For the Glory

by Duncan Hamilton

  Liddell, given the twin responsibilities of teaching science and sport, learned how to control a classroom. He did so alongside another new recruit, Eric Scarlett, who moved into the laboratory with him.9 Scarlett was twenty-eight and also had missionary ambitions. After a disillusioning war, serving with the Royal Engineers, he’d sought some meaning from the whiz-bang of shells and the carnage of the Western Front. As well as taking science at Manchester University, he became travelling secretary of the Student Christian Movement. Liddell rubbed along with everyone because he searched for common points of interest. With Scarlett, it wasn’t difficult. As another colleague said of him, Scarlett was ‘a delightful person’, a look-on-the-bright-side sort of chap who sought perfection for his blue-gowned pupils and wanted them to know why science was relevant even to non-scientists. In church his wife Dorothy played the piano. At home Scarlett liked to sing comic music hall songs to her accompaniment.

  Lavington-Hart taught the theory of physics. He did so occasionally, as if giving a paper to the Royal Society. These classes were like obstacle courses for the mind. Liddell and Scarlett drafted more practical lessons to make science seem less daunting. Sometimes Liddell would reveal his mischievous side to lighten things. He’d brew up a chemistry solution and make a show of tasting it, telling his pupils ‘it’s wonderful’. He’d then invite one of them to dip his finger into the liquid too. The pupil found that Liddell’s solution was actually so foul-tasting you had to spit it out. The class hadn’t noticed the trick. With a deftness of hand that disguised it, Liddell had placed his forefinger into the glass but licked his middle finger afterwards.

  Taking tea. Eric Liddell plays host to his Union Church congregation in Tientsin.

  Twice a week Liddell and Scarlett had a tutor of their own. Conscious of the need to speak Chinese well, Liddell had begun to re-learn the language and sought out a teacher, whom Scarlett shared. Liddell even studied the Bible and the mission hymn book in Chinese to familiarize himself with its characters.

  He soon fell into a timetabled routine. He taught his classes. He took his turn on the rota for Morning Service. He went to the weekly evening prayer meetings. He read lessons as Sunday school superintendent. He took Bible classes. Occasionally he preached at the Union Church, which served the British and the American communities. As if the Amsterdam Olympics of 1928 remained a possibility, he continued to train too. The six-lane cinder track at Tientsin was planted into a piece of prime fenced-off parkland fringed by low trees overlooking the high windows of the college buildings. When Liddell raced against his pupils, he did so under a severe handicap, generously surrendering a huge yardage to them. He was glad to lose, for the credit awarded to whoever beat the Olympic champion improved morale. He’d often be seen playing tennis against himself too.10 He’d lob the ball from the baseline and chase it around the net. He’d then lob it back again before the shot bounced twice.

  What the smartly dressed science teacher should wear. Eric Liddell in Tientsin in the early 1930s.

  Colonial life was well ordered for Liddell. His teaching duties were a pleasure. His preaching duties weren’t over-strenuous. Every August there was the bonus of another holiday in Peitaiho and days of sea-bathing, shell-hunting and beach picnics. But even in his cosy existence, Liddell was conscious of Tientsin’s ‘other face’,11 which some of those around him tried to pretend did not exist.

  Commercialism had made Tientsin wealthily and vibrantly cosmopolitan. Electric trams rattled along broad arterial roads and merchant ships and steamers crawled into the congested docks, backing up bow to stern. But the finery their trade brought only accentuated the rank poverty existing alongside it. Illiteracy and a lack of basic hygiene were commonplace in the populated suburbs to the west and to the north where rickshaws and wooden handcarts, their wheels 3 feet wide, crawled along the streets beside donkeys, bullocks, packhorses and camels. The houses were shacks. Those who lived in them scrabbled for a living as coolies, carpet-weavers or manual labourers on the roads, at the docks or in the agricultural fields, the crops in them fertilized by human excrement toted in metal buckets. In the outlying villages – both there and elsewhere – the conditions were far worse. Confirmation of that for Liddell came not only from his father but also from his new friend.

