Chris Brasher (right) wins a mile race at London's White City Stadium in 1954, 4:09.0 to dd4:09.2.ddd Chris Brasher (16) beats Don Macmillan (8) in a Mile race
at London's White City Stadium in 1954, 4:09.0 to 4:09.2.
Australia should have had a head start in producing the World’s best milers. After all, Edwin Flack had won both the 800 metres and 1500 metres at the first Modern Olympic Games in Athens in 1896. Preserving the heritage, though, was not nearly as simple and straightforward as it might seem. Flack was not indisputably Australian by any means. Australia did not even exist then as an established country. Flack’s performances, however worthy, were not remotely near to international class.
“Teddy” Flack was English by birth, in Islington, which was then in Middlesex and is now part of London, on 5 November 1873, and had been taken to Australia by his parents at the age of five. He had returned to London in March 1895 to further his accountancy experience with the Price Waterhouse company, and before leaving Australia he had already taken an interest in the revival of the Olympic Games, having studied Greek history at school. He made his way by train and ferry-boat crossings to Athens. He chose to represent Australia, but the country was still in the 1890s a collection of six colonies and was only in 1901 created as a Commonwealth.
Flack’s winning times in Athens of 2:11.0 and 4:33.2 were far inferior, even allowing for the tightness of the bends on the track reconstructed in the style of Ancient Greece, to the best recorded to date by amateur athletes anywhere in the World. These were 1:53⅖ for 880 yards (804.67 metres) by Charles Kilpatrick and 4:15⅗ for one mile (1609.35 metres) by Thomas Conneff, both in New York in 1895. Neither of these American champions, regrettably, were in Athens, and nor were numerous others who would surely have beaten Flack with untroubled ease – including 13 Americans alone who broke two minutes for the half-mile during 1896 and 13 Britons who ran 4:30 or faster for the mile.
Though Charles Herbert, the English Amateur Athletic Association secretary from 1883 to 1906, was a keen supporter of Baron Pierre de Coubertin’s plans for reviving the Olympic Games, neither he nor anyone else in a responsible administrative role seems to have given thought to officially advising interested athletes in Britain that the Games were taking place, let alone selecting a representative team. Thus the few Englishmen who went – six in total – did so on their own initiative and at their own expense. In the case of an otherwise unknown runner in the 100 and 800 metres heats, George Marshall, the cost was not high as he lived in Athens. Flack left London on his journey to Greece on 27 March, and he reached his destination on 1 April, six days before his first race. After seeing him place 2nd in a cross-country event in February of 1896 a “Sporting Life” correspondent had commented, “Though hardly up to the best English form, Flack has, however, shown sufficient pace and stamina to earn for himself a distinct and meritorious place as a cross-country runner at home”. It was a spiteful remark, clearly implying that Flack was a second-rate colonial upstart but would do alright back in the remote and untamed antipodes.
Regardless of such Anglophile disdain, Flack would clearly leave a lasting impression. In a book entitled “The Lonely Breed”, published in 1967, and co-authored by one of the greatest of distance-runners, Ron Clarke, and the most accomplished of athletics journalists, Norman Harris, an assessment of Flack was set in lavishly praising terms: “Teddy Flack was a remarkable man. Good-looking, with a compelling presence that made him stand out in a room amongst any company, he possessed the indefinable characteristic which defines the great leader. He was a charming but thoroughly single-minded businessman who helped to build the family accountancy firm into one of the busiest and most respected in Australia. That he was even in attendance at the 1896 Olympic Games, only 22 years of age and thousands of miles away from his homeland, reveals something of the personality of the man”. Flack returned from Athens to compete unobtrusively in England during the rest of 1896 and into 1897 before sailing back to Australia and setting up in business with his father, but later in life he suffered heart problems and died at the age of only 61 in 1935.
