A week later, the news agency reporter sent to record his ‘impressive send off’ from Edinburgh highlighted ‘the large following of women’ trailing behind his black landau cab, which was decorated in streamers of red, white and blue.24 The specific mention of these female supporters, who would nowadays be categorized as groupies, illustrates Liddell’s wide appeal. It was as if he were a movie idol heading to California to star beside Mary Pickford. Hundreds of fans followed him to Waverley station. Another thousand-plus were already waiting there, most of them flooding on to the platform. In the briefest of speeches, his voice ‘rising shrilly above the noise of the station’, Liddell said he was going to China as ‘an ambassador’.
For the ordinary man and woman, who seldom went beyond their own communities, China was as distant as a planet; and the land and sea separating it from them seemed as vast and as unnavigable as the Milky Way. The Chinese alphabet, their clothes and their food were alien to Westerners too. There was bafflement over why Liddell should want to go there. He was like an explorer, heading off into the kind of uncharted territory on to which the earliest cartographers had scrawled the warning ‘Here Be Dragons’.
In one of his best-known essays, entitled ‘Boys’ Weeklies’, George Orwell pointed out that Britain had a tendency to slot citizens of non-English-speaking nations into categories.25 These were crude and offensively condescending. There was the ‘Froggie’ Frenchman, the ‘Dago’ Italian, the ‘stupid’ Scandinavian. The Chinese fared worst. The ‘Chinaman’, explained Orwell, was forever portrayed as being ‘sinister’ and ‘treacherous’ – a ‘nineteenth-century pantomime Chinaman, with saucer-shaped hat, pigtail and pidgin-English’. Orwell omitted the other stereotypes: the drooping moustache thinner than a rat’s tail, the long gowns with huge drop sleeves, the curly-toed slippers and the slits for eyes. Orwell also argued that few of Britain’s population thought ‘what happens in foreign countries is any of their business’. This was certainly true when he wrote it in 1940. It was truer still when Liddell went back to China.
There were reports of famine in the Kweichow Province, where it was claimed that ‘people were eating the leaves off trees and selling their children for a handful of rice’. An earthquake in Talifu had made it uninhabitable, reducing homes there to cinder and splinters. But one headline starkly portrayed Western priorities about faraway tragedies: ‘Earthquake Destroys Town in China: Foreigners Safe’.26
Foreigners, however, weren’t safe elsewhere. On the day Liddell left Edinburgh at the end of June, a single-column story on page fourteen of The Times put this into perspective.27 The disorder in China was described as ‘very serious’. The writer said a ‘campaign of barefaced misrepresentation’ was being orchestrated by ‘professional agitators’ who specialized in the spread of a single and ‘maliciously exaggerated’ allegation. The Chinese believed treaties forced upon them in the past were cut from crooked timber. ‘Foreigners’ were being blamed for it, he said – ‘particularly the British’.
China and the lineage of power there had grown thickly tangled in the eighteen years since Liddell’s last sight of the place. The Xinhai Revolution had overthrown the Qing dynasty in 1911, breaking a hold first established in the mid-seventeenth century. In January 1912 China became a republic under Sun Yat-sen, its first provisional president. Sun was immediately forced to relinquish power to Yuan Shikai, an autocrat who failed to restore the monarchy and install himself as Hongxian Emperor. Sun went on to lead the Kuomintang, the Chinese Nationalist Party.
From 1916, a fragmented China drifted under the rule of warlord coalitions. After the war, the Treaty of Versailles awarded German rights to Shandong Province to Japan. China was apoplectic. It had entered the struggle in 1917 supporting the Allies on condition that Shandong and other German territories would be returned to it. Reneging on the agreement stoked terrible resentments, the Allies damned as duplicitous. From the backlash grew the student-led May Fourth Movement and also a feverish spread of nationalism. The anti-Christian movement was active again and fiercely intolerant. Under Russian influence, Communist propaganda was proliferating too. The newly formed Communist Party of China held its first session in 1921. Among the thirteen attendees was the twenty-seven-year-old Mao Tse-tung.
Missionaries had distributed more than eight million Bibles, established churches and hospitals and served impoverished communities. But now to be pro-Christian was to be anti-Chinese.
