For the Glory

by Duncan Hamilton

  Then his luck ran out.49 He was caught with a 10lb package of sugar in one hand and a bag containing fourteen tins of jam in the other. The Japanese hauled him off to the stone guardroom, sentencing him to solitary confinement. Knowing nothing of Scanlan’s Trappist religion, the commandant thought solitary confinement was a punishment for him.50 Supposed to serve fourteen days, Scanlan was released after ten because he annoyed the Japanese so much.51 He sang hymns and chanted loudly in Latin throughout the early hours, interrupting the guards’ sleep. Scanlan was so well liked that internees used to give him what he called ‘a pleased and knowing smile’ whenever he passed them in the mornings and ‘saw and heard the eggs I had bought sizzling in peanut oil’. So his freedom was celebrated in an Independence Day-like parade.52 The guards looked on askance when the short route back to his room was lined with an enthusiastically cheering crowd, as though he’d beaten Liddell in one of the athletics races.

  The risk of conducting business became more dangerous.53 And the ramifications grew worse. The Japanese panicked, becoming worried that the internees would start to purchase guns instead of food. The guards badly beat up two Chinese dealers. A third was hoisted by his arms and legs and an internee witnessed his body being ‘swung like a battering ram against a brick wall until his skull was a bloody pulp’. A fourth was shot at, the bullets just clearing his head. A fifth was electrocuted on the barbed wire fence. The Japanese left the blackened corpse to hang there for almost a week to deter the Chinese and the internees alike. A sixth and a seventh were marched off to face a firing squad in front of other villagers. The rapid crack of rifle fire, killing both of them, could be heard inside the camp. There were numerous instances of water torture. One local, found packing eggs in his padded trousers, was subjected to it ruthlessly. ‘When his belly was swollen like a barrel,’ said Scanlan, ‘the soldiers often kicked it, stepped on it and jumped on it.’ Rice was sometimes tipped into a victim’s mouth, which ‘made the ordeal worse’, added Scanlan, because ‘the water caused [it] to swell in the poor fellow’s stomach’. Scanlan and his team worked on, placing commitment towards the community ahead of personal safety. Scanlan also told one internee: ‘If we are caught and executed for this, there will be one less priest. If one of the fathers of a family is caught, there is the added suffering of his wife and children.’

  The ancient economic law of supply and demand was always stacked in favour of the Chinese, who openly exploited it. As Scanlan confessed, the dealers ‘asked much more for their goods than the actual price’. A watermelon could cost $50. Fewer than half a dozen apples might be twice as much and were considered a delicacy. Once, after a supply was delivered, Liddell said cheerfully, ‘Well, even if we don’t have the money to buy them we can at least enjoy the smell.’54 Even a carton of eggs, abundant on the farms, fluctuated between $20 and $50 depending on the mood and the whim of the seller. Scanlan estimated that each night ‘many thousands of dollars’ were passed either over the wall or through the drainage system.

  It meant the oldest economic principle – and also the most basic – became a factor. When outgoings exceed income, bankruptcy can follow. The Comfort Money, which was paid only spasmodically anyway, was never sufficient to consistently cover the sums the Chinese demanded. The internees began to swap jewellery and trinkets for food instead.55 Some went to extreme lengths, telling the camp dentist to pull out gold fillings. Others dealt with a hideously vulgar character named Jacob Goyas, a short, rotund Uruguayan with globed eyes, thick lips and a leathery tan.56 In his early forties, he called himself a ‘merchant’, which was the polite alternative to his real title – criminal conman and war profiteer. It was believed Goyas owned multiple passports and had been embroiled in murky and mostly illegal currency trading in North China, which made him fairly wealthy. He loaned money to internees, ideally preferring gold in return, and could often be seen counting a wad of IOUs.

