastened with gold buttons. When it came to the race, all the other fathers were obsessed with beating the great man. Sir Roger remembered it as literally a close-run thing; he won, he said, by the gold buttons on his waistcoat.
Sir Roger wasn’t knighted until 1975, when he was 46.
The folly of dishing out knighthoods during sportsmen’s brief careers was embarrassingly exposed by the doubts cast on the achievements of Sir Bradley Wiggins. An MPS’ report found that Team Sky ‘crossed an ethical line’ by using drugs – that were allowed under anti-doping rules – to enhance performance instead of just for medical purposes.
Sir Roger received his ‘K’ in later life, principally for his neurological work on Parkinson’s disease. It should further have humbled today’s pampered professionals that, on the day of his recordbreaking mile, he put in a full morning’s work at hospital and was up celebrating till 5.30am the following morning in a nightclub with his two pacemakers and the trio’s girlfriends. Today, such understandable high jinks would probably have lost him his sponsors. He was back at work in hospital a few hours later.
Sportsmen are rewarded enough during their brief careers, especially financially. Sir Roger did not receive a penny for his momentous mile; glory was all. To earn a title, they need to do something more than win sporting events.
That Oldie of the Year ceremony of 2015 is doubly fringed in mourning black. That was the year we gave Sir Ken Dodd, a fan of the magazine, the supreme Oldie of the Year award. The prize welcomed Doddy back from the establishment cold after it was discovered that he had not paid tax on £350,000 of cash hidden in his house. ‘I told the Inland Revenue I didn’t owe them a penny because I lived near the seaside,’ he said.
When Doddy stood up for his acceptance speech at the Oldie of the Year ceremony, the Old Un was expecting to be bombarded with Doddy jokes like his favourite – ‘Television was invented by a man when he saw his wife nagging at him through the serving hatch.’
Instead, the great man assumed a somewhat studious persona to suit what he obviously regarded as an august honour. Still, then aged 87, he talked for longer than any other prizewinner that day, or indeed any before or since.
The Old Un was much impressed by a recent talk on the great classical site of Aphrodisias in Turkey, by Professor R R R Smith, Lincoln professor of classical archaeology and art at Oxford.
Among the extraordinary finds at Aphrodisias is a list of maximum prices for popular goods, as laid down across the empire by the Emperor Diocletian in AD 301. Pricecapping in the modern British utilities business is nothing new. Included on the list was the maximum price for slaves’ loincloths. The Romans were nothing if not meticulous.
This August will see the 25th International Gilbert and Sullivan