For the Glory

  About the Book

  FASTER . . . HIGHER . . . STRONGER . . .

  No one has embodied the ideals of the Olympic movement quite like Eric Liddell. Blessed with abundant athletic talent, he strove to be the best he could while showing consummate sportsmanship at all times. After winning the gold medal in the 400 metres at the 1924 Games in Paris, instead of fame and fortune he chose to follow his calling as a missionary in the country of his birth, China. Then when that land fell under the iron grip of a brutal Japanese army, he was the inspirational leader of the work camp in which he, like many thousands, was interned.

  In For the Glory, Duncan Hamilton tells for the first time the full story of the life of Eric Liddell in extraordinary, vivid detail. From the Oscar-winning film Chariots of Fire, we know how Liddell’s refusal to compete on the Sabbath forced him out of the event in which he was favourite, the 100 metres. How despite his ungainly style – head thrown back, gasping for air – he ran the race of his dreams, bringing the crowd at the Colombes Stadium to their feet in jubilation. How he explained to his sister Jenny that God had made him fast, but had also made him for a purpose. But this is also the story of his family, of his fellow internees, his mentors and contemporaries, and the terrible hardships and atrocities they experienced in the Far East.

  This is the tale of a sporting icon, a man of honour and principle admired across the globe. But it is also the definitive biography of one of Britain’s greatest ever heroes, who paid the ultimate sacrifice while becoming the moral centre of an otherwise unbearable world.

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Map

  Prologue: The Last Race of the Champion

  Part One: Faster

  Chapter One: How to Become a Great Athlete

  Chapter Two: Just a Drop of Strong Tea

  Chapter Three: Coming to the Crossroads

  Chapter Four: I Wonder If I’m Doing the Right Thing?

  Chapter Five: Dancing the Tango Along the Champs-Elysées

  Chapter Six: Not for Sale at Any Price

  Part Two: Higher

  Chapter Seven: Goodbye to All That

  Chapter Eight: There Are No Foreign Lands

  Chapter Nine: Will Ye No Come Back Again?

  Chapter Ten: There’s Something I Want to Talk to You About

  Chapter Eleven: Everywhere the Crows Are Black

  Chapter Twelve: The Sharpest Edge of the Sword

  Part Three: Stronger

  Chapter Thirteen: The Man Who Isn’t There

  Chapter Fourteen: No More Happy Birthdays

  Chapter Fifteen: You Can Run … But You Won’t Catch Us Old Man

  Chapter Sixteen: Call to Me All My Sad Captains

  Epilogue: What Will Survive of Us Is Love

  Acknowledgements

  Timeline of Eric Liddell’s life

  Notes and Sources

  Index

  About the Author

  Also by Duncan Hamilton

  Copyright

  For the Glory

  The Life of Eric Liddell

  Duncan Hamilton

  In memory of Florence Liddell.

  Some wife. Some mother. Some woman.

  PROLOGUE

  The Last Race of the Champion

  Weihsien, Shandong Province, China

  1944

  HE IS CROUCHING on the start line, which has been scratched out with a stick across the parched earth.1 His upper body is thrust slightly forward and his arms are bent at the elbow. His left leg is planted ahead of the right, the heels of both raised slightly in preparation for a springy launch.

  Exactly two decades earlier he had won his Olympic title in the hot, shallow bowl of Paris’s Colombes Stadium. Afterwards, the crowd in the yellow-painted grandstands gave him the longest and loudest ovation of those Games. What inspired them was not only his roaring performance, but also the element of sacrificial romance wound into his personal story, which unfolded in front of them like the plot of some thunderous novel.

  Now, trapped in a Japanese prisoner of war camp, the internees have teemed out of the low dormitories and the camp’s bell tower to line the route of the makeshift course to see Eric Liddell again. Even the guards in the watchtowers peer down eagerly at the scene.

  In Paris, Liddell ran on a track of crimson cinder.2 In Weihsien, he will compete along dusty pathways which the prisoners have named to remind them nostalgically of faraway home: Main Street, Sunset Boulevard, Tin Pan Alley.

