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- Herausgeber: The Robson Press
- Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014
It was a blustery late spring day in 1954 and a young Oxford medical student flung himself over the line in a mile race. There was an agonising pause, and then the timekeeper announced the record: three minutes, fifty-nine point four seconds. But no one heard anything after that first word - 'three'. One of the most iconic barriers of sport had been broken, and Roger Bannister had become the first man to run a mile in under four minutes. To this day, more men have conquered Mount Everest than have achieved what the slender, unassuming student managed that afternoon. Sixty years on and the letters still arrive on Roger Bannister's doormat, letters testifying to the enduring appeal of the four-minute mile and the example it set for the generation of budding athletes who were inspired to attempt the impossible. In this frank memoir, Sir Roger tells the full story of the talent and dedication that made him not just one of the most celebrated athletes of the last century but also a distinguished doctor, neurologist and one of the nation's best-loved public figures. With characteristically trenchant views on drugs in sport, the nature of modern athletics and record breaking, the extraordinary explosion in running as a leisure activity, and the Olympic legacy, this rare and brilliant autobiography gives a fascinating insight into the life of a man who has lived life to the fullest.
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To my beloved family and all those good friends who have so enriched our lives.
Contents
Preface
I remember vividly a moment as a child when I stood barefoot on firm dry sand by the sea.
The air had a special quality. The sound of breakers on the shore shut out all others. I looked up at the clouds, like great white-sailed galleons, chasing proudly inland. I looked down at the regular ripples on the sand and could not absorb so much beauty. I was taken aback – each of the myriad particles of sand was perfect in its way. I looked more closely, hoping perhaps that my eyes might detect some flaw. But for once there was nothing to detract from this feeling of closeness to nature.
In this supreme moment I leapt in sheer joy and started to run. I was startled and frightened by the tremendous excitement that so few steps could create. I glanced round uneasily to see if anyone was watching. A few more steps – self-consciously now and firmly gripping the original excitement. I was running now, and a fresh rhythm entered my body. I was no longer conscious of my movement. I discovered a new unity with nature. I had found a new source of power – a source I never dreamt existed.
Chapter 1
Growing Up in Harrow
I struggled into the world on 23 March 1929. Unlike most babies then, I was not born at home, but in a midwife’s house in the road where we lived, which had been converted into a small nursing home. Our road was lined with redbrick Edwardian terraced houses. Each had two floors and tiny front and back gardens. The speculative builder had embellished the roof corners with some fancy shaped tiles and the upper section of each front door had an elaborate stained-glass panel with a stylised picture of mountains and a rainbow. Except that one day, aged about three, I found myself in my pram outside the front door, restrained by much-chewed leather straps, frustrated by boredom and demanding attention. I must have been provoked beyond fury, for I hurled a Marmite jar, apparently then my favourite toy, through this fancy glass panel. Some might have predicted for me a future as a shot-putter, not a runner. To this day, the coloured panel has never been restored to its full glory and remains dull, frosted glass.
Discipline was paramount in many homes then; eating and sleeping were closely regulated. Truby King, the then guru on childcare, warned mothers against picking up their crying babies, lest the baby became a spoilt child. Another strange myth persisted that, if encouraged to walk too much before the age of three, children’s legs might be overstrained. My mother had no truck with such myths. ‘It’s nonsense,’ she said. ‘Your legs will only get stronger the more you use them.’ How sad that some pampered children were prammed around until they were almost three. Even the photographs of royal children show them being wheeled about in Kensington Gardens in the Rolls-Royce of perambulators, the Silver Cross. Rickets, which caused children’s bones to become weak and bowed, was known several years before my birth to be due to a lack of vitamin D. My mother said, ‘Yes you do have to swallow this halibut-liver oil. I’ve made it nice for you on a lump of sugar.’ Ugh – that never did disguise the horrible taste.
Even on hot summer nights an early bedtime was enforced. As I lay sleepless, looking at the cracks in the ceiling, I imagined monsters and grotesque shapes coming to life. Neurologists have yet to understand why our long-distant memory is threaded through with such strong emotion, in my case born of frustration. I can still remember as a child a vivid feeling that there must be more to life than this, but I had not the slightest idea where that magic place might be found.
Years later, when my wife Moyra and I had our own children, Chris Brasher’s mother, a most kind and maternal woman, was our neighbour. She recalled her own anguish in the 1920s when she paced up and down outside her sons’ rooms, hearing them cry bitterly, but not daring to go in and comfort them. Our own generation, partly under the benign influence of Dr Spock, reacted strongly against this, so Moyra always picked up and comforted a crying child, as indeed Mrs Brasher did when she became a grandmother. Our mothers can hardly be blamed for adhering to the bleak and misguided view of childcare. Every generation of parents clings to its nostrums in the hope that they will succeed where their own parents failed.
When they learn that I was born in Harrow, most people think of the great public school founded in the sixteenth century and attended by Winston Churchill. But my family had no connection with the school, except for the first road we lived in being called Butler Road after a famous headmaster. Presumably the local council, when searching for street names, had exhausted their lists of English authors and Crimean victories and so turned closer to home.
Harrow for us was a part of Betjeman’s Metroland, houses built to absorb London’s expansion during the years of Edwardian prosperity; then followed a second building boom between the wars. For some, the area embodied an escape from the inner London slum clearance; for us it was a formulaic group of streets, radiating from the railway station, with a Victorian primary school, perhaps a recreation ground with swings, a boating pond, some tennis courts, and also, if you were very lucky, a public library.
