Roger Bannister / The Times 3.3.2018

On the morning of May 6, 1954 a junior doctor named Roger Bannister ate porridge for breakfast, went to work at St Mary’s hospital in Paddington, London, then caught a midday train to Oxford for an athletics meet between Oxford University and the Amateur Athletics Association. It was a meet with a difference. It was the meet at which Bannister had resolved to become the first to break the four-minute mile — a goal that was being hotly pursued by his two great rivals, Wes Santee of the US and John Landy of Australia, but which many thought impossible.

The auguries were poor. A gale-force wind was blowing. Bannister considered postponing his attempt, but on the train Franz Stampfl, his Austrian coach, warned that this might be his last opportunity. “If there is only a half-good chance you may never forgive yourself for missing it,” he said. “You will feel pain, but what’s pain?”

Bannister ate a ham salad at a friend’s house, then went to the Iffley Road track at about 4.30pm for the 6pm race. The wind was still strong. Bannister remained undecided about running. Thirty minutes before the start his pacesetters, Chris Brasher (obituary, March 1, 2003) and Chris Chataway (obituary, March 20, 2014), demanded a decision. Bannister noticed that the flag on a nearby church tower was drooping. “Right, we’ll go for it,” he declared.

About 3,000 spectators had gathered to watch. A meet organiser, Norris McWhirter, had tipped off various athletics correspondents. Harold Abrahams, the 1924 Olympic 100m champion of Chariots of Fire fame, was commentating live for BBC Radio. Brasher made a false start, then the gun went off a second time and the race was on. For two laps Brasher set the pace while the tall, gangly Bannister tucked in behind him. “Faster,” Bannister shouted. Brasher prudently ignored him.

At the halfway stage their time was 1 min 58 sec, and Chataway took over as pacesetter. The third lap took just over 62 sec, meaning Bannister had to run the final lap in 59. Three hundred yards from the finish he overtook Chataway.

“I felt at that moment that it was my chance to do one thing supremely well. I drove on, impelled by a combination of fear and pride,” recalled Bannister, a tall man with dark-blue eyes and a resonant voice, who was hailed as the epitome of the English gentleman.

“With five yards to go the finishing line seemed almost to recede. Those last few seconds seemed an eternity. The faint line of the finishing tape stood ahead as a haven of peace after the struggle. The arms of the world were waiting to receive me if only I reached the tape without slackening my speed. If I faltered now, there would be no arms to hold me and the world would seem a cold, forbidding place.

“I leapt at the tape like a man taking his last desperate fling to save himself from a chasm that threatens to engulf him. Then my effort was over and I collapsed, almost unconscious, with an arm on either side of me. It was only then that real pain overtook me . . . I felt like an exploded flashbulb.” Slowly, dramatically, McWhirter announced the result: “First, Number 41, RG Bannister, Amateur Athletic Association and formerly of Exeter and Merton colleges, in a time which, subject to ratification, is a new track record, British native record, all-comers record, European, British Empire and world record — three minutes . . .”

The rest was lost in the roar of the crowd and what The Times described as “scenes of the wildest excitement”. Bannister had broken the four-minute mile with a time of 3 min 59.4 sec. It was an astounding feat, not least because he was a part-time athlete running on a wet cinder track. It was an achievement that made him an international celebrity overnight, and for which he would be remembered for the rest of his life. On the evening of his historic run, Bannister took a walk up Harrow Hill with Chataway and Brasher and surveyed London lit up below. “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.”

Within months he gave up competitive running to focus on medicine. He became a fine physician and distinguished neurologist, and would tell interviewers that he was prouder of what he achieved in medical research than in athletics. He chaired the Sports Council, was president of the International Council for Sport and Physical Recreation, and served eight years as master of Pembroke College, Oxford. “Running was just a small part of my life,” he said. “I thought the ideal was the complete man who had a career outside sport.”

Bannister once said that athletes should not get too hung up if they enjoy a few drinks or even the odd cigarette and that “you don’t have to make your life boring to be a good runner”. He later said that he deplored the “narrow professionalism” of sport in the modern age. “You cannot train all day; the body wouldn’t be able to cope,” he told Matthew Syed when the columnist went to interview him for The Times in 2012. “That isn’t just true of running but in all sports . . . What better way for a young person to switch off from the demands of sport than by reading, learning and expanding the mind.”

Although he left competitive athletics behind, Bannister’s achievement continued to resonate with aspiring runners, steeped in the folklore of the sport. Lord Coe, the president of the International Association of Athletics Federations who also once held the world record for the mile, said on the news of his death: “This is a day of intense sadness both for our nation and for all of us in athletics. There is not a single athlete of my generation who was not inspired by Roger.”

