Basil Clifford became only the second Irish athlete to break the four-minute mile barrier when he ran 3:59.8 in the Emsley Carr mile – an achievement that placed him in the elite company of Ronnie Delany and marked him as a genuine international-class miler.

A native of Inchicore, Dublin, and a worker at Tony Farrell’s bakery in Blackrock, Clifford was an amateur athlete in the purest sense of the word – part of his training regime involved running up the steps of the bakery shop with bags of flour on his back.

He competed in the men’s 1,500 metres at the 1964 Tokyo Olympic Games, finishing 8th in his heat in 3:54.9. His later son Brian Clifford became the youngest male Irish Olympic competitor in history at the 1972 Munich Games.

Clifford died at the age of 35 on the 14th of November 1973, in an explosion at the Imperial Metal Industries plant near Birmingham.