Hello I'm Kirstie Young and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive.

For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.

The program was originally broadcast in 1992, and the presenter was Sue Lolly. My castaway this week is a physician.

Born 62 years ago, the son of a civil servant and a Sunday school teacher, he discovered early on that he was a natural runner.

Running, whether to win a race or simply for itself, gave him confidence and a sense of freedom.

It was a talent which resulted one May evening in 1954, in his becoming the first man to run a mile in less than four minutes.

He went on to become a neurologist, a chairman of the Sports Council,

and latterly master of Pembroke College Oxford.

For him, sport was merely an interlude in a distinguished

medical career, but it was that interlude 38 years ago which gave him a place in

history. He is Sir Roger Bannister. The four-minute mile is obviously something

you haven't allowed to dominate your life Sir Roger, but hasn't it inevitably

influenced people's perception of you?

Yes, for me, my life in the past 37 years has been medicine and neurology,

but there are times when people around the world come up to me and recognize me and so on. I am in a sense a piece of

public property in that way. It's true too, isn't it, of Christopher Brasher and Chris Chateaway

who also have gone on to do other noteworthy things in their lives in politics and business and mountaineering and so on, but their names and yours will be forever bound in our memories with that day in 1954?

Well, I think we ran at a time when public spirits in Britain were rather low.

It was the end of the war, and the country was really still finding its way. Sport wasn't really developed and

there had been the climbing of Everest in 53 and this was something which

seemed to be possible and broke on the sporting world and more generally because it seemed to be an emergence of some new kind of desire to

excel and try to tackle physical barriers.

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