Roger Gilbert Bannister was born in 1929, the descendant of a Norman soldier called Robert de Banastre. He was brought up in a house in suburban Harrow, northwest London, overlooking the playing fields of the public school. His early aptitude for running helped him to escape a gang of bullies on a nearby housing estate.

The family moved to Bath, Somerset, when the war broke out. His daily walk to the City of Bath Boys’ School ended with a sprint up 150ft of steps, and he soon broke the school’s cross-country record. “My running ability seemed to have come to me as a gift — as if by magic,” he wrote. His father, Ralph, a civil servant and devout Methodist, and his mother, Alice, a Unitarian and Sunday school teacher, instilled in him a belief that it was “a crime to waste time”. He was a quiet and deeply earnest child who worked so hard that one master told him: “You’ll be dead before you’re 21 if you go on at this rate.”

When the family returned to London in 1944 he went to University College School in Hampstead. The next year his father took him to the White City stadium in west London, where he watched the British runner Sydney Wooderson win a thrilling race against Arne Andersson of Sweden. “I resolved then to become a miler,” he recalled. At 17 he went to Exeter College, Oxford, to read medicine, and joined the athletics club, earning a blue.

Bannister had never worn spikes or run on a track. He undertook only what he later described as “ridiculously inadequate” training, but at a lithe 6ft 2in he was a natural athlete. The day before his 18th birthday he found himself running as Oxford’s third-choice miler against Cambridge at White City. He won by 20 yards in 4 min 30.8 sec. The next year he was elected president of the university athletics club and oversaw the conversion of Iffley Road’s decrepit and badly sloping track into a quarter-mile circuit that met international standards.

In early 1950 he was introduced to a new method of “interval training” that gave the runner speed and stamina by alternating gentle and fast running over varying distances. He also studied his body mechanics to make his running style more efficient. Bannister began to improve, although he still trained alone and had no coach. That Christmas he ran 4 min 9.9 sec at a meet in New Zealand. The next April he won a race in Philadelphia in 4 min 8.3 sec — “No manager, no trainer, no masseur, no friends! He’s nuts or he’s good,” one American reporter wrote. Later that year he won the British AAA Championships at White City in 4 min 7.8 sec.

That autumn Bannister began his clinical training at St Mary’s and his athletic training was largely restricted to laps of the Harrow playing fields behind his parents’ house. However, he went to the 1952 Olympics in Helsinki as favourite for the 1,500m — the so-called metric mile. The heats, semi-finals and final were staged on consecutive days and Bannister came fourth despite breaking the Olympic record. He was lambasted in the media. It was “a shattering blow,” he admitted, but he felt cheated. “It was impossible for someone training on my schedule to run three good races in such a short space of time and I felt sure the organisers knew as much,” he complained. The failure sealed his destiny; he said that he would have retired if he had won gold.

After Helsinki Bannister set himself a new goal. He gave himself two years to break the four-minute mile — a feat athletes had dreamt of for a century and, in his words, “a barrier that seemed to defy all attempts to break it”. He stepped up his training, and set a new British record of 4 min 3.6 sec in May 1953. Shortly afterwards he ran 4 min 2 sec — the third fastest mile in history. However, Landy and Santee were also closing in fast on the record. That autumn Bannister began training with Brasher, Chataway and Stampfl, his first proper coach.

Gradually they reduced their times to 60 seconds per lap, but by April 1954 had plateaued. In desperation they went climbing in Scotland, got drenched, slept little and ate badly. It was a “lunatic” thing to do, Bannister acknowledged, but it worked. They came back and ran 59 sec laps, setting the stage for Bannister’s triumph in Oxford the next month.

Bannister characteristically gave much of the credit for his triumph to his pacesetters. “We shared a place where no man had yet ventured, secure for all time, however fast men might run miles in the future,” he wrote. “No words could be invented for such supreme happiness.” Britain rejoiced and Bannister was fêted, but his record stood for only 46 days. On June 21 Landy ran 3 min 58 sec.

On August 7 the two men competed in a dramatic showdown labelled the “miracle mile” at the Commonwealth Games in Vancouver. Before a huge and deafening crowd Landy led until the final bend when he glanced over his shoulder, looking for his rival. Bannister interpreted that as desperation. Encouraged, he swept past Landy and won by five yards. It was the first time two runners went under four minutes in the same race.

Twenty-two days later Bannister won the 1,500m at the European Championships in Berne. He promptly retired at the age of 25 to concentrate on medicine. The next year — on the day he was appointed CBE — he married Moyra Elver Jacobsson, an aspiring portrait painter. They had met at a party a fortnight before his first four-minute mile. Having only one sister, Bannister said that he was determined to have a bigger family “than the one I grew up in”. The couple had four children — Erin, an artist; Clive, chief executive of the Phoenix life insurance group; Thurstan, who works for the investment fund Alphadyne Asset Management in New York; and Charlotte, an Anglican priest in Oxford. They lived in a six-bedroom house in Kensington, west London. His wife and children survive him.

