Sir Roger Bannister

Speaker 30:00

Hello, I'm Kirsty Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs Archive. For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.

Speaker 30:08

The programme was originally broadcast in nineteen ninety two, and the presenter was Sue Lawley.

Presenter0:30

My castaway this week is a physician.

Presenter0:32

Born sixty two years ago, the son of a civil servant and a Sunday school teacher, he discovered early on that he was a natural runner. Running, whether to win a race or simply for itself, gave him confidence and a sense of freedom.

Presenter0:46

It was a talent which resulted one May evening in nineteen fifty four in his becoming the first man to run a mile in less than four minutes. He went on to become a neurologist, a chairman of the Sports Council, and latterly master of Pembroke College, Oxford. For him sport was merely an interlude in a distinguished medical career but it was that interlude, thirty eight years ago, which gave him a place in history. He is Sir Roger Bannister.

Presenter1:14

The four minute mile is obviously something you haven't allowed to dominate your life, Sir Roger, but hasn't it inevitably influenced people's perception of you?

Sir Roger Bannister1:23

Yes, for me my life in the past thirty seven years has been medicine and neurology, but there are times when people around the world come up to me and recognise me and so on. I am in a sense a piece of public property in that way.

Presenter1:37

It's true, too, isn't it, of Christopher Brascher and Chris Chataway, who also have gone on to do other noteworthy things in their lives in politics and business and mountaineering and so on but their names and yours will be forever bound in our memories with that day in nineteen fifty four.

Sir Roger Bannister1:52

Well, I think we ran at a time when public spirits in Britain were rather low. It was the end of the war, and the country was really still finding its way. Sport wasn't really developed, and there had been the climbing of Everest in 1953, and this was something which seemed to be possible and broke on the sporting world, and more generally because it seemed to be an emergence of some new kind of desire to excel and try to tackle physical barriers.

Presenter2:24

And and of course there'd been the coronation as well. We had a new queen, so it was a whole sort of

Sir Roger Bannister2:26

Put

Presenter2:28

After all the austerity and the ration books, it was suddenly a brave new beginning for everything, wasn't it?

Sir Roger Bannister2:34

We did have something which is not perhaps so fashionable now, a kind of patriotism.

Presenter2:41

Well, now to the island, and to music. Are are you a music lover?

Sir Roger Bannister2:44

Uh yes, but my musical tastes are not very refined.

Presenter2:48

What's the first one?

Sir Roger Bannister2:50

The first one is Beethoven violin concerto, and I have chosen this because it's a magnificent piece of music, but there is another reason which may seem a little odd, and that is as a neurologist I'm always concerned with how the brain controls movement, and the intricacy of a violin concerto and the speed of movement of the hand is something that is very close to the limits of understanding. Of course, also the memory involved. So I like to think of this as a test of the brain controlling the body.

Presenter4:26

Part of the first movement of Beethoven's violin concerto played by the Vienna Philharmonic conducted by Kirill Kondrashin. The soloist was Kiang Wa Chang.

Presenter4:37

By your own account, Sir Roger, you ran everywhere as a small boy. Was this more than the usual need for haste in children? Were your legs special to you?

Sir Roger Bannister4:46

Yes, I I think there was something, perhaps, genetic, which meant that I didn't get tired as other children might, and I was impatient my wife tells me I'm still impatient and I just wanted to get everywhere as fast as possible. It certainly was as easy for me to run as to walk, perhaps easier.

Presenter5:04

You said it was a genetic thing.

Sir Roger Bannister5:06

Well, you have to have a certain shape, a largest chest and rather thin body, in order to have a good power to weight ratio.

Presenter5:14

Have you passed it on to your children, this talent?

Sir Roger Bannister5:17

Well, it's rather a burden, I think, to them. They are all athletic. The son in New York ran in the New York Marathon and broke three hours for the marathon. And all my children have been involved in sailing. So they're all sports interested and sports concerned. And we've done orienteering together. So we've engaged in sport as a family. But I think it would be very difficult for them to set about breaking world records because if they did break a world record, people would say, well, what do you expect? And if they didn't break a world record, they'd say, gosh, you know, they're really not much good. So they start in an impossible position, and I'm not surprised that they didn't take sport seriously.