  Liddell claimed his gold medal in a snow-white singlet, his country’s flag across his chest.3 Here he wears a shirt cut from patterned kitchen curtains, baggy khaki shorts, which are grubby and drop to the knee, and a pair of grey canvas ‘spikes’, almost identical to those he’d used during the Olympics.

  As surreal as it may seem, ‘Sports Days’ such as this one are an established feature of the camp. For the internees, it is a way of forgetting – for a few hours at least – the reality of incarceration; one prisoner wistfully calls each of these days ‘a speck of glitter amid the dull monotony’.4

  Even though he is over forty years old, practically bald and pitifully thin, Liddell is the marquee attraction. Those who don’t run want to watch him. Those who do want to beat him.

  Though spread over 60,000 square miles, the coastal province of Shandong, tucked into the eastern edge of China’s north plain, looks minuscule on maps of that immense country. Weihsien is barely a pencil dot within Shandong. And the camp itself is merely a speck within that – a roll of land of approximately 3 acres, roughly the size of two football pitches. Caught in both the vastness of China and also the grim mechanism of the Second World War, which seems without respite let alone end, the internees had begun to think of themselves as forsaken.

  Until the Red Cross at last got food parcels to them in July, there were those who feared the slow, slow death of starvation.5 Weight fell off everyone. Some lost 15lb or more, including Liddell. He dropped from 160lb to around 130. Others, noticeably corpulent on entering Weihsien, shed over 80lb and looked like lost souls in worn clothes. Morale sagged, a black depression ringing the camp as high as its walls.

  Those parcels meant life. While hunger stalked the camp, no one had the fuel or the inclination to run. This race is a celebration, allowing the internees to express their relief at finally being fed.

  Liddell shouldn’t be running in it.

  Ever since late spring cum early summer he’s felt weary and strangely disconnected. His walk has slowed. His speech has slowed too. He’s begun to do things ponderously and is sleeping only fitfully, the tiredness burrowing into his bones. He is stoop-shouldered. Mild dizzy spells cloud some of his days. Sometimes his vision is blurred. Though desperately sick, he casually dismisses his symptoms as ‘nothing to worry about’, blaming them on overwork.

  Throughout the eighteen months he’s already spent in Weihsien, Liddell has been a reassuring presence, always representing hope. He has toiled as if attempting to prove that perpetual motion is actually possible. He rises before dawn and labours until curfew at 10 p.m. Liddell is always doing something; and always doing it for others rather than for himself. He scrabbles for coal, which he carries in metal pails. He chops wood and totes bulky flour sacks. He cooks in the kitchens. He cleans and sweeps. He repairs whatever needs fixing. He teaches science to the children and teenagers of the camp and coaches them in sport too. He counsels and consoles the adults, who bring him their worries. Every Sunday he preaches in the church. Even when he works the hardest, Liddell still apologizes for not working hard enough.

  The internees are so accustomed to his industriousness that no one pays much attention to it any more; familiarity
has allowed the camp to take both it and him a little for granted.

  Since Liddell first became public property – always walking in the arc-light of fame – wherever he has gone and whatever he has done has been brightly illuminated. The son of Scots missionaries born, shortly after the twentieth century began, in the port of Tientsin. The sprinter whose locomotive speed inspired newspapers to call him ‘The Flying Scotsman’. The devout Christian who preached in congregational churches and meeting halls about scripture, temperance, morality and Sunday observance. The Olympic champion who abandoned the track for the sake of his religious calling in China. The husband who booked boat passages for his pregnant wife and two infant daughters to enable them to escape the torment he was enduring in Weihsien. The father who had never met his third child, born without him at her bedside. The friend and colleague, so humbly modest, who treated everyone equally.

  The internees assume nothing will harm such a good man, especially someone who is giving so much to them. And none of them has registered his deteriorating physical condition because he and everyone else around him look too much alike to make his illness conspicuous.

