For the Glory

by Duncan Hamilton

  Liddell was constantly asked whether he’d offer himself for selection. While publicly never ruling himself out, he privately didn’t regard it as a realistic possibility. Without Tom McKerchar, he couldn’t train satisfactorily at the Anglo-Chinese College. Having signed a four-year tenure there, he couldn’t travel back and forth to Europe and America for meetings either, denying him proper preparation. So Liddell simply said he couldn’t tell, until reaching China, whether teaching and missionary responsibilities would be compatible with the Olympics. He imagined his spare time would largely be devoted to evangelistic work.

  Liddell was counting the days until he left. None of these went unfilled for the workaholic. When he wasn’t attending classes or writing theological essays, Liddell went on the road either alone or with D. P. Thomson. He was inexhaustible. His schedule was crammed with preaching – weekend after weekend and frequently on successive nights as well, observed Thomson. The requests mounted up. An eight-day week wouldn’t have been enough to satisfy demand. Sometimes, risking laryngitis, Liddell spoke four to six times in twenty-four hours. ‘No man found it harder to say no,’8 added Thomson. ‘No place was too small. No meeting house too insignificant. No audience too unpromising.’

  The Church sorely needed him. As the war had begun, service numbers swelled because people sought succour. After the war ended attendances eroded, slowly and then drastically. Some soldiers became agnostic, criticizing passive religious leaders for not doing enough to end the slaughter sooner. In the search for solace, spiritualism became an alternative to the Church. The bereaved relied on séances, Ouija boards and clairvoyance in attempts to communicate with the dead. As the 1920s rolled on, it was estimated that only fifteen out of every hundred went to a church service in Britain.9 A. J. P. Taylor summed up the general attitude in the Oxford History of England: ‘The dogmas of revealed religion – the Incarnation and the Resurrection – were fully accepted by only a small minority. Our Lord Jesus Christ became, even for many avowed Christians, merely the supreme example of a good man. This was as great a happening as many in English history since the conversion of the Anglo-Saxons to Christianity.’ The Moderator of the Assemblies of the Scottish Churches was more candid still.10 The Church, he said, ‘stood at the crossways with the signposts somewhat obliterated’. One minister believed the ‘dread of Hell’ was dead, for Hell had been seen, garbed in scarlet and black and smelling of cordite and gas, at Bazentin Ridge and Arras and Ypres and Passchendaele and in innumerable shell-holes and rat-infested trenches that were now unmarked graves for unknown soldiers.11 Another claimed weekend motoring had slashed the size of congregations; his church planned to provide garaging and car wash facilities.12 A fact-finding report concluded that complacency was infesting the clergy, which it said was too tolerant of Sunday ‘sport and games’ and also lacked ‘live wires’13 to speak on its behalf.

  The live wire who wasn’t tolerant of Sunday participation preached on. Wherever he went – theatres, music halls and public auditoriums as well as churches – anyone who couldn’t find a seat gladly stood. There were 1,700 at one meeting in Kilmarnock. Another thousand came to a service in Paisley. As many as six hundred wedged themselves into Glasgow’s Dundas Street Congregational, the small church where his father James had been ordained. To prove Liddell had a cachet beyond Scotland, a further thousand heard him at a YMCA gathering in London. One Sunday the prohibition-supporting Liddell was even given a hearing by lunchtime drinkers in a pub. Thomson’s verdict was: ‘We reached audiences14 not readily accessible to any other type of evangelist.’

  Liddell sounded like John Wesley, the father of Methodism, in his pronouncements. His approach was also comparable. Adept, like Wesley, at open-air preaching, Liddell spoke wherever there was a need and irrespective of the surroundings. Like Wesley, he did so without flummery, and the plain props of his philosophy were compassion and rigour.

