For the Glory

by Duncan Hamilton

  The first was the deteriorating situation in China. Disorder and lawlessness continued to blight the country; and two of the people Liddell most cared about found themselves ensnared in the worst of it.

  In the previous twelve months Annie Buchan had not only been shot at – she was caught in bandit crossfire, the bullet passing through the raised peak of her cap – but also forced out of Siaochang with the other missionaries. When rival warlord armies began lashing out indiscriminately, causing more deaths there, the London Missionary Society staff loaded mule carts and escaped.8 Buchan, fearful for the locals left behind, admitted, ‘We felt ashamed to go free.’ In the villages she saw the soldiers kick down doors or thrust swords through the gaps in the brittle wood and heard ‘the cries of the terrified’ inside. A platoon of these soldiers soon caught up with the missionary carts, commandeering them and forcing Buchan and her colleagues to walk. When the mission reopened in Siaochang in September 1927, Rob Liddell moved from Shanghai to continue the rebuilding of the hospital, which a flash flood had previously swept into a jagged ruin. That reconstruction, as well as tending to traumatized peasants, made the effort of acquiring another gold medal seem a puny waste of energy to his brother. ‘He didn’t think it was fair to leave for such a long time in those circumstances,’ said a friend.

  Liddell had come to the conclusion that he was too ring-rusty for the Olympics anyway. No one had coached him since Tom McKerchar. No one had stretched him on the track since the Scottish AAA Championships in 1925. No one – not even Liddell – knew what another week and a half on the Trans-Siberian railway might take out of him on the way to Amsterdam. As unselfish as ever, Liddell also didn’t want to take a place someone else might use more profitably; an athlete, moreover, who had been through the selection races and wouldn’t be chosen purely because of his status as the defending champion.

  It was a miscalculation. Another American, Ray Barbuti, beat Spencer in the Olympic trials and then went on to win the gold medal in 47.8 seconds, slower than Liddell’s performance in Paris. In agency reports, filed from Amsterdam, Liddell’s absence was viewed as a ‘great misfortune’.

  Exactly how much of a misfortune became apparent that October when Liddell ran a race in the port city of Dairen on the southern tip of the Fengtien peninsula. He sailed there across the Bohai Sea. The South Manchurian Railway Celebrations, staged to commemorate the Emperor of Japan’s coronation, were planned as a contest between Japanese and French Olympians. Liddell, a guest runner, outshone them. Reports of what he did – both before and afterwards – differ because of the fractured nature of news distribution in the 1920s. According to one dispatch he took the 400 metres in 47.8 seconds.9 If that is true, he equalled Barbuti’s Olympic time in Amsterdam without training for it. More plausible is an alternative account. In a wind so strong that it almost blasted the athletes backwards off the last bend, Liddell won in a ‘fraction’ over 51 seconds. The captain of the French team was an Olympic bronze medallist from 1924. He’d seen Liddell’s race in Paris. Watching him again, he calculated Liddell would have crossed the line in 48 seconds – if that gale hadn’t hampered him.

  There was a bizarre coda.10 The race was run at 2.45 p.m. Liddell’s boat was casting off half an hour later. The docks were a twenty-minute taxi ride away. Still wearing his kit and his spikes, Liddell grabbed his coat and bag and was attempting to leave when the band struck up the British national anthem. ‘I had to stand as still as a post,’ he said. As the last note sounded, Liddell was ready to ‘leg it’ again. This time the band played the Marseillaise to honour the second-placed Frenchman. The taxi reached the wharf as Liddell’s steamer was pulling out. The wind that had slowed him on the track tossed his boat towards the dock again on what he described as ‘a bit of a tidal wave’. Liddell hurled his bag on to the wooden deck before a hop and a step launched him into an enormous leap. He cleared at least 15 feet of water. ‘I tried to remember in the very act how a gazelle jumps . . . and I made it.’ Like the standard fisherman’s tale, the distance Liddell covered grew appreciably as the years passed. Before long he’d straddled half the China Sea without getting a toe wet.

  Everyone who saw him that afternoon thought Liddell should have run in the Olympics. There was also consensus about what would have happened: he’d have taken a second gold medal. Because his legs, his shoulders and his upper body were stronger and had developed with age, he possessed more stamina than before. It is easy to extrapolate extravagantly when contradiction is impossible. The claims made on his behalf were, however, given more credence in autumn 1929.

