Timekeepers Page 15
‘Now, ladies and gentlemen, we have an extremely special lot for you here. As I’m sure you’ve all seen, Christie’s are hugely honoured to be offering you this – possibly the most important, iconic, um, piece of sporting memorabilia, British sporting memorabilia, that Christie’s has ever offered. Of course – Roger Bannister’s running shoes, he broke the record back in 1954 on the 6th of May, the Iffley Road running track. We’re delighted to be offering them . . .’
Time passes, and the auction house or charity shop always benefits. It was now September 2015, 61 years and 6 months since the race, and an auction titled ‘Out of the Ordinary’ was getting into its stride. Bannister’s shoes were lot 100, and the auctioneer had already dispensed with a collection of 21 novelty biscuit tins and a Victorian brass and steel working mechanical model of a canal dredger. There was also the pine door from the studio of the illustrator Ronald Searle, signed by, among others, John Peel and Stephen Hawking.
Bannister’s shoes each weighed 4½ ounces and looked like kippers – thin, black and smoky brown, off-white string laces and six primitive spikes on each. They were displayed in a Perspex case at the side of the auctioneer’s podium, but when it was their turn an assistant with white gloves removed them and held them in front of her face. Photographers stepped forward to record the moment. Potential bidders were given a saleroom notice with an amendment: ‘The title for this lot should read “A Pair of English Black Kangaroo Leather Running Shoes” and not as printed in the catalogue.’ The catalogue described them in exactly the same way, except without the kangaroo. (How many people in the room thought ‘it was the kangaroo that gave him the extra spring in his step’ is impossible to say.)
There was another amendment too: ‘It should also be noted that the footnote stating that Sir Roger Bannister had retired from professional athletics should in fact read amateur athletics.’ The catalogue estimate was £30,000–£50,000, but this was noble guesswork. The shoes had never been sold before.
‘As you can imagine, ladies and gentlemen, we’ve got a lot of interest in the lot, so I’m sprinting right along there to 45 to 48 to 50 to 55 to 60 thousand pounds. I already have offered 60 thousand pounds. Any advance at 60 thousand pounds? Who’s going to bid me 65 thousand? Sixty-five, here it is. Sixty-five, Kate, thank you. At 65 thousand pounds. Who’s coming in next? Sixty-five thousand. Seventy thousand at the back of the room, thank you, sir. At 70 thousand, Kate, come back to me.’
Kate and her colleagues were at the side of the room on the phone with bidders. ‘Seventy-five thousand. Eighty thousand. Eighty-five. Eighty-five thousand pounds. Ninety-five. Ninety-five thousand. A hundred thousand pounds, thank you, sir, back of the room, 100 thousand pounds. Against the telephones, 100 thousand. A hundred and twenty thousand, 130 thousand pounds. A hundred and forty thousand. A hundred and fifty thousand, quite right too.’ And so it continued: ‘A hundred and eighty thousand pounds, new bidder. Having a think at the back of the room. There it is, 180 thousand with Kate.’ The shoes went for £220,000, and there were cheers and applause when the gavel came down. Kate’s anonymous bidder had won after just under three minutes, and ended with a bill, including commission and tax, for £266,500. When interviewed before the auction on why he was selling up, Bannister just said ‘it was the right time to part with them’. He was failing, he had carer bills and children and charities to consider. Sixty years ago as an amateur he would have been fatally compromised by benefitting from his ancient and noble sport. Now, of course, in the era of systematic Olympic Soviet doping and Paralympians standing trial for murdering their girlfriends, anything went, and quite right too.5
When Bannister withdrew from the track in 1955, he dedicated himself to medicine. His specialty was the autonomic nervous system, and to explain what this is, Bannister is fond of quoting an American physiologist named Walter Cannon: ‘It is that part of the nervous system which Providence in its wisdom decided should be outside the range of voluntary control.’ Bannister and his colleagues spent years analyzing cerebral circulation, ocular nerves, the lungs, heart, bladder and digestive system. One of his most engaging investigations was into the causes and purposes of fainting (or, medically, postural hypertension) due to emotional stress (caused, perhaps, by the sight of a needle or blood or sudden bad news). Many of Bannister’s experiments took place on a motorised tilting table he had seen being wheeled out of Great Ormond Street: he strapped patients onto the table with a seatbelt, and he measured blood pressure and other cardiac functions as they moved from horizontal to vertical. Back issues of the Lancet feature Bannister’s research into all manner of autonomic disorders, but his greatest legacy is the work conducted to revise Brain’s Clinical Neurology, the classic textbook of how to diagnose and treat disorders ranging from epilepsy to meningitis. The book later became known as Brain and Bannister’s Clinical Neurology, and by the time the seventh edition came out in the 1990s he had included advances in molecular genetics and the neurological complications of Aids. But in the fourth edition, published in 1973, one of Bannister’s largest revisions concerned what was then still described as Parkinsonian disease or paralysis agitans. The degeneration of neurons was always progressive, Bannister observed, although the rate of deterioration varied considerably. There was a wide range of drugs to limit the tremors, but nothing yet to reverse or halt the process. More than 40 years later our understanding and treatment of Parkinson’s has advanced considerably, but the outcomes are still familiar. Parkinson’s is a disease that, whatever the severity and variety, slows you down; it distorts one’s motor system and it may radically affect one’s perception of time. The fact that Bannister is now himself afflicted he calls ‘a strange irony’, but I’m unsure if the irony derives from the source of his work or the source of his fame.
Bannister received his knighthood for services to medicine. He has advised governments on health policy, and in 2005 he was given the first lifetime achievement award by the American Neurological Association for advancing our understanding of degenerative disease. But I think everyone came to see him in Chipping Norton because we were interested in that other thing.
Over the years, Bannister had clearly had enough of repeating himself; it was like running round a track. One great day, one truly famous thing, one perfect outcome that entailed being held aloft by other men. The achievement would never be bettered, no matter how the modern mile time shortened, and autonomic neurology would only get you so far at the dinner table. A broken record can never be unbroken. I asked Bannister whether running 3:59.4 had in fact been as much of a curse as a blessing, and immediately I felt embarrassed for having asked him, an insufferable boy who once won a form prize at the school and never really got over it. He must have been asked about the burden almost as often as he had been asked about the glory. But he was gracious and patient in response, and he had a Pixar-style uplift. ‘No, it was an honour,’ he said. ‘It seems to inspire younger people to think that nothing is impossible.’ (As he had written in 1954 – and in 2014 – ‘We shared a place where no man had yet ventured, secure for all time, however fast men might run miles in future.’) So he told the story again. What he could not do was tell the same story in a new way. Time usually imposes embellishment (the fish that got away grows bigger over time), but not here. Here it is always 6 p.m. just off Iffley Road on 6 May 1954, and Bannister, in his mid-80s, is relying on certainties. In 1954, in his first account of the race, ‘Those last few seconds seemed never-ending.’ He wrote how
The faint line of the finishing tape stood ahead as a haven of peace, after the struggle. The arms of the world were waiting to receive me if only I reached the tape without slackening my speed . . . Then my effort was over and I collapsed almost unconscious, with an arm on either side of me . . . I felt like an exploded flashbulb with no will to live.
And his newly published account in 2014 had changed primarily in its grammar: ‘The faint line of the finishing tape stood ahead as a haven of peace after the struggle. The arms
of the world were ready to receive me only if I reached the tape without slackening my speed . . . Then my effort was over and I collapsed almost unconscious, with an arm on either side of me . . . I felt like an exploded flashbulb.’ The biggest difference was, being older and nearer his end, he now had ‘a will to live’. But there was one other slight modification. Those last five yards before the tape had seemed to him to stretch out so far that race time and stopwatch time appeared to be at odds, a new elastic consciousness. Sixty years ago he wrote: ‘The last few seconds were never-ending.’ In his new book it was: ‘Those last few seconds seemed an eternity.’ Same difference, perhaps, but the change of phrase was meaningful to him, for he’s been living those last few seconds his entire life.