Presenter6:04

Next record.

Sir Roger Bannister6:06

I've chosen something from Tosca at Covent Garden this year, and this is what I'd like to hear.

Speaker 46:23

Run swear.

Speaker 46:37

Oh I need a beautiful thing.

Speaker 46:47

We want it long.

Speaker 46:51

We must survive Pochino.

Sir Roger Bannister6:52

We must lie for you.

Speaker 46:55

Perfecta or dar miscario.

Speaker 46:59

Si morosu, please.

Speaker 47:04

Ol kol okadi is ul da di semban.

Presenter7:14

Placido Domingo and Renata Scotto singing the duet Odolce Mani from Act Three of Puccini's Tosca, with the Philharmonia Orchestra conducted by James Levine.

Presenter7:24

Tell me about your parents, Sir Roger. Did they expect a lot of you?

Sir Roger Bannister7:29

Yes, I think they knew that I'd had chances that they hadn't and so were very interested in my work and uh at that stage I was beginning to think about medicine as a career, so it was certainly not a

Sir Roger Bannister7:43

An obsession with sport, it was a concern about general school.

Presenter7:47

But you wrote in that early book that you wrote when you were twenty five, you wrote I was brought up to think that it was a crime to waste time. I mean, it sounds as if they pushed you somewhat, that you were under some pressure.

Sir Roger Bannister7:57

I think that it was certainly true that we didn't waste time and uh obviously in order to get to university one had to um work fairly hard and that was what I was doing.

Presenter8:09

So you were quite industrious at school? Yeah.

Sir Roger Bannister8:09

Yeah.

Sir Roger Bannister8:11

Yes, yeah.

Presenter8:11

You're at school in at the City of Bath Boys.

Sir Roger Bannister8:14

Yes.

Presenter8:14

uh during the war, and you were quite a loner.

Sir Roger Bannister8:17

I had close friends, and we used to cycle about Somerset, because very unlike London, it was possible to get to the coast and get down to Cheddar Gorge, and so there were a group of us that used to cycle round, so I had good friends there.

Presenter8:32

But didn't you discover that you know running could get you off certain social hooks, as it were, that if you could show some prowess in this field, then somehow you could avoid being got at in any other way?

Sir Roger Bannister8:45

Well, I think it's in many schools there is a certain disrespect for work. And provided I I was involved in winning cross countries and other events, then I was certainly left alone and had the total freedom to do what I wanted.

Presenter9:02

Record number three.

Sir Roger Bannister9:03

The next record um reminds me of Oxford Now.

Sir Roger Bannister9:07

Uh one of the pleasures of living there.

Sir Roger Bannister9:10

Is that our eldest daughter, Erin, and her husband live there, Alan Townsend, and their three children, our three grandchildren.

Sir Roger Bannister9:18

And we see a lot of them.

Sir Roger Bannister9:20

And Alan, my son-in-law, is an immunologist.

Sir Roger Bannister9:24

In Oxford, but in the past year he started a jazz band for fun.

Sir Roger Bannister9:30

and they've called their band Risky Business, and the next record is its signature tune, written by Geoffrey Cottrell, who's one of the band.

Presenter10:40

Risky Business, written by Jeffrey Cottrell, performed by Alan Townsend with his own band, called Risky Business.

Presenter10:46

It sounds to me, then, as if running for you at school was not something you did because you wanted to compete, it was something that you did because you wanted to be supreme at something.

Sir Roger Bannister10:57

Well, it was a sense of freedom, a sense of liberation from whatever constraining forces I might have imagined there were there. But I realized that there was some talent there, and the question was, would I have the chance of fulfilling some running potential? And the first time that I saw a major athletic event was when my father took me to the White City Stadium in 1945. And it was one of these post-war major meetings. And White City Stadium was full, but the crowd pushed over the fence just ahead of us. And so, in an entirely lawless way, we went through the hole in the fence and were perched at the back of the stadium. And Sidney Wooderson, who had held the British mile record in 1937, had re-emerged from being a corporal in the army during the war and was challenging Arne Anderson, who had held the world record that year at four minutes, 1.6 seconds. And the brave Wooderson, who was only about 5'7 high, came up to Anderson's shoulder, challenged him, made Anderson alter his stride, and although Anderson won, I thought that courageous performance by Wooderson was absolutely magnificent and gave me a thrill of what mile running was really about.

