An athletics article in The Times on May 6, 1954, on the morning of Roger Bannister’s assault on the four-minute mile, struck a glum note. “In spite of our own standards,” the journalist lamented, “we are still hard-put to keep up with the advances of other countries.”
Such glumness was not confined to achievements in athletics. Britain was gripped by post-Second World War rationing. The rationing of sweets, for example, was only relaxed in 1954, that very year. Those who were able to travel abroad were confined to a meagre £25 travel allowance. The stipend seldom stretched as far as you wanted to go.
The hidden subject of The Times’ article on the morning of Bannister’s race was the USA. American post-War production dwarfed everyone else’s. On visiting America in 1949, Bannister noticed, for example, that very few Americans walked because they could drive.
He was seen as strange by his hosts because he sometimes chose to walk to his destination rather than jump into an out-sized automobile. Car production in the ‘States accounted for 60% of all the motor cars produced in the world. More than half the population already had – wait for it – that new-fangled middle-class contraption, the telephone.
Not only did the USA produce automobiles and telephones, they produced rock ‘n roll. Bill Haley’s “Rock around the Clock” was released in 1954, and Elvis Presley’s ingenious sexing up of rhythm ‘n blues, was heavy-breathing down Bill’s neck.
America’s pre-eminence as the world’s production dynamo extended to facilities in sport. When confronted with the fact that 18 year-old American, Bob Mathias, had won the decathlon at the 1948 London Olympics, Bannister said it was “inconceivable” that an athlete from Great Britain could manage such an achievement at such a young age.
First, Bannister blamed the weather – England’s simply wasn’t warm and dry enough. But he also blamed it on post-War Britain’s crippling lack of resources.
The weather was uppermost in Bannister’s mind on the morning he decided to challenge the four-minute barrier, which gives the impression that Bannister had decided he would make an assault on the four-minute mile that very afternoon.
This is slightly misleading. Bannister equivocated for hours. And the weather didn’t help him make a decision. It was early May, and summer hadn’t really arrived in the south-east of England. There were oodles of wind and rain to rain on Bannister’s parade.
Of the two, wind was the most troublesome for an athlete because it could add crucial fractions of a second to your lap time. The assault – the verb is telling – on the four-minute mile would suffer as a result.
The four-minute mile was something you didn’t creep up upon, or prod, or sort-of attempt. Before Bannister broke it, the record had stood since 1945. It was the sport’s Holy Grail, occupying important minds with how to approach it for fifty or-so years.
So it loomed, apparently impossible to climb or penetrate or tame. As the American poet, Robert Frost, famously wrote in a different context: “The only way out is through.”
Bannister was a junior houseman at St Mary’s hospital in Paddington in 1954, having started his medical career the previous decade. The assault on the four-minute mile was planned to take place on the Iffley Road track in Oxford and had been months in the planning.
In truth, he wasn’t a prodigiously talented athlete, at least not to begin with. He’d only discovered his ability when asked to be a pace-setter for better Oxford athletes in their meeting against Cambridge University in 1947.
In the midst of carrying out his brief, Bannister realised that he was running well and could run better, so he decided that he had a responsibility to himself to see what he could do. He ran for the front and won the race. Bannister had awoken to his talent.
Still unsure of whether he’d attempt to run because of the weather on the morning of the race, Bannister caught the train up from London. On the train he hoped for some quiet time to himself as he weighed up the pros and cons of an assault.
His need to be alone is revealing. Serious to the point of austerity, Bannister was no carefree extrovert. When he could, he ran by himself. He didn’t believe in coaching or coaches, keeping them at arm’s length.
But, irony of ironies, at Paddington train station he met Franz Stampfl, the coach of the two athletes Bannister knew best and would be competing against in the upcoming Iffley Road meeting – Chris Chattaway and Chris Brasher. Bannister and Stampfl sat together in the train, falling into conversation.
At one point the dapper Austrian, who favoured flat caps and mohair duffel coats and had arrived in Britain from Austria in 1936, told Bannister that if he didn’t make a stab at things now, he might live to regret it. Athletes elsewhere in the world were circling round the record, believing they could run the mile in under four minutes.
Take the elegant Australian, John Landy. Or Wes Santee, the American, otherwise known as the Kansas Cowboy. Santee who had won so many races across the world that he had a collection of watches as long as his arm.
Stampfl’s idea that he might never forgive himself if he didn’t make a stab at the record later in the day struck a chord with Bannister. He had been fretting for weeks. The day before he had slipped on St Mary’s linoleum floors while doing his rounds. The injury wasn’t serious but for several hours, Bannister obsessed. What if he was seriously injured? This clearly meant that he wasn’t destined to run the following day.
Bannister felt alternately sick and excited as he arrived in Oxford; he kept on watching the weather. He had salad for lunch with friends and tea with Brasher. Still, he was pre-occupied. Was it really now or never? Would the wind never die down?
