Sir Roger Bannister Interview (page: 3 / 8) Track and Field Legend	Print Interview

How did your father and your mother react when you began to show an interest in running? Did they support your taking it so seriously?

Sir Roger Bannister: They were supportive, but...

Get the Flash Player to see this video. At the time I was about to break a world record and become well known, my mother used to say, "Well, it is all very well, this running business, but I hope it doesn't distract you from your work as a medical student." So in other words, I got the impression that for her the only important thing was for me to become a doctor which as it were, was a career which had not been possible in her generation and in her society. So the values were career, medicine. Sport was something other, something to be set aside.

Some parents today seem to be obsessed with their children's athletic performance. It sounds like you performed and achieved without that kind of obsessive attention from your parents.

Sir Roger Bannister: Yes, I was self-motivated, and driven to do the things as successfully as possible. So in relation to sport, I tried to do that as well as possible, but at the same time remained primarily a medical student with quite wide interests, which I'm sure was the result of my parental influence. Quite quickly, I decided I wanted to be a neurologist. That seemed to be the most difficult, the most intriguing, and the most important aspect of medicine, which had links with psychology, aggression, behavior, and human affairs. So that was my choice.

What were you like growing up? Could you give us a picture of yourself at about age 10? What were your passions and interests at that age?

Sir Roger Bannister: At age 10, the war was about to break out, and I was at a simple state school in a suburb of London. I had already shown some signs of being a rather speedy runner. My father worked in a government office, and with war breaking out, his office was thought to be important enough to be evacuated to Bath. So at age ten, I go to Bath. I go to quite a small school there, and try to make my mark at this school. I was involved in music, and some acting, and some running, but already my firm wish was to become a doctor. None of my immediate friends or associates were doctors, but I had a distant cousin who was a doctor. That was the formative age when I had decided on the pattern of my career.

What did your father and mother do?

Sir Roger Bannister: My father was the youngest of 11 children, and he came from a depressed area with awful unemployment. It is in Lancashire. Lancashire is the center of the cotton industry, but periodically there were grave slumps and people tried to build up businesses. Then there was an international dispute and American cotton didn't come, so that the factories shut. Then there was the competition from Indian cotton and so on. My family actually lived in the same village for about 400 years. They had great stability until the last century. People lived and intermarried in small villages. Then young people, in a bicycling craze in the 1890s would cycle and meet other people and started to marry outside of the village and began to think, how can we escape from this environment in which there was going to be no employment? In order to get away from what was really not going to be a successful place to live, my father took an examination for the British Civil Service. They have nationwide competitive examinations, or they did then. He entered the clerical service, which was all he was able to qualify for. He came to London, so I was brought up in a suburb of London.

What about your mother? Did she work?

Sir Roger Bannister: No. Mothers, unless they were very poor, didn't work. Both of my parents had to leave education, my mother actually had to work in a cotton mill because her father died, until 18 or 19, when she took some training in domestic science. So she was qualified to be a teacher, but she did not teach. She wanted to spend her life completing the education that she never had. So I grew up in a family in which books were read and education was extremely important.

How did the war intrude on the consciousness of a ten-year-old? Was it important to you, or were you able to have what we would consider a normal life except for the evacuation?

Sir Roger Bannister: Well, I've always been very impatient. At age ten I frankly found life in this suburb and at this school boring, and I can remember age nine having the awful thought, as it seems now looking back on it, "A war! That should liven things up a bit."

So it was rather exciting actually.

Sir Roger Bannister: Yes. The first air raid siren sounded when I was still in London and I ran back from the park, where I'd been playing, home hearing this siren. Of course, nothing happened for six months. We had what we called the phony war. But when I went to Bath there was some reprisal bombing. Britain had started bombing Germany, so the Germans chose cities which were of no military consequence and Bath, of course, is a historic center, with lots of fine buildings from the 17th and 18th Century.

Our house was actually bombed, and the roof fell in. We were sitting under the stairs of the basement, and we were quite safe, but it brought home the realization. In two nights 400 people were killed in this relatively small town, so on the third night I persuaded my parents that we should leave. We went out of Bath and camped overnight about four miles away in a wood. My parents obviously agreed, but I wasn't going to suffer another night.

It sounds like you were already very determined about what you thought was the right thing to do.

Sir Roger Bannister: Yes, I was determined sometimes to the point of riskiness.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. I wanted to go rowing on the River Severn near Bewdley, and the person who hired out the boats said, "No, it's too rough." You know, "It's not safe to go out." And I made such a pest of myself that my father said, "All right. You know, we will go out." And it proved to be dangerous and frightening but that's an instance of the determination I had to try to do things, and later on if there was any opportunity to climb a mountain, or to go ballooning, or some adventurous activity, I would always be keen to do it. And, it's perhaps fortunate that nothing ever went wrong, but my discovery in Bath was of the countryside. I loved the countryside. I cycled, from the age of sort of 10 to 15, all around Bath and Somerset and Cheddar Gorge, and the sites of castles and country houses. And I remember that as a time of freedom, often perhaps a bit solitary, but great excitement of discovery and exploration.

[ Key to Success ] Courage

Were you an only child?

Sir Roger Bannister: No, I have an older sister who was also living with us in Bath.

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