Presenter12:32

So you would have been, what, about sixteen at the time. So was that then the moment when you knew

Presenter12:38

That you would like to compete in that kind of way. Before that, running, you could have taken it or left it, as it were.

Sir Roger Bannister12:43

Yes, before that I could have taken it or left it. And I wasn't running at school at that time. I was playing rugby and I don't think athletics was taken seriously. But I realized that if I got to Oxford then I could take it up again.

Presenter12:56

So you went up to Oxford quite young about seventeen, I think, weren't you?

Sir Roger Bannister13:00

Yes, it was a curious year in 1946. The war years had all got their permission to go to university, and so ninety percent of

Sir Roger Bannister13:11

Oxford were ex-servicemen, and some of them pretty senior. There were many decorated majors and even lieutenant colonels, some of them battle-scarred. And they were very kind to those of us who'd come up from school, but it obviously made life easier if we were able to mix with the ex-servicemen on the sports field.

Presenter13:34

How long before you got your blue?

Sir Roger Bannister13:37

I got it the first year had been seen training, and I was just put in at the last minute, but then found when the race came I was able to overtake the field, which third strings weren't really supposed to do, and won the race.

Presenter13:51

Do you remember your time?

Sir Roger Bannister13:53

It was at four thirty, very slow.

Presenter13:55

So there was thirty seconds to be knocked off that time in the next, what, seven years? Yes. And you were to do it. But you didn't know then. Did you have any idea then that you might just make a large mark?

Sir Roger Bannister14:05

The notion of a four-minute mile, I think, had been virtually dropped in this country, although it was certainly clear that it would one day be run. And I simply took each year as it came and had no really long term plans at that stage.

Presenter14:23

Shall we have your next record?

Sir Roger Bannister14:25

The next record is Dvorak New World Symphony. I've chosen it because I've always been happy in America. I've made many visits there. When I was nineteen I went with an Oxford team to tour American universities. I then went back

Sir Roger Bannister14:41

as a research fellow in the neurology department at Harvard. At that time it was the time of Kennedy's inauguration which we saw. And so I I have a great feeling for America and many friends there. And so this

Sir Roger Bannister14:57

New World Symphony reminds me of the freedom and expansion that one feels in America.

Presenter16:03

Part of the second movement of Vorjak's New World Symphony played by the Columbia Symphony Orchestra conducted by Bruno Walter.

Presenter16:10

You were studying medicine at Oxford, and you went on later to make a a study of the effect of of heat on the body, didn't you, when you did your national service? How soldiers could drop dead from heat exhaustion.

Sir Roger Bannister16:21

Yes, I was then trained as a physician and so was a medical specialist in the army. And at that time, troops were being flown out post-Suez crisis to Aden and they arrived unacclimatized in the Gulf on an aircraft carrier and were expected to climb up jebbles pretty quickly. And I realized that there were problems involved and several soldiers died. And so I went out really to try to study what the causes of this were, how long they should be trained and acclimatized before they were submitted to this kind of stress. And this was a problem I took up again later because marathons were being run in the heat of the day and there were instances of collapse, for example in 1954, Jim Peters, and I

Sir Roger Bannister17:17

with a colleague did some experiments to find out what happened when healthy

Sir Roger Bannister17:22

Athletes ran in a warm environment and we found that their temperatures could rise to one hundred and five degrees Fahrenheit, although they then weren't feeling very ill, but the margin between 105 degrees Fahrenheit and heat illness and death, especially if there was something wrong with their sweating, was very narrow indeed. And so I was able to persuade, with others, the authorities to hold marathons in the cool of the day. So that was an interaction of medicine and sport, which was the kind of interaction I had always hoped to be able to do.

Presenter17:57

Didn't you in fact advise against the Olympics being held in Mexico?

Sir Roger Bannister18:02

Yes, Mexico City was 7,500 feet high, which meant that the pressure of the air was 25% less, so 25% less oxygen. And of course, all middle distance and distance running depends on your capacity to take in oxygen from the outside air. And we predicted that there would be trouble in the events from 1500 meters upwards. Less air resistance and therefore faster sprinting, but in all the longer distances there are instances of collapse. And I still think it was very wrong for the administrators to put this additional burden on young athletes. Some, I believe, of the athletes didn't make a full recovery after those games.