  Dr Otto Peltzer, born in 1900, was a Teutonic track hero in the 1920s – skinny and tall and as blond as white sand, his hair parted high on the left.11 He was a world record holder in three middle-distance events and had set German bests in eight different disciplines. He’d captained the team in Amsterdam and had been the favourite for the 800 metres until, during a game of handball, someone stepped on his foot accidentally, fracturing a bone. He was labelled ‘Otto the Strange’ because of his training methods. Like a disciple of Max Sick, Peltzer insisted the elasticity of the muscles was vital. He took hot baths and found a coach in the McKerchar mould to massage him before and after races. Peltzer liked to sunbathe nude. He was able to sleep for a few moments at a time, dropping off even minutes before a race began. He also developed jumping exercises to strengthen his legs. From a standing start, Peltzer could leap from the bottom to the middle step of a flight of stairs. He even went to Finland to glean insights from Paavo Nurmi. In 1926 he beat him in Berlin over 1,500 metres and also snatched the world record.

  Showdown in Tientsin. Eric Liddell lines up beside Dr Otto Peltzer for their exhibition race.

  When it came to sport, Peltzer shared Liddell’s outlook. After triumphing over Nurmi, he turned down $250,000 from two entrepreneurs who asked him to re-stage the race across America. The notion of it went against his principles. ‘A sportsman does not need financial compensation since the act carries its own reward,’ he said. ‘You can’t turn it into a job without taking away its ideal root, and the inner joy in doing it.’ You can almost hear Liddell yelling ‘hear, hear’ in reply.

  Peltzer was promoting German athletics around the globe, which pulled him into Liddell’s path in Tientsin. The contest between them was a double-header over 400 metres and then 800 metres.

  The wind got up, making both races tests of endurance. Liddell still comfortably bested Peltzer in the 400 metres. He then pushed him to a near photo finish in the 800 metres, finishing only 0.1 of a second behind. Afterwards the conversation between them turned towards the next Olympics, the Los Angeles Games of 1932. Almost every athlete will dig out an excuse for failure. Liddell found reasons – always charitable ones – to explain his opponents’ defeats. Peltzer wasn’t at his slickest, he said, because the German had been ‘travelling a good deal’. Peltzer knew differently.

  To beat him over any distance was remarkable. To beat him as Liddell had done – in this outpost where competition of calibre was virtually non-existent – astounded Peltzer. He’d expected the two races to be an exhibition rather than a showdown. He judged Liddell against the Olympians of Amsterdam, finding them inferior. Considering him to be his prime rival in Los Angeles, Peltzer asked Liddell to confirm he’d compete there. No, said Liddell, claiming he was already ‘too old’ to do that. Peltzer was taken aback. He’d be thirty-two by the next Games, which made him two years Liddell’s senior. Why, for pity’s sake, wouldn’t he run? In slightly imprecise English Peltzer advised him, ‘You train for the 800 metres and you are the greatest man in the world at that distance.’ Liddell’s attitude was inconceivable to a fanatic such as Peltzer, for whom the track meant everything.

  But Liddell was withholding one significant fact. It was like hiding the last pieces of a jigsaw underneath the box. Without them, Peltzer couldn’t see the picture properly.

  Eric Liddell admired no man more than his father, whom he regarded as the model mis
sionary. Work, rather than words, defined James Liddell, and he went about it dedicatedly, the betterment of his congregation always put before the betterment of the self. Even his hobby of photography was used for the sake of the Chinese peasants.12 His pictures, exposing the level of poverty in the countryside, swayed hearts and minds among the administrative members of the London Missionary Society who were ignorant of it.

  Early in Liddell’s life, his father shared the biblical passage that most influenced him, which was the Sermon on the Mount. With poetic flair, the Sermon distils the main tenets of Jesus’s sayings and teaching – including the Beatitudes and the Lord’s Prayer – into chapters five to seven of the Gospel of St Matthew. Even non-churchgoers find the Sermon familiar, though sometimes without knowing it, because quotations from it have passed into common usage: blessed are the poor; the meek shall inherit the earth; turn the other cheek; give to him that asks for it; love your enemies; judge not that you be not judged; seek and you shall find. Through his father, Liddell adopted the Sermon as his manifesto. One passage summed up in only three words what he attempted to achieve daily: ‘Be ye perfect’ – the same thing he’d preached ever since that Friday night in Armadale beside D. P. Thomson.

  Liddell knew perfection was unobtainable; but he also thought that shouldn’t dissuade him from striving for it. If he fell short, he would strive again tomorrow. His father set the example for him. He’d loved his enemies. He’d turned the other cheek. He’d blessed everyone, however antagonistic. He had striven to be perfect.

  His moustache had long since gone white. His hair was thinning badly. Gastric trouble had forced him to cancel trips – his first debilitating sickness since arriving as a probationary missionary more than thirty years earlier. Most children still tend to believe their parents are indestructible; Liddell supposed so too. The Boxer Rebellion hadn’t forced his father from China. Nor had flood and famine. Nor had the initial scepticism and indifference of the locals he’d been sent to convert. He’d survived the dust storms, the diet and the daily slog of riding on mules and carts to remote places, which awaited cartographers to properly recognize them.

  But, at the beginning of 1929, James Liddell had gone to Tsangchow to participate in one of the LMS’s district meetings.13 There he’d suffered a stroke, which briefly affected his speech and the movement of one arm. He was fifty-eight. James wanted to recuperate in Tientsin. His next furlough was due in June. The doctor, despite the patient’s delicate state, told him to convalesce in Scotland immediately.

  James, regarding the LMS as brethren, had no intention of retiring, which would have put them to the inconvenience of replacing him prematurely. He was certain his recuperation wouldn’t last long. He’d see China again within eighteen months. His son, though convinced of that too, felt his absence keenly. What separation nonetheless brought was a sharper sense still of what must come next for him. For Liddell, the coming decade was mapped out as surely as if the route existed in an atlas. He planned to become a member of the London Missionary Society. At the end of the following summer, he’d return to the Congregational College in Scotland and be ordained in Edinburgh after another period of theological study. He’d then come back to China, where he and his fit-again father would complement each other. That was why, unlike Peltzer, he’d be content to read about the 1932 Olympics from afar.

  Liddell had a capacious memory. It closed around information as tightly as the leaves of a fly-trap plant and devoured it, allowing him to memorize long stretches of his sermons. As well as the Bible, he could also remember, often verbatim, sections of novels, verses of poetry and sequences of numbers and chemical formulas.14 During what were called ‘the entertainments’ – party pieces for house guests – he’d give recitals of Dickens or Robert Burns.

  Burns’ most quoted line is a warning about the unreliability of planning for the future:

  The best-laid schemes o’ mice an’ men

  Gang aft agley,

  An’ lea’e us nought but grief an’ pain . . .

  So it proved for Liddell.

  Missionaries moved through China with increasing trepidation, always walking in the shadow of terror or death.15 These instances harked back, like a banshee echo, to the Boxer Rebellion. In April 1929 pirates killed three American bishops in Chenki in West Hunan. Less than two months later brigands held hostage five British members of China’s Inland Mission, plus a baby, in Shekichen in Honan. Whole streets were burned. Inhabitants were ‘beaten, tortured and shot’. Widespread looting took place. The hostages were finally released.

  Innocents elsewhere were not so fortunate. A missionary was stabbed in the back while riding in a rickshaw in Chang-tu-fu. Another was stabbed in the stomach for failing to hand over money from a safe. In Lungyan, in south-west Fukien, bandits took ‘a fiendish pleasure in torturing those they were about to slay’, said The Times. ‘Some were disembowelled. Some hanged. Some drowned. Some brained.’ Some were also beheaded, dismembered or buried alive. ‘Women were killed with tortures that cannot be written down,’ added the newspaper. So it went on. Early in 1930 two Italian bishops and three nuns were murdered in Hong Kong. The headlines read like the covers of those popular but sensationalist Victorian penny-dreadfuls. Some told of ‘Lootings Along the Yangtze’ and ‘China on the Rampage’. Two in particular – ‘The Outrages of Murder’ and ‘Foreigners in Peril Again’ – cropped up monthly. In Yunnan Province, for example, those who either couldn’t or simply refused to pay bandit bounty were soaked in paraffin. ‘They burned like torches,’ said one account.

  The missionaries of the London Society in and around Tientsin still thought of themselves as relatively safe. The city was fearsomely fortified. There were 8,500 foreign troops stationed there. The Americans, responsible for almost half of that number, could call on an assortment of aircraft, five tanks and five field guns. Only the certifiably insane would have taken them on.

  An atrocity spilled into the colonial enclave nonetheless in April 1930. It changed everything, especially for Eric Liddell. A. P. Cullen and Eric Scarlett were travelling to Peitaiho.16 Their brief was a pleasurable one: the LMS wanted them to check whether the beach-front bungalows needed repairing. The journey from the railway station to the coast was barely 5 miles. Cullen and Scarlett each rode there on a donkey. Halfway along the route a gang of three men, their faces covered in scarves, brandished short pistols at them in a surprise attack from the high thickets running on either side of the rough pathway. Cullen and Scarlett listened to the demand for valuables and money. Cullen, a couple of yards in front of Scarlett, began to unthread the gold watch and chain that hung from his waistcoat pockets. He tried to reason with one of the robbers, who he supposed was as ‘inexperienced’ as the other two. The men seemed to him to be ‘considerably flustered’, as though this – a stand-and-deliver highwayman’s hold-up – was their baptism in serious crime. The stress of the moment made one of the men pull his trigger without provocation. The shot Cullen heard instinctively sent him swivelling in his saddle. He saw Scarlett drop to the ground. The bullet had hit him a couple of inches above the heart. The sight of Scarlett bleeding affected the gang as much as it did Cullen. The men began an agitated scramble to take what each of them could hold or stuff into a canvas bag. Cullen was yanked off his donkey. The watch chain, still looped through a button hole, was torn from his waistcoat and a robber made a successful grab for his wallet, which contained only a few notes. The suitcases and a briefcase, which the donkeys had been carrying as a tied pack, were ransacked. Clothes and papers were scattered across the path. Another shot was fired – more as a warning to Cullen than an attempt to murder him too – before the gang vanished, leaving nothing but footprints behind. Five minutes later Scarlett died as Cullen cradled his head.

  In the first nine months of that year a total of ninety-seven missionaries were reported kidnapped; thirty-three of them were murdered.17 Seen as just another statistic of the unrest, Eric Scarlett was soon forgotten except by thos
e who knew him in Tientsin. His murderers were never caught. Liddell was a coffin-bearer at the funeral. When reflecting on Scarlett’s killing, he referred to the ‘darkness of the days we have passed through’. Those days had direct consequences for Liddell.

  When his train had left Waverley station in 1925, his friends had sung an old Scottish ballad to him from the platform: ‘Will Ye No Come Back Again?’ His answer, shouted from the carriage window, was that he’d be back ‘soon enough’.18 As Liddell began teaching some of Scarlett’s classes, he realized his planned return would have to be delayed because of the murder. There’d be no possibility of seeing Scotland or his father again for at least another twelve months. To stick to his original schedule would have put the college and the LMS ‘in a very difficult place’, he said.

  In deciding to postpone his homecoming, he acted exactly as his father would have done.

  In his diary for 4 September 1931, D. P. Thomson wrote of seeing Eric Liddell again for the first time in half a dozen years. Thomson noted that he looked ‘a little yellower and balder’ than before.19

  The newspapers were more interested in his athletics than in his missionary ambitions. As Thomson stressed, ‘For tens of thousands he was still a national hero.’ Would Liddell train throughout the winter? Would he, approaching thirty, enter the Scottish AAA Championships the following summer? Liddell explained that he hadn’t competed seriously for nearly a year – he’d won the sprints and the quarter mile in the North China Championships – and had no intention of reviving his career because an impossibly crowded twelve months of learning and preaching were his priorities instead. The clamour to see and hear him was so ‘very great’, added Thomson, that ‘almost every pulpit in the country would have welcomed him’. Invitations for Liddell to speak piled up months before the date of his arrival became known. A committee was formed to arrange a workable timetable for him; otherwise Liddell would have been exhausted within weeks. On top of his regular Sunday sermons there were public ‘welcome home’ gatherings, temperance and Sabbath observance rallies, sportsmen’s services, London Missionary Society and Women’s Institute meetings. As ever, overflow areas had to be created for him as he criss-crossed the country.