He signed about 20 books, and when he left the church hall he walked slowly with a stick, and a car was waiting to run him through the Cotswolds to his home.
_______________
1 Of course there will be hundreds: people reliving glories and disasters; memories of accidents and errors of judgment; even the pop star endlessly replaying their huge but unrepeated chart success, Terry Jacks or Norman Greenbaum on a greatest hits tour.
2 Ever since he failed to win a medal in the 1,500 metres at the 1952 Helsinki Olympics (he came fourth).
3 Norris liked his records, gaining fame on the television series Record Breakers and editing The Guinness Book of Records and its offshoots with his twin Ross. The McWhirters would often take Bannister to race meetings in their car, and Bannister says he was sometimes unsure which McWhirter was which. Norris was also known for his politics, which combined reactionary Conservatism with libertarianism; were he still alive he probably would have been an ardent UKIP supporter. He died on 19 April 2004 and had dined with Bannister the previous evening; at the end of the meal, in the presence of Sebastian Coe and others, he repeated his famous timing Tannoy announcement from 1954.
Ross McWhirter was assassinated by the IRA in 1975 after he had offered a reward for information leading to the conviction of IRA members connected with past bombings.
4 The women’s record, achieved in 1996 by the Russian Svetlana Masterkova, stands at 4:12.56.
5 Bannister’s famous day had featured in auctions before. There were at least three stopwatches that recorded the time of 3.59:4 (some reports have five), and one of them is in a glass case with other Bannister mementos in the gallery at Pembroke College dining hall, where he served as master for eight years. The watch held by the chief timekeeper Charles Hill had been bought at auction by novelist Jeffrey Archer for a little under £9,000 in 1998, and then resold by Archer in June 2011 to benefit the Oxford University Athletics Club; at the second auction the winning bid was £97,250. Another stopwatch used on the day by W.J. Burfitt came up for auction in May 2015 and surpassed its estimate of £5,000–£8000 to reach £20,000. At Chipping Norton I asked Bannister about the watch he wears now. He said he didn’t really know what it was, and when he examined his wrist he wasn’t much the wiser, and the maker’s mark was difficult to read. ‘I don’t think it’s a famous make, but it always keeps good time.’
Nick Ut: ‘I have very important film.’
Chapter Nine
Vietnam. Napalm. Girl.
i) The Split Second
A few photographers somehow manage to shoot one masterpiece after another. Henri Cartier-Bresson did it. So did Robert Capa, Alfred Eisenstaedt, Jacques-Henri Lartigue, Elliott Erwitt, Robert Frank, Gisèle Freund, Ilse Bing, Robert Doisneau, Mary Ellen Mark, Garry Winogrand, William Eggleston and Vivian Maier: so much stunning, innovative and memorable work. Nick Ut wasn’t like that. Nick Ut took one photograph.
Strictly, he took more than one photograph, but only one photograph anyone remembers. It’s the only photograph of his that anyone wants to talk about or buy. It’s a photograph that built and almost suffocated a reputation all at once, and one that won him the Pulitzer Prize. It may even have hastened the end of a war. The image is so powerful that when Leica want to remind people of it in advertisements promoting their cameras, the photo isn’t used at all. Instead, there are just three words in white type on a black background: Vietnam Napalm Girl.
The story is justly famous too. At about 7 a.m. on 8 June 1972, a 21-year-old Vietnamese photographer named Huỳnh Công Út set off for Trang Bang, a small village north-west of his base in Saigon. It was a familiar journey. Nick Ut, as he was known to his American colleagues, had been a photojournalist with the Associated Press for five years, taking up the trade not long after his brother, also with AP, had been killed on assignment. (Some would have it, in pure tragic narrative, that in searching for the perfect photograph, Ut was avenging his brother’s death.)