  Liddell stuck with Scanlan, as if declaring a solid oath of solidarity with him. He began willingly to donate the only valuables he’d brought into Weihsien – those medals and trophies from his athletics career that Florence hadn’t taken to Toronto.57 Most of them had been won at relatively minor events, such as inter-varsity competitions, and small Saturday ‘games’ held around Scotland. The food Liddell got from exchanging his personal history was shared, the bigger portion always going to those he thought needed it.58 Much later he also had his gold watch and chain valued, intending to sell it to purchase new sports equipment to replace what had been lost or broken.59 A colleague called it ‘a sacrifice willingly thought out and prepared for’ simply so Liddell could ‘give pleasure to scores of people’.60 He kept the timepiece only when a package containing long-awaited Comfort Money, delayed because of Japanese bureaucracy, arrived at last.

  Scanlan didn’t spend long in Weihsien. In the late summer and early autumn of 1943, the camp went through an upheaval.61 More than three quarters of the priests and nuns were released and taken to Peking after Pope Pius XII’s officials declared each was a citizen of the neutral Vatican State and the Japanese accepted the argument rather than squabble with the pontiff. While Scanlan and most of his colleagues marched two abreast out of the camp – ‘on many sides I saw tears’, he said – a group of them stayed behind to minister to the needs of the imprisoned Catholics. Within a fortnight there were new arrivals to replace them. From the China Inland Mission School at Chefoo came teachers and more than three hundred students, aged between six and sixteen.

  Liddell became ‘Uncle Eric’62 to dozens upon dozens of them. ‘If he’d told us the moon was square, we’d have believed him,’63 said one, remembering his impact on their young lives.

  Trying to drag back childhood or early adolescent recollections can be maddeningly difficult. What returns often does so in flashes, appearing and disappearing again in the speed of a subliminal image. The pictures that settle in the mind are seldom completely whole either. That’s why there are always irregularities in early recollections – discrepancies between what you are sure happened, what you think happened and what actually did happen. The past is like looking at a half-finished painting in which a corner is missing, a face is blurred, a distant scene is indistinct.

  But the children and the teenagers of Weihsien who spoke or wrote about the camp afterwards had shared points of reference about the place. Each of them remembered the small, tight rooms and the barbed wire along the walls. Each of them remembered the food – the grain and the beans and the tough meat. Each of them remembered the flies and the bed bugs and rat-catching competitions, the first prize a tin of sardines. Each of them remembered the perpetual search for coal and coal dust and the endless pumping of water and the daily roll calls, which seemed endless too. And each of them remembered Eric Liddell, the memory of him as sharp as sunlight. Aside from their own family, Liddell was the one adult in Weihsien whose presence made an enduring impression on everyone who came into contact with him.

  Separated from his own children, and so considering himself to be orphaned, Liddell adopted whoever needed him.64 Recalling his own unhappiness without his mother and father at Eltham College, he was especially solicitous towards the parentless in the camp. That title of unofficial ‘uncle’ was bestowed on him because of it. In his so-called free time, which meant whatever hours were left after his designated chores were over, Liddell gave himself willingly to the camp’s children and teenagers. Worried about the psychological as well as the physical damage Weihsien would inflict on them, Liddell tried to make each day interesting to alleviate stretches of boredom and also educational to nourish the mind. Joyce Stranks, almost sixteen, became particularly devoted to Liddell, who she said was ‘concerned about our concerns’, never trivializing them or patronizing whoever raised them. ‘He was so kind and so patient and always so gentle with everyone,’ she said. ‘All of us knew we could talk to him about anything, especially our difficulties, and he’d take what we said seriously and offer advice. Sometimes we could spea
k to him more easily than our own families.’ A contemporary of Stranks’s added that Liddell’s one-to-one conversations made you feel ‘as if you were the only person who mattered to him’.65 Stranks said simply: ‘We youngsters went to see him whenever we could.’ One of Liddell’s friends in the dormitory, constantly pestered with the question ‘Is Uncle Eric here?’, carved a wooden sign which he nailed to the front of the door.66 It was an arrangement of two sliding panels. One panel told the caller that Liddell was IN. The other informed the caller Liddell was OUT.

  In the chemistry classroom, where textbooks were scarce and the apparatus for practical experiments was virtually non-existent, Liddell found a solution. He hand-wrote an instructional book in blue and black ink on lined paper, which was then stitched together.67 The book, a hundred pages long, also exhibited his artistic talents. He drew sketches of instruments and also diagrams that explained an assortment of tests to be carried out using them. At the front of the book he wrote a dedication to whoever read it: ‘The bones of inorganic chemistry. Can these dry bones live?’