  Wesley’s instruction to his congregation had been the austerely altruistic ‘Do all the good you can. By all the means you can. In all the ways you can. In all the places that you can. At all the times you can. To all the people you can. As long as you ever can.’ This was Liddell’s ambition too. At each event there was a loose script which, like a politician’s stump speech, Liddell tweaked to suit audience and place. Thomson called it ‘a straightforward and manly message’. Liddell introduced himself as being from the third or fourth generation of non-smoking teetotallers.15 ‘Seldom does a proper athlete come from a drunken family,’ he’d warn. Comparisons between sport and the demands of everyday life were then drawn. He talked about faith, prayer and the spirit of competitiveness and fairness on the field. ‘The good team sportsman’,16 he stressed, didn’t backslide or bend the rules. Nor did he play purely ‘for his own sake’. He had high ideals. He was concerned for others ahead of himself. He was forever striving to be ‘the best’ – even if his best didn’t win him a medal. Whatever the outcome, the mind and the body were scrupulously maintained at ‘the highest pitch of perfection’, he added.

  Always Liddell welded sport to sportsmanship, calling the first element of it ‘courage’. This, he thought, reached ‘its very highest form’ in the trials of ordinary life. ‘The man who had got the spirit of sportsmanship in his game would be able to carry that spirit into everyday activities.’ The example he gave was going on ‘day after day without work’. The crucial line was still looming. ‘The good sportsman is in all of us,’ said Liddell, urging those who heard him to become one.

  Since the men who heard him say all this were generally the impoverished or the pitifully low-paid for whom a weekend luxury was a full pouch of tobacco, Liddell went on a tightrope walk whenever he gave that speech. He could have come across as pompous and condescending, another hectoring interferer from the island of the relatively well-off. But Liddell had a lambent quality and he qualified the sportsman analogy, tempering its ambition with an understanding of what it took to bind a family together in the mid-1920s. It seemed as if Britain had lost the Great War. Industry was ailing, blighted by strikes and walk-outs and shortages. More than 1.2 million of the male-dominated workforce were registered as unemployed. Row upon row of mid-Victorian houses were dank, insanitary, half-lit hovels. Ex-servicemen, still traumatized from shelling and the taste of death, suffered abominable neglect. He told them nonetheless: ‘No man who really is a man ever cared for the easy task. There is no enjoyment in the game that is easily won. It is that in which you have to strain every muscle and sinew to achieve victory that provides real joy.’

  Liddell was also concerned that ‘to many people, Christianity [was] something that came out with the Sunday clothes and did not affect the rest of their daily life and work’.17 Unlike other preachers, he was convinced that ‘no amount’ of churchgoing could turn anyone into a true Christian. ‘Only intimate contact with God through Jesus,’ he said, could achieve that. He described it as a ‘free gift’ from Him – ‘the greatest of all sportsmen’.

  Like every British medal won in Paris, Liddell’s Olympic gold was delayed in the post because a dozy French official miscalculated the cost of the postage.18 The package got stuck in transit until someone in a sorting office realized what it must contain and organized delivery without excess charge. After receiving so many requests to look at the medal, Liddell occasionally took it with him when he travelled. The chance to see it was another incentive to go to hear him.

  When asked about the Olympics, he referred to them in the past tense. He’d remember Paris sweetly as a ‘crowded and glorious week’ and ‘the greatest experience of my life’. But he’d then add, as if no one knew of it, that irrevocable change was coming for him. ‘I am needed in China,’ he’d say. ‘And I am going to run a different race there.’

  There were goodbyes to say and debts to pay before Eric Liddell left.

  His brother Rob had married shortly before the Olympics. In December he and his wife, Ria, sailed for Shanghai. In January 1925 Tom McKerchar’s wife gave birth to a so
n. The boy was named Eric Liddell McKerchar; Liddell became the baby’s godfather. He also secured an Olympic memento for his coach.19 Edinburgh’s city grandees had presented Liddell with a second piece of gold to add to his medal, a half-hunter pocket watch with a barley-twist chain. He arranged for McKerchar to receive an identical timepiece. The inscription, which Liddell also chose, thanked him for ‘faithful service’ from ‘Scottish Athletic Friends’.

  Liddell then travelled to Wildings, having agreed to a last favour for Eileen Soper.20

  The length of her hair made Eileen the Rapunzel of the house; though, unlike Rapunzel, she didn’t want to escape her confinement. Her reluctance to stray far from that sheltered home was a consequence of her father George’s well-meaning mollycoddling and his exaggeration of some of the dangers lurking beyond its high hedges. George had a phobia of germs and disease. Eileen’s nanny had been ordered never to allow anyone to lay a hand on his daughter during her infancy. Nor was she ever to take her into an unfamiliar house. Stricken with appendicitis as a girl, Eileen even underwent an operation in her father’s studio because of his morbid fear of hospitals. The gardener scrubbed down a wooden table for the surgeon to work on. Those childhood experiences turned Eileen into something of a hypochondriac as an adult. So she worked relentlessly in self-imposed isolation, seldom leaving her studio except for a car ride into the countryside.