Just after noon he was among a small group of other journalists and US troops on Highway 1 leading to the village when he saw two planes dropping bombs and shortly afterwards he saw people fleeing and running towards him in distress. One of the planes had also dropped napalm. His first instinct was to photograph them, and professionally he was in luck. Two of the other photographers present were loading new film, but Ut had enough film left in his Nikon and his Leica.1 He used the Nikon with a long lens to pick up the huge dark cloud over the village, and then switched to the Leica as the people neared. He first took photographs of an elderly woman holding what appeared to be a dead baby. And then he saw a small group of children running towards him. There were five in all. He saw that one girl, screaming with her arms outstretched, had shed her clothes, and the burns were visible on her skin. And then Nick Ut took his picture.
The children stopped a little further up the road and were surrounded by troops and journalists. Ut remembers that the naked girl kept shouting the words ‘nóng quá!’ (too hot!’). His second instinct took hold: he stopped taking photos; he had to help them get to hospital. The girl, whose name was Phan Thi Kim Phúc, and who clearly needed help the most, was given water and then wrapped in a soldier’s rain poncho. Ut accompanied them to the closest hospital, where Kim Phúc, drifting out of consciousness, was judged too sick to treat. Although still alive, she was taken to an area she believed later to be a morgue.
Nick Ut returned with his pictures to his agency bureau in Saigon. He remembers being asked by the darkroom technician, who was a skilled photographer himself, ‘Nicky, what do you have?’ Ut replied, ‘I have very important film.’ But compared to the speed at which the events of the previous few hours had just occurred – the bombing, the unfolding tragedy, the photos, the rush to hospital – the next few seemed to take an eternity. His films, eight rolls of high-speed Kodak Tri-X 400, had to be developed and fixed in a hot dark room, requiring continual movement of the negatives through the chemicals. They were then hung up to dry in a cabinet fitted with hairdryers, and several pictures were made up into 5×7-inch prints. It was clear from the start that one picture, negative 7a, was something exceptional. As a viewer one tends to focus on the girl, but it is an extremely busy photo, with two distinct lines of activity and a road that not only frames and directs one’s view into the story, but also invites us to consider the burning horror beyond. There are five barefooted children running towards us, all related. On the left of the frame is a boy in such distress that his huge gaping mouth resembles something we would normally only see in a Peanuts strip. Behind him, at the back of the group, is the youngest child, the only one not looking towards the camera, momentarily distracted perhaps by activity behind him. Then there is Kim Phúc, a burn clearly visible on her left arm, running in what appears to be a thin strip of water. Behind her, a boy seemingly holding hands with a slightly older girl, and behind them a line of soldiers and photographers in uniform, distinctly set back from the young chaos, almost oblivious, as if this was a common occurrence. Later, the children in the photograph would be identified from left to right: Kim Phúc’s younger brothers Phan Thanh Tam and Phan Thanh Phouc, and her cousins Ho Van Bon and Ho Thi Ting. When Horst Faas, the AP bureau chief in Saigon with 10 years’ experience in Vietnam, looked at the
image for the first time that afternoon he reportedly said, ‘I think we have another Pulitzer here.’
But there was a problem: the same element that gave the picture its terrible force was also the thing that might make it unusable in the newspapers: AP, and most of the world’s media, had a strict rule about not printing full-frontal nudity. The immediate thought was that the image couldn’t be sent. Faas argued with his head office in New York that rules were made to be broken, and it was agreed that the image would not be cropped to show Kim Phúc alone or in close-up. And then the radio-wave transmission began, a 14-minute line-by-line process for each image if the lines held up, which they rarely did. The picture was first sent to AP in Tokyo, and then via land and submarine wire channels to New York and London. And from that point the story wasn’t about speed any more. For a short while, the world waking up to that photo hung in suspended time. Everyone drew breath.
Television pictures from the day’s events, taken by ITN and NBC, had got there first with the story, but it was Nick Ut’s photo that burned into the memory. The initial shock – which was the same as Ut’s original shock as he clicked the shutter, ‘Oh my God. What happened? The girl has no clothes’ – immediately turned to outrage. This was unforgivable inhumanity. The war had to stop. A single image taken in a fraction of a second (and it is always the personalised image of a few that amplifies the suffering of millions), brought the story home. It helped, as it always does, that the victims were children, innocent and bewildered. Yet it would be three more years before the war in Vietnam drew to a close.2