Liddell was willingly walking into all of this.
CHAPTER EIGHT
There Are No Foreign Lands
CORRESPONDENTS SENT BACK almost daily dispatches that told of the instability in China and the hostility towards non-nationals, which convulsed the country.
The sense of betrayal over the post-war treaties grew worse; petty hierarchies, spites and rivalries existed even within the competing factions that sought to have them torn up or rewritten. There were strikes and riots, demonstrations and looting, military banditry and shootings. In late May 1925 nine students and workers were slain in Shanghai after colonial police fired indiscriminately into a crowd of several thousand, attempting to disperse a violently anti-foreign protest.1 Four more were shot dead the following morning. As the week progressed, foreigners were specifically targeted and ‘badly mauled’, reported The Times. Tramcars were stoned too. Finally martial law was enforced. These incidents begat others elsewhere, temporarily closing schools, including the Anglo-Chinese College in Tientsin. The instability drew dire predictions of massacres to come. North China was on fire, and the sparks were flying everywhere when Eric Liddell got there.
His father, James, hadn’t tried to pretend otherwise or coax him on false promises. At the end of every year the missionaries of the London Society were obliged to put together a state-of-the-nation review, including tentative forecasts about the next twelve months. Most of these, attempting to trap history as it flew, were staid documents. In the mid-1920s the worsening social and political climate made prediction a fool’s task anyway. The uncertainty was reflected in the reports James Liddell sent from his own mission. These were uncommonly vivid compared with the efforts of his colleagues. In 1924 he referred to China’s ‘sad condition’2 and said: ‘The feeling all round is one of suspense, not knowing what will happen next.’ He discussed the ‘perplexity, alarm, trouble and distress’ of the upheavals around him and also the ‘needless suffering, destruction and waste’ as a consequence of them. One sentence implies his hopelessness. ‘Oh, the horror of it all!’ he added, the exclamation mark flung down to convey sights whose details he didn’t want to share on the foolscap page. His 1925 report was darker still; so dark, in fact, that it made the previous one seem as cheery as a birthday card. ‘The waters are boiling,’ he wrote of the unrest. Liddell’s father spoke of ‘China’s grievances’ and ‘the crushing load’ under which its foundations were bowing. ‘A nation is in travail,’ he said.
None of this deterred his son. From infancy, Liddell’s bond with the Chinese went far beyond the fact of his birth in the country and the hymns his father sang for it. The landscape and the life he had briefly led across it still gave him a sense of firm belonging, which he felt nowhere else at that stage. China was indisputably home to Liddell. Missionary work constituted the family business, and this was the only place he had ever envisaged continuing it, whatever the sacrifices. To believe – as Liddell did – that God had given him a task was also to accept that considerable hardships, sorrows and separations must be endured to complete it.
He could have sailed to China, a sedate journey lasting six weeks. In a decision that illustrated his keenness, Liddell instead took the boat train from London to Paris and then stopped off in Berlin on his way to Moscow, where he boarded the Trans-Siberian Express.3 The entire trip, from his old country to his new one, lasted a fortnight. The Trans-Siberian was not the Ritz on rails, however ornate the decorations of its gilt, peacock-blue rolling stock. The train was dirty, cramped and cold. There were usually three stops p
er day – at places such as Omsk, Irkutsk and Verkhneudinsk – and the countryside was mostly monotonous. The engine had a habit of breaking down, usually in remote spots, such as the Ural Mountains. Sleeping was difficult because the beds were as hard as red-brick. The traveller Peter Fleming, reflecting on his experience on that line less than a decade later, wrote of leaving ‘the shoddy suburbs’ and then seeing a vista ‘clothed in birch and fir’. He reflected on the ‘nondescript smell of the upholstery, the unrelenting rattle of our progress, the tall [glasses] of weak tea’. He liked the railway, admitting nonetheless ‘You are a prisoner, narrowly confined.’ Liddell called his voyage ‘splendid’ and told a friend, ‘All along the way I was most fortunate to have as my companions Germans, Russians and Chinese who could all speak English.’