Despite being held in such regard for so many years, it should not be surprising that Flack’s modest athletic performances were of little or no inspiration to Australian middle-distance runners of later generations throughout a half-century, who were rarely to be found making any sort of serious Olympic challenge – in truth, very rarely so. One among them, Gregory Wheatley, was 4th in the 10th anniversary Olympic Games 1500 metres in Athens in 1906, but rather distantly so. Another, William Whyte, reached the 1500 final in 1928 but was 10th of 12 starters. In Berlin in 1936 Gerald Backhouse was 8th of nine finalists at 800 metres and the next day was well outside qualifying in his 1500 heat, but better was soon to come from him. At the 1938 British Empire Games in Sydney, though 7th of eight in the 880 yards final, he was then 2nd in the mile in 4:12.3 to the winning 4:11.5 by Jim Alford, of Wales.
Again, as in the case of Teddy Flack, some proviso has to be made because Sydney Wooderson, who had set the World record of 4:06.4 the previous year, was unable to leave his work as a solicitor’s clerk to make the long journey to the Games from England (but set World records for 800 metres/880 yards and won the European 1500 metres title later in 1938 instead). Nevertheless, Backhouse ranked 8th fastest miler in the World for the year behind five Americans, Jim Alford and Joseph Mostert, of Belgium, who was the European silver-medallist to Wooderson, and Backhouse’s time was equivalent to 3:53.8 for 1500 metres, which would have put him in the top 20. He was also of a most distinctive nature.
This eccentric aspect of Backhouse’s life was to be related in entertaining detail more than 70 years later by Len Johnson, the foremost of Australian athletics journalists, in a book he wrote about the era of the 1950s in which Australian miling came, as he expressed it in his title, “From nowhere to the top of the World”. He quoted a fellow journalist, Jim Blake, who in 1975 had interviewed a contemporary of Backhouse’s named, coincidentally, Alex Hillhouse, who had placed 2nd in the three miles and the steeplechase at the inaugural 1930 British Empire Games and had some surprising tales to tell about Backhouse’s training methods. He was an enthusiastic party-goer and Hillhouse remembered one occasion when he and Backhouse were travelling home on an all-night bus: “We were in full evening dress, white tie and tails. At St Kilda Junction Gerald said ‘Goodnight’, jumped off the bus, tucked his tails in his trousers and ran the rest of the way home wearing dancing-pumps !”
In a 1935 newspaper article Backhouse had said that the previous year he had left a party at 1 a.m, run 11 miles home, and then finished 6th in the Victoria state 10 miles cross-country championship that afternoon. “The desire to do something that savoured of the spectacular or displayed physical activity found its outlet for me through two channels”, Backhouse told his interviewer. “One was in competition of speed and the other in the fascinating adventure of going a long way on foot”. Another of his impromptu “adventures” involved a 30-mile run home in 3½ hours when he was stranded without transport, and he undoubtedly would have accomplished a very capable marathon, but tragically he was killed in a flying accident in England in 1941 at the age of only 29, while serving as a Sergeant in the Royal Australian Air Force.
The extrovert driving-force of Australian middle-distance and long-distance running after World War II was the irrepressible Percy Cerutty (1895-1975), who by sheer will-power and a Spartan régime of life had recovered from a nervous and physical breakdown to run his first marathon at the age of 51. Then he bought a ¾-acre plot of land on a wind-lashed beach at the remote peninsular village of Portsea, 65 miles (110 kilometres) from Melbourne, and set himself up as “Percy Wells Cerutty – Conditioner of Men”. He brought together a group to train for the 1948 Olympics, and in 1964 his biographer, Graeme Kelly (his book was titled “Mr Controversial”), was to write, “None of the band succeeded in being selected for the Games, but two years later another group was formed, including distance-runner Les Perry and milers Don Macmillan and John Landy. They did considerable training amid the sand-hills of Portsea, living in a shack they built on the acquired property. The trio succeeded in making the team for the 1952 Olympic Games in Helsinki, although Landy was not on the paid list”.
