For the Glory

by Duncan Hamilton

  Thomson, ordained only three years earlier, had become closer than ever to Frank Buchman and the Oxford Group. Liddell now became a convert too.20 Buchman, born in Pennsylvania in 1878, had gone to China during the First World War. Some loved him, hailing a far-seeing Christian statesman. Others loathed him, reaching for words such as ‘autocrat’ and ‘fraud’ and hurling them like rotten tomatoes. South African newspapers had given Buchman’s apostles the Oxford tag in 1928 because so many of them were current or former students of the university. ‘Those who disliked the movement and valued the good name of Oxford accused Buchman of accepting the sobriquet to give [it] a cachet,’ wrote The Times.

  The group had ‘four absolutes’ – honesty, purity, unselfishness, love – which it said ‘Jesus Christ kept to . . . in their fullness’. Buchman, who compared mass evangelism to ‘hunting rabbits with a brass band’, instead held house parties, intimate gatherings where the public confession of sins was encouraged.

  Liddell’s programme of engagements soon became a slog for him. As a respite, he went to his parents’ home to listen to an Oxford Group member and found himself refreshed. He said the ‘four absolutes’ clarified the teachings of the Sermon on the Mount and that the movement itself gave him a ‘greater willingness to share the deepest things in my own life’ and also ‘a greater power’ as a speaker.

  He needed that power to convince his audiences of China’s relevance to them. Stories that appeared during his first months back reinforced the British public’s derogatory impression of it. Everything there seemed anarchic and anachronistic.

  A woman was condemned to die after being found guilty of mistreating her mother-in-law, who had committed suicide with an opium overdose. The punishment was ling chih – death by a thousand cuts. Yet another group of missionaries was abducted to elicit a blood ransom. Almost simultaneously, a nineteen-year-old from Britain was abducted by police, bleeding from the chest and the face. Within forty-eight hours of his capture the teenager was shot by an interrogator who lost his temper during questioning. These events hardened prejudices about China.

  Liddell acted as an educator. He conceded that one crisis was perpetually overtaking another and even that the Chinese ‘did not want foreigners’. He explained, however, that the extremes of climate created a level of poverty unimaginable even when compared with the foulest slums in Britain. These contributed to the political instability. He also made it clear that China was convinced ‘other nations’, especially Britain, had ‘taken from her what should be hers’.21 Liddell said he still believed in the fundamental decency of the Chinese. Despite all the trouble he’d seen and all the trouble reported to him, the British and Foreign Bible Society were handing out nearly five million shilling texts per year in China now. Too many families, trying to survive off the parched or flooded soil, were illiterate because wielding a hoe was still considered among farmers to be more important than reading a book; but a Bible in the home was an incentive to learn written language at last. Liddell compared handing them out to sowing seed. Something would grow from it, even if it took another generation. However unpromising that task seemed to outsiders, his mission was to fulfil it. That is why he’d be returning to China as an ordained minister.

  For Liddell, studying was relaxation from talking. His knowledge of theology was already encyclopaedic, so to read formally what he always read informally anyway never seemed like a chore to him.

  The other pleasure was seeing his father again. The LMS had compulsorily retired James Liddell because of further bouts of ill health, which were slowly worsening. The old Reverend Liddell was resigned to never seeing China again. All he had left of that country were his photographs and his memories and also the satisfaction of knowing that a new Reverend Liddell was about to replace him.

  Liddell’s furlough seemed so short. He’d originally asked for a twenty-four-month-long leave. The LMS, ignoring his family circumstances and his father’s generous service, allowed him only half that. James Liddell was given some consolations. He sat proudly in the front pew when his son preached in Drymen, the church of his childhood. He was also present at his ordination and then stood on the platform at Waverley station to see him off, promising to be there again when the train brought him back from China at the end of the decade.