Presenter18:50

But later on in your neurological career you went on to specialize in something else, didn't you? You specialized in low blood pressure.

Sir Roger Bannister18:57

Yes, I had been very busy doing clinical work at two hospitals and.

Sir Roger Bannister19:04

My wife and I were involved in a car accident, and I got my ankle crushed, and so I was not able to get about for several months, and that gave me the chance to rethink.

Sir Roger Bannister19:19

My next few years and what I really wanted to be doing, and I realized that I really wanted to get back to research. Everybody knows about high blood pressure, and it's dangerous and should be treated, but there hadn't been as much interest in low blood pressure, which is just as complex in its control. And we recognized a number of patients who did have problems from low blood pressure. So, for 15 years, really, the past 15 years, we have actually been able to create a knowledge of a very small area, but one which is potentially important. And discovering a little brick, as it were, that can be inserted in the whole realm of knowledge in relation to medicine is, I think, one of the most satisfying things in my life.

Presenter20:06

Record number five.

Sir Roger Bannister20:09

This is Noah's flood.

Sir Roger Bannister20:11

During the time when my family were growing up, we remember many school concerts, but I can remember our boys singing in this Noah's Flood, singing their hearts out at school.

Speaker 420:25

Space of Spark and late on high with all the blue imperial sky and shallant the shining frame

Speaker 421:03

Son from day to day, God is free to God is grave, and hope is rest to every.

Presenter21:26

The English Chamber Orchestra and an East Suffolk Children's Orchestra conducted by Norman Del Mar performing part of Benjamin Britton's Noah's Flood.

Presenter21:35

Sir Roger Ballister, you represented Britain in the nineteen fifty two Helsinki Olympics and came fourth. How much of a blow was that?

Sir Roger Bannister21:43

Well, it was quite a blow because I had, about two weeks before, run the equivalent of a four-minute mile in training. But I think if I had won that gold medal, I would have retired, because I was a medical student in clinical years, and it was becoming very difficult to train.

Presenter22:01

So if you'd reached the pinnacle then, you might have given it all up and never run the four minute mile?

Sir Roger Bannister22:06

Yes, perfectly possible.

Presenter22:07

But you went on for another couple of years and then you um started to train with Brascher and Chataway.

Presenter22:13

And then you met that night at the Flea Road track in Oxford, May 6th, 1954, with the deliberate intention of breaking the four-minute barrier, didn't you? You took a look at the camera.

Sir Roger Bannister22:22

Yes, I'd run a mile in four minutes, two seconds the year before, so it was perfectly clear that I could do it. But the problem was that on the day itself, the weather was very bad, and I travelled up with Frank Stamfel, our coach, and I wasn't sure I could run a mile in 356, which was what it might involve in bad weather.

Sir Roger Bannister22:46

And he put it to me that first he thought I could run it in that time, and secondly, if I didn't take this opportunity when it was offered to me, I might never forgive myself. I might pull a muscle the next day, the three of us might not be able to get together on another occasion. So

Sir Roger Bannister23:04

Quite late in the afternoon I made the decision that we would attempt it and

Sir Roger Bannister23:10

Due to the pacemaking of Chris Bracer over the first half mile and then Chris Chataway after that, the times for the early part of the race were perfect. I got a bit impatient and shouted to Bracer to go faster, but he kept his head and so was within distance and time of breaking the record and so managed to do it.

Presenter23:32

And you wrote, um, not long afterwards, that the arms of the world waited to receive me, if I succeeded, and if I didn't, the world would be a cold and forbidding place. That's fairly dramatic.

Sir Roger Bannister23:43

Of course it wasn't really as important as that, but at the moment of doing it one had to feel it was very important, otherwise one wouldn't have put all the effort in.

Presenter23:53

Had you then been set free at that moment, if you like? Was there a sense in which you could then give it all up and turn your back on athletic ambition because you've done it?

Sir Roger Bannister24:00

Yeah.