Macmillan had previously gone to the British Empire Games in Auckland in February 1950 but was 7th of eight in the mile final. Again this was a race of lowered expectations, won by a Canadian, Bill Parnell, in 4:11.0, whereas Bill Nankeville, of England, had run 4:08.8 the previous year but, like Wooderson 12 years before, was unable to afford all the time needed away from home and his work as a self-employed salesman to go to New Zealand. Another absentee was Roger Bannister, committed to university medical exams, but he travelled to New Zealand during the Christmas vacation at the end of 1950 for the country’s Centennial Games and won a mile race from Macmillan, 4:09.9 to 4:12.7, though losing a slow 880 yards to Macmillan.
Athletics was still strictly amateur for the vast majority of athletes in those days, though no one apparently questioned how it was that one of the leading sprinters in the World, Herb McKenley, of Jamaica, could manage to spend almost three months without visible means of support during 1950 – from 4 July to 24 September – in Scandinavia, taking part in 77 races. “Hustling Herb” no doubt loved competition, but such dedication as this could be thought to be excessive.
Whatever McKenley’s motivation, Macmillan was one of the myriad of international-class athletes who in the 1940s and 1950s ran just for the love of it. As he was to explain formally in a questionnaire, “I find great pleasure in training, with the infectious enthusiasm passed on to me by Percy Cerutty, and being fit to enjoy life from all aspects, with many fine friendships made”. Maybe, too, running was in Macmillan’s blood as his Scottish grandfather, James Alexander Thomson Macmillan, had raced as a university student in Aberdeen and his father and his uncle had done so at national level in Australia in the 1920s. The Scots connection was self-evident in the first names with which Don Macmillan was christened, “Donald Robertson Thomson”, at his birth on 5 January 1928. His grandfather had been born in India, and from Scotland he went to Australia and was then, as the Reverend Thomson Macmillan, a missionary from 1896 to 1936 in Tanna, the second largest of the 80 islands in the New Hebrides archipelago in the South Pacific, now the Republic of Vanuatu. It must have been an adventurous life – on his retirement it was said that when he had arrived in Tanna it was the “home of noted savages with a long line of cannibal ancestry”.
The Macmillans were all tall, and Don Macmillan was the least likely looking of milers, 6ft 3½in (1.91m) in height, 13st 4lb (82kg) in weight. Having run an Australian schools’ record mile of 4:27.0 in 1946 (a record held by his father 30 years earlier), he won the first of his national senior titles at 880 yards and the mile in 1950 and brought the Australian mile record down to 4:08.9 in November 1951, by which time he was studying at Melbourne University. A year later, in response to inquiries put to him by Jimmy Green, editor of the UK’s “Athletics Weekly”, he was to describe this as his most satisfying performance, explaining, “It brought the record back to me after being held for two weeks by John Landy, and at the same time breaking the Olympic selection standard for Australia set at 4:10.0”.
By 1952, motivated by Percy Cerutty, Macmillan was training at least six days a week, and sometimes seven, for up to two hours each evening, and he summarised his schedule as follows: “Cross-country, hill running, a certain amount of weight-lifting and general conditioning in the winter. Then speed work on a grass track when the season approaches and during the season, consisting of ¾-miles, 660s, 440s, 300s and 220s”. The brazenly outspoken Cerutty had a high opinion of Macmillan’s potential but was inclined to be rashly critical of his athletes in some of his public statements, and in 1952, and thus two years prior to Bannister’s historic sub-four-minute mile, was quoted as saying, “The four-minute mile, Olympic gold, it was there for Macmillan if only he believed he could grasp it. Like most Australians he was only lacking in confidence – the only thing holding him back was the belief that he couldn’t hold his own against the world”. However extravagant the claim of four-minute potential made on Macmillan’s behalf, it was one with which Macmillan himself readily concurred in “Athletics Weekly” in October 1952: “I am hopeful of running 3:59.9 for one mile, as are many other milers of the world today”.
