Sir Roger Bannister
First man to run a mile in under four minutes who devoted the rest of his life to service as an eminent neurologist and researcher
SIR ROGER BANNISTER, who has died aged 88, was a distinguished neurologist and Master of Pembroke College, Oxford, but will be universally remembered as the first man to break the four-minute mile. Running a mile in less than four minutes had been deemed impossible. As Bannister himself later recalled: “The four-minute mile had become rather like an Everest – a challenge to the human spirit.”
It was at the Iffley Road track in Oxford on May 6 1954, running with the Amateur Athletic Association team against the university, in adverse conditions that included rain and a crosswind, that Bannister made history.
The race commentator, Norris Mcwhirter, announced: “Ladies and gentlemen, here is the result of event number 9, the one mile. First: number 41, RG Bannister … with a time which is a new meeting and track record and which, subject to ratification, will be a new English native, British national, British all-comers, European, British Empire and world record. The time is three … ”
The rest (the time was 3:59.4) was lost in the deafening roar of the ecstatic crowd.
Bannister’s achievement was testimony to his powers of selfbelief and determination. He was later to remark of the race: “The physical overdraft came only from greater willpower. Those last few seconds seemed never-ending.” Afterwards he “felt like an exploded flashlight, no will to live”.
That evening he climbed Harrow Hill with his pacemakers, Chris Chataway and Chris Brasher, whom he later made godfathers to his first son. The three men looked down on a glittering London, and Brasher later remembered: “We didn’t have anything to say to each other. We all knew that the world was at our feet and that we could do anything we wanted in life.”
In the event, Bannister held his world record for only 46 days before it was broken by the Australian John Landy. The two men were due to face one another at the Empire Games at Vancouver in August, and both knew that this battle would mean more to Bannister than the four-minute mile and more to Landy than the world record. As Bannister wrote: “The world seemed almost too small for us both, and we must meet to settle the score. The race would settle our rivalry.”
The Bannister versus Landy mile race turned into a huge media fanfare, and 40 million people watched it on television. It became one of the most exciting duels of all time as Bannister overtook Landy on the last lap. In looking round, Landy had lost a valuable fraction of a second – and Bannister grabbed his chance and overtook him at 3 minutes 58.8 seconds. Bannister went on to win the European Championships before disappearing from the athletics scene to practise medicine.
Descended from a Norman soldier named Robert de Banastre, Roger Gilbert Bannister was born at Harrow on March 23 1929 to Alice and Ralph Bannister. Ralph was a civil servant and a Methodist, Alice a Unitarian and Sunday School teacher.
In his memoirs Bannister recalled that by the age of nine he had already learnt that his best defence against bullying “was to be so fleet of foot that bullies thought it too bothersome to pursue me”. On one occasion in elementary school he and a friend were chased by a gang from the nearby estate. “I took to my heels … pounding hard down the road until I got home, breathless and frightened.”
On the outbreak of war his father moved to Bath to help audit the accounts at the relocated Admiralty, soon followed by his mother and sister. Roger was sent to the City of Bath Boys’ school, where, taunted for being a swot, he became a somewhat solitary character.
Sport became his way of commanding respect among his peers, and he won his first race – a three-mile junior cross-country – aged 13. He went on to the University College School in London, where he continued with his running despite the lack of facilities there. He used to climb over fences to find fields large enough to run in, and once crashed into some concrete blocks at night, ending up in hospital.
On arriving at Exeter College, Oxford, in 1946 to read Medicine, Bannister immediately took up track events, methodically setting himself a series of achievement targets. He won his first mile (and with it his Blue) for Oxford against Cambridge at the age of 18 and later recalled: “I had expressed something of my life in the only way it could be expressed and it was this that gave me the thrill.”
Subsequently he became president of the Athletics Club, taking on the task of raising the money to level the track at Iffley Road where he would later make history.
After taking his BA in Physiology in 1950, he remained at Oxford to work for a BSC, later enrolling for clinical studies at St Mary’s Hospital in London – he was chosen by the dean, Lord Moran (best known as Winston Churchill’s personal physician), to receive one of the entrance scholarships.
Meanwhile, Bannister represented Great Britain at the Olympic Games at Helsinki in 1952. On arriving there, he was dismayed to learn that a new semi-final had been introduced. His training programme was unsuited to the new schedule, and he came fourth in the final. He said later that, had he won the gold, he would have retired. Instead, his focus changed and he became intent on breaking the four-minute mile.
After the Olympics, Bannister came under fierce criticism for his training methods. He had avoided competition, and his preparation was described as “unenterprising” and “perfunctory”. This was, however, deliberate because of what he called the “tremendous nervous strain” that he suffered during races.
He was also attacked for not having a trainer. Instead, he carried out his own scientific experiments into breathing. He realised that if he could eliminate unnecessary movements, he would increase his oxygen uptake, thereby maximising his running potential.
Bannister has often been called the last of the amateurs. He was essentially a self-made athlete who never allowed sport to take over his life. He would write that “my ideal athlete was first and foremost a human being who ran his sport and did not allow it to run him”.
In order to relax shortly before attempting the sub-four-minute mile, he went climbing in Glencoe with Chris Brasher; Brasher fell off Jericho Wall in Clachaig Gully, while Bannister got soaked to the skin and thoroughly frozen. As Brasher later remarked: “It was a crazy training programme with the race just three weeks away.”
