In Memoriam: Sir Roger G. Bannister, CH, CBE, MSc, MA, DM, FRCP (1929–2018)

Abstract

Known first for his achievement as the first man to run a mile in less than 4 minutes, Sir Roger Bannister, who died on March 3, 2018, lived a long and productive life away from athletics. The 4-minute mile, believed at the time to be at the limit of human endurance, was achieved on the Iffley Road cinder track at Oxford in poor weather on May 6, 1954, and recorded in grainy black and white film. The iconic final image showed him straining to the tape at the finish with raincoated, hatted timers, the official timekeepers, clasping stopwatches, one determinedly smoking a pipe. He retired from athletics in the same year after winning the 1,500-meter European and Commonwealth Games Championships. How fast he might have gone had he continued his athletic career is a source of speculation. He described his athletic career in his first book The First Four Minutes (1955) and in his autobiography Twin Tracks (2014). He was a student at Exeter College, Oxford, and then, after a year at Merton College as Demonstrator in Physiology, a clinical student at St Mary's Hospital, London, graduating BM BCh in 1955. He married Moyra Jacobsson in 1955. After House appointments at St Mary's and at the Radcliffe Infirmary, Oxford, he trained in cardiology at Hammersmith Hospital and the Brompton Hospital, London. Army service then intervened. He was posted to Aden, where he investigated heat exhaustion and heat-related deaths in unacclimatized British soldiers, leading to a publication in Lancet and a thesis for the DM degree at Oxford University. He trained in neurology at Queen Square and spent a year with Derek Denny-Brown at the Boston City Hospital in 1962. He was appointed as Consultant Physician to the National Hospital, Queen Square, in 1963, and the following year to St Mary's Hospital, London. He continued in these appointments until 1985, when he returned to Oxford as Master of Pembroke College, a role he maintained until 1993.