Getting to the Olympic Games in Helsinki from Australia in 1952 was a far more laborious business than it is now. The Qantas flight departed from Sydney (itself 550 miles/880 kilometres from Melbourne, the home city of Macmillan, Landy and Perry) and stopped off in Darwin, Djakarta, Singapore, Calcutta, Karachi, Beirut and Rome in the course of its three-day journey with overnight stopovers to London. Macmillan made no showing in the English AAA Championships mile final later in June, suffering from a spike wound, while Landy impressed with 2nd place to Bill Nankeville, 4:09.8 to 4:11.0, but 12 days afterwards Macmillan won a 1000 yards race in Dublin in 2:12.4, which was probably an Australian record of sorts.
At the Helsinki Games he was seemingly outclassed in his 800 metres semi-final, though maybe conserving his energies for the 1500 metres heats starting in another three days. In that event he did well enough, 9th in the final in 3:49.77, equivalent to a mile in 4:08, but Landy fared not so well, eliminated in the 1500 and 5000 heats. Even so, he had run a startling two miles on a grass track in the rather unlikely setting of the North Yorkshire industrial seaside town of Middlesbrough in a British Empire record time of 8:54.0 and clearly learned a lot from his experiences in Europe. Towards the end of the year, back home, Landy ran a sensational 4:02.1 for the mile, and the subsequent saga of his World record 3:57.9 and his “Miracle Mile” against Roger Bannister in 1954 is all far too well known to bear repeating here.
Macmillan, meanwhile, stayed on in England after the Olympics to further his teacher training studies at London University for a year, and he promptly ran a couple of fine races at the White City Stadium, in London, in September. He won a mile in his marginally best ever 4:08.8, which would be the fastest time in Britain for the year, and then very narrowly lost an invitation 2000 metres during a London-v-Brussels-v-Paris match to the “Flying Dutchman” so often welcomed to Britain over the years, Willy Slijkhuis, in a time of 5:20.4 for both. Remarkably, despite his height, Macmillan was not always the tallest man in domestic races in Britain as a contemporary rival, Don Seaman, who ran 3:49.0 for 1500 metres and 4:08.0 for the mile, was 6ft 4in (1.93m) ! Macmillan’s subsequent performances during 1953 were prosaic compared with Landy’s – best times of 1:52.6 for 800 metres, 4:12.4 for the mile, 9:11.2 for two miles – but he became involved in one of the most bizarre and contentious record-breaking episodes in British athletics history.
Thoughts of an imminent sub-four-minute mile were at fever pitch during the early months of 1953, and in the forefront of contenders John Landy had run 4:02.8 in Melbourne in the first week of January. He was then quoted by one of Australia’s leading athletics writers, Joe Galli, in an article for the April issue of the influential London monthly magazine, “World Sports”, as saying that he thought that the man most likely to be the first to break four minutes would be the surprise Olympic 1500 metres champion of the previous year, Josy Barthel, of Luxemburg. Hedging his bets, though, Landy added, “But Lueg, Åberg, Dohrow, Reiff, Neilsen and McMillen may also do it, and possibly Don Macmillan”. It was a rational selection – McMillen and Lueg had been 2nd and 3rd in the Olympic 1500, Åberg 7th, Macmillan 9th. No mention, though, of Roger Bannister or a young American, Wes Santee, but their latest performances would have yet to come to Landy’s attention..
Santee, aged only 21, was putting together some highly impressive relay stages in inter-collegiate competition in California and elsewhere during April and May. Roger Bannister, having placed 4thin the Olympic 1500 metres, was training more intensely than ever before during the lunchtime breaks from his hospital doctor’s duties in London, and on 2 May he broke Sydney Wooderson’s UK mile record with 4:03.6 in the annual Oxford University-v-AAA match at the university’s Iffley Road track. Bannister was to write in his 1955 autobiography, “We ran the first half mile too slowly to come near the four minute mile, but we were delighted to have done so well in our first attempt. The race made me realise that the four-minute mile was not out of reach. It was only a question of time, but would someone else reach the goal first ?” Bannister had been paced by his former Oxford University team-mate, Chris Chataway, through laps of 61.7, 62.4 and 61.1. 0n 5 June, again in California, Santee ran 4:02.4.