  No matter how many miles separated them, Liddell always felt extremely close to his father. The feeling was particularly powerful over Remembrance weekend in 1933.22 His father was in Drymen, he was in Tientsin’s Union Church. Later he’d reveal how his father had seemed so ‘very near to me’ as he preached that day. The overwhelming sense of his presence was inexplicable to Liddell then. Next morning he received a telegram from Scotland. His father had died twenty-four hours earlier.

  The circumstances of his death came only afterwards. He’d settled into a comfortable chair, intending to take an afternoon nap. He’d never woken up. He died as good men ought to die – peacefully. Another stroke had claimed him.

  In the awful silence that enveloped him after slitting open the telegram and reading the brief factual message it contained, Liddell said he thought of ‘all the love, sacrifice and service’ his father had given during his ‘devotion to missionary toil’. Short obituaries appeared. James Liddell was mentioned in the newspapers because his son was famous. There was a terrible misprint in one of them, which called him ‘Mr Riddell’.23 Fifteen days after learning of his death, Liddell received his father’s last letter. In it he reassured his son that he was ‘full of energy’.

  Liddell had comforted and counselled hundreds of men and women through grief. Only now had death’s hand touched him directly. In response Liddell did what he knew his father would have demanded of him: he hurled himself into his classes and his congregation, grateful for long hours immersed in other people’s concerns. Writing to his mother, he confessed it was a coping mechanism. ‘I have just kept straight on with my work here,’ he said. ‘It has been the best thing possible for me.’

  He had used his father’s life as the template for his own. He’d been his friend as much as his mentor. Without him, the world could have fallen in on Liddell.

  What saved him was something that has saved many men both before and since.

  A woman.

  CHAPTER TEN

  There’s Something I Want to Talk to You About

  IT IS NOT only a single man in possession of a good fortune who is in want of a wife. The missionary, with meagre funds and scant worldly goods, eventually is in need of one too. In that regard, Eric Liddell’s celebrity preceded him. He received invitations to cocktail parties and coffee mornings, dinners and smart suppers, church fairs and poetry recitals.

  What we are travels with us always. Never able to say no in Edinburgh, Liddell was unable to say no in Tientsin either. He was on every guest list. The morning post brought formal invitations to speak or appear at an event so his name would add lustre to it. The informal invitations were delivered during a stroll through the compound. There were requests to attend a dinner or a tea or simply an offer to ‘drop by’ whenever he liked. Tientsin’s Union Church Literary and Social Guild, the community’s upper crust, even pressurized him into telling his Olympic story to them.1

  On every occasion Liddell found himself steered towards an eligible woman in the hope he would find her irresistible. But he was choosy and patient. Eileen Soper, still painting in the seclusion of Wildings, was aware of that fact more than anyone.

  From observing his parents’ own marriage, Liddell understood what it took to be a missionary couple in China and also how tightly bound husband and wife needed to be. Everything his father and mother had experienced – danger, disruption and absences – Liddell expected to experience as well. His parents had come through all of China’s turmoils. That’s because the marriage was a true partnership, said Liddell. Each was the other’s spiritual soul-mate, best friend, confidant and unconditional supporter. He knew his father could never have devoted himself so comprehensively to the m
ission without his mother. Never drawing attention to herself, she shaped the conditions that made it possible for him to focus on his field-work. In the wider world her unglamorous endeavours on his behalf – the practical structures she built around him – went unnoticed. Her sympathetic counselling of some of the local women, who approached her rather than him, also went unacknowledged. It was as though her responsibilities were taken for granted except by those, like her son, who saw that labour close up. Inspired by his mother’s example, Liddell searched for identical attributes in his bride.

  To find a wife wasn’t difficult in Tientsin. There was no shortage of attractive women who would have volunteered to become Mrs Eric Liddell. But to pick, as his father had done, that ‘true partner’ required discernment. Liddell searched for beauty beneath the skin as well as beauty itself.

  He chose Florence Jean MacKenzie.2 Usually called Flo, she was 5 feet 7 inches tall, auburn-haired, hazel-eyed, athletically energetic and vivacious. Liddell said he came to appreciate how much ‘fire’ was in her too. She was the eldest of seven children. Her father Hugh MacKenzie and his wife Agnes were both missionaries from Canada. He was the reliable Man Friday and chief mechanic of the creaky London Society machine. Around him almost everything turned, especially financial bookkeeping and travel arrangements, which could be labyrinthine. Agnes had originally come to China as an evangelist and now ran the MacKenzies’ eight-bedroom house in Tientsin and also a staff of servants. Missionaries with bulging cases came and went there like commuters crossing the concourse of Grand Central Station.

  Liddell and Florence first met during the autumn of 1926 in the Union Church. His courtship of her didn’t begin, however, until three years later. The delay seems inexplicable without another piece of information: Florence was only fourteen years old when she arrived in Tientsin. She shared a classroom with Liddell’s brother, Ernest. Liddell taught her in Sunday school. When he fell in love with her, Florence was approaching her seventeenth birthday. She was established as a church organist and a pianist and had also begun leading some Sunday school lessons, shepherding infant classes through Bible stories. Occasionally Liddell invented an excuse – the need to borrow a book; the need to rifle through the store cupboard; the need to pick up something that had been ‘forgetfully’ left behind – to go into the room where she taught. Apart from catching a glimpse of her, he also wanted to eavesdrop. What impressed him was Florence’s empathy with her attentive but always difficult-to-please young audience, which got bored easily and would have squirmed on the polished wooden floor if Miss MacKenzie hadn’t held their imagination. The more he saw of Florence, the more he liked her. He liked her sense of independence. He liked her feisty, get-up-and-go approach to the challenge of each fresh day. He liked the way she spoke, perceptively and without pretension, about what she saw around her, which emphasized a mature outlook.

  His courting of her was nonetheless painstakingly circumspect. D. P. Thomson described Liddell as ‘one of Nature’s gentlemen’,3 which isn’t surprising because the same was said of his father. He was strictly proper in his pursuit of Florence. He was a timid suitor more akin to the late eighteenth century than the early twentieth. Indeed, you could hardly call it courting at all. The two of them drank tea and exchanged friendly conversation in a crowd of other people at the MacKenzies’ or spoke to each other in church. When his sister Jenny gave Florence advanced piano lessons, Liddell cleared his diary and came home early to make sure he never missed them.4 So much for passionate wooing. Liddell’s crush on Florence walked softly on tip-toe so as not to reveal itself conspicuously and scandalize one or both of them. Behind the clean lace curtains of middle-class respectability, Tientsin society could be sternly censorious, always watchful for those who used the wrong fork. Even when Florence broke into her late teens, he was nervous about the age gap – almost ten years – between them. Liddell didn’t want to be perceived as plucking her from the reeds of the Moses basket. It would have been less troublesome to date and marry anyone else. But, sensing the woman Florence would become, Liddell refused to compromise.

  Portrait of Florence taken in the mid-1930s.

  In the summer of 1929 the two of them went on a holiday-cum-expedition into the mountains near Peitaiho.5 Lasting four days, it involved walks along steep paths and the dry beds of streams strewn with boulders. Florence wasn’t so much chaperoned as guarded. Among the party of ten was one of her sisters and one of her brothers. But, back at the beach, Liddell finally summoned the courage to meander to the front door of the MacKenzies’ bungalow and invite her to accompany him along the shoreline alone. The couple had still to hold hands, and what Liddell felt for her went unspoken until circumstance forced him to express it at the end of that same year.

  Florence had turned eighteen only a few weeks before. Like Liddell’s mother, she wanted to become a nurse. She planned to train for three years in Toronto. He had been coaching her in mathematics, which she needed to pass to attend college. The question of what – if anything – would happen after she achieved her nursing diploma now needed to be asked and answered. Liddell had no idea whether or not Florence was considering returning to China once she had earned her qualification. He wasn’t entirely convinced she’d want to wed him, or that she had even considered the prospect of doing so. One evening, when she was unable to concentrate on her mathematics, which exasperated her, Liddell suggested a breath of fresh air, concealing his real motive for it. For him, it was now or never.

  There was a butterfly-delicacy about the way he floated the matter of marriage, as if afraid of being rebuffed. From him there were prevarications and hesitations, qualifications and reaffirmations. From her there was a request for him to repeat what he’d said and then to confirm it again to avoid the possibility that she’d either misheard or misconstrued him. Florence, though confessing that she was ‘terribly in love’ with Liddell, had never expected him to discuss marriage. She’d supposed there were more obvious candidates; and that each of them was far ahead of her in the queue for a ring. Years later she recalled what Liddell had said so awkwardly to her:

  ‘There’s something I want to talk to you about.6 Now I’ve been thinking about this for a long time . . . I have thought I would like you to be my wife. I know you’re very young.’

  She asked him two things: ‘Are you sure? Do you really mean it?’

  If Liddell was sure, the second question was superfluous. ‘Yes, indeed,’ he replied.

  The couple then kissed for the first time.

  His fiancée announced herself as ‘stunned’ by the proposal.7 ‘I was naive,’ she said. ‘I knew I was special to him because he was spending so much time with me. I didn’t ever imagine he’d propose. There were a lot of women who were his own age. I thought they’d kill me after finding out he’d popped the question.’ Her family was equally taken aback. ‘We thought: “Why is he marrying Flo? She’s so plain”,’ said one of her brothers, proving that familiarity means siblings don’t always appreciate one another’s merits.8

  Liddell bought Florence an engagement ring almost identical to his mother’s, a band containing five diamonds.9

  That she instantly said yes to Liddell showed the age-gap didn’t bother her. What counted were his character and his demeanour and the commonality between them. The date of his birth and hers was immaterial. Anyone who arched their eyebrows in shock didn’t know Liddell and didn’t appreciate the sensitive way he’d conducted himself. She loved him all the more for it. Mind you, it was easy to love Liddell. In the same sentence Florence once described him as ‘a very good man’ and as ‘a naturally good man’, which had the benefit not only of establishing that fact – as if it were in doubt – but also of explaining it.10 She was sure Liddell had been born good, which was an intrinsic part of his appeal to her.

  Before friendship turned into a marriage commitment, Florence had observed him as intently as he had observed her. A lot of people pretend to be what they are not. They superficially put on a
n act designed to impress or flatter. They behave in a way that their social antenna tells them will suit either the company or the circumstances of the moment. Florence saw that Liddell wasn’t like this. He was just himself and nothing more. He didn’t change his accent or his manner, and he didn’t compromise his beliefs, so that a dinner-table audience or a roomful of strangers gained a false impression of him. The boldest lines of the sketch Florence always drew of him conveyed his gentleness and tolerance.

  She called the quiet, private hour he spent every early morning in Bible study ‘the mainspring of his life’.11 The implacability of his faith still didn’t make him solemn or preachy whenever he spoke about the practice of it, she said. He didn’t bore or brow-beat anyone who failed to share his religious certainties either. One of Florence’s friends, recovering after an attempt to commit suicide, was fearful of meeting Liddell again in case he cold-shouldered her.12 Florence provided reassurance. He would understand and be sympathetic; he judged ‘no one’, she said.

  Liddell was also ‘strict on himself’, Florence explained. He was restless after leaving tasks unfinished. He chastised himself for squandering so much as an hour, which made him more determined to ‘do better’ next time. He seldom rested because he was ‘always doing something for somebody’. He was also ‘a peacemaker’, she added. ‘I watched him settle disputes and misunderstandings between friends and colleagues, and even strangers.’ Afterwards, a few of them milked his generosity appallingly and others, knowing Liddell wasn’t confrontational, were arrogantly obstreperous towards him. ‘It used to stagger me the way people would disagree violently with him and say the bitterest things. He would smile and pass it off. He was incredibly forgiving and thought nothing was accomplished by losing one’s temper.’ Florence felt that what truly set him apart was the one quality so few possess. ‘He was so understanding of other people. He always seemed to be able to put himself in the shoes of somebody else.’