Time was not on Bannister’s side in the narrow sense but it wasn’t on his side in the wider sense either. In point of fact, it was slipping away. Very soon he wouldn’t be able to take his athletics seriously, because his professional duties as a neurologist wouldn’t allow for it.
He was proud of being an amateur and working toward becoming a doctor. It appealed to his sense of balance and propriety. Soon he might not be able to balance the two separate halves of his life.
And it wasn’t as though he hadn’t had his opportunities. At the 1952 Olympics in Helsinki, Bannister progressed towards the final as the 1500m field winnowed through the heats. By the time he arrived at the final – after an extra race that he found energy-sapping – he had as good a chance as any of grabbing one of the available three medals.
It wasn’t to be. In the event, he came fourth. The race was won by Josy Barthel of Luxembourg, followed by an American and a German. The result didn’t sit well with Bannister, who felt he’d let himself and the nation down.
So the ghost of failure hung over Bannister’s considerations in the heavy hours before the Iffley Road meeting. To run or not to run, that was the question. “There was,” he said many years later with a delightful twist of English under-statement, “the matter of desperation.”
The record for the mile had been stranded for nine years, and it was felt that it might never be broken. Running four laps of a quarter-mile track in under four minutes, said some, could not physically be done. It was an impossibility.
Throughout the Second World War, two Swedes, Gunder Haegg and Arne Andersson, chased one another over the distance. Mostly they competed against one another all over Scandinavia but they sometimes competed from a distance.
Haegg, for instance, caught a cargo ship across the Atlantic to compete with the Americans in 1943. Andersson, didn’t join him, watching carefully from across the seas.
When he returned, the world went dizzy with excitement. They expected Haegg, with Andersson pushing him all the way, to finally break the record, but perhaps it would be the other way round?
In mid-July, 1945, the two met in perfect conditions at a meeting in Malmo. It was surely now or never. The two went out in an impressive first lap but, then, something strange happened. According to the athletics historian, John Bryant, in his excellent book on the four-minute mile, somehow a cartridge from the starter’s gun at the Malmo meeting became lodged between the spikes of Andersson’s running shoe.
“The crushed cartridge, its brass tip twisted, was like an instant callus under Andersson’s foot,” wrote Bryant. “He tried to stamp or shake it free, but every step fixed it more firmly. He tried not to break stride, despite the unwelcome distraction. It wouldn’t stop him, but it threw him – and he wasn’t happy.”
Despite the lodged cartridge, Andersson pushed Haegg all the way to a new world record of 4:01.4 (four-minutes, one-point-four-seconds), but that was a far-off nine years ago. In 1954, the record Bannister aimed to break still stood. Mystifyingly and heavy-handedly, both Swedes were banned by their Athletics Federation for violations of the amateur code in 1946, and so the record remained.
When asked if he thought that the four-minute mile could be broken, Haegg said, yes, he thought it could – but he wasn’t going to be the one to do it.
Elsewhere in the world, records were being broken. In 1953, a beekeeper from Auckland in New Zealand called Edmund Hillary and his Sherpa colleague and friend, Tenzing Norgay, had successfully climbed Everest, the world’s highest peak.
Change was in the air. Slowly the world was beginning to emerge from years of post-War austerity. There was a theme of reaching out, of reaching up. It was no good anymore to say that things could simply not be done.
The meeting for which Bannister had travelled to Oxford was one between Oxford University and the Amateur Athletic Association. As the afternoon progressed, still Bannister wrung his hands.
What Stampfl said in the train from Paddington was true, wasn’t it? Bannister needed to grasp the moment. He looked at the flag of St George at the Iffley Road track and noticed that it wasn’t flapping. The wind had died down. With the scheduled mile race fast approaching, he decided to race.
As planned, Brasher, wearing glasses, strong of thigh, almost pugnacious, went out first, followed by Bannister, with his slightly fey running style, his left hand flapping slightly, his fringe bobbing on his forehead.
Chattaway, who was to play and important part later in the race, tucked in behind Bannister in a close third. The three went to the front, as though they were running the race with no-one else. The three other athletes quickly melted away. The wind seemed to have died down completely. And the sun came out.
In the middle of the second lap, Bannister caught a voice in the crowd, rising above the cheering and clapping. Bannister heard one bold, simple word – “Relax” – and he obeyed. Only after the race did Bannister realise that the voice was Stampfl’s, Brasher and Chattaway’s Austrian coach. The words were meant for him. He took them to heart and relaxed. If the pacing was wrong, he could now do nothing about it.
With the race half over, Chattaway, cruised past Bannister and passed a tiring Brasher. Bannister chased him and the two, accelerating, left Brasher behind.
The crowd, variously numbered at a thousand, perhaps 1500, started to clap. Many, many more have said they were there that day, but they’re probably being fanciful. It was cold and there was no particularly good reason for being outdoors if you could avoid it, threatened attempt on a world record or not.
Those that were, were in anoraks and trench coats and duffel coats. You can see the throng on the banks of the track as Chattaway punched forward. Bannister chased him. Excitement rose. The spectators began to cheer. They cheered and they cheered. Their cheers helped the athletes on.