  Anyone else would find an excuse not to race. Liddell, however, doesn’t have it in him to back out. He is too conscientious. The camp expects him to compete, and he won’t let them down, however much the effort drains him and however shaky his legs feel. He is playing along with his role as Weihsien’s breezy optimist, a front concealing his distress. Every few weeks he merely slits a new notch-hole into the leather of his black belt and then pulls it tightly around his ever-shrinking waistline.6

  Liddell makes only one concession. Previously he has been scrupulously fair about levelling the field. He’s always started several yards behind the other runners, giving them an outside chance of beating him. This time there is no such handicap for him. That alone should alert everyone to the fact that he is ailing.

  Liddell says nothing about it. Instead, he takes his place, without pause or protest, in a pack of a dozen other runners, his eyes fixed on nothing but the narrow strip of land that constitutes the front straight.

  The starter climbs on to an upturned packing crate, holding a white handkerchief aloft in his right hand. And then he barks out the three words Liddell has heard countless times in countless places.

  ‘Ready . . . set . . . go!’

  Weifang, Shandong Province, China

  Present Day

  He is waiting for me at the main gate on Guang-Wen Street.7

  He is dressed smartly and formally: white shirt, dark tie and an even darker suit, the lapels wide and well cut. He looks like someone about to make a speech or take a business meeting.

  His blond hair is impeccably combed back, revealing high widow’s peaks. There’s the beginning of a smile on his slender lips, as if he knows a secret the rest of us don’t and is about to share it. Barely a wrinkle or a crease blemishes his pale skin, and his eyes are brightly alert. He is a handsome, eager fellow, still blazing with life.

  On this warm spring morning, I am looking directly into Eric Liddell’s face.

  He’s preserved in his absolute pomp, his photograph pressed on to a big square of metal. It is attached to an iron pole as tall as a lamp post. This is Communist homage to a Christian, a man China regards with paternal pride as its first Olympic champion. In Chinese eyes, he is a true son of their country; he belongs to no one else.

  A study in concentration. Eric Liddell’s studio portrait taken during the mid-1920s.

  More than seventy years have passed since Liddell came here. He’s never gone home. He’s never grown old.

  The place he knew as Weihsien is now called Weifang, the landscape unimaginably different. Liddell arrived on a flat-bed truck. He saw nothing but a huge chequerboard of field-crops stretching to the black line of the horizon. Narrow dirt roads, along which horse-drawn carts rattled on wooden wheels, linked one flyspeck village to another. Each was primitively rural.

  I arrived on the sleek-nosed G-train from Beijing, a distance of 300 miles covered in three rushing hours. What I saw were power stations with soot-lipped cooling towers, acres of coal spread around them like an oil slick, and the blackened, belching chimneys of factories. The city that needs this industrial muscle is the epitome of skyscraper modernity, a gleaming example of the new China built out of concrete and glass, steel and neon. Skeletal cranes are everywhere, always creating something taller than before. These structures climb into a sky smothered in smog, the sun glimpsed only as a shadowed shape behind it.

  Guang-Wen Street is the bridge between this era and Liddell’s.8

  When he arrived in 1943, the locals, living as though Time had stopped a century before, parked hand-held barrows on whichever pitch suited them and bartered over home-grown vegetables, bolts of cloth and tin pots and plates. Today’s traders, setting up canvas stalls, sell ironmongery and replica sports shirts, framed watercolours and tapestries, electrical gadgetry and a miscellany of ornamental kitsch. There’s a pudgy, middle-aged man with tobacco-stained teeth who tips pocket cameras and mobile phones from a black bin liner. Next to him another man, balding and gut-heavy, is peddling blood-red Manchester United shirts, Chicago Bulls vests and an unsteady stack of New York Yankees peaked caps. There’s also a stooped-shouldered woman with pitted skin who looks ancient enough to remember the Boxer Rebellion. She drapes bolts of coloured silk across outstretched arms, bowing her head at each polite refusal to inspect them. Her neighbour offers the most surreal sight of all. Wearing tangerine-coloured training shoes and a sleeveless black cocktail dress, like a semi-stylish Holly Golightly, she holds aloft pendants and chain-link bracelets. Her fingers, the false scarlet nails tapered into talons, are decorated with broad gold rings.