My father had bought the house in Butler Road for £700 in 1925. It was then customary to secure a house before marriage. Given his horror of indebtedness, he bought it outright from his savings, accrued from fifteen years’ work as a clerical officer at the Board of Trade in London. His caution was balanced by generosity and, when my sister and I came to buy our own houses, he gave us substantial help. By then, in the 1950s, every sensible person was advised to buy a house and take on any mortgage they could afford, later selling in a rising market, and so move up the housing ladder. But in the 1920s, with the slump approaching, there was no certainty that house prices would rise.
It may seem strange to people today for a man to buy his own house, to bring his newlywed down from Lancashire, to be able to sustain them both and their children, and all in order that his bride could become a full-time wife and mother. It will puzzle them as to how the middle classes then considered this pattern of life fulfilling. My daughter once exploded with incomprehension that it should have been so. Freedom gives a mother time to read, to think, to exercise, to go to classes, to fulfil her educational gifts. It can only be achieved when women are liberated from the grind of juggling home and full-time work, a dilemma that is with us still. Then, the fear of indebtedness haunted those who had seen the boom and bust of the cotton industry, and my father was no exception. He must have been a proud man to bring his bride from the north to a home free of mortgage.
When we were buying our first house in 1963, my father said, ‘This is a mistake. In my day in our family it was a point of honour to save enough money to buy without a mortgage and bring one’s bride only when the transaction was completed. Autres temps, autre moeurs.’ We blithely plunged on, buying the house of our dreams with a mortgage. Looking back, my father was half right. We were in the midst of the terrible financial turmoil of the 1970s monetary crisis, with a grotesquely high tax rate of 87 per cent and a stock market fall from 900 to 200. There was an equally grotesque rate of inflation. Then we had a serious car accident, stopping me working, and so we were forced to downsize so we could make ends meet. It was, to borrow a phrase from our own Queen, an annus horribilus. I said to Moyra, ‘Darling, there is no alternative. We’ll have to move. The school fees have rocketed. Unless the children go to the local comprehensive there’s no way we can stay in this house.’
However, back in 1935, when I was five and just starting at the elementary school, we were moving up in the world, to 89 Whitmore Road, a semi-detached house with a garage. It had been built ten years before, on a wider road which was half a mile from our old house and adjoined the Harrow School cricket ground and fields with cows that provided the daily milk for the metropolis. It had larger front and back gardens and the road was lined by grass verges with small trees. The house cost £1,500 freehold.
My father particularly enjoyed gardening and growing vegetables, apples and pears, which supplemented food rationing during the war. I never liked gardening. For a start, I found the whole activity stunningly boring, perhaps lacking the patience to wait for the seasons to pass before reaping the benefits of such mundane labour.
A visit to relatives in Lancashire gave me the dream of acquiring untold riches. They kept chickens and sold both the birds and their eggs for profit, as did many families during the war. It would have been a delight to have fresh eggs instead of the wartime dried egg powder, but any idea of a chicken run in our back garden was quashed by my father.
While the Butler Road house had been dark and cramped, the house in Whitmore Road was definitely a notch up. I could gaze from my bedroom windows across the Harrow School playing fields. My father could delight in a fair-sized back garden.
One evening I heard my father in serious tones talking to my mother: ‘I’m transferring from the Board of Trade to the Exchequer and Audit Department. Where I am, the men who served in France are being promoted over my head and my service in Ireland doesn’t seem to count. That’s why I am changing to a department that seems to be expanding, though by moving I shall have to start again at the bottom.’ From this superior dwelling I had my first lesson in class distinctions. Between Butler Road and the new house there lay a pre-war council housing estate. This was built for families who were moved out of the London slums and so the children were, in my parents’ words, ‘rough’. My sister and I were warned not to stray too near this estate and I suppose this stirred my first fears of danger and violence, from which, if I broke their injunction, my parents could not protect me.
In 1935, my father duly made his transfer to the Exchequer and Audit Department. This came with one exciting reward: he was appointed the junior member of a team to inspect the accounts of the Canadian government, which, as a dominion at the time, submitted itself periodically to British audit. He travelled across the Atlantic on the Queen Mary, in cabin (second) class, as a mark of respect for the British civil service. To be properly attired, he had to purchase his first dinner jacket, which the family all admired. He sent back the menus, filling us with wonder at the plethora of extravagant dishes.
At home in Harrow the food was simple but must have been nutritious. Otherwise, despite fifteen years of food rationing starting in 1939, I would hardly have grown to more than six foot one inch, five inches taller than my father. Looking at the photograph of Chris Brasher, Chris Chataway and me at the end of the four-minute mile, it is noticeable that I am taller than either of the Chrises, both of whom, one might feel, had the supposed advantage of being at a prep school and a boarding public school. From 1940, food rationing was strict, but my mother cycled into Harrow every day with shopping bags on her handlebars to buy fresh vegetables to supplement our diet, especially the well-remembered spam and dried eggs. Our food, except for bread, was all cooked or baked at home. We had no refrigerator, only a walk-in larder with marble shelves. We never went to restaurants and so, when we went into London to visit the museums, frequently the Museum of Natural History, we always took our own sandwiches.
On rare occasions, as a treat, we bought muffins from a muffin man who would come down the road singing his street cry, balancing a tray on a curious flat-topped hat and ringing a hand bell. On Shrove Tuesday we had pancakes and I soon learnt how to toss them out of the pan to turn them without their hitting the ceiling. Christmas we usually celebrated with pork, home-made stuffing and apple sauce, rather than the traditional turkey, followed by mince pies and Christmas pudding.
