For the Glory Read online

  Only another three years, two months and 146 races would separate the two of them from Olympic triumph in Paris.12

  There was no sporting streak in Eric Liddell’s genealogy.13 His father, James Dunlop Liddell, went to Mongolia in 1898 to make certain another corner of a foreign field remained under the flag of the London Missionary Society. As a probationary, his specific corner was Ch’ao Yang, an inauspicious spot 250 miles north-east of Peking. He was twenty-seven years old, a former draper ordained in the ministry. The Reverend Liddell came from the central belt of Scotland. His village, Drymen, minuscule but picturesque, was at the western end of the Campsie Fields, close to Loch Lomond. His fiancée was a qualified nurse, Mary Reddin, who arrived in China twelve months after him. Her home was Paxton, an equally tiny map-dot near Berwick-upon-Tweed. The North Sea coastline lay only 5 miles away.

  Mr Liddell and Miss Reddin had met in Stirling and married in Shanghai after a six-year engagement. Their timing was terrible. The wedding in October 1899 coincided almost exactly with the bloody birth of the Boxer Rebellion. Married life began under the threat of the sword and the bullet.

  Proud parents: James and Mary Liddell, when Eric was ordained into the ministry in Edinburgh.

  James Liddell had announced before going to China that he’d willingly endure ‘duties pertaining to a real pioneer experience’. In his wedding photograph he still looks more like a senior bank clerk or a bookkeeper than a rough and ready son of the elements. Entirely in keeping with the picture protocol of that era, he and Mary wear expressions solemnly reminiscent of a funeral service rather than a matrimonial breakfast. The husband folds his hands in front of him. His mouth is almost completely hidden beneath a moustache, which probably took longer to grow than a hothouse plant, and confirms that a Victorian chap wasn’t considered to be properly attired without one. His wife loops a white-gloved hand into his left arm. Her hat is a small hill of lace and taffeta and its spacious, flat brim casts her forehead and eyes in thin shadow.

  A missionary and his wife. James and Mary Liddell were married in 1899.

  The couple had barely said ‘I do’ to each other before finding themselves in the midst of turmoil.

  Ch’ao Yang was a hard row to hoe for a new missionary. Robbery, rape and banditry were common. Kidnap and ransom were routine. A family believed to have money often found a body-part in a box at the front door and a note demanding cash from them. Were it not forthcoming, other pieces of hacked-off flesh would follow. Non-payment would lead to public immolation for the dismembered victim. What remained of him or her was smothered in oil or cooking fat before being set alight.

  The Boxer Rebellion was more terrible still.

  The originally clandestine peasant movement the Society of Righteous and Harmonious Fists sought to violently eradicate all foreign participation and influence in China.14 It despised Christianity. It despised the missionaries, such as the Liddells, who preached it. And it despised the subservience of the 1860 Treaty of Tientsin that had sanctioned the teaching of the Bible with impunity.

  From the early disturbances in the autumn of 1899 through to the autumn of 1900, the total of deaths in the conflict was calculated in high numbers: more than 250 missionaries – Catholic and Protestant – and over thirty thousand Chinese Christians. As many as seventy-five were burned alive at the American mission in Tung-chau. In Pau-tong-fu six British missionaries, most known to that community for more than twenty-five years, were knifed to death. One atrocity followed another, the use of the machete, the halberd and the club frequent. Lootings and sexual assaults on women were commonplace. The diplomatic compound in Peking was even under siege for fifty-five days. In one of the most horrendous incidents the governor of Shanxi invited Christians to his provincial capital under the pretext of offering sanctuary and then had forty-four of them killed, including women and children. Westerners referred to the Society as the Boxers, essentially because its members practised martial arts. The Boxers chanted for the blessings of Taoist and Buddhist spirits and believed a ghost army of others like them would descend from the sky as reinforcements against their enemies. The Society also believed diet and incantation would allow its soldiers to fly and make them immune from the blast and slash of weaponry. It took the Eight Nation Alliance – a super-fighting force comprising fifty-four warships and almost forty-nine thousand troops from Britain, the United States, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia and Austria-Hungary – to disabuse them of both fantasies.

