For the Glory Read online

  Such patience is one of the greatest debts Liddell owed him. The other – again highlighting McKerchar’s calibre as a coach – is that he tried only fleetingly to alter Liddell’s running style. Liddell was frequently asked to explain his ungainliness, as if those who saw him regarded it as a high mystery and couldn’t believe how something so awful could produce something so successful. He was compared to a ‘startled deer’, a ‘windmill’, the sails off kilter, a ‘terrified ghost’ and someone whose joints had never been oiled.28 It was said sophisticated experts were reduced to ‘ribald laughter’ watching him. Liddell relied on humour to avoid questions about it.29 He’d say that his distant ancestors had lived on the Scottish–English borders. From there, commando-like raids to rustle cattle and filch provisions were launched beneath the cover of starless nights. ‘They had to hurry back,’ explained Liddell, emphasizing with a cheeky grin that ‘one did not look for correct action when one was returning from such raids’.

  McKerchar did attempt to improve Liddell’s arm-action and tried to stop him from hurling his head back, like someone trying to swallow a big pill with a gulp of water. He soon abandoned it, realizing it was not only pointless but also counter-productive. For why fix what only looked broken?

  To force him into change would have thrown the mechanics of his running hopelessly out of sync.30 McKerchar focused on the basics instead, allowing Liddell’s speed to do the rest. He did hone him out of the holes. He made sure Liddell’s front foot was about 4 inches behind the line and he insisted on a 14- or 16-inch gap between each foot. The fingers of his hand rested exactly on the start line. ‘At the words “get set” my balance was such that almost all the weight of my body rested on the front leg and the hands,’ said Liddell. ‘The first step taken was a short one – just a foot or perhaps 18 inches.’ McKerchar told him not to go off too quickly. ‘The first 10 yards or so should be spent gradually rising,’ added Liddell. In training he always completed three or four 50-yard dashes and then a 220-yard run. According to Liddell, ‘The first 100 yards was not “all out”. The last 120 was as fast as I could do it.’

  He wrote down what he called his ‘athletics experiences’ in a notebook, listing the races in black fountain pen and sometimes adding remarks about the other runners he either competed against or observed. Liddell also quoted little homilies, which could easily have been framed posters on a wall. ‘Failure comes when you fail to keep mind and body at the point of perfection . . . Look after your body . . . A rub down before and after running is essential . . . a simple diet all through the season is much better than trying to cut out this and that’.

  However simple that diet, it would make the modern athlete cringe. On race days he’d feast on roast beef or steak and chips. Liddell avoided only pastries and anything ‘stodgy’, he said, which would be ‘heavy passengers’ on the track; though once he ate a plum pudding before a race and still won easily.

  During the remainder of his first season he was bettered only once over 100 yards – and that came in a handicap.31 In only his tenth race he won the Scottish AAA title at Hampden Park in 10.4 seconds. His 220 yards time was more revelatory still – a new championship record of 22.6 seconds. He admitted to feeling ‘various emotional tremors that vibrated through my system’ that day. Nervous energy made him throw up his food. ‘It makes you ask yourself: Is it all worth it?’ he said.

  Thankfully, he decided it was.

  The prizes piled up.32 As well as a ribboned medal or a cup, the winner of races was always given a gift so as not to compromise his amateur status with the mucky handover of money. This gift was usually a gold watch or household goods: a tea service, a clock, cutlery in a teak box, a figurine or a decorative ornament, a silver tray or a coffee pot. Soon Liddell had more silver than he could polish. And he had enough cabinet china to set up his own department store. He gave most of it away as presents.

  No one who had waved Liddell goodbye from Eltham recognized him as a future star. He never won the school’s most cherished honour, the Bayard Prize, which was given to the pupil who had most influenced his contemporaries. Rob, however, was a Bayard recipient. An accolade of a different kind was given to Eric. Assessing his first phenomenal summer of running, the Glasgow Herald published a summary that now reads like a piece of crystal ball clairvoyance.33 It forecast that Liddell would become a ‘British Champion’ and ‘might even blossom into an Olympic hero’. The newspaper also said that Liddell’s emergence from nobody to somebody in just sixteen weeks was ‘one of the romances of the amateur path’.