Unsurprisingly, exercise formed a big part of the Bannisters’ family life. He would take his children out for a run around Kensington Gardens before breakfast every morning and Erin recalled gruelling family holidays “traipsing across Wales with packs on our backs”. However, it upset Bannister that his children were put under pressure to excel at sport. “I never wanted my children to become elite athletes. They would have been running in my shadow and continually measured against me.”

After completing his training he did his National Service with the Royal Army Medical Corps. Stationed in Aden (Yemen), he investigated the deaths of young soldiers there. His report suggested that they should not be subjected to strenuous exercise until they acclimatised to the heat.

As a young doctor, he found it hard to win the respect of his colleagues. “People had difficulty imagining me, a four-minute-miler, as a serious physician.” It drove him to work even harder with obsessive attention to detail; so much so that in the early years of his marriage his wife would take their young children to the hospital so that they could see their father.

Life became easier in 1963 when Bannister was appointed as a consultant neurologist at St Mary’s and London’s National Hospital, the world’s first neurological hospital, where he remained for the next 25 years.

Bannister was fascinated with the brain and specialised in failures of the autonomic nervous system — a field in which he had become interested as a student after visiting paraplegic patients at the Stoke Mandeville spinal injuries unit a few years after the war.

He founded the pioneering Autonomic Investigation Unit at the National Hospital, and was awarded the American Academy of Neurology’s first lifetime achievement award in 2005. He also edited the standard neurological textbook, Brain’s Clinical Neurology, which was later renamed Brain and Bannister’s Clinical Neurology. His research into the neurodegenerative disorder Shy-Drager syndrome showed that the condition could be improved if patients slept with their heads slightly raised.

Bannister still found time to promote sport and exercise. He played a small role in setting up the Duke of Edinburgh Awards scheme. He served as the first independent chairman of the Sports Council between 1971 and 1974, and was responsible for a substantial increase in sport facilities, as well as initiating the first tests for anabolic steroids in athletes and promoting corporate sponsorship of sports. In 1975 he was knighted for his services to sport.

Between 1976 and 1983 he was president of the International Council of Sport and Physical Education, travelling widely and helping to promote sport on an international level. In that role he opposed the US-led boycott of the 1980 Moscow Olympics after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, arguing that sportsmen alone should not have to sacrifice.

Bannister and his family relaxed at their country cottage in the village of Lyminster in West Sussex. He founded an orienteering club in the area and bought a small yacht. Bannister took a skipper course and was at the helm of many family adventures in the English Channel. He also played golf, sometimes with the former England cricket captain Colin Cowdrey.

However, Bannister’s ability to run, something he had continued to do for recreation, was abruptly curtailed in an accident in 1975 when a car broke through the central barrier on a motorway and collided head on with his vehicle as he and Moyra drove to London. His ankle was crushed and his wife’s ribs were broken.

In 1985 Bannister’s life took another unexpected turn. He was appointed master of Pembroke College, Oxford. It was a job he loved, and that he held for the next eight years while living in a house built by Cardinal Wolsey. Pembroke was a relatively poor college, but his most concrete achievement was the construction of the new £5 million Fulbright building, then the largest new college building in postwar Oxford, thanks to assiduous fundraising in the US and Japan. He held drinks parties for the students twice a week, and promoted rowing so enthusiastically that two years after he stepped down Pembroke went head of the river for the first time since 1872. He donated his athletic trophies to the college.

Oxford was Bannister’s spiritual home, and after retiring from Pembroke in 1993 he and his wife moved in to a large flat in the city where some of his many grandchildren would come at the end of days at the nearby Dragon School. In 2012 he returned to Iffley Road to carry the Olympic torch a short way along what is now called the Sir Roger Bannister athletics track.

In 2014 he announced that he had been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. It meant that the ageing neurologist who achieved fame through running could no longer walk.

In 2015 he decided to sell the kangaroo leather running shoes in which he had made history. They sold at Christies for £266,500, five times above the estimate. Bannister donated the money to the Autonomic Charitable Trust.

Gentlemanly and modest to the last about his considerable achievements, Bannister was nonetheless a man of strong opinions, which were regularly expressed on the letters page of The Times. In April 2015, he wrote disparaging the idea that the game of bridge should be considered a sport. “It surprised me as neurologist that a distinguished member of the judiciary, Mr Justice Mostyn, believes that ‘the brain is a muscle’.”

He faced his final decrepitude in a wheelchair with dignity. “It’s in the nature of things. There’s a gentle irony to it,” he said, with not a trace of rancour or self-pity.

Sir Roger Bannister, CH, CBE, athlete and physician, was born in Harrow, northwest London, on March 23, 1929. He died on March 3, 2018, aged 88 after suffering from Parkinson’s disease