  After the Boxers were finally defeated, the Chinese signed the Boxer Protocol, a punitive document ordering executions and reparations. Like the Treaty of Tientsin, four decades earlier, it was a fuse waiting for a lit match. The Protocol stored up grievances, grudges and angers that would explode soon enough, and more violently than before.

  The fighting had become so bad in the early summer of 1900 that James and Mary Liddell were forced out of Ch’ao Yang. Mary, already seven months pregnant, left the village in a sedan chair that six Chinese Christians risked death to carry. She gave birth to her first son, Robert, in Shanghai, where she and James had fled to safety. The faint-hearted, especially those beginning a family, could have made an excuse and packed for home despite the restriction of a missionary contract. James Liddell was different. Father, mother and baby went instead to Tientsin. James settled them in and then headed back to Mongolia in 1901 on a mission of reconnaissance and repair. For four months Mary heard nothing from him.

  Father and son. James Liddell beside Eric, his second child, in Turkey in 1903.

  Tientsin had been at the centre of the Boxer Rebellion. The city had been locked down for four weeks only three and a half months before the Liddells got there. More than 1,500 soldiers of the Eight Nation Alliance died or were wounded. Among those dodging artillery during the siege of such a strategically important point was a twenty-six-year-old mining consultant who saved children in the crossfire. His name was Herbert Hoover, the future American President.

  This is where Eric Liddell was born on 16 January 1902.

  The Liddells weren’t allowed to linger in Tientsin. Near the year’s end the London Missionary Society dispatched them almost 700 miles to Siaochang on the Great Plain. The last, long furlongs of that journey were completed on a wooden mule-drawn cart that rattled in the ruts left by thousands upon thousands of other carts before it. A contemporary eyewitness estimated there were ten thousand villages spread over the Great Plain’s 159,000 acres.15 The ten million villagers inside them sowed and reaped harvests of millet and wheat and lived primitively on the brown flat earth where almost nothing broke the horizon except for low shacks or reed huts, each resembling the other. Siaochang was no better and no bigger than most of them. The gated, mud-walled compound comprised four large houses in a row, each with verandas upstairs and downstairs on two sides. A stone church and a school lay behind these properties.

  James Liddell tended to his flock across an expanse of land alien to him. Agriculture was blighted. The crops repeatedly perished because of droughts, flooding or locusts. Gangs of bandits roamed indiscriminately. The peasant population was illiterate and the elders in the farming communities regarded reading as a distraction from labour. There was no concept of the world beyond the nearest trading town or city. During the torments of the rebellion there, the Boxers wrecked nearly a hundred churches and approximately five hundred Chinese Christians died. Rebuilding and restoration were now extra duties for the missionaries. James Liddell was on a treadmill of constant work, and Mary strained to cope with his absences.

  The Liddells on parade: (from the left) Eric, Jenny and Rob.

  To steel herself for the daily adversities of being a missionary wife, Mary had moved to the Hebridean Isle of Lewis in the months immediately before her wedding.16 The remoteness of its crofts was her preparation for the rural bleakness and isolation of China. But she was a fragile thing, weighing less than 8½ stone, and Siaochang was a demoralizing place because of the climate, the insects and the
loneliness. Always tired and frequently ailing, Mary nearly died after her third pregnancy. A daughter – christened Janet but always called Jenny – was born in 1903. Less than seventy-two hours afterwards Mary, frail and worn down, was diagnosed with peritonitis. She was at ‘death’s door’,17 said Jenny later. The doctor even said he ‘expected’ her to die. James prayed beside her bed. Somehow she survived, her recovery to full health taking almost a year.

  Everyone who knew him as a child remembered three standout things about Eric Liddell. The family had its own servants, including an amah called Chi-nai-nai. Her feet were bound, so when Liddell misbehaved or ran away she couldn’t catch him. Since Chinese words seldom begin with vowel sounds, she was also unable to get her tongue nimbly around the name Eric. She called him ‘Yellie’,18 the closest pronunciation she could manage. Yellie always cried salty tears over the hymn ‘Ninety and Nine’, the song-story of the shepherd searching for the one sheep lost on the hills. And, aged four, he fell desperately ill with dysentery. There was no doctor and his mother had to nurse him as adequately as she could, pouring out tablespoons of Valentine’s Meat Juice, a concoction of pressed liquid that came from torn, raw beef. The legacy of that illness was numbness in his legs. He walked so awkwardly during his recovery that a neighbour swore he would ‘never be able to run again’, and pitied him for it.19

  In the cocoon of childhood, protected within the walls of the compound, Liddell saw himself as Chinese.20 In winter, like his siblings, he wore a padded coat and a wide crowned hat against the below-zero temperatures. In summer he went to the seaside resort of Peitaiho, where the LMS owned wooden beach bungalows, the breeze and the water there cooling the family in temperatures that climbed as high as 110 degrees. He ate like the locals and tried to speak their language. He uttered his first Chinese phrase after friends adopted a family of kittens.21 Unable to capture them on his unsteady legs, Liddell learned to scream ‘Hsieo mao pao la’, which meant ‘Little cat has run away’. He knew nothing of customs or environments elsewhere. Everything for the family revolved around the LMS. When she caught him banging a nail into the wall of the house, his mother scolded, ‘Don’t do that. It belongs to the mission.’ Liddell stopped, then asked her whether he ‘belonged to the mission’ too? It felt as though he did.

  His sister, Jenny, said her brother ‘remembered much’: walking through dust storms, sitting on the veranda, the tenderness of his amah, the spread of the land and the sight of those who lived on it and from it. Nothing, though, enforced Liddell’s idea of China as being the beating heart of him more than the family’s leaving of it on furlough in 1907. Liddell was told he was ‘going home’ to Scotland; but that country, which seemed so far away, wasn’t ‘home’ to a boy who had never seen it. China was ‘home’ to him, and he was glad of that fact; he didn’t want to uproot himself from it.

  Like Tweedledum and Tweedledee: Rob (left) and Eric in their Eltham College uniforms.

  The Liddells first went to Drymen, renting rooms in a house there and sending Eric and Rob to the local school. This was a preparatory step, acclimatizing them to both the greenery of their new surroundings and formal education. James had a bigger duty to perform before Siaochang called him again. He enrolled his boys in the ‘School for the Sons of Missionaries’ in Blackheath in south-east London. It subsequently outgrew that site and moved to the more spacious former Naval School at Mottingham, where it became known as Eltham College. The mellow stone of the college, and its fine facade of pediment and columns and roof balustrades, soared like the buildings described in Tom Brown’s Schooldays. But however fine its architecture, and despite the manicured acreage of its sports fields, Eltham wasn’t exactly a warm hearth and a soft bed. For the cherubically innocent-looking Liddell, being wrenched away from his parents was like being orphaned. On the day she sailed back to China his mother unobtrusively watched him, oblivious to her imminent departure, play cricket.22 That night Liddell, aged six, wept himself into a fitful sleep.

  The all-round sportsman: Eric Liddell in cricket whites at Eltham College.

  Eltham became Liddell’s substitute family for the next decade. This forced adoption forged a strong character. Even at eight years old, Liddell was dissuading older boys from bullying younger ones. When the headmaster broke his own rule about not bicycling through the quadrangle, the voice he heard in rebuke – ‘Hey, no cycling there’ – was Liddell’s. The headmaster punished Liddell rather than himself. He was sent to his room without supper, which wasn’t necessarily purgatorial. The kitchen at Eltham soaked food in inedible fat; Liddell regularly spat it into a wastepaper basket.

  As the elder, Rob, whether he liked it or not, was pressed into becoming father and mother, counsellor and comforter to his brother. In an early photograph of them at the college he and Eric look like Tweedledee and Tweedledum. The brothers are of the same height and stature and their hair is the same shade of mousey blond. The uniform each wears seems comic to us now – an Eton collar with a thin bow tie and knickerbockers, the jet black socks turned 6 inches above a pair of ankle-laced boots. What sets them apart is Rob’s deadly seriousness beside the smirk that is beginning to spread across Eric’s face.

  The avuncular A. P. Cullen: teacher, friend and part-mentor to Eric Liddell.