Bannister, determined that if he was going to run sub-four it would be at Iffley Road, had been ready to try again on 30 May at an Oxford University-v-London University match but was thwarted. “With ever an eye on the main chance of exorcising the four minute phantom, Roger Bannister decided reluctantly only five minutes before the meeting that the dark blue OUAC flag was straining too strongly at its halyards for there to be any chance of bettering his four-week-old mile record”. The words were those of the McWhirter twins in their incomparable monthly magazine, “Athletics World”, and Norris and Ross McWhirter knew more about Bannister’s athletics ambitions better than anyone – former fellow-undergraduates at Oxford, now London journalists, future founders of “The Guinness Book of Records”.
Bannister wrote in 1955, “The energy of the twins was boundless. For them nothing was too much trouble and they accepted any challenge joyfully. After running together at Oxford as sprinters, they carried their partnership into journalism, keeping me posted of the performances of my overseas rivals. They often drove me to athletics meetings. Sometimes I was not sure whether it was Norris or Ross who held the watch or drove the car, but I knew that either could be relied upon”. On that windswept day at Iffley Road Bannister had run the 880 yards instead, and paced by Don Macmillan through a 54.5 first lap finished in 1:51.9 to transform a ground record that had stood rather a long time – at 1:54.4 by Francis Cross since 1888, equalled by the impending Olympic 800 metres champion and World record holder, Tom Hampson, in 1932 ! Macmillan had otherwise joined in elsewhere on one of the hallowed institutions of British athletics, the London-to-Brighton road relay of 50 miles or so, and briefly taken his club Polytechnic Harriers, into the lead on stage two.
Aware that Santee might well make a serious sub-four-minute bid on 27 June at the US championships in Dayton, Ohio, Bannister agreed to take part in a race hastily arranged to take place that same day, but with a six-hour latitude time advantage, on the famed Motspur Park track where Sydney Wooderson’s mile record had been set in 1937. The logistics were, to say the least, unusual because the locale was the hour-long lunch-break during the Surrey county schools’ championships. Bannister was rather vague about the arrangements in his autobiography, saying, “I was uncertain how I was to be paced, but Don Macmillan led for 2½ laps. Then Chris Brasher, who had run the first two laps at snail’s pace, loomed on the horizon in front of me, but a lap in arrears. He proceeded to encourage me by shouting over his shoulder as he ran ahead of me. All things considered, it could hardly be called a race, though I accept full responsibility for running in it”.
The lap times were 59.6 and 60.1 by Macmillan, then 62.1 and 60.2 to finish in 4:02.0, faster than anyone except Hägg and Andersson in neutral Sweden during World War II had ever run, but Bannister was to reflect realistically, “My feeling as I look back is one of great relief that I did not run a four-minute mile under such artificial circumstances”. The only privileged spectators in the know beforehand were apparently the McWhirters (or at least one of them), together with Philip Noel-Baker, chairman of the Achilles club and Olympic 1500 metres silver-medallist of 1912, and Dr John Mawe, a mountain-climbing friend of Chris Brasher’s, though the best known of athletics photographers in Britain, H.W. (“Bert”) Neale, was also in attendance and provided a lap-by-lap sequence of shots for “Athletics Weekly”. The more youthful onlookers leaning on the trackside railings must have included rather too many who paid little attention in class because the McWhirters reported that “the fourth lap for the first time brought forth a cheer from the 1000 schoolchildren spectators who thought that Brasher was winning !” Maybe an exception more attentive than most was a Dutch-born 19-year-old named Hans Heins, from Whitgift School, in Surrey, who was inspired enough to win the English schools’ 880 yards the following month.