Afterwards he recuperated by stepping back into his childhood – those cosy days of beachside living beneath the sun. The Liddell family gathered together again for the first time in three years, in a bungalow with a shady veranda at Peitaiho, where there were long conversations and walks, reading and swimming, the leggings of Liddell’s full-piece bathing suit longer than the shorts he wore in Paris. Seven of them were there: Liddell, plus his brothers Rob and Ernest, his sister Jenny, his parents and also Rob’s wife, Ria. The Liddells weren’t the only holiday-makers. Nor was Liddell the only freshly arrived Scottish missionary.
Annie Buchan was on the cusp of her thirtieth birthday.4 Born above the family bakery in Peterhead, Aberdeen, she had trained as a nurse and as a midwife in Dundee and Edinburgh before applying to the LMS. ‘The work was hard, the training and discipline that of Miss Florence Nightingale,’ she said. Her intention to go to China was the talk of her town. ‘I might have been going to the moon,’ she explained. Arriving four months before Liddell, Buchan had been based in Peking, where she was instructed in Mandarin Chinese. Peitaiho gave her the briefest of breaks before her studies resumed intensively. On the outside she was a comely, compassionate woman with a brisk, matronly manner. On the inside she had a flinty core and a capacious mind – prerequisites for dealing efficiently with ghastly medical emergencies. All this was contained within a bird-like frame, giving her a deceptively passive appearance. She was just 4 feet 11 inches tall. She had a thin face, hazel eyes and greyish brown hair parted wide on the right. She wore a pair of wire-framed glasses, the lenses as circular as the bottom of a milk bottle. To husbands who mistreated their wives in rural China, and also to wives who mistreated their children, she looked certain to be a push-over in a verbal fight, like a mousey librarian who daren’t tell anyone to shush. That impression vanished as soon as she confronted them. Buchan’s disapproving glare could have cracked ice.
She knew almost everything about Liddell and he knew almost nothing about her. Buchan’s father had heard Liddell speak in Glasgow and asked one thing of him: would he deliver a letter to his daughter that told her how much he missed her? ‘I was so thrilled, and not without emotion,’ said a tearful Buchan after receiving it from Liddell’s hand.
The LMS would soon be sending her to Siaochang. She’d already witnessed unsettling scenes in Peking, where student marches made the streets impassable. She’d watched the flourishing of banners and clenched fists punching the air in protest. She’d heard the chanting and the impromptu speeches – all anti-Western and especially anti-British. Buchan wasn’t sure what awaited her in Siaochang. She was, however, steeled for it.
Liddell often quoted Robert Louis Stevenson’s assertion ‘There are no foreign lands.5 It is the traveller only that is foreign.’ At that time – and in that place – Liddell was certainly a ‘foreigner’ because even the normally pacific and pro-British locals of Peitaiho were restless for change. Some were openly antagonistic. Liddell saw propaganda posters slapped everywhere. The messages were unsophisticated. The British government was accused of being arrogantly interfering and conspiratorial charges were levelled against it. Its politicians were nefarious. Its businessmen were exploitative. Its missionaries were there to lure the unwary into un-Chinese ways. Listening to Buchan talk about Peking, Liddell became aware of how softly he would have to tread. ‘There is a prejudice against the British,’ he said.
People drift in and out of everyone’s life because friendships aren’t always kept in constant repair. But Liddell and Buchan saw missionary work similarly, and each instinctively took to the other because dedication of service had brought them both to China. Their casual introduction on the sands of Peitaiho was the beginning of a good companionship. Over the next twenty years Liddell’s life would intertwine with Buchan’s in ways neither could have foreseen.
In a photograph snapped to celebrate the Liddells’ reunion, the family poses half-formally at the bottom of the steps outside the front door of their two-storey brick home in Tientsin.
Eric Liddell, the right side of his face caught in the light of the sun, wears white flannels and matching shoes, socks and a button-down shirt. In a dark blazer, slightly loose at the shoulders, he resembles a day-tripper about to embark on a sea-front stroll. Sitting in front of him, James Liddell is like the archetypal Victorian, the sagacious patriarch who dispenses advice and signs the cheques. Beside him Mary, now a woman with a fuller figure, seems much more energetic than her husband and looks a decade and a half younger than him. Her hair is as black as it ever was. Ernest sits cross-legged in front of his parents, like a team mascot. He has a schoolboy’s parting, a lank of hair flopping across his forehead, and his ears stick out. Anyone coming to the photo without prior knowledge about anyone in it would assume Rob was the athlete. He is bolt-straight and as lithe as a hurdler.
Together again. The Liddell family in front of their Tientsin home in the French Concession after Eric’s arrival in China. (Back row, from the left): Eric, Jenny, Rob’s wife Ria, Rob; (front row): James, Ernest, and Mary.
Nothing in the picture suggests it has been taken in China. That is because the London Missionary Society and the Anglo-Chinese College, both as fixed as compass points in Tientsin, were settled in the city’s French Concession, one of eight areas cordoned off for foreign residents.6 The other seven belonged to Austria-Hungary, Belgium, Britain, Germany, Italy, Japan and Russia. These territories were created as a consequence of China’s military defeats – primarily against the British and the French – and existed outside local law, functioning largely as independent states in policing, taxation and government, like an early version of Hong Kong. The architecture within them was an indulgent, eclectic mix of styles, among them Greek, Tudor and Edwardian. Residents such as the Liddells were free to live or socialize anywhere in the Concessions, using the shops, banks and libraries created for them. There was even a racetrack, where Ascot-like ladies’ days were arranged, and a country club that offered a genteel Home Counties atmosphere abroad. You could play tennis there. You could swim. You could dance in its ballroom to classical orchestras, big bands or jazz musicians. You could eat and drink and entertain clients and friends alike. The cooks and the waiters, responding to a finger-snap, were Chinese.
In this landscape, the Anglo-Chinese College looked like a Gothic fortress of learning. It had grey-stone towers with turrets and an 8-foot wall. The founder and principal was Dr Samuel Lavington-Hart.7 The Times called him ‘a pioneer of western education in China’. The son of a Congregational minister, Lavington-Hart was a physicist as well as a missionary and he had originally gone to China in 1892 as a shooting-star prodigy. A graduate of both the Sorbonne and Cambridge University, Lavington-Hart was said to be capable of achieving anything after his graduation. As a student at Cambridge he’d made his own version of the penny-farthing bicycle, developing the curved front fork. He rode it between the colleges with his hands tucked into his pockets, speaking aloud his ideas for essays as he pedalled. Like Liddell, he had heard the missionary call early. To go to China wasn’t career advancement for him, it was a compulsion. He refused academic chairs and research fellowships; he also refused to leave China despite the wrenching dea
th of his brother – and his brother’s wife – from dysentery within twenty-two months of their arrival there.
He began the college in 1902 with fifty pupils. His aim was to school and shape the boys of Chinese politicians, civil servants and businessmen, hopefully guiding the decision-makers of tomorrow towards a Christian baptism. It was said, ad nauseam, that the Battle of Waterloo was ‘won on the playing fields of Eton’, a twisting of something that the Duke of Wellington only half-said. An echo of this misquotation nonetheless existed in Lavington-Hart’s approach to both scholastic excellence and biblical teaching. The playing fields of Tientsin were his Eton, and he intended to develop a Christian spirit on them.
The roll had since swelled ten-fold, and Lavington-Hart was almost sixty-seven. The tip of his white beard was short and wispy, like a goat’s. He was an avuncular figure but protectively precious about the reputation of the college. He hired only on ability. The fact that he knew Liddell’s father did not influence his decision to recruit Liddell. He did it because he believed Liddell, even without his status as an Olympic champion, was made of the right stuff. Another of his trusted masters had told him so. More than a decade after teaching him science, history, English and classics at Eltham College, A. P. Cullen was now Liddell’s staffroom colleague.
Liddell easily swapped athletics for academia. He took the attic room of the house and filed his old life away like exhibits from the past. As an assiduous record-keeper, Liddell had always clipped out and saved newspaper cuttings and press photographs in a box.8 With a sense of finality, thinking nothing more would be written about him, he placed these inside two large scrapbook albums and became the curator of his own mini-museum. He hired a carpenter, who made a small cabinet with shallow drawers in which were placed almost two hundred medals, including his Olympic gold.
For the Glory Page 15