  Outside the classroom Liddell trained anyone who wanted to run, teaching them about stride-pattern and stamina and then timing them with his stopwatch.68 Shortly after arriving in camp, a group from Chefoo decided to stage a race. Liddell, overhearing them, said he would compete too. The teenagers saw a bald man rather than a former Olympic gold medallist. None of them imagined this ‘old chap’, which is how he looked to them, could possibly stay the course. In agreeing to let him jog along one voice rose above the others and said, ‘You won’t catch us.’ The sight of Liddell coasting along beside them, never needing to accelerate, came as a revelation to them. Among those runners was Steve Metcalf, then fifteen. He’d been born in China, the son of a Protestant missionary who had translated the New Testament into Eastern Lisu. ‘He won easily,’ Metcalf said of Liddell that day. ‘He wasn’t breathing hard at the end. We didn’t find out until afterwards that he’d already beaten the adults in a proper race before we got into the camp. We didn’t know his full history and I suppose weren’t fully aware of what being an Olympic champion really meant. We thought we’d win simply because we were younger.’

  Metcalf was dark, short – around 5 feet 4 inches – and slim too. The camp was initially overwhelming for him. ‘It seemed so chaotic. The adults who were already there didn’t know what to make of us at first. Some of the men were relieved to discover our lads were strong enough to pump water. We still represented mouths to feed and couldn’t be as effective as the Catholic priests had been.’ Liddell became Metcalf’s mentor. ‘He was my role model too,’ said Metcalf. ‘He was also everyone’s hero.’

  Metcalf admired Liddell’s hatred of cheating. After catching one of his other athletes attempting to elbow a rival in the chest, he spoke to him about a hurdles relay race he’d witnessed at that Stamford Bridge meeting against America in 1924. This was the first time – but not the last – that Metcalf and his friends heard it. The first leg was run in two lanes. The remaining legs were run on the inside only, making the hurdle in the second lane redundant. Watching from the grandstand, Liddell saw the splendidly initialled Major E. G. W. W. Harrison open a 10-yard lead on the American Dan Kinsey, another gold medallist in Paris. Harrison’s foot then flicked the top of an inside-lane hurdle, tipping it over. Kinsey had a choice to make. ‘The fallen hurdle left a gap,’69 said Liddell, knowing Kinsey could run through it and gain easy distance on the shaken Harrison. ‘In the fraction of a second at his disposal, a decision was made. He swerved to the side, jumped the hurdle next to the fallen one and then moved back in to the edge of the track again.’ He remembered the thrill that ‘went through me’, and ‘the cheer’ rising from the crowd, which recognized the gesture. ‘That was the finest thing done that day,’ said Liddell, who believed Kinsey had been inspired ‘by the spirit of sportsmanship’ which was ‘ingrained in him’.

  Steve Metcalf, who received Eric’s grey running shoes and considered the Olympic champion to be his mentor.

  Metcalf knew the purpose of the story: ‘Those were his values and he wanted us to be like that in life as well as in sport.’

  Liddell played hockey, football, basketball, baseball and softball too. He also made sure the equipment was well maintained and asked Metcalf to become his assistant in the repair shop, which was a white-walled space no bigger than a broom cupboard. Broken bats and hockey sticks were bound with either torn bedsheets or twine and glued to the wood. The glue stank like fish that had been left to rot for a fortnight. ‘The smell was terrible,’ said Metcalf. ‘It made you feel sick until you got used to it.’ Shut off from the camp, the door closed to contain the stench of the glue, the teacher and his pupil talked away, attempting to ignore it.