  She’d become successful nonetheless, establishing herself as an artist without the patronage of her father’s circle of influential friends. Only eight weeks before Liddell won in Paris, Eileen received a letter from the Royal Academy. Her dry-point painting called Flying Swings, depicting three young children in a playground, had been sold for £4.14s.6d. The buyer was Queen Mary.

  Liddell would have made the ideal husband for her – if he’d been willing to forgo China.

  The romance Eileen had envisaged for them was unrealistic. She did, however, prolong the relationship for a few extra weeks, persuading this least vain of men to sit for a portrait. Eileen asked Liddell to pose in his civvies rather than in his Olympic vest and shirt. She wanted to convey the studious thinker and scholar she knew rather than the brawn of the athlete. Eileen hadn’t attempted a serious portrait before and usually preferred to work in watercolour rather than oil, the medium she chose for Liddell’s painting. She laboured out of love; and the subject of that love was captive in her studio for a while, a patient sitter in front of an L-shaped window. At the end of each session the two of them walked and talked, which meant she had the memory of those last days together, as well as the portrait itself, to console her after he’d gone.

  In Eileen’s painting Liddell wears a three-piece grey suit, a tie of Scottish blue with thin red stripes, and a white shirt fastened with a slender gold pin across the collar. In his left hand he is holding a letter, which has been folded twice. The background is, oddly, almost the same shade of soft grey as his suit. Liddell looks much younger and fresher in art than he does in photographs. Eileen paints him as she saw him: handsome, wise and with a virtuous gleam. His hair is the colour of corn. His eyes are an iridescent cerulean. His flesh contains no crease, wrinkle or blemish apart from sharp scores beneath those eyes. Eileen purposefully allows strong light to bounce off Liddell’s high forehead and along the lines of his cheekbones, which gives him a sort of celestial glow. The art critic Andrew Graham-Dixon regards the picture as ‘no masterpiece’ and adds that Eileen’s inexperience and relative lack of aptitude for painting in oils is reflected in the portrait’s ‘uneven quality’.21 Only one aspect redeems it in Graham-Dixon’s opinion. ‘It seems to catch Liddell better than any surviving photographs of him,’ he says. That is arguable, but the gaze Liddell gives the viewer is undoubtedly pensive and intense. Graham-Dixon believes it makes him ‘seem distant, as if entranced by some vision . . . perhaps it was that spark of divinely inspired purpose’.

  Captured in oil. Eileen Soper’s painterly homage to Eric.

  COURTESY OF THE CHRIS BEETLES GALLERY, ST JAMES’S, LONDON ON BEHALF OF AGBI AND THE SOPER ESTATE

  Eileen adored the painting. She hadn’t received a commission and there was no prospective purchaser for the 29-by-25-inch canvas. This was just as well: she had no intention of parting with it.

  Eileen was an amateur poet too. She admired John Masefield and was drawn to the rural life and landscapes that Edward Thomas and John Clare depicted. Reading them persuaded her to write verse of her own. She concentrated on what moved her, the fauna and flora, the birds and the animals she saw in and around Wildings. These were love poems to Mother Nature. Only one poem expressed love for a man. Entitled ‘To E. L.’, it begins ‘We walked the fields of June’. She evokes a perfect day of ‘lifting skies / Blue as the speedwell’. The clouds she sees are ‘flying / Over the hill’s rise’. What she hears is a ‘peewit crying’. According to Eileen, she and Liddell climbed the hill, looked across the valley and then walked into a ‘leaf-chaliced gloom’, where the two of them found the white bell flowers of Solomon’s Seal, its blossom drooping ‘like tears upon the spray’. She regarded the walk as an advanced stage of courtship; and she is explicit in her opinion that Liddell did too. For the poem records that he took a silver key from his pocket and – ‘though loath to mar / The beauty of the tree’ – engraved their initials, lichen-deep, on the bark of a beech, where Eileen insists ‘Many names were carved / For lovers’ past delight’.