Mile records set in such an orchestrated fashion were no novelty. Sydney Wooderson had run his 4:06.4 in 1937 aided every step of the way by carefully chosen pacemakers given starts ranging from 10 yards (former British Empire mile champion Reg Thomas) to 65 yards (British mile international Bernard Eeles), 100 yards (Olympic 800 metres finalist John Powell) and 140 yards (Sydney’s brother, Stanley). In 1915, when an American, Norman Taber, ran an historic 4:12⅗, faster even than the peerless 19th Century professional, Walter George, he had a trio of clubmates each stationed at the beginning of successive laps to lead him round. Taber had been an undergraduate at Oxford, and Bannister very likely would have known much about him.
The most perplexing aspect of Bannister’s creative 4:02.0 is to speculate as to what the promoters and the participants really expected to get out of it. Did any of them imagine that a record time achieved in such circumstances would be readily accepted ? Or were their sights not set that high ? The McWhirters reported that Don Macmillan had told Bannister before the start that he intended running 4:05 or so, though his miling form so far that season gave no indication that this was feasible – he had been beaten by more than four seconds, 4:11.2 to 4:15.8, the previous month by steeplechaser John Disley. Macmillan, well short of his self-declared 4:05 form, had to give way sooner than expected to Bannister, who later said that he had agreed to the plan because “an enthusiastic friend persuaded me that I ought to run a paced time-trial” (one of the McWhirters, presumably). Maybe they thought that the press and public would regard the venture as being no more serious than that.
The absent newspapermen were understandably miffed at being kept in the dark, leaving the McWhirters to their “scoop”, and Bannister was fully aware of their discontent. With characteristic honesty in his autobiography of two years later he reproduced the opinion expressed by the athletics correspondent of “The Times”, who had written. “The profound secrecy with which the project was planned and carried out – and it certainly was an ingenious, if slightly odd, idea to pitchfork so important an event into a school-children’s meeting – prevented all but a favoured few from being able to give an eye-witness account. How far the secrecy really assisted Bannister as a great athlete in the public eye, and all that means, seems open to question … Public interest seems to demand some kind of explanation of so important an effort”.
One of the most objective of newspaper athletics correspondents, Roy Moor, of the London “Daily News”, who had been a pre-war Great Britain 440 yards international, quoted an unnamed AAA official as saying, “We have to appeal to the man-in-the-street for funds to send such fine athletes as Bannister to the Empire and Olympic Games. It seems a pity that the generous donors are deprived of the opportunity to watch such a magnificent performance. We must not allow the business of ‘hush-hush’ record attempts to become a habit”. A perfectly reasonable view, it could be said, in an era long before central funding when athletics-supporting volunteers had to go, collecting-boxes in hand, among the public to raise the money to send athletes to major Games abroad.
Officialdom itself took a hand in the matter because on the weekend of the AAA Championships, 10-11 July, where Bannister easily won the mile in 4:05.2, the British Amateur Athletic Board met and issued a statement rejecting his 4:02.0 but accepting his 4:03.6 as a ratified record. Of the 4:02.0 it was pronounced, “The Board, having very carefully considered the circumstances connected with this performance, regret that, although it has no doubt that the time was accomplished, it cannot recognise the performance as a record. It has been compelled to take this action because it does not consider the event was a bona fide competition according to the rules”.
Chris Brasher himself and Norris McWhirter had planned the race, and the key factor was to have Brasher dawdling through two laps of 90 seconds each so that Bannister conveniently caught up with him, having completed three laps, and then was paced by Brasher to the finish. Brasher was to tell a long-time journalist friend, John Bryant, in a book that Bryant wrote about the four-minute mile in 2004, “We decided to pace the whole thing and get Roger round in four minutes if we could. It was all a bit mad and had been fixed up on the hoof, very quickly. Macmillan reckoned he was fit enough to manage three laps, but that wouldn’t be enough. So we got to thinking and came up with what we thought was a fiendishly clever idea”.
