JEFFREY ARCHER ON SIR ROGER BANNISTER:
As four-minute mile legend Sir Roger Bannister dies aged 88 ...
AMODEST timepiece sat in a place of honour in my living room for some 30 years. But it was no family heirloom, or a gift from a dear friend. It was venerated because it was the stopwatch used to record the breaking of the four-minute mile by Roger Bannister on the afternoon of May 6, 1954, a moment that enraptured the nation and immortalised Bannister in the annals of sporting history.
His time of three minutes 59.4 seconds, set at Iffley Road university sports ground in Oxford at just after 5pm, stood as a record for just 46 days, but the young doctor’s place in history was assured.
Sir Roger died in Oxford on Saturday at the age of 88 following a long struggle with Parkinson’s disease. A source of sadness to us all — but also a moment to reflect on a man who in an instant became a legend.
He, being a man of immense shyness and modesty, would have hated the description. Sir Roger’s achievement was worn lightly, a source of quiet, understated pride but not one to be endlessly re-run in conversation.
We had a few things in common: we were both runners (I was a sprinter) and both presidents of the Oxford University Athletics Club — my term being 12 years after his.
Indeed, during our occasional encounters — it would be presumptuous to call him a close friend — he never once spoke to me about that day.
This was a man who, once he had left the limelight, pursued a long career as an eminent neurologist before assuming the role of Master of Pembroke College, Oxford.
And that distinguished position is not granted for sporting prowess, however great. There was a great deal more to Roger Bannister than youthful success on the track. And what about that stopwatch?
Some 30 years ago, I purchased the stopwatch, held on that day in 1954 by timekeeper Harold Abrahams — a champion in the 100m at the 1924 Paris Olympics famously depicted in the Oscar-winning film Chariots Of Fire.
It sat in my lounge for those 30 years, until I thought of donating it to Oxford University.
It was Sir Roger who suggested that, as Oxford already own the second stopwatch used on the day, it would be better to auction it and donate the money to the University’s athletics and Blues clubs. Omega, the Swiss watchmaker, won the bidding with an offer of £100,000 and I duly donated the sum.
I first got to know Sir Roger when I was the young MP for the Lincolnshire constituency of Louth and he was chairman of the Sports Council, and a very good chairman he was.
We were, naturally, both lovers of athletics, but there was a subtle distinction between us: he was an athlete of great distinction and I was not.
The sub-four-minute-mile was — like the sound barrier broken seven years earlier by U.S. Air Force captain Chuck Yeager — an invisible barrier.
BUT UNLIKE that unseen wall in the sky, it could not be broken by a combination of man and machine — only man. Aged 25, Bannister was that man, and it was my honour and pleasure to have known him.
Sir Roger was that classic of British folklore, the gentleman amateur who wore his fame, sporting prowess and academic distinction lightly.
He made not a penny out of running, was not interested in financial reward and, when he ‘retired’ from athletics a few years after his triumph, he got on with being a doctor — what he would have called a ‘real job’.
Roger Gilbert Bannister ran for fun.
How different is the world from which he has just departed, one in which sporting earnings, like Chuck Yeager, soar into the stratosphere. Money in sport can be a good thing, helping to improve facilities and performance, but the drive for success on running track and field, with its promise of lucrative branding deals, has been marred by scandal after scandal involving covert performanceenhancing drugs which make a mockery of fair competition.
Even as I write, British cycling — one of our great Olympic successes — is facing a damning report from a House of Commons committee investigating this practice.
Sir Roger represented an altogether more relaxed era. Sustained by pilchards ( no medically devised diets then) he would run for maybe 45 minutes a day — generally during his lunch hour — and take weekends off.
He once said he considered it cheating even to talk to your coach on the day of the race. I can’t believe he liked the professional era and, my goodness, he would have been livid about drugs in sport. But back to that glorious day in 1954.
A pupil at preparatory school, I was engaged in my evening prep when a master burst in and announced the news. A great cheer went up and we took the rest of the evening off.
The next day, Sir Roger’s feat dominated the newspaper front pages, as Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay’s conquest of Everest had the previous year, sharing space with the Coronation.
Norris McWhirter, of Guinness Book Of Records fame, told me with great pride that he never got the full time out when announcing it at Iffley Road, because everyone went mad with cheering.
All he managed was ‘ three minutes . . .’ before being drowned out by the crowd. But behind the shy, gentle, modest demeanour, Sir Roger was a true competitor — he didn’t like losing.
The sub-four-minute mile was a well-planned enterprise. Bannister knew that if he did not do it that May, he might be beaten to the prize. Two other runners, John Landy of Australia, and Wes Santee of America, were planning to demolish the barrier in the summer. It was now or never.
Over the previous decades, running times had been steadily whittled away — and Landy and Santee were breathing down Bannister’s neck with times around four minutes two seconds. Indeed, both those other runners broke the four-minute barrier that year.