  In the college Rob was Liddell Number One and Eric was Liddell Number Two. The personality differences between them were soon apparent. Rob was an extrovert, an orator with the Literary and Debating Society. Eric was reticence personified. In a production of Alice in Wonderland, he played the Dormouse successfully because he hid meekly behind the costume and became the character. Away from the stage and the classroom, he deferred to Rob. Among his favourite teachers was the classics master, Augustus Pountney Cullen, who curled his lip at those highfalutin Christian names and preferred to be known as plain ‘AP’.23 He was a Cambridge graduate – sporty, pipe-smoking and tweedy – who spoke to his dog in Latin. Once the dust of academe had settled on him at Eltham, Cullen looked more mature than someone in his early twenties. As well as classics, he covered lessons in science, English and history. Science was Liddell’s subject. Experiments entranced him, and Cullen brought each alive through quirky demonstrations and dramatic readings of dense textbooks.

  Sport offered solace to Liddell too. That role of the Dormouse briefly brought him the obvious nickname of ‘Mouse’. But in any game, this Mouse roared, which was a substitute for speech. As a rugby wing-three-quarter, he couldn’t be caught. As a sprinter, he usually didn’t get caught either – unless his brother did the catching. The crowning glory for them as a pair was the 1918 school championships – otherwise known as the Liddell Games.24 Eric won the 100 yards in 10.8 seconds, edging out Rob. He then took the 440 yards and the long jump too. Rob claimed the sprint hurdles, the high jump and the cross-country titles. If only their parents could have seen them . . .

  Separation is the cruellest hardship for the children of missionaries. Between 1908 and 1920 Liddell’s parents returned just once – shortly before the outbreak of the First World War – and then only because Mary required surgery to remove gallstones. Their new baby, Ernest, born in 1912, came with them. The family was split up again in March 1915. Jenny was spared the trauma of that parting. She was supposed to board permanently at Walthamstow on the other side of London. Her mother, learning she was wretched there, took her back to China instead. As adolescents and teenagers Eric and Rob got to know their parents primarily through letters, written twice weekly on thin paper and always delivering news several weeks old.

  The Eltham motto was Gloria Filiorum Patres: The Fathers Are the Glory of the Sons. His own father’s absence didn’t dissuade Liddell from wanting to be exactly like him. Indeed, rather than resenting it, the gap his father ought to have filled in his upbringing accentuated Liddell’s desire to become a teacher-missionary and live up to his ideals. Liddell later told a friend that he’d decided to become a missionary in China at ‘eight or nine’.25 He went to Bible class and read t
he scriptures daily. At fifteen he was confirmed in the Scottish Congregational Church. As the war crawled towards an armistice, he then volunteered to work in a medical mission.

  What was once said about James Liddell would be later said of his second son too. He was the ‘ideal of Christian brotherliness’. He possessed ‘such a big heart’. There was ‘no shadow of meanness or narrowness’ in him. And he gained true satisfaction only ‘when doing something for others’.

  Tom McKerchar was among the first to discover that after Liddell gained a place at Edinburgh University.

  The dreary commonplace of practice is necessary for any athlete.26 Eric Liddell initially found the rigour of it too testing for him. It was ‘not the easiest thing to do’, he said, because the ‘continual repetition of certain exercises’ was unutterably boring. He disliked practising his start. ‘Time after time you go to your holes, rise to get the “get set” position and wait for the pistol to go. Someone tries to go off before the pistol and so we all have to get up and start from the beginning again.’

  Tom McKerchar allowed Liddell the leeway to ease himself into becoming professional about his running rather than moonlighting at it. McKerchar knew that Rob Liddell was taking his medical qualifications in Edinburgh. He knew that his new recruit relied on his brother – and vice versa – for stability and comradeship. He knew Eric Liddell had only got into university after obtaining his entrance certificate, which meant becoming competent in a language; and that he’d paid for a French tutor through farm labouring to achieve it. He also knew that Liddell was a committed teetotaller as well as a committed Christian, and that his church was Morningside Congregational, which sat on what the locals called ‘Holy Corner’ because of the cluster of other churches gathered around it.27 With the red-yellow glow of its Burne-Jones window, Morningside was conspicuous in its support of the London Missionary Society through its original minister, who had worn a monocle, and a walrus moustache so splendidly wide that it resembled a pair of wings. The church had sent its first missionary to China in 1896. Liddell frequently arrived late at Powderhall because he was attending services, taking care of the needy or administering Bible classes at Morningside. McKerchar let it pass.