  A train and then a springless mule cart carried Annie Buchan to Siaochang, where she shook the sand off her clothes.12 Dust storms, sweeping in from the Gobi Desert to the north of the Great Plain, covered the soft, brown, powdery earth. The eye saw only flat land. That flatness turned the sky into a vast canopy that was icy blue in summer and metallic grey in winter. ‘No fleecy clouds like back home,’ said Buchan. Hundreds of mud-brick villages were spread towards the flat edge of the Great Plain, which she said ‘had a glory of its own’. The furthest of them shimmered like a mirage. Each village had a dotted copse of weeping willows and, in rare shady patches, peaches, hard pears and apricot trees bore fruit precious to the half-starved.

  Buchan called Siaochang ‘not a very important place, just one of many small communities linked by dirt roads’. She saw ‘one or two market towns’; though the term ‘market’, suggesting a hectic to-and-fro trade, didn’t chime with the sight of a few shops that were ‘dark and dingy inside’ and displayed meagre and mediocre goods on the open street. The rhythm of the villages was cyclical, tied to the seasons. In the short spring Buchan followed the progress of the farmers, who on plots between 1 and 5 acres grew kao liang, a dark wheat that sprouted between 14 and 16 feet high, and also millet, cotton, sweetcorn, watermelons and peanuts. She sweltered in early summer, the temperatures reaching 110 to 116 degrees and causing a lassitude noticeable in everything and everyone. Buchan said that even the birds were ‘in distress . . . their beaks open and feathers drooping’. In mid-July came the annual miracle of meteorology in those parts. ‘A cloud the size of a man’s hand would appear on the far horizon and literally, while one watched, the cloud would grow bigger and more clouds gathered and came thick and fast.’ The wind accompanying these clouds could be hurricane force, and Buchan would always hear a ‘loud bang’ – the opening note of a thunderstorm. The rain came in a dam-burst and would last ‘for weeks’, she said. ‘To our amazement with one night of rain frogs would be deafening us with their croaking.’

  Annie Buchan, who became one of Eric Liddell’s most avid supporters and closest friends in China.

  The farmers feared the uninvited guest. Buchan watched locusts arrive in their thousands, spreading over the fields in a black mass and stripping the crop to bare stalks in less than an hour. The farmers and their families ran pointlessly into the fields, shouting and banging together tools and sticks in an attempt to save a scattering of grain for the harvest. The locusts feasted and flew on.

  And then the winter came. Snow and frost lingered because it was so dry. The thermometer dipped below zero. Buchan wore padded clothes stuffed like a mattress. The farmers swathed themselves in goat-, sheep- and cat-skin coats. The fur was worn on the inside, leaving exposed the pink-brown skin of the animal from which the pelt had come. The farmers didn’t care how this looked; nor did they care if their coats smelled of rotten hacked-away flesh.

  While working as a nurse, Buchan ran into other customs she found impossible to reconcile. In the factual accounts she kept, both contemporaneously and decades afterwards, Buchan looked at Siaochang the way Pepys had looked at London. Her typewritten records, though never sensationalist, are unflinching, which is why readers come across passages that make them stop suddenly, appalled and incredulous. ‘The people were primitive in their mode of living. They had not moved on with the passing years,’ she said, attempting to provide perspective as well as mitigation.

  There were horror stories. A father hacked off one of his son’s arms for disobedience. ‘The father would not be in trouble legally for that,’ Buchan commented. Daughters had it even tougher. Those who got pregnant before marriage could be buried alive. ‘No one questions it because there is no law
against it,’ said Buchan. She remembered one case in which a woman was rescued from that fate after being kidnapped and gang-raped. ‘Rogues and bandits did terrible things,’ added Buchan, alluding to frequent instances that went uninvestigated. The woman hid in the hospital and gave birth there. The baby was adopted so she could return home without the fear of being murdered by her father. Some cases were tragically hopeless. A baby’s fingers were bitten to the knuckle by a hungry rat. A man who lost a fight was ‘so cross’, said Buchan, ‘that he cut off his own right hand so as to put the blame on his opponent’.