The fact is that the British Board’s decision was distinctly questionable. A reasonable argument to set against the hierarchy’s ban would surely have been that the Surrey schools’ championships was a bona fide meeting, and the organisers had every right to accept a week or so beforehand a request to incorporate an extra-mural race involving three of the leading athletes in the country. Would not the gathered teachers have thought how entertaining and instructive it would be for the youngsters, pausing in their valiant athletic efforts to have their lunchtime sandwiches and lemonade and be treated to such a demonstration of supreme talent ! Qualified officials would be on hand to ensure that any such event would be properly organised.
After all the rush to foil Wes Santee, the threat from him never materialised. He won the US title in 4:07.6 and then went on a hectic tour of Europe, during which he ran a mile race at the White City, in London, with a galaxy of legendary milers looking on as invited guests – Joe Binks (UK record 4:16⅘ in 1902), Paavo Nurmi, Sydney Wooderson and Gunder Hägg. Santee had run in 26 meetings in the previous 40 days, and had thus been denied any respite for a sub-four-minute bid, and he lost to Gordon Pirie, 4:06.8 to 4:07.2. I have no hesitation in saying that in more than 60 years of watching first-class athletics this remains one of the most intensely exciting races I have ever seen.
Bannister, immersed in his medical studies, completed his season, to all intents and purposes, with his AAA win. Don Macmillan, suffering a leg injury, managed a 4:12.4 mile in a handicap race in Lincoln in August, beating Tom Hulatt, who (did anyone but know it) would figure in Bannister’s historic sub-four-minute mile the next year. At the end of 1953 roles were reversed when a week before Christmas Bannister attempted to pace Macmillan at Motspur Park to a 4:10 mile which would qualify him for the next year’s Empire & Commonwealth Games, but neither the weather nor Macmillan’s form fitted the task, and after Bannister had led the first three laps and then stepped off the track Macmillan finished in 4:15.4.
The editor of “Athletics Weekly”, Jimmy Green, condemned the whole affair out of hand: “Despite all the ballyhoo given to the ‘Macmillan Mile’ at Motspur Park last Saturday, the whole eagerly awaited event proved a fiasco. What should have been merely a trial was built up into something approaching a ‘Mile of the Century’, and a fair-sized crowd turned up see what proved to be a very disappointing affair. Fortunately, it will soon be forgotten, for the sport cannot afford such bad publicity”. Macmillan, having run Brasher close in a mile race the following June, 4:09.0 to 4:09.2, was selected by Australia anyway, though he only managed the get to Vancouver by paying part of the costs himself.
Macmillan had a rather odd 1954 season, not called upon again by Bannister, and with a best mile of only that 4:09.2 and eliminated in both the 880 yards and mile heats at the British Empire & Commonwealth Games in Vancouver (but an unexpected bonus bronze medal in a makeshift 4 x 440 yards relay team), and then a 1:50.2 for 800 metres in Oslo, close behind Audun Boysen (1:49.8), who would figure in the first ever sub-1:46 800 metres the next year. Macmillan’s time was by far the fastest ever by an Australian.
Having completed his London University course, Macmillan was home again in Australia for 1955 and was running better than ever. The prolific athletics correspondent for “The Age” newspaper in Melbourne, Bruce Welch, reported, “He has been back from his studies in England for only four months but has shown great improvement in technique and tactics and in confidence. Now 27, Macmillan may realise how just good he is”. Despite having told another leading Australian athletics writer, Joe Galli, that he “no longer liked the mile” Macmillan won both the 880 at the Australian championships in a domestic record 1:51.9 (which Bruce Welch was reckoned as worth 1:50, allowing for the conditions) and the mile in his best ever 4:07.0.
Joe Galli, too, thought that Macmillan deserved something faster. writing that “Macmillan can run 4:02. Conditions were deplorable, with near-century heat and saturating humidity, and the facilities were poor and the presentation anything but creditable”. The temperature was 102degF for the mile, and the next day Macmillan had to battle his way through 40 m.p.h dust-squalls for his Australian residents’ half-mile record. He was even faster later in February, winning a mile in Sydney in 4:05.8, taking air-flights of more than 500 miles (800 kilometres) each way from Melbourne the same day, and four days later improving his 880 record to 1:51.6.