After retiring from running at 25, Bannister threw himself into his medical career. He was concerned that his superiors might have difficulty believing that a worldrecord-holder could be a serious doctor. He thus resolved to work even harder to prove the sceptics wrong.
From 1955 to 1957 he served as a house physician and house surgeon. The first post was under the physician Sir George Pickering at St Mary’s, who became a lifelong friend and whom, 30 years later, he succeeded as Master of Pembroke College, Oxford.
There were also spells at the Hammersmith and Brompton Hospitals in London; at the Brompton, under the cardiologist Paul Wood, Bannister published his first clinical research showing that patients with mitral valve blocking had dilated lower heart chambers.
In 1957 he passed his MRCP exams and won the William Hyde award for research relating physical education to medicine.
In March that year he began National Service with the Royal Army Medical Corps. Posted to Aden, he investigated deaths among young soldiers, proving that they could not be expected to undergo strenuous exercise until they had acclimatised – otherwise they would be susceptible to potentially fatal infections. He continued to work on this at the National Hospital for Nervous Diseases in London after his return to Britain, publishing his work in two Lancet papers.
Bannister often participated in his own research into heat and hydration, sitting naked in a hot chamber for up to six hours after intravenous injection of increasing doses of bacterial pyrogens (substances that produce fever). His colleagues remembered him as “extremely conscientious” and “obsessionally precise”, a doctor who took an interest in all his patients.
In 1962-63 he spent a year doing research work at Harvard looking at the effect of oxygen shortage on the lining cells of the blood vessels in the brain. On his return he was appointed consultant neurologist at the Western Ophthalmic Hospital and St Mary’s in London, remaining there for the rest of his career.
Bannister’s particular research interest and expertise was in the autonomic nervous system, which unconsciously controls all the automatic systems of the body from digestion to the heartbeat. As part of this work, he investigated Shy-drager syndrome, a potentially fatal condition. His research using a tilting table showed that many patients benefited from sleeping with their heads raised. He also treated epilepsy, multiple sclerosis and Lou Gehrig’s disease.
Bannister always retained an interest in the world of sport. He would insist on the benefits of physical exercise to society as a whole and “wanted to put back some of the pleasure I got out of it all”. He donated half of the royalties of his book The First Four Minutes (1955) to the Amateur Athletic Association, suggesting (but not insisting) that they might build a training area in Harrow. This gesture was particularly generous, as he had little money at the time.
He would later be president of the National Fitness Panel (195659), and in 1967 began to serve on a Ministry of Health advisory committee on drug dependence. In 1971 he was made chairman of the first executive Sports Council, setting out to show “that this was a body not just concerned with squash and badminton but a body concerned with the very gut of the British people”. The following year he launched the “Sports for all” campaign, with a £350 million programme for all types of sports centres over the next decade.
In 1973 Bannister was able to claim that the Sports Council had made a “major breakthrough in the campaign to end the use of drugs” as a new test was heralded that could detect the amount of anabolic steroids in an athlete’s body. The next year, wishing to devote more time to his medical work, he gave up his chairmanship after achieving record public spending of £80 million on sports facilities over 1973-74.
In 1985 Bannister was appointed Master of Pembroke College, where he served until 1993 and is remembered as “unfailingly courteous”. He oversaw an expansion of undergraduate accommodation, while a dedicated building for graduates was named after him.
Although officially retired, he continued working as honorary consultant physician at the National Hospital for Nervous Diseases in London (now the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery).
In 1975 Bannister damaged his right ankle in a car accident, after a car crossed the central barrier of a motorway and collided with his. He was told that he should never run again. Within a few years, however, he was running in Hyde Park, unable to resist the temptation despite being in considerable pain.
From 1955 to 1962, Bannister wrote for The Sunday Times on running and on the scientific aspects of sports, such as the need for athletes to acclimatise to the altitudes to which they were exposed at the Mexico Olympics.
In the academic arena, he took over the editorship of Brain’s Clinical Neurology in 1969, and also edited from 1983, with Christopher Mathias, Autonomic Failure. He wrote more than 100 papers on neurological matters, disorders of the autonomic nervous system, cardiovascular physiology, the physiology of exercise and heat illness.
Throughout his career Bannister undertook a great deal of extracurricular work, serving on or advising numerous bodies, including regional and district health authorities; a government working party on sports scholarships; and the British Association for Sport and Medicine. He also organised medical conferences at Leeds Castle and was president of International Council for Sport and Physical Recreation.
Roger Bannister was appointed CBE in 1955, knighted in 1975 and became a Companion of Honour in 2017. In 2005 he received a lifetime achievement award from the American Academy of Neurology.
Latterly he suffered from Parkinson’s Disease, and in 2014 he published a memoir, Twin Tracks, which Nicholas Shakespeare in The Daily Telegraph described as “intimate, discreet and modestly quite proud of itself ”.
Roger Bannister married, in 1955, Moyra Elver, an artist and the daughter of Per Jacobsson, chairman of the International Monetary Fund. He once observed that his marriage was “the most important thing I did”. The couple had two sons and two daughters.
A man of integrity and humility, Bannister accepted that he would be remembered principally for his record-breaking achievement in 1954. But although proud of that milestone, he regarded it as an interruption of his career in medicine: it was, he said, “the shadow of my being, not the substance”.
Sir Roger Bannister, born March 23 1929, died March 3 2018