On that momentous evening at Iffley Road, with a stiff breeze moderating and showers ceasing barely an hour before the race, the plan worked out by Bannister and his compadres and pace-makers, Chris Brasher and Christopher Chataway, worked like a dream.
Brasher led for two laps, Chataway for the next one and a bit more. Bannister, always on the leader’s shoulder, needed to run the final quarter-mile in 59 seconds, and thought he was a second out.
He collapsed at the finish, but
revived to hear McWhirter announce his success over the public address: ‘ A track record, English Native record, British National, British All- Comers’, European, British Empire and World record. The time . . .’
Landy and Santee, great athletes both, are now lost in the mist of time. You don’t know who was second to break the sound barrier, you don’t know who was in the second team to climb Mount Everest, and many don ’t know who the second man to set foot on the Moon was ( apologies to Colonel Buzz Aldrin). Being first confers a glow all of its own, never to be taken away.
The immortality grasped by Roger Bannister was a world away from the modest home in which he grew up.
He was born in Harrow , North London, the son of Ralph Bannister, who with his wife, Alice, had moved south from his native Lancashire to work in a clerical post in the civil service.
The family was evacuated to Bath during the war before returning to London. Roger attended University College School, Hampstead, where his running prowess soon showed itself. In 1946, aged just 16, he won a scholarship to read medicine at Exeter College, Oxford. Studies were combined with the track.
After Oxford, Bannister was a junior house officer at Paddington General Hospital, mixing ward rounds with runs around Regent’s Park.
‘I had no special diet when I was training,’ he once said. ‘I lived on pilchards and stew. I always had a stew on the go in my basement flat in Earl’s Court.’ T raining was short but intense.
‘I trained for less than three quarters of an hour , maybe five days a week ,’ he explained. ‘I didn’t have time to do more. But it was about quality, not quantity, so I didn’t waste time jogging. Ever.’
Unlike today’s track stars, man - aged, massaged and manipulated to perfection, Roger coached himself, running on grass to toughen himself up and saving time on the track for races only.
The morning before his triumph he was still on ward rounds, nervously sharpening his clunky metal running spikes on a grindstone in the hospital medical lab. He travelled to Oxford by train, fretting about the bad weather and its effect on his performance.
As it turned out, he was to fly around the track as though borne on the wings of the wind.
After his running career , Sir Roger went into the Army , volunteering to investigate the deaths of young soldiers in Aden.
But he never stopped running , until one awful day in 1974 when — aged 45 — he and his family were involved in a serious car accident. It took Roger years to recover.
RECREATIONAL running was out of the question — Roger’s wife describing his months of inactivity on the sofa as like ‘Beethoven going deaf’.
So it was that he turned his energies to research into diseases of the nervous system, and he regarded his book on the subject as his greatest achievement.
In 1975 he was knighted, and ten years later returned to Oxford as master of P embroke College, where he served until his retire - ment in 1993.
Even after that he was to be seen sitting near the back of the stand at Iffley Road on V arsity Match day, watching the young genera - tion of student athletes do battle.
A father of four and grandfather of 14, he was stalwart member of
many committees aimed at the public good.
One of Sir Roger’s most treasured memories was the Tuesday in July 2012 when he returned to the Iffley Road track and, despite his crushed ankle from the car accident and three hip replacements, managed to carry the Olympic Torch around the ground.
‘It will feel like a full circle being completed,’ he said before the event. ‘I saw the flame and the torch ceremony at the 1948 Olympics, and again at Helsinki in 1952, and then at eight other Olympic games as a sports correspondent. I was always very idealistic about the Olympics and still am. It’s so very exciting.’
He was typically modest about those who have come after him: ‘If I were a young man today, I would probably have become a reasonably good recreational runner, but I wouldn’t have had a hope of qualifying for the Olympics.’
In later years, he had difficulty walking. I last saw him the Christmas before last when he was looking frail. The time before that, we lunched together as guests on the Orient Express.
A memorable occasion befitting such a memorable man.
Sir Roger’s priority through it all was his family, who surrounded him as he entered his last hours. In 1955, he married Moyra Jacobsson, an artist.
Their relationship in 1954 got off to a shaky start when she tried to fob him off with one of her friends on the phone and he hung up in fury.
She survives him, along with their two sons, two daughters and grandchildren.
‘He banked his treasure in the hearts of his friends’ reads a charming statement from his family.
Sir Roger was made a Companion of Honour in recognition of his contribution to sport, an accolade accorded to just 65 people at any one time. Its motto: ‘In action faithful and in honour clear.’
He lived up to those words — and those of Kipling in his poem If:
If you can fill the unforgiving minute With 60 seconds’ worth of distance run.
He did that and more. Roger Bannister: athlete, scholar and an English gentleman.