As he and Chattaway passed the last bell for the final lap, Bannister realised that the four-minute mile was in his grasp – although he would need to run it in 59 seconds, a monumental task.
With 300 yards to the finish, Bannister entered another world. He was by himself, with no-one else in front of him. His pace quickened. He was dimly conscious of the swelling emotion on the verges and in the stands. In later years he spoke of his mind taking over, of it drawing him forward, pulling him along with it. It was, he has said, the moment of a lifetime.
For a full half a minute, Bannister lived that “moment of a lifetime”, and, suddenly, he had broken the four-minute barrier, something that had eluded athletes for over sixty years.
His time? Three-minutes, fifty-nine point four seconds.
Upon crossing the line, Bannister promptly flopped, exhausted, into the arms of waiting officials. The language of boxing rather than athletics is appropriate here: Bannister was out on his feet. That’s what happened when you went four bruising rounds with the Mile. You got punch-drunk; you became legless.
The Foreign Office were quick to capitalise on Bannister’s achievement. They sent him under an assumed name to America on a goodwill tour. The Americans – who Bannister had been critical of on his visit five years earlier, sometimes preferring to walk when others drove – went down a hit with the star-truck Americans.
They loved him for being, well, so English. He spoke at the Yale Club in New York. He was plied with gifts but such was his commitment to amateurism that he either accepted very small ones or politely rejected the offers.
Santee wasn’t as scrupulous. He ran hard and his hard-running meant he was given trophies, watches and prize-money in excess of the amateur code. Rather than running around the track he’d always – in fact – skated on thin ice and it was no surprise when he eventually fell foul of the authorities, who banned him. It meant that whomever was going to be the second athlete in the world to break the four-minute mile, it wasn’t going to be the Kansas Cowboy.
Landy, the Australian, was, however, still in the race – as it were. In fact, many were mystified that Landy (and not Bannister) had broken the magic mile and it was left to Chattaway to helpfully suggest that perhaps Landy would benefit from a pacemaker.
Pacemakers were frowned-upon by the athletics establishment and, strictly-speaking, weren’t allowed. But Chattaway suggested his services anyway and, 46 days after Bannister’s record-breaking run at Iffley Road, he, Landy and the Finnish athlete, Denis Johansson, ran against each other on the black cinder of a Finnish track in Turku.
It was a beautiful still evening with the scent of pine resin in the air, writes Bryant. Landy hared to the front, and although Chattaway made a spirited attempt to kick past him, he just didn’t have the gas. In the event, the smooth Australian was unstoppable.
He shaved nearly a second and-a-half off Bannister’s time at Iffley Road to record a three-minute-fifty-seven-point-nine-second run [3:57.9] – and this less than two months since the early evening run in Oxford in early May.
When contacted for comment back home in London, Bannister was full of praise. His crucial sentence was, “it shows that times can always be broken”. In conclusion, he added that he now looked forward to competing against Landy at the Empire Games (later to become the Commonwealth Games) in Vancouver, Canada, in August.
The mile event in Vancouver had many guises. It was called “The Miracle Mile”, “The Dream Mile” and, “The Mile of the Century.” Despite being a Commonwealth event, no black or Indian athletes competed. Before the race, Bannister shook hands with his Canadian counterpart, Rich Ferguson. All in all, eight athletes competed in the race, including a runner from Northern Ireland.
The New Zealanders went into an early lead. It wasn’t long before Landy, in dark shorts and a pale vest, surged beyond them at about 200 yards. At the end of the first quarter mile Landy, the world record holder after his run in Finland, was ahead by five yards.
The New Zealanders had faded, and Bannister, with long strides, had swept into second place. Ferguson, the Canadian with whom Bannister had shaken hands, was fourth. Over the course of the second lap, he would move into third.
While Landy passed the half-way mark in world-record pace, Bannister had made up some ground on the Australian. He made up further ground on the third lap. By the time the two started on the last quarter-mile lap of the track, Landy must have felt the lick of Bannister’s breath on the back of his neck.
Sensing that Bannister was looking for an opportunity to pass him, Landy increased the pace; Bannister went with him. Landy put down the hammer again; Bannister stalked him.
At this point in the race, with the challenge from all the other athletes having evaporated, something strange happened: Landy turned his head over his left shoulder to see where Bannister was. As this happened, Bannister floated past the Australian on Landy’s right side. Once gone, there was nothing to stop the long-striding Englishman.
Landy had looked in the wrong direction.
Again, Bannister collapsed after cresting the tape, barely able to keep himself upright. Afterwards, no longer legless, Bannister ran over to Landy. The two embraced like drunken sailors. For Bannister, the disappointment of finishing fourth in Helsinki in the 1952 Olympics receded in the days to follow.
The Empire Games mile in Vancouver was to be his last competitive race. He was making huge strides as a junior houseman, ready to gallop to the top of his field. It was time to turn professional.