  For someone so appalled by bawdiness, written or verbal, the prospect of physical intimacy can only have been contemplated with trepidation. So her use of the word ‘lovers’ is significant. Evidently Eileen thought that she and Liddell were about to become a loving item; that the carving was like an unspoken proposal; and also that she was willing to be a wife. So do another two lines:

  You wrote that Time might spell

  The letters E and L.

  This suggests she’d more than contemplated becoming Eileen Liddell rather than staying as Eileen Soper.

  The poem is undated, but was almost certainly composed after his departure from her life and almost certainly, too, discusses the summer of either 1923 or 1924. Its closing verse is wistful and melancholic:

  On fallen leaves

  The beech is lying.

  Nothing remains of that fair day

  Save a lonely peewit crying.

  Preserving Liddell in poetry as well as in paint proved how much she cared for him. There is a yearning for the past about ‘To E. L.’, the sense of a time that cannot come again. With Liddell’s departure, Eileen had lost something precious and unrecoverable. Only the sweet pain of remembrance remained.

  Like a great racehorse handicapped by dropping slate weights into the saddle it carried, Eric Liddell could only be beaten on the track if he was disadvantaged first. So his last athletics season was a long lap of honour.22 Between mid-May and the end of June 1925 he ran in twenty-three races, winning nineteen of them. Of the four he lost, three were handicaps and the other was a relay. His final appearance came in the Scottish AAA Championships at Hampden Park. His 10 seconds for the 100 yards equalled a Scottish record set in 1884. He predictably won the 220 yards and 440 yards as well. At the end of the meeting barricades were erected to hold back the crowds wanting to mob him. The response was identical when he preached from the pulpit.

  D. P. Thomson ambitiously booked Edinburgh’s Usher Hall and saw no contradiction in taking the temperance advocate to a concert venue built from the profits of a whisky distiller.23 Classically designed, with a dome and circular walls, Usher Hall held between 2,500 and 3,000. No city auditorium was bigger. Thomson was warned that Liddell wouldn’t fill it. ‘You’ve made a big mistake,’ a critic told him. To avoid the embarrassment of Liddell addressing empty seats, Thomson agreed to a solution. An evening service nearby would be shortened, its congregation briskly marched to Usher Hall to guarantee a decent turn-out. The reinforcements were never necessary. Liddell was due to speak at 8 p.m. At 5.50 the queue stretched for 50 yards. At 7.20 plans
had to be made for an overflow meeting. Just over half an hour later, when the prearranged rent-a-crowd appeared, expecting to choose a seat almost anywhere, Thomson said Usher Hall was ‘as tightly packed as we had dared’. Hundreds were being turned away from the overflow meeting too.

  In Glasgow, another thousand came too late to see him and were stranded on the pavement, forced to wait for an overflow meeting later. This was a pity for them because Liddell’s speech there was his most heartfelt. He wound back the clock. What Liddell gave wasn’t so much a sermon as a chronological autobiography, as if wanting to explain both his life and his motivations. He had never spoken so expansively about himself before. He revisited Thomson’s surprise arrival at George Square and the offer to go to Armadale. He revealed his own doubts about speaking in front of strangers. He disclosed the crucial details in that letter from his sister Jenny and recited the quotation it contained from Isaiah, which he’d seen as a light-beam illuminating his path. Liddell talked without drama or exclamations, never hammering out the message he wanted to convey. The facts did that for him, and each was laid next to the other like bricks.

  The play St Joan had been premiered less than two years earlier. In it George Bernard Shaw imagines the scene between the doubting squire, Robert de Baudricourt, and Joan, who is questioned about the voices she claims to hear. ‘They come from your imagination,’ he tells her. She replies, ‘That is how the messages of God come to us.’ In speaking of how the message had come to him, as surely as if it had been an audible command, Liddell told the audience how it might come to them also. This had been an awfully big adventure for him. It had begun, as all big adventures do, with straightforward steps: that knock on the door; that letter next morning; that short ride to a nondescript spot – a spot, moreover, that was so like others his audience knew with a neighbourly familiarity; and then that first speech, which was no more than nervous throat-clearing before he found his voice. Now the adventure was taking him to China.