  Health education was rare. There was also a reluctance among the Chinese to be treated in a Western hospital. Villagers tried to heal themselves with concoctions of leaf and stem, the recipes inherited from previous generations. Cataracts would be ignored until the eyelid turned inward, threatening blindness. Arthritis or osteoporosis had already bent a spine or withered a hand before a doctor was sought. Opium addicts raged and sweated and wiped their black-rimmed, yellow eyes. Women – even among some of the poor – were disfigured for life after foot-binding, the hideous custom of soaking cotton bandages in animal blood and herb water before repeated, vice-like swathing of the feet broke and re-broke the toes and disabled the arch. Even acute pain and swellings were tolerated, which meant cancerous tumours and growths were at a late stage before an operation attempted to cut them out. One man, complaining of indigestion, was found to have peritonitis. Buchan also recalled a seventy-year-old widow who admitted her daughter to the clinic. The daughter was pregnant and suffering from an advanced abdominal tumour. The baby died. The widow became ‘almost demented’, said Buchan. ‘Her grief was terrible to witness. She screamed and screamed. She thumped her head with her fist. She tried to drag and shake [the baby] back to life. She then lashed out and kicked. She cursed us all.’

  Buchan knew that the baby’s death, though no fault of the doctors, would deter prospective patients from attending the hospital. Word of mouth would take the news around the villages, each re-telling gingering up the details so that in the end the story bore little relation to the truth. Buchan was used to such setbacks. She had learned that being a missionary meant overcoming the mistrust of those you were trying to help. She had learned something else too: there were some things she could never change and others that could not be eradicated in one decade or two.

  It wasn’t uncommon, for instance, for baby girls to be abandoned shortly after birth. The male was the more highly prized in a family. But Buchan once found a baby boy, wrapped in a dirty rag, who had been placed on a roadside dump. His mother already had four children. She couldn’t feed any of them, let alone herself. The baby, ailing from malnourishment and exposure, died two days later.

  Domestic violence was common too. The men claimed ‘devil spirits’ were responsible for their veniality. Buchan said that ‘culture, pride and history’ made the truth ungraspable for them. She slogged intrepidly on. In Siaochang, there was no other way.

  In Tientsin, where she sometimes travelled to collect supplies and meet Eric Liddell, the expatriate community was sheltered behind its iron-studded gates and crenellated walls. Afternoon tea was always served. Everyone dressed for dinner. The elegant urbanites saw themselves as a civilizing presence. The only crisis for them was a shortage of tonic for their gin. The rest of China was viewed with detachment, as if through glass. Liddell once caused a social kerfuffle after appearing in the Union Church pulpit wearing a pair of shorts.13 He’d thought it too hot for trousers. This was considered to be a shocking breach of protocol – proof that priorities were sometimes warped within Tientsin’s smug bubble.

  But the rudest of awakenings there wasn’t far away.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Will Ye No Come Back Again?

  THE PHOTOGRAPHER FROM the Tientsin Times wanted an action image of Eric Liddell at full speed.1

  He set up his heavy camera on the track, its wooden tripod like a spider’s legs, and then began focusing the lens. There was a minor, but critical, flaw in this plan. He had no conception of how fast an Olympic champion was capable of running. The clueless photographer was still trying to frame the shot when he discovered the gold medallist bearing down on him. Like someone attempting to sidestep an avalanche, the photographer tried to remove his camera – and himself – from Liddell’s path. Liddell tried to swerve out of the way too. Neither man was successful. Liddell crashed into the photographer, flattening him and tipping over the camera. The smack of heads knocked both of them unconscious. Annie Buchan, sitting in the stand, saw Liddell slump ‘flat on his face’. He was carried into a tent, where he awoke and woozily announced that he was ‘just winded’. That incident, which reads like something from a slapstick film, proves that what one newspaper said of Liddell in the late 1920s was not flannel meant to flatter. He hadn’t lost ‘any of his wonderful speed’ in China.

  Another eyewitness confirmed it shortly afterwards.2 He saw Liddell in a relay race, competing in the Min Yuan stadium. Min Yuan, opened in 1926, was partly Liddell’s design; he’d modelled it on Stamford Bridge. ‘He stood, hands on hips and thin hair blowing above his high forehead,’ said his admirer. ‘He received the baton last, but then flew around the track, overtaking all opposition.’

  What he’d given up for China was apparent during the preparation for the 1928 Amsterdam Olympics, and then the Games themselves.

  There’d been regular updates in Britain about his fitness. One telegraphed dispatch, from the Anglo-Chinese Mission Sports, said he’d won the 100 metres and 400 metres – no one referred to track yards any more – and had also ‘wiped out’ an enormous deficit to take his team home at ‘a canter’ in the last leg of an 800 metres relay.3 The writer didn’t spoil a decent yarn by pointing out the catch in his story. The Mission Sports provided shabby opposition for Liddell. It was like running a pedigree greyhound against a cocker spaniel. During the 400 metres he could have stopped for a cup of Earl Grey and still taken the race in a dip finish.

  Liddell avoided reporters as much as possible.4 Once, seeing a group of them waiting for him on a dockside, he borrowed a huge conical cork hat and wore it to cover his face, sneaking past his would-be interrogators. But now, almost a year before Amsterdam, he couldn’t dodge the newspapers and so had to give a pessimistic answer to a straightforward question. Asked about his Olympic prospects, Liddell listed the difficulties of reclaiming his peak without the presence in China of anyone to push him. He explained that the Chinese wouldn’t agree to stage handicap events, believing them to be uncompetitive. That meant he couldn’t make competition deliberately tougher for himself. As a consequence, Liddell implied, he was considerably short of top form. The British Olympic Association appeared casually indifferent about the matter. No one bothered to contact Liddell, either directly or indirectly, about his physical condition. To the BOA, out of sight really did mean out of mind, his gold medal in Paris like a memory lost to them.

  Britain’s Amateur Athletic Association paid attention to Liddell only to mildly rebuke him after the publication, mid-way through 1926, of a series of ghosted articles in All Sports Illustrated Weekly. In one of them he implied that Alec Nelson and Sam Mussabini would have been useful in the Colombes Stadium dressing rooms. Immediately the AAA replied in a huff. As Nelson and Mussabini were professionals, the two of them ‘would possibly have aroused discontent amongst the officially appointed trainers’, it said high-handedly. Liddell outlined the importance of Philip Noel-Baker as well. In its letter to the newspaper the AAA were dismissive of him too. ‘I fear your correspondent is rather at fault,’5 wrote the Honorary Secretary, who added condescendingly that Noel-Baker ‘no doubt’ had done ‘good work’ before proceeding to denigrate it. Nothing Liddell said could be construed as rabble-rousing. The message from the AAA was unmistakably clear, however. Even a gold medallist didn’t have the right to express an opinion.

  Along with a dozen other sportsmen – including Harold Abrahams, Douglas Lowe and Guy Butler –
Liddell was signatory to a letter published in the Daily Mail five and a half months before Amsterdam.6 The letter called for voluntary donations to ensure that British competitors were ‘afforded every chance to give of their best’ there. The BOA, who couldn’t have missed it, still didn’t float an invitation to the Games in front of him. This was despite the fact that most of its home-based 400 metres runners could barely break 50 seconds. Since it wasn’t in his character to force himself on anyone, Liddell didn’t approach the BOA either. Doing so would have been a meretricious shout of ‘Look at me!’ which Liddell would never have justified to himself.

  In April 1928 the Daily Mail reported that the BOA ‘thought he wouldn’t get leave’ for Amsterdam and so consequently continued to do what it did best, which was nothing.

  May was the pivotal month. In its first week Lowe, who received letters from Liddell, let slip that his friend wouldn’t be in Amsterdam.7 His ‘absence’, said the New York Times, ‘removes from the forthcoming competition . . . one of the most colourful figures’. On the 12th, the time Liddell had recorded in Paris was finally beaten by the twenty-two-year-old American Emerson ‘Bud’ Spencer, who ran in a pair of dark spectacles after a car crash robbed him of his sight in one eye and damaged the other. Spencer clocked 47 seconds flat at Stanford University, a performance as unexpected as it was accomplished. Less than a week afterwards Liddell confirmed Lowe’s original statement. It was impossible for him to participate, said a report, because he couldn’t take a furlough from China. This went unchallenged, though top-notch investigative journalism wasn’t needed to enquire why, if the Anglo-Chinese College wouldn’t release him, he hadn’t come clean about it well beforehand to end all the speculation. In fact, Liddell could have gone to Amsterdam; but, rather than the BOA’s apathy towards him, his decision to forsake the Olympics turned on personal factors.