  When Liddell occasionally spoke of his family, he did so with a quiet, touching pride.70 ‘He missed them without ever admitting how much,’ said Metcalf. When he spoke of the Olympics – only whenever Metcalf mentioned it – he usually changed the topic after a few sentences. ‘He was concerned with the present rather than the past,’ added his friend. Metcalf once asked Liddell about his refusal to compete on Sunday in Paris. ‘He replied that it was just the natural thing to have done. He’d been following his beliefs and had never regretted it.’ Ready to frame a follow-up question about the repercussions of that decision – Metcalf wasn’t fully aware of the British Olympic Association’s reaction to it – he heard Liddell turn the conversation in another direction. ‘I took it as a sign that he didn’t want to say anything else that afternoon. It was done very politely and graciously, of course.’ Eventually Liddell did let slip that ‘pressure’ was applied on him to change his mind even after reaching Paris. In what can only be a reference to Lord Cadogan’s ‘playing the game’ message in the official brochure to athletes, Liddell also added that the higher-ups in the BOA thought sporting ‘principles’ should come before personal convictions.

  Things were different in camp. Weihsien pushed Liddell into making a concession over Sunday sport that no amount of brow-beating from the BOA had ever accomplished.

  Liddell always locked away the sports equipment in a hut on Saturday night and then unlocked it again on Monday morning.71 The camp’s elders accepted his stance, never disputing it, until one summer Sunday morning when Liddell discovered the door had been split, the lock hanging off. A handful of older boys, weary of the humdrum rhythm of that listless day, had broken in, taken the hockey sticks and begun a game to occupy themselves. Without a referee, the contest had disintegrated into quarrelling, rancour and brawling. The precious sticks were used as weapons. Fisticuffs and the odd bruise and black-eye were hardly the harbinger of feral anarchy to come. Weihsien’s disciplinary committee was nonetheless spooked enough to ask Liddell to reconsider his position on strict Sunday observance. He didn’t want to appear dogmatic, certainly not when conditions were so trying in camp. After forty-eight hours, during which time he contemplated the dilemma, Liddell adopted the middle-way. He agreed to arrange Sabbath sport, but only after the midday meal. And so it was that the continental Sabbath, which Liddell had refused to acknowledge during the Paris Olympics, came to Shandong Province. He even refereed the next hockey match, which passed with barely a cross word between teams amazed to see him there. No one had thought Liddell would contribute to the game, believing instead he’d only open up the equipment store and then either return to the church or conduct Sunday school. ‘Everything he did was for the greater good, including that,’ explained Metcalf.

  If there was a problem anywhere, ‘Uncle Eric’ would be there to sort it out.

  In the web of forced associations that Weihsien became, the usual rules about the birds and the bees and what happened as a result of them could never be suspended.72 The heart wants what it wants whatever the surroundings and the circumstances. Even the celibate priests and monks formed strong emotional attachments with women, who waved them a lachrymose goodbye after the Vatican secured those release papers for them. Sex in Wei
hsien was difficult because of the lack of privacy and also the lack of contraception. It was nevertheless not impossible after the lights dimmed. The statistical proof is irrefutable. There were thirty-three children born in Weihsien. There were also half a dozen weddings, the bride usually wearing a veil made from a mosquito net and a dress cut from a silk nightgown. Among the weddings was an interracial marriage between the jazz band leader and his attractive half-English, half-Chinese bride, who gave birth to a daughter ten months later. With the exception of a few loudmouth bigots, the internees were generally more enlightened and tolerant about racial integration than others in the 1940s. The camp was less forgiving about under-age sex.

  With puberty came rites of passage – not only mild sexual experimentation but also intercourse between some of the more mature-minded teenagers. Langdon Gilkey claimed that a group of them gathered at night in an unused basement for ‘what we could only term sexual orgies’, which sounds very Sodom and Gomorrah. Gilkey added that ‘horrified and furious’ parents, who beforehand had ‘taken no interest’ in what their offspring were doing ‘so long as they were out of the room’, neither offered a constructive solution nor volunteered to find one. ‘To no one’s surprise,’ he concluded, ‘the crisis was finally dealt with by the missionary teachers.’ Evening classes and dances were held and a makeshift games room appeared. Gilkey said he regularly saw Liddell bent over a ‘chessboard or a model boat, or directing some sort of square dance’.73 He also witnessed the constant demands placed on Liddell and the way in which he responded to them – ‘absorbed, warm and interested, pouring all of himself into this effort to capture the imagination of those penned-up youths’.