Sir Roger Bannister24:01

For about a week and then of course John Landy, who'd been my great rival, had come from Australia to Finland in order to run a four-minute mile, and he then broke my record. And so quite quickly, the four-minute mile became relatively unimportant, because we were both going to race against one another in Vancouver, and that would be the race to settle the score.

Presenter24:25

But you won that race, didn't you?

Sir Roger Bannister24:26

Yes, fortunately, he nearly ran me off my feet in the first part of the race, which I had expected him to do, but I managed to get back to his shoulder, and he didn't know quite where I was and hoped that he'd dropped me. And he looked over his left shoulder at the end of the bend, and that was when I chose to overtake him on his right-hand side. And so one, and we had both then broken the four-minute mile in the same race the first time this was done. But I formed a great affection for John Landy, and I remember him saying when a statue was put up, a big bronze statue of the two of us.

Sir Roger Bannister25:08

with him looking over his left shoulder as I overtook him. He said Lot's wife was turned to a pillar of salt for looking over her shoulder, but I'm the first person to have been turned into bronze, which I thought was a nice comment.

Presenter25:24

Next piece of music, what is it?

Sir Roger Bannister25:27

It's uh in the bleak midwinter and this is a setting of uh Christine de Rossetti's poem and it's a happy reminder to me of going back to Oxford. So it's it's Christmas and Pembroke College Chapel.

Speaker 426:09

Uh

Presenter26:41

In the Bleak Midwinter, sung by Jeremy Pound with the Choir of New College, Oxford. You may have turned your back on athletic ambition when you were twenty five, Sir Roger, but not on sports. You eventually became chairman of the Sports Council, didn't you?

Sir Roger Bannister26:54

Yes, this was the so-called independent sports council, which was set up by a royal charter.

Sir Roger Bannister27:00

And so, for a number of years as chairman, I had the wonderful opportunity of being able to.

Sir Roger Bannister27:08

try to replan the sporting facilities. And what became clear was that it was very necessary to have better sports facilities for indoor use.

Sir Roger Bannister27:21

I think it was Byron who said that in England winter draws to a close on the thirty first of July, only to start with renewed venom on the first of August. And so the plan

Presenter27:31

Yeah.

Sir Roger Bannister27:35

was to set up these multi-purpose sports centers, sometimes linked with schools. And by the time I retired as chairman of the Sports Council, there were some 250 of these. And this process has gone on so that now there are perhaps a thousand in the country. And I believe that this has made the

Sir Roger Bannister27:58

possibility of sport for all, which was the campaign that we developed, a reality.

Presenter28:04

And then seven years ago you were invited to become master of Pembroke College, Oxford.

Presenter28:10

It's not, of course, far from Ifley Road and the scene of the Great Triumph. Do you walk down the road and remember, or do you prefer to forget these days?

Sir Roger Bannister28:18

I do go back to the Ifley Road track, and the record was actually finally broken after thirty-six years, a year ago.

Presenter28:26

Have you still got the shoes you ran it in?

Sir Roger Bannister28:29

Yes, I'm not quite sure where they are because we've had a number of house moves and some of these uh impedimenta from my uh past uh get uh lost.

Presenter28:38

Memorabilia and the attic, aren't they?

Sir Roger Bannister28:39

Memoropedia

Sir Roger Bannister28:41

Mm-hmm.

Presenter28:43

Some more music.

Sir Roger Bannister28:46

Well, I travel quite a lot now to meet uh Pembrokeans around the world, uh some five thousand of them. And last year I was visiting a

Sir Roger Bannister28:58

Pembrokean at Princeton and

Sir Roger Bannister29:01

At point blank notice he asked me to come with him to the Princeton Chamber Orchestra, as they needed some help in the Toy Symphony.

Sir Roger Bannister29:11

So I found myself playing the second nightingale. A music critic afterwards said he thought the nightingales were a bit slow coming in, and that's not something entirely characteristic of me.

Presenter29:25

What did you do? Play it with a tin whistle?

Sir Roger Bannister29:27

Well, it's a very complicated little bowl filled with water, and you blow bubbles through it. That's the secret.

Presenter30:33

Mozart's Toy Symphony, performed by the Princeton Chamber Orchestra with guest percussionists, including Sir Roger Bannister, playing the whistle and water. I haven't asked you yet how you're going to cope on the desert island. Have you got any plans?