  Not everything went so smoothly for him.34

  Liddell once raced in Greenock and rode home in the carrier of a motorbike. When a nut was shaken loose on the way, he fell hard on his behind. The motorbike travelled on for another hundred yards before the driver discovered that his passenger was missing. The carrier was patched up with a ball of twine and Liddell, expecting to be bumped off again, clung on desperately. McKerchar was unimpressed, imagining his number one sprinter incapacitated for months.

  The athlete and the coach made an odd couple. When each got to know the other well, hardly a word passed between them during training or after it. McKerchar even massaged Liddell’s muscles in near silence. Liddell understood what McKerchar expected of him; and McKerchar understood that Liddell didn’t have to be prodded to get a performance out of him. His pride made that superfluous.

  McKerchar also became aware of something else that went unspoken between them. Liddell’s commitment to athletics was secondary to his commitment to the Church.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Just a Drop of Strong Tea

  ERIC LIDDELL COULD identify precisely when his life changed.1 It was 6 April 1923. The time was shortly after 9 p.m.

  A week earlier he’d received an unexpected visitor at George Square, the digs he shared with friends and fellow students near Edinburgh University. The Union Free Church evangelist David Patrick Thomson – always known as DP – had been deputized to recruit Liddell to the interdenominational Glasgow Students Evangelical Union. The idea was to ask Liddell to speak in Armadale, a town almost 25 miles west of Edinburgh.

  Armadale was not the sort of place to attract the postcard photographers.2 Coal and brick dust clung to it. A forest of headstocks and factory chimneys dominated the landscape; one resident counted forty-four of them in the 1920s. There were clay pits and ironworks too, and the hard-palmed, cloth-capped men who toiled in these dirty industries were condemned to the drudgery of shift work, the reward for which was low pay and lung and chest infections that caused a shortness of breath and a hacking cough. The workers washed afterwards in tin baths placed in front of the hearth at home. But, no matter how much soap accompanied the hot water, a thin film of grime accumulated on the skin and could never be scrubbed off altogether, leaving them with a blue-greyish pallor. The population of Armadale – almost five thousand in total – chiefly gathered around four long, rough-tracked roads, the reek of industry hanging in the damp air. The GSEU, including Thomson as organizing secretary, had been zealously preaching among the community, mostly persuading women to come to meetings. As Thomson conceded, as tactfully as possible, ‘the men of the non-churchgoing class proved very difficult to reach’.3

  D. P. Thomson gave an illustrated talk on his religious campaigns alongside Eric Liddell. This is the opening slide.

  Another of Thomson’s duties was his secretaryship of C. T. Studd’s Heart of Africa Mission.4 It gave him an insight into the importance of a figurehead. Studd, then sixty-two, had broad appeal as a former England, Middlesex and Cambridge University cricketer.

  He’d made his England debut in 1882 against Australia at The Oval. That Test match was historic. It led to the creation of the Ashes after a comic conclusion in which Studd was unwittingly pivotal. He’d found himself in a last-wicket partnership with Ted Peate, an oafish and corpulent Yorkshire slow bowler. With no pedigree as a batsman, Peate unilaterally decided that he – rather than Studd – would sw
ish the bat and attempt to score the measly ten runs that England needed to win. He was clean-bowled. Loss of supremacy to Australia – the colonialists were patronized as social and cricketing subservients to Queen Victoria’s gentlemen – killed one spectator in his seat, the poor chap dying of shock because of the result. Asked afterwards why he’d been so incompetently cavalier, Peate replied, ‘I couldn’t trust Mr Studd.’ Everyone else, however, did trust him. Studd was respected for his philanthropy and his charitable countenance – even towards Peate, who he refused to criticize afterwards.

  Studd had found religion at his public school, Eton, and went to China to work for the poor. On the death of his father he gifted his £30,000 inheritance to religious causes. And, despite his cricketing success, Studd always asked: ‘What is all the fame and flattery worth?’ He was able to build up his own mission because those who wouldn’t necessarily be attracted to the Church were drