Grim days they were. Britain owed £3 billion, principally to the United States, and the sum was growing. Exports had dried up, in large part because half of the country’s merchant fleet had been sunk. Returning soldiers found rubble where their homes had once stood. Finding work was hard, finding a place to live harder. Shop windows remained boarded up. Smog from coal fires deadened the air. Trash littered the alleys. There were queues for even the most basic staples, and when one got to the front of the line, a ration card was required for bread (three and a half pounds per person per week), eggs (one per week), and everything else (which wasn’t much). Children needed ration books to buy their sweets. Trains were overcrowded, hours off schedule, and good luck finding a taxi. If this was victory, asked a journalist, why was it ‘we still bathed in water that wouldn’t come over your knees unless you flattened them?’
And the blows kept falling. The winter of 1946–7, the century’s worst, brought the country to a standstill. Blizzards and power outages ushered in what the Chancellor of the Exchequer called the ‘Annus Horrendus’. It was so cold that the hands of Big Ben iced up, as if time itself had stopped. Spring brought severe flooding, and summer witnessed extremely high temperatures. To add to the misery, there was a polio scare.
Throughout the next five years, ‘austerity’ remained the reality, despite numerous attempts to put the country back in order. Key industries were nationalised, and thousands of dreary prefabricated houses were built for the homeless. In 1951 the Festival of Britain was staged to brighten what critic Cyril Connolly deemed ‘the largest, saddest and dirtiest of the great cities, with its miles of unpainted half-inhabited houses, its chopless chop-houses, its beerless beer pubs … its crowds mooning around the stained green wicker of the cafeterias in their shabby raincoats, under a sky permanently dull and lowering like a metal dish-cover’. The festival, though a nice party, was an obvious attempt to gloss over people’s exhaustion after years of hardship. Those who were particularly bitter said that the festival’s soaring Skylon was ‘just like Britain’, standing there without support. To cap it all, on 6 February 1952 London newspapers rolled off the presses with black-bordered pages: the king was dead. Crowds wearing black armbands waited in lines miles long to see George VI lying in state in Westminster Abbey. As they entered the hall, only the sounds of footsteps and weeping were heard. A great age had passed.
The ideals of that bygone age – esprit de corps, self-control, dignity, tireless effort, fair play, and discipline – were often credited to the country’s long sporting tradition. It was said that throughout the empire’s history, ‘England has owed her sovereignty to her sports.’ Yet even in sport she had recently faltered. The 1948 Olympic Games in London had begun badly when the Olympic flame was accidentally snuffed out on reaching England from Greece. America (the ‘United, Euphoric, You-name-it-they-had-it States’ as writer Peter Lewis put it) dominated the games, winning thirty-eight gold medals to Britain’s three. After that the country had to learn the sour lesson of being a ‘good loser’ in everything from football and cricket to rugby, boxing, tennis, golf, athletics, even swimming the Channel. It looked as though the quintessential English amateur – one who played his sport solely for the enjoyment of the effort and never at the cost of a complete life – simply couldn’t handle the competition. He now looked outdated, inadequate, and tired. For a country that considered its sporting prowess symbolic of its place in the world, this was a distressing situation.
Roger Bannister, born into the last generation of the age that ended with George VI’s death, typified the gentleman amateur. He didn’t come from a family with a long athletic tradition, nor one in which it was assumed he would go to Oxford, as he did, to study medicine and spend late afternoons at Vincent’s, the club whose hundred members represented the university’s elite.
His father, Ralph, was the youngest of eleven children raised in Lancashire, the heart of the English cotton industry and an area often hit by depression. Ralph left home at 15, took the British Civil Service exams, qualified as a low-level clerk, and moved to London. Over a decade later, after working earnestly within the government bureaucracy, he felt settled enough to marry. He met his wife Alice on a visit back to Lancashire, and on 23 March 1929 she gave birth to their first son and second child, Roger Gilbert. The family lived in a modest home in Harrow, north-west London. Forced to abandon their education before reaching university (his mother had worked in a cotton mill), Roger’s parents valued books and learning above everything else. All Roger knew of his father’s athletic interests was that he had once won his school mile and then fainted. Only later in life did he learn that his father carried the gold medal from that race on his watch chain.
Bannister discovered the joy of running on his own while playing on the beach. ‘I was startled and frightened,’ he later wrote of his sudden movement forward on the sand in bare feet. ‘I glanced round uneasily to see if anyone was watching. A few more steps – self-consciously … the earth seemed almost to move with me. I was running now, and a fresh rhythm entered my body.’ Apart from an early passion for moving quickly, nothing out of the ordinary marked his early childhood. He spent the years largely alone, building models, imagining heroic adventures, and dodging neighbourhood bullies, like many boys his age.
When he was 10 this world was broken; an air-raid siren sent him scrambling back to his house with a model boat secured under his arm. The Luftwaffe didn’t come that time, but soon they would. His family evacuated to Bath, but no place was safe. One night, when the sirens sounded and the family took refuge underneath the basement stairs of their new house, a thundering explosion shook the walls. The roof caved in around them, and the Bannister family had to escape to the woods for shelter.
Although the war continued to intrude on their daily lives, mostly in the form of ration books and blacked-out windows, Roger had other problems. As an awkward, serious-minded 12-year-old who was prone to nervous headaches, he had trouble fitting in among the many strangers at his new school in Bath. He won acceptance by winning the annual cross-country race. The year before, after he had finished eighteenth, his house captain had advised him to train, which Bannister had done by running the two-and-a-half-mile course at top speed a couple of times a week. The night before the race the following year he was restless, thinking about how he would chase the ‘third form giant’ who was the favourite. The next day Bannister eyed his rival, noting his cockiness and general state of unfitness. When the race started, he ran head down and came in first. His friends’ surprise would have been trophy enough, but somehow this race seemed to right the imbalance in his life as well. Soon he was able to pursue his studies, as well as interests in acting, music, and archaeology, without feeling at risk of being an outcast – as long as he kept winning races. Possessed of a passion for running, a surfeit of energy, and a preternatural ability to push himself, he won virtually all of them, usually wheezing for breath by the end.
Before he left Bath to attend the University College School in London, the headmaster warned, ‘You’ll be dead before you’re 21 if you go on at this rate.’ His new school had little regard for running, and Bannister struggled to find his place once again. He was miserable. He tried rugby but wasn’t stocky or quick enough; he tried rowing but was placed on the third eight. After a year he wanted out, so at 16 he sat for the Cambridge University entrance exam. At 17 he chose to take a scholarship to Exeter College, Oxford, since Cambridge had put him off for a year. He never had a problem knowing what he wanted.
Bannister intended to study to become a doctor, but he knew he needed a way not only to fit in but to excel among his fellow students, most of whom, in 1946, were eight years older than he, having deferred placement because of the war. A schoolboy among ex-majors and brigadiers, he realised that running was his best chance to distinguish himself. The year before, his father had taken him to see the gutsy, diminutive English miler Sydney Wooderson take