  At one end of Guang-Wen Street is an office high-rise with tinted windows. At the other is the People’s Hospital, its facade whiter than a doctor’s house coat.

  What counts, however, is the plot of biscuit-brown land between them. Number Two Middle School is a motley assortment of low, dull structures which look anachronistic and architecturally out of kilter with everything nearby.

  The camp once stood here.

  The buildings familiar to Liddell were bulldozed long ago. Gone is the whitewashed church. Gone is the bell tower and the rows of dormitories. Gone also are the watchtowers with arrow-slit windows and conical tops, like a Chinese peasant’s hat.

  The Japanese called it a ‘Civilian Assembly Centre’, a euphemism offering the flimsiest camouflage to the harsh truth.9 A United Nations of men, women and children were prisoners alongside Liddell rather than comfy guests of the Emperor Hirohito. There were Americans and Australians, South Americans and South Africans, Russians and Greeks, Dutch and Belgians and British, Scandinavians and Swiss and Filipinos. Among the nationalities were disparate strata of society: merchant bankers, entrepreneurs, boardroom businessmen, solicitors, architects, teachers and government officials. There were also drug addicts, alcoholics, prostitutes and thieves, who co-existed beside monks and nuns and missionaries, such as Liddell.

  Weihsien housed more than 2,100 internees during a period of two and a half years. At its terrible zenith, between 1,600 and 1,800 were shut into it at once.

  The place already had a past.10 It had previously been an American Presbyterian mission. Born there was the Nobel laureate Pearl S. Buck, who wrote the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Good Earth, which made China less mysterious to the millions who read it in the 1930s. Henry Luce, founder of Time and father of its subsequent empire, lived within the compound as a boy. The Chinese had christened it Le Dao Yuan – Courtyard of the Happy Way. The Japanese left the phrase chiselled across the lintel of the grand entrance, as though mocking those forced to pass beneath it. Awaiting them to deter disobedience or escape were armed guards, some with German Shepherd dogs on chain leads, and an electric fence. A trench, dug 6 feet deep, came next.

  A man’s labour can become his identity; Liddell testifies to that. Before internment,
he worked in perilous outposts in China, dodging bullets and shells and always wary of the knife-blade. After it, he dedicated himself to everyone around him, as though it were his responsibility alone to imbue the hardships and degradations there with a proper purpose and make the long days bearable.

  The short history of the camp emphasizes the impossibility of Liddell’s task. In the beginning it was filthy and insanitary, the pathways strewn with debris and the living quarters squalid. The claustrophobic conditions brought predictable consequences. There were verbal squabbles, sometimes flaring into physical fights, over the meagre portions at mealtimes and also the question of who was in front of whom in the queue to receive them. There were disagreements, also frequently violent, over privacy and personal habits and hygiene as well as perceived idleness, selfishness and pilfering.

  Liddell was different. He overlooked the imperfections of character that beset even the best of us, doing so with a gentlemanly charm.

  With infinite patience, he also gave special attention to the young, who affectionately called him ‘Uncle Eric’.11 He played chess with them. He built model boats for them. He fizzed with ideas, also arranging entertainments and sport, particularly softball and baseball which were staged on a miniature diamond bare of grass.

  Sceptical questions are always going to be asked when someone is portrayed without apparent faults and also as the possessor of standards that appear so idealized and far-fetched to the rest of us. Liddell can sound too virtuous and too honourable to be true, as if those who knew him were either misremembering or consciously mythologizing. Not so. The evidence is too overwhelming to be dismissed as easily as that. Amid the myriad moral dilemmas in Weihsien, Liddell’s forbearance was remarkable. No one could recall a solitary act of envy, pettiness, hubris or self-aggrandizement from him. He bad-mouthed nobody. He didn’t bicker. He lived daily by the most unselfish credo, which was to help others practically and emotionally.