THE death of Sir Roger Bannister this week brought back a distant memory, not for me of his famous feat of running in 1954, but of the more prosaic hobby of collecting Brooke Bond tea cards.

This was a pursuit in which many of my generation indulged while at primary school – I was at Balksbury.

There was some degree of competition in trying to get them all and some cards were perceived as difficult to get.

Was this contrived, I wonder, to keep parents buying the tea or just pure chance?

In a long series of sets issued by Brooke Bond from the 1950s, Famous People 1869-1969 was issued in the latter year and depicted those who were then considered famous in order of birth from the early 19th century onwards.

Early notables included Alfred Lord Tennyson, Charles Darwin and Florence Nightingale, all long dead. But towards the end of the set as the personalities chosen were more recent, those still alive were included – Sir Alf Ramsay, born in 1922, the England football manager who had been in charge when England won the World Cup (then only three years before in 1966); Pat Smythe, the Olympic horsewoman, born 1928, and No 50, which was the last in the set and the youngest famous person, Roger Bannister, born 1929.

I suppose all the other characters have died in the intervening years and now finally, No 50, the last of them, has passed on as well. I wonder how many people have still got the set they collected almost 50 years ago? And I wonder whether those selected at that time would still be deemed as deserving the term ‘famous’ today? I suspect the influence of political correctness would preclude a few of them at least.

David Borrett, Lansdowne Avenue, Andover.