Sir Roger Bannister30:45

I'd want to escape. Um I don't uh enjoy a lonely life.

Presenter30:50

And you're a navigational expert, I think, so you you might just have a chance, hm?

Sir Roger Bannister30:54

Yes, well, sailing's played quite a large part in my family life because we taught our children to sail dinghies and then gradually got a little more expert and cruised along the south coast. And there I realized that it was a more dangerous um

Sir Roger Bannister31:11

pursuit. We had a few escapades which were a bit alarming, and so I went to the Pimlico Comprehensive School for night classes and managed to get my yacht master's uh certificate in coastal navigation and offshore.

Presenter31:25

I'm not sure. How old were you when you did that?

Sir Roger Bannister31:28

fifty three.

Presenter31:29

That was quite adventurous.

Sir Roger Bannister31:31

Well, I I I enjoyed it. It was so different from my neurology and then eventually crossed the Channel and I can remember sailing as a mixture of um

Sir Roger Bannister31:41

periods of intense inactivity interspersed with periods of active danger. I can remember engine failure in the shipping lanes in the Channel. Not not an experience I'd like to undergo again.

Presenter31:54

But if you're going to use this navigational prowess to escape, you've got to make a boat out of something, and uh from what I gather about the boats you built as a boy, they were so full of nails they sank first time out.

Sir Roger Bannister32:05

Um yes, but I think I read Contiki and uh know a little bit more about putting uh rushes together and bits of wood and so I'd make a real effort to get off this island, I can assure you.

Presenter32:17

And will you keep fit then? I mean, do you keep fit you so you can't run any more?

Sir Roger Bannister32:20

Yes, I do. I currently have started bicycling again. My son gave me a mountain bike for Christmas, and although it's got twenty one gears, I can't quite keep up with my nine year old grandson, but it helps to keep me fit.

Presenter32:36

So there's no sense in which you're looking forward to being cast away on a desert island, away from your family, on your own, stuck?

Sir Roger Bannister32:43

No, I in particular I wouldn't tolerate separation from my wife very well. We've been married for thirty seven years and we enjoy so many pleasures together that it would be certainly a pretty sad affair.

Presenter32:59

Last record.

Sir Roger Bannister33:01

This again reminds me of Oxford. Last year there was a magnificent concert in the Sheldonian Theatre to commemorate the 200th anniversary of Haydn's visit to Oxford, and we listened to the wonderful music of the creation. I suppose Oxford is really a place of ideas primarily, but two of its pleasures are music and architecture, and these two pleasures were celebrated in this particular occasion.

Speaker 434:02

And this old is shown.

Presenter34:32

The final chorus from Haydn's Creation, performed by the Chorus and Academy of Saint Martin in the Fields, conducted by Sir Neville Mariner.

Presenter34:39

Now which one of the eight, Sir Roger, would you take if you couldn't take them all?

Sir Roger Bannister34:43

The Beethoven.

Presenter34:45

Beethoven's Violin Concerto. Why'd you want that one?

Sir Roger Bannister34:46

Yeah.

Sir Roger Bannister34:47

Well, it's a beautiful music, and uh for this curious reason that I would continue to ponder the way in which such uh extraordinary facile finger movements can be allied with the feeling which the brain emanates, uh and these are the problems that a neurologist contemplates all the time.

Presenter35:07

And your book, as well as the Bible and Shakespeare.

Sir Roger Bannister35:09

Well, I'd hoped I might be able to get a book on celestial navigation because I never took that course in sailing. And I thought you might let me have a sextant, but perhaps those are not permitted. Yes, I'm afraid so. Well, I think having the Bible and Shakespeare, I'd like something lighter. And I thought an enormous anthology of short stories, Russian, American, French, and English. That would be something which would give me plenty to read.

Presenter35:21

It's all a bit more difficult.

Presenter35:39

And a luxury?

Sir Roger Bannister35:40

A luxury I think a solar powered receiver. If we could have a television as well as a radio, but uh and if a radio I could listen to radio four.

Presenter35:52

How nice Sir Roger Bannister, thank you very much indeed for letting us hear your desert island discs.

Sir Roger Bannister35:58

Thank you. I've enjoyed it.