He was married in December 1955 to Geva Donaldson, having raced in a half-mile 2½ hours before the evening ceremony. Now taking guidance from Franz Stampfl, who had advised Roger Bannister but had taken up a coaching appointment in Australia, the next month Macmillan ran 1:50.9m/1/51.7y but was well beaten by John Landy’s national records of 1:49.8/1:50.4. The 1956 Olympics were an irresistible objective, of course, being held toward the end of the year in Melbourne, but there was obviously no place available in the Australian team at 1500 metres as John Landy and Jim Bailey had both run 3:58.6 for the mile that year and Merv Lincoln 4:00.6.
Macmillan wisely withdrew from the 1500 metres in the trials meeting. So chosen for the Olympic 800 metres instead, he was a shade unlucky to be drawn in the only first-round heat which included two eventual finalists – the winner, Tom Courtney, of the USA, and 5th-placed Mike Farrell, of Great Britain – and was eliminated in 4th. Macmillan then retired from competition and began a long and honoured career teaching history and geography at Geelong College, where he had been captain of athletics and rowing in 1946 and head prefect, and for some 30 years he would also be a highly successful rowing coach, taking his school eight to England in 1973 for the World junior championships in Nottingham, where they were 2nd to Great Britain in the “B” final. He died in 2004, aged 76.
As a footnote it is worth pointing out that speculation about a mile in under four minutes dates many years further back than the 1950s. Two of the most credible examples which came to light in the fullness of time are as follows:
(i) George Hutson, the AAA mile champion of 1914, believed that he could run four successive quarter-miles in 60 seconds, as was to be recalled some 60 years later by a leading official and athletics writer, Marshall Bennett, who had discussed the matter with Hutson. Though Hutson’s winning AAA time was only 4:22.0, he set a UK ¾-mile record of 3:09⅗ a fortnight afterwards, but tragically he had no chance whatsoever to prove his full capability. He was a regular soldier reported missing in action in the war in Northern France two months later, and his body was never recovered. Hutson’s better known track achievements were at longer distances: 3rd in the 1912 Olympic 5000 metres and AAA champion at the then standard distance of four miles in 1912, 1913 and 1914, setting a championship record of 19:41.2 which lasted until 1927.
(2) The first officially recognised holder of the World mile record, John Paul Jones, of the USA (with 4:14⅖ in 1913), was to write, “In 1913 I asked Jack Moakley, who in my humble opinion was the greatest trainer of track men who ever lived, if he thought 4mins 10secs would be beaten. He replied, ‘Within three years, and some day four minutes will be beaten’. The first part of this prophesy may have been inaccurate as to time, but the latter proved correct, although it took a little over 40 years. Jack lived just long enough to hear of its fulfilment”. J.P. Jones related that tale in the preface which he had been invited to contribute to an excellent history, “All Out For The Mile”, by an English author, George Smith, published in 1955. Elsewhere in the book the 1912 Olympic 1500 metres champion, Arnold Strode-Jackson, told of a meeting he had with Moakley in 1952 in which Moakley told Strode-Jackson, “If I had had you, I would have had the one thing I wanted – the four minute mile”.
Note: See my racingpast article, “Early Attempts At The Four-minute Mile”. Numerous books have been written about the mile, notably including “All Out For The Mile”, by George Smith, 1955; “The First Four Minutes”, by Roger Bannister, 1955; “Lap Of Honour”, by Norman Harris, 1963; “The Lonely Breed”, by Ron Clarke and Norman Harris, 1967; “The Milers”, by Cordner Nelson and Roberto Quercetani, 1985; “3:59.4 – The Quest To Break The 4 Minute Mile”, by John Bryant, 2004; “3:59.4 – The Quest For The Four Minute Mile”, by Bob Phillips, 2004; “The Landy Era, From Nowhere To The Top Of the World”, by Len Johnson, 2009.
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