In the week after Christmas we would go to a pantomime or a children’s play such as Peter Pan, and it was when travelling on the London Underground that I was first shocked by the sight of helplessly drunk men and beggars. My first visit to the Harrow Cinema was to see Treasure Island when I was eight. My sister and I were enthralled to see a performance of the play Charlie’sAunt put on by the Harrow Boys’ County School. Coming home from school one day, my sister Joyce ran towards me, her face all eagerness. ‘This Christmas we’ve got tickets for a performance at the Harrow School Speech Room,’ she said. This was the large auditorium where Winston Churchill returned to sing school songs, weeping with emotion. When my father got home he said, ‘Yes, it’s true, we’re going to the Messiah.’ Such treats were few and far between but gave us all the more delight when they came. It is hard to conceive now how great was our excitement over these trips to the cinema and rare live performances, which we talked about for days in anticipation.
On our birthdays our parents were good at giving children’s parties in return for our having been invited to our friends’ homes for their birthdays. My father presided over a Victorian magic lantern, which showed cartoons of animals and clowns. Decades later we experienced our grandchildren’s ever so sophisticated parties in New York with a live Punch and Judy show. Moyra murmured to me, ‘This is some contrast to our children’s parties in which the games were “Sardines” and egg-and-spoon races and the going-home present was a balloon and a block of chocolate.’ No musical chairs for them, or hunting for marbles round the house in such pristine, designer-furnished apartments. It would have been unthinkable for chocolatey fingers to leave their mark on the decor.
Imagine the elation of my first bicycle when I was aged seven. This opened up a whole new world of freedom and exploration. Until then, my energies were used for zipping along at speed on a ramshackle trolley, constructed from a wooden draining board and wheels from a tricycle, which my long-suffering father had watched me assemble with nails, not screws as he would have preferred. But it worked! As for many a boy, the allure of speed inspired me, though pushing myself along at up to ten miles an hour made me a menace to pedestrians.
All over England the middle classes forced their children to learn music almost as a rite of passage. It was my lot to be put to the piano, though from the very start I had the dread feeling I would never be any good at it. The climax came when my gaunt, lantern-jawed teacher had inveigled my eight-year-old self into playing at her end-of-term concert. Climbing the platform, sitting on the piano stool, I looked down at the keys as they danced before my uncomprehending eyes. On which note should I start? To my shame, the teacher eventually climbed the steps, placed my fingers where they should have been, and I stumbled through my piece. Even she had realised that we should part company.
Later, in Bath, I came ‘under the baton’ of an elderly spinster music teacher. She had thick, knitted woollen stockings and knitted skirts and blouse to match – boys notice these things. In her orchestra I was consigned to the back row of the second violins, where I could cause least damage, scratching away at some dull, repetitive dirge. I was next to the violas and a boy who, rather pretentiously, I thought, made endless comments to me about mistakes in the way the music was being conducted, whispering that the adagio was ‘too slow’ and so on. I should have known better – this viola player later became Professor of Music at Cambridge. I just knew that I would never excel with the instrument. It is a very great regret that I know so little about music, and I deeply envy our friends whose lives are so enriched by their musical knowledge. It has been a sad gap in my life, but on some occasions our friends invited us to the opera, in which we took much delight.
When I was seven, miracle of miracles, my father said, ‘I’ve bought a car.’ A box on wheels though it was, my father drove it back from Coventry after the briefest instructions – no driving test was necessary then. The next weekend we were off to admire Burnham Beeches in Hertfordshire, with sandwiches, cakes, lemonade, and tea in a thermos. There followed many jaunts which gave us children unfettered glee. My father’s obsessive checking of the tyre pressure and level of water in the radiator seemed to take forever when we were so eager for the off. To his credit, he never had an accident or even a slight scratch on this treasured vehicle. How deeply shocked he must have been at my cavalier approach to its upkeep when, many years later, after I had left Oxford, I bought the car in the hope that he would stop worrying about it. I used it to zip my girlfriends about the countryside. Moyra remembers her first outing in it: we drove to St Mary’s country convalescent home near Henley, singing all the way.
These days, an injured child would be taken to hospital at the drop of a hat. When I fell out of an elm tree, frightened of being caught trespassing by an irate farmer, I gashed my hand on barbed wire. Today it would have been sewn up after a tetanus injection at the A&E department; then, stoicism and home remedies were the order of the day. Many of my generation wince at the memory of iodine being poured on an open wound, causing sharp pain. I still have the scars. Many owe their health to the assiduous nursing of their mothers. There was often no other remedy than maternal attention through all those childhood illnesses which are virtually unknown today thanks to enormous medical advances in inoculation.
In those days, the terrors of poliomyelitis and tuberculosis (TB) were the most menacing. Every summer brought the threat of a polio epidemic. Victims who had respiratory weakness usually died, until iron lungs were invented. Deaths of both women and babies during childbirth and of school-age children, extremely rare today, were then an accepted part of life. In Whitmore Road, a pretty girl, a friend of mine with blonde curly hair, died within a week of contracting meningitis. Another girl caught rheumatic fever and disappeared from home for many months’ treatment in a sanatorium.
I must have been a tiresome brother, because my sister Joyce still shivers at certain memories today – and never more so than at the recollection of the whole family nearly drowning on the river Wye. It is still a mystery that a reluctant boatman’s warnings about the waves and current went unheeded by my parents. How could they have given way to my insistent importuning? Like the apothecary in Romeo and Juliet, the boatman gave us due warning but then accepted our money. Not twenty yards from the river’s edge, the boat was being swamped by waves. My father rowed as best he could and four frightened Bannisters reached safety, wet and chastened. My love affair with boats and water resurfaced many years later when I owned a sailing cruiser. I learnt respect for the sea after some dire episodes.
In vivid contrast to our staid, heads-down and homework-encompassed lives, come the summer, for two weeks our whole lives changed. In 1942 we were told we were going back to Lynmouth, which we had visited before. On the great day of departure we were instructed, ‘Anything you forget is your own fault and we are not coming back for it!’ Joyce and I would be both nearly choking with excitement. Would the car get up Porlock Hill, a few miles from Lynmouth, which had given us trouble two years earlier? Porlock Hill had a 1 in 4 gradient, the steepest road in the country. The car with four of us might be so overloaded with luggage that we would have to get out and walk, as we had done before. Joyce and I almost burst with impatience as at last we crested the hill and could see ahead the town of Lynmouth. On the journey we were told the story of how Coleridge was interrupted from his dream about Kubla Khan by a stranger from Porlock, and how his vision could never be recalled.
The Holiday Fellowship centre at Lynmouth was a modest manor house. What a welcome they gave us: many old friends, the children we had met on previous holidays, and some new faces. Joyce and I rushed to scan the notice board for events over the next two weeks for children of our age. There were walks, table tennis competitions, musical evenings, dancing and acting – a whole world away from Harrow.
We never went to a hotel or boarding house. Each time, we travelled to a Holiday Fellowship guesthouse in a different part of the country, and a family centre was chosen where we would meet other children. This was our first experience of the wider social contact which was lacking at home. I still clearly recall the various places around England where we holidayed: Marske, Cromer, Hythe, Swanage and Lyme Regis, Teignmouth, the Wye Valley and the Lake District. Our two favourite places were Lynmouth in north Devon and Portinscale, close to Derwent Water in the Lake District. The flavour of the holiday can be judged from the blunt guidance note to ‘guests’ in a brochure, which stated, ‘the simpler you dress in the daytime and the evenings the better’.
The Holiday Fellowship movement, for which my parents and other members took out the maximum holding of a £1 ‘share’, had been founded as a kind of mutual society or cooperative in Lancashire after the First World War. It was intended to give those who worked in northern cities the chance to escape to the countryside for a cheap, healthy, Christian-based holiday which was strong on temperance.
My parents acted as ‘host’ and ‘hostess’ for between sixty and a hundred paying ‘guests’ in this movement at each of their Easter and summer holidays for more than thirty years. Their duties earned them a free holiday because they organised the social programme for the guests. After walking in the countryside all day, the evening included debates, music and acting, the guests contributing according to their talents. My parents could of course have afforded such holidays as guests (in the 1920s the cost was a mere £10 a week for the whole family), but I think they took pride in using skills that lay dormant in suburban Harrow for the rest of the year. They acquired kudos in the movement, both admired for their organisational skills and also popular.
Later, when I was seventeen, I myself acted as secretary to the Holiday Fellowship at Derwent Bank. The princely salary was £1 a week with free ‘board’. For this I had to collect the guests’ money and would feel rather bold walking to Keswick with some £500 in a bag, this being the weekly receipts. More importantly, I had the responsibility of taking the guests on vigorous countryside excursions; a guide to these was left for me by my predecessors as secretary. One day, I was taking a shortcut through a farm as there was no clear guidance of the route from my notes. A week later, I took the same shortcut again, rushing down the same hillside to the farm at the bottom. There, I was faced by the farmer, red-faced with anger, who stood on his gate holding a pitchfork in his right hand. ‘You came trespassing last week and I didn’t manage to catch you, but I’ve got you today and if you effing move a step forward I shall kill you with this pitchfork, I promise.’ I knew he meant it, so, rather crestfallen, I turned to the thirty or so guests behind me and said to them, ‘I am very sorry but there are some times in life that you have to admit you are beaten; this is one of them. I must ask you all to turn around and we shall climb back to the road at the top of the hill.’ As this six-week post involved walking approximately ten miles a day, it must have helped to strengthen me for all my later running.
I was trained to respect authority, keep in line, work hard and do well. For me, even then, home was a place of serious activity. No comics were allowed in our home. I knew of other homes where comics were read, and I had an orgy of guilty reading when I visited them. In our own home most books were of the ‘look and learn’ variety; we had a complete set of Arthur Mee’s Children’s Encyclopaedia. When we got married my wife was astonished that I knew so few of the cheerful or dramatic children’s books, such as Just William, The Scarlet Pimpernel, or Beau Geste, which my parents had deemed not to be ‘Literature’. In other homes, in my mother’s terms, time was wasted, and the children in them risked failing the eleven-plus examination, which was my avowed target.
My class in elementary school seldom had fewer than fifty pupils. We sat paired in desks, each with an iron base, a hinged wooden seat and a hinged top under which we kept our books. Classes were mixed. Each week we had some kind of test and, based on these results, children with higher marks were moved towards the back of the class, as they were trusted to work further away from the eye of the teacher. Only the first two or three in the top class, aged ten or eleven, would get to Harrow County School, the best state school in the district, which was fed by the cleverest children from a very wide catchment area of the new suburbs surrounding Harrow. Although it was called a ‘county’ school, its standards were those of a grammar school, but without the historic tradition. There were alternative secondary schools that had been recently built around the housing estates at Ruislip, Northwood and Pinner, where competition was less severe. By then I was usually in the top three, although I can remember a girl who always got higher marks in mathematics. At that stage I had throbbing headaches nearly every Friday night, culminating in severe vomiting. No doctor was ever consulted but, in retrospect, as a neurologist I can diagnose that I had a variant of migraine from which some children suffer, in my case a response to the stress and intensity of school and the weekly tests. I am glad to say that this migraine went away when I was thirteen and only recurred very occasionally with some visual disturbances in my sixties.
During my childhood I think I was naturally assertive and cheerful at home. At school, minor offences were punished by standing the child in front of the class or sending him to stand in a corridor. Corporal punishment was then still common in elementary schools, though I managed to avoid it myself. The instrument was chosen by the particular teacher administering the punishment and was usually a ruler or a rubber-soled shoe, applied to the palm of the hand.
A fear grew inside me that I might be set upon by a group of boys from the nearby estate. In my vivid imagination, I could see myself captured by these boisterous alien boys evacuated from London slums. Tales of other boys being captured by this gang, taken hostage and tortured cruelly, terrified me. On one occasion I took to my heels when my friend and I were caught by this gang as we walked past the estate. I escaped and ran away, pounding hard down the road until I got home, breathless and frightened. In some way I expected my father to come and settle with the gang. But for reasons I now well understand, he would do no such thing. He made me feel ashamed of myself by asking, ‘Why didn’t you fight them?’ My first experience of the fight and flight emotion had crystallised into flight.
The ‘fight’ and ‘flight’ response is one of the most powerful and primitive biological responses. A fair fight such as a boxing match in the gym at school held no fears for me. What frightened me was the thought of being captured and outnumbered, when fighting would be useless. So, when trapped by the gang, the balance of my excitement was switched from ‘fight’ to ‘flight’.
I asked my father to pass on his knowledge of boxing and for a while he did so, but it was not a very wholehearted or successful training, as I later found out at my secondary school. But by the age of nine I had already learnt that my best defence was to be so fleet of foot that bullies thought it too bothersome to pursue me. They hadn’t the puff I had.
After marriage and the arrival of her two children, my mother, to use her own favourite phrase, was very much thrown on her ‘inner resources’. At the time, middle-class women rarely went out to work. The frustration of leaving school early generated an unassuageable yearning for music, poetry and literature, as well as open-air exercise. Each day was planned so that she had her own kind of freedom. After lunch she had a short rest and then walked briskly, alone, over Harrow Hill, taking perhaps three-quarters of an hour.
My sister Joyce said recently, ‘I never heard a cross word spoken between our parents.’ My mother believed she had an easy life, presumably comparing her position to the struggles of her own mother, who had been widowed young and had brought up six children on her own. As a trained dressmaker, my mother made nearly all her own clothes except for her outside coat, and also our clothes until we were about eight. I minded having to wear cut-down, altered clothes.
Summarising life in Harrow, it seems that my parents, with the best intentions, may have mistaken the cultural shadow of life for its substance. They were both immersed in their music, reading and listening to the radio.
As I see it now, neither my father nor mother really needed or wanted close friendships. They had come from large families and these had been all the ties they valued or needed. They may even have recognised difficulties in their own families from which they were glad to have escaped. My mother spoke about the unpleasant teasing from younger brothers which, in her own serious way, she had found intolerable. My parents felt that if you did not accept invitations, you avoided commitments that might prove onerous later. They were very self-contained.
Chapter 2
Family Origins
It is a common experience that as the years pass we regret bitterly that we did not ask our parents more questions about their own lives. We want to know more about their hopes, fears, ambitions, perceptions of their own parents, and even everyday occurrences which possibly seemed mundane to them but are now so different from our own. In Pepys’s diary it is not the great events of state that appeal so much as his sprightly accounts of people and day-to-day happenings.
The early Bannisters who left some record are distantly related; although we are likely to share few of their genes, some part of their make-up must still exist in us. As Oscar Wilde remarked, ‘Debrett is one of the greatest works of fiction in the English language.’ Full of cheerful fantasies though it is, it is only human to try to find some evidence of reasonable distinction in our ancestors, however remotely connected. It is believed that our family’s origins can be traced all the way back to a Norman soldier named Robert de Banastre, who came over with William the Conqueror in 1066 and whose name is enrolled in Battle Abbey at Hastings. He might be one of the moustachioed figures depicted on the Bayeux Tapestry. Nevertheless, Tennyson cautions us: ‘Kind hearts are more than coronets, and simple faith than Norman blood.’
My headmaster uncle diligently worked out a family tree, a copy of which now hangs on our corridor wall. There were ups and downs in their fortunes. One Bannister in 1215 was beheaded on the field of battle after a rising against the Duke of Lancaster. Other signs of awkwardness included a prolonged legal battle over a church pew. Another refused a knighthood because it would have cost him an annual payment. When I became a knight a kindly friend said I would become the victim of a ‘Sir charge’. As in all families there were some rogues as well as some saints. One aunt became a missionary nurse in Africa and died of yellow fever. There is a mixed thread of non-conformity, idealism and sometimes a rather quixotic sense of purpose that has remained with them through the centuries.
Among his record of the most interesting Bannisters prior to the eighteenth century, my uncle found nine knights, eight Members of Parliament and ten Mayors of Preston, the largest nearby Lancashire town. Bannisters married into various prominent families, among them the owners of Marsden, Darwin and Townley Halls, all grand houses in the vicinity. Around 1450, our own branch of the family’s fortune declined and thereafter they settled down to modest farming at Park Hill, Barrowford.
Park Hill, a manor house, was, rather remarkably, the home of the Bannister family for 300 years. This is not a myth. It is now a heritage centre which includes a room devoted to the genealogy of the Bannister clan. Prince Charles, because of his interest in the architecture of the house, visited it and I was struck by his detailed knowledge of the structure and its large barn.
My father’s isolated village of Trawden was thought of as being on a road to nowhere. In fact, a small road winds from Trawden into Yorkshire over the Pennines, the ‘backbone of England’. These hills are generally bleak and cold. Ten miles from Trawden, in Lancashire, is the village of Haworth, over the border in Yorkshire. The Brontёs lived in the rectory there and the surrounding country is well portrayed in Wuthering Heights, in which Heathcliff and Cathy share a secret rock on the moor’s windswept pinnacle. Some early biographers of the Brontës tended to portray their work as the outcome of spinsters’ fevered imaginations. In fact, the reverse is true and more recent meticulous biographies show just how wild and primitive life was in this part of England.
My father was the youngest of eleven. That small boy, gazing out from the photograph, perhaps slightly apprehensive, but no doubt much loved. The family had a cohesion, shown by a round-robin letter that went from brother to brother or sister with friendly additions from each. It could take six months to circulate as some correspondents were laggardly. On receiving the letters, each sibling withdrew his own previous contribution and added a new one and the group of letters was posted on. The letters included descriptions of their interests and hobbies, showing a blend of eccentricity, scepticism and ingenuity. There would be advice on a plethora of tasks, such as mending cars, buying houses or choosing holidays, as well as family gossip and folk history. It helped keep the family close, despite the fact that many siblings had left Lancashire, finding no prospects there, and only returned at Christmas and other holidays. Despite the diaspora, the chain of interest and affection was linked by this letter for seventy years.
My father was not tall by today’s standards, but was sturdy and eventually grew to five feet eight inches, then the average height. What is striking is that all the siblings in the family, as you see them in photographs, grew up healthy. For eleven children, a number unimaginable today, to have grown to adulthood without a single death in childhood was an unusual event and an immense tribute to the nurturing qualities of their quite remarkable parents. In those days before antibiotics or immunisation, some families, on average, lost as many as half the children that were born to them before they reached adult life.
My parents both had a memory of the terrible poverty in Lancashire with the collapse of the cotton trade when supplies were cut off in the American Civil War. It was so strong with my parents that they feared such times might easily recur and this contributed to their caution over money. My father and his parents would have put aside their savings in a bank or ‘friendly society’, to keep it out of temptation’s way. My father told me that at no stage in his life did he ever spend more than half his salary. He never had a mortgage and, as I have said, he was reluctant for me to take one out when I was buying my first house, even though I was then aged thirty-four and had the security of a hospital consultancy in the National Health Service. It was a caution bred of a bitter family experience of past hardship, rather than any meanness on his part.
Over the last century, our branch of the Bannister family’s fortunes had slowly declined, largely due to the collapse of the cotton industry, and my father, at fifteen, left Colne Secondary School in Lancashire to come to London. All my children and nearly all my grandchildren were born in London or the south of England, though I sometimes like to feel proud of the vigour given to me by my Lancashire blood.
Most children worked in the family mill when they left full-time school at the age of thirteen or fourteen. While children were still living at home, they had to ‘tip up’ to their parents eleven pence of every shilling they earned to pay for board and lodging. Many young men and women also had to do this. It meant coming home on a Friday night and putting almost their whole wages down on the kitchen table.
Fortunately, my father, like his three immediately older brothers, but unlike most Trawden boys, did not have to work in the mill. They passed examinations from the village school in Trawden admitting them to Colne County Secondary School. My uncle Fred went on to a teachers’ training college, then took an external BSc at Liverpool University and became the headmaster of a local secondary school. His research on family history was published in a book entitled The Annals of Trawden Forest in 1930. The other brothers, including my father, passed open public examinations for the civil service and the Customs and Excise Department and one of them became a policeman.
In 1910, at the age of fifteen, my father came second out of many thousands of candidates in the general civil service examination for the clerical grade for school leavers. On the evidence of this alone, he must be rated both clever and determined. He then came down to London, where he first worked at the Board of Trade. He went home to Lancashire for all his holidays, thanks to his affection for his family and loneliness in London.
One of my strongest early memories is of a visit to Oxford with my parents and Joyce in 1938, when I was eight. During the day we saw some colleges and my cousin Edith’s lodgings; she was my uncle Fred (the headmaster)’s younger daughter, the first member of our family to go to Oxford. As a result of this visit I subtly absorbed my parents’ ambitions for me to follow in her footsteps. If London had been my father’s escape from Lancashire, Oxford became my hoped-for escape from suburbia.
My parents were engaged for over two years, not then unusual, and did not marry until 1925, when my father was thirty and my mother was twenty-five. My mother’s father, Robinson Duckworth, died prematurely from a cerebral haemorrhage at the age of forty-six, when my mother, the eldest of six children, was only fourteen. My only knowledge of him comes from the obituary in the local newspaper, which described him as a ‘Unitarian Worthy’. The Unitarian movement had been founded in the sixteenth century and became quite strong in Lancashire. Its believers did not accept the deity of Christ, instead regarding him only as a supremely good human being.
When my father was ten his own father was sixty-one, so my uncle Gilbert acted rather as a second father to him and took a direct interest in his development. When my father reached his twenty-first year Gilbert handed him a list of the most desirable qualities to be looked for in a wife. These were, in order, that she should be:
healthy, sensible, able to look after a home, intelligent, well-educated, good-tempered (nice-mannered and agreeable), a credit to you – i.e. no sense of shame or apology for her, inexpensive and willing to remain so, not belonging to a ‘swanky’ lot, but one who can work for her living and has done so, has similar tastes to you, is beautiful, of your own class – with ambitions but no pride, and moderate in all things – no crank.
Physical beauty appeared low down on the list, perhaps because he thought most men are unduly swayed by this. I might add that Gilbert seems to have been better at giving advice in this respect than taking it. Sadly, his own marriage ended in divorce, something that happened to no other member of the family. His wife was an outstanding beauty but evidently this was not matched by enough other qualities, on both sides, to enable the marriage to endure.
My mother was undoubtedly beautiful and as far as I can tell she possessed in good measure all the other qualities too. At the age of twenty-nine my father was, in Jane Austen’s phrase, ‘in want of a wife’. He had a steady income, a secure job and, through assiduous saving, enough money to buy a house. I suspect his heart remained in Lancashire. London for him consisted of work and survival, as well as attendance at evening classes. Perhaps romance only blossomed when he went home for his holidays. He relied on his niece Mavis, with whom he had a close friendship, who arranged a meeting with Alice, my mother.
Their honeymoon, spent in the Pyrenees, set the pattern for the rest of their holidays together with the Holiday Fellowship movement. At that time my father’s main diversion was photography. He had a heavy, nine-inch-square mahogany reflex camera which used glass plates, six inches by six inches, of which he carried a gross (144) in his rucksack. Their clothing for the holiday must have been sparse, but I believe he took some fine photographs, in the pictorial style of the time. Some were successful in photographic competitions.
One such winning entry was a photograph of me failing to eat up my lunch, with sunshine crossing my face. The prize was a camera and for some reason the camera was given to my sister. Disappointment was not the word for it – it was just one of those situations in which all children cry out ‘it’s not fair!’
Chapter 3
School in Bath and Hampstead
One day in September 1939, as I was sailing my toy boat on the West Harrow recreation ground pond, the terrifying wail of the first air-raid siren I had ever heard pierced the suburban calm. In every garden there was an Anderson shelter with emergency food rations stored inside. We had all been issued gas masks. War had been declared a few days earlier and, since I couldn’t know that this siren was a false alarm, I was fearful that violence might be unleashed immediately. I grabbed my boat and sprinted home. I was already feeling guilty because a few days before, when hearing that war might be declared, it had occurred to me that this might be an exciting prospect, as it may have done to some other children. A truly wicked thought. Now, at any moment, bombs might be falling on innocent people.
The government imagined London would suffer a huge number of casualties through gas attacks and bombing and so plans were rushed through to send as many government departments as possible to safer cities, like Cheltenham, Oxford and Bath. Within weeks of the outbreak of war my father moved to Bath, where the Admiralty had been relocated. At that point he was helping to audit Admiralty accounts. When I asked him what he was up to in his office, he replied that he was trying to stop the electrical companies from overcharging the government for work done on submarines.
The historic Bath Grammar School was full, because thousands of civil servants and their families had already descended on Bath. I had been offered a place at the state secondary school. At the end of the first day, catapulted on the same day into a new town, new home and new school, the form master asked me to stay behind. He spoke kindly to me and it was too much for me. I burst into tears. This same master a year later took me aside again after class, having watched the intensity with which I threw myself into everything. ‘If you can’t slow up, you’ll be dead by the age of twenty-one.’
Before my mother and sister joined us, my father and I lived in a boarding house, where we had terrible food. I remember particularly the high teas with ‘brawn’, bits of pork in jelly. Rather touchingly, my father, presumably hoping to cheer me up in my mother’s absence, took me to the cinema every Friday evening, despite not really approving of it. There we saw patriotic war films about spying. I remember in The Spy in Black: the main character, a German spy, flashes messages from headland cliffs to German submarines. These were propaganda films intended to instil wariness about spying. At the end we all stood for the national anthem to be played and left with a warm patriotic feeling.
Later in January my mother and sister joined us in Bath. It was almost impossible for the whole family to find accommodation and at first we lived in a cramped top-floor flat in one of the five-storey Georgian houses at the bottom of Lansdown Hill. I slept in a small cubbyhole between the bathroom and the kitchen. After eight months we found a flat in a three-storey Georgian house and we moved there so we could all have proper bedrooms.
It had always been as easy for me to run as to walk and, since I had no bicycle and did not want to travel by bus to school, each morning I had to walk or run down Lansdown Hill on the east side of Bath, through the city past the Roman Baths, to the school on Combe Down, the hill on the west side. The final part of the route was up 150 feet of steps called Beechen Cliff. It was no trouble for me to sprint up these steps, recovering my breath at the top.
My school was split between the Bath-born boys and the newcomers, most of whom, like me, had been working towards the more competitive London eleven-plus examination and whose intrusion was resented. Jealousy over work standards led some of the Bath boys to bully the Londoners. One day I was roughly and deliberately pushed over by a particular Bath boy in the playground. I got up and started a scrap with him. This was seen by a supervising master, who happened to be the school PE teacher. The bully was well known as the class’s bruiser and had taken boxing lessons. The master came up to us and told us to come to the gym after school, put on boxing gloves and, supposedly, settle our quarrel fairly. At the end of school that day, the whole class came to watch the unequal struggle. I was much lighter than the other boy and had almost no boxing training and so of course was no match for him. After a couple of rounds my face was bruised, my nose was bleeding and the fight was stopped. I went home feeling ashamed and hid the real cause of my injuries from my parents, claiming they were the result of a game of rugby. After that I did try to get my father to give me some more boxing lessons, but in my heart I knew that my fists were not my real weapons. Later that year I discovered the knack of winning cross-country races for the school and my house. I was never bullied again and was free to work as hard as I chose without being taunted for being a swot. Never underestimate the importance of sport in English school life.
The following year, aged eleven, although I was still one of the smaller boys in the school, I won the junior cross-country race over some two and a half miles. I realised for the first time that, in contrast to most other boys, I could run myself to total exhaustion, taking more out of myself than they were prepared or able to do, and then I gradually recovered over hours or days afterwards.
After winning this first race, I was presented with a large silver cup at assembly in front of the whole school the following morning. I won this cup two more years in succession and broke the school record before I turned fourteen and became ineligible to compete. There was a notion in my mind, supported by a school rumour, that any cup which was won three times was then owned outright by the winner. Our schoolteachers, hearing of my misconception and touchingly not wishing me to be disappointed, clubbed together to present me with a silver replica, about four inches high, of the larger trophy. This cup, now rather battered, is my most precious athletic trophy, and sits among the others in the glass case in the gallery of the main hall at Pembroke College, Oxford. In this cabinet there is a faded photograph from the Bath Chronicle showing me having won the school cross-country race, which my father kept with pride, as any father would. In the same cabinet there is a silver badge on a watch chain, which, after badgering him, he told me was given to him when he himself won the one-mile race at Colne County Secondary School. Was my athletic success the result of genes, nurture or hard work? This is still the subject of heated debate.
At thirteen I won several events at the school summer sports and was junior victor ludorem for sports, receiving my second most valued trophy. I treasure them not only because they were the first ones I received, but because they made such a difference to my school life and growing up. I felt I needed some success at that age and this seemed an easy way to acquire it and to overcome my lack of confidence; all my later trophies were in one sense just an extension or completion of this beginning which had so genuinely surprised me. My running ability seemed to have come to me as a gift – as if by magic.
In Bath I worked hard and I remember with gratitude a few masters who ignited in me a real interest in their subjects. In contrast to the drabness of suburban Harrow, I was delighted by the city of Bath itself, with its Georgian and Regency buildings, the Crescent, the Assembly Rooms and the Pump Room and relics of its rich history in the Roman Baths.
At thirteen, my parents bought me my first grown-up bicycle, a second-hand BSA Roadster, at least twenty years old, with a three-speed gear which had the disconcerting habit of either slipping or getting stuck in a high gear. But to me it represented freedom – a kind of freedom I had never enjoyed in London – and I made full use of it. There were wartime hazards of large military convoys, including American trucks. Almost all my cycling was done alone. One of my early expeditions was to ride the 100 miles from Bath to London in one day to stay with a friend. It seemed to me quite natural and completely thrilling to be allowed to do this. For this trip I carried a rucksack on my back with the clothes I would need. Every weekend I would plan a cycle tour, taking with me my Ordnance Survey map, sandwiches and a bottle of home-made lemonade. North of Bath I could cross the battlefields of the English Civil War and reach Castle Combe, one of England’s most beautiful villages. Heading west would take me to Bristol and Avonmouth, then an important target of German air raids as shipping was diverted there after heavy bombing had devastated the Port of London. To the south-west lay Clevedon, Weston-super-Mare, Cheddar Gorge and the remarkable stalactite chambers of Wookey Hole. I also cycled to Longleat Park and along the Avon Valley to Farleigh Castle and Bradford-upon-Avon.
Hardly any of these trips would be feasible today for a thirteen-year-old riding alone, given the fast-moving and heavy road traffic everywhere. I greatly regret the restrictions that my own grandchildren have to tolerate. Even our own children enjoyed more freedom to roam in the countryside than the current generation. For example, (not without some prior discussions) we allowed our children to spend a week taking boats up the River Arun in Sussex and camp on the banks at night wherever they found themselves. My hope is that some of these earlier freedoms will return, if the government can create a network of cycle paths to criss-cross the country. A possible consequence of these early expeditions was our son Thurstan’s later exploit of canoeing round New York Island, which is just possible if you catch the right tides, to promote cycle routes in the city. At one stage a police launch approached him, suspecting he might be a drug smuggler. On hearing his English accent, they presumed he was an eccentric and let him be.
My mother’s religious roots, as a Unitarian, were stronger than my father’s Wesleyan background. My parents’ attitude to religion was eccentric and non-conformist. In Bath we regularly attended a Unitarian church and my parents played a part in its activities. The adult school we sometimes attended met in a wooden hut in a poor part of the city; it consisted of a few hymns accompanied by a piano and then study classes on morals, ethics and humanism. Then later we attended a Quaker meeting house for a time. I recall the embarrassment of sitting in silence waiting for someone to feel moved to speak and listening to some rather strange contributions. These visits fizzled out. Clearly, my parents were concerned that we should be exposed to some religious experience but shied away from close involvement with any particular church.
I made some great friends during my time in Bath. One was a boy who was at the top of the class with me as we moved towards the School Certificate. His mother was a pharmacist. He was bold and knew which chemicals were needed to make a ‘bomb’. One afternoon when his mother was at work we packed the necessary ingredients together into a tin which we then buried in his back garden. We detonated the bomb from twenty yards away, by lowering a paving stone onto a gramophone needle held in place by a piece of wood. This then struck a starting pistol blank cartridge, which detonated the ‘bomb’. The enormous and satisfying explosion brought a local policeman down the road on his bicycle, knocking at the front door. My friend answered the door while I cowered out of sight, and calmly but firmly lied with a conviction that would have done credit to an MI5 spy, and directed the policeman farther down the road. Together we also explored disused mine shafts on the top of Combe Down and, at a nearby quarry, engaged in exploits which I am ashamed now to admit were both illegal and dangerous. I suppose, like other adolescent boys, I was skirting around the edge of delinquency. My grandchildren are particularly fond of these stories.
Our lives in Bath were changed drastically when in 1942 there was a Baedeker raid on Bath, so called because they were raids on towns without much industrial significance but often with great cultural treasures (and so included in the famous Baedeker tour guide), and were intended simply to undermine civilian morale. In the case of Bath, the Germans were also aware that the Admiralty was stationed there. Around Bath there were aerodromes with fighter planes, but none were available to defend the city against the German onslaught. The surprise first night attack brought German Stuka dive bombers, which were designed to generate a terrifying whining, screaming sound as they swooped down, almost as bad as the sound of the bombs themselves. As we crouched in the basement, every window in our house was shattered by a near miss and the glass roof over the central staircase fell in. We hoped that the Germans might leave us alone after the incendiary bombs had wrecked the Assembly Rooms. However, they returned the following night, causing even more damage, and in total killed four hundred people and destroyed more than a thousand homes. This damage, of course, did not compare with that wreaked on central London and the Docklands, where many thousands of civilians were killed. But it was a surprise attack and the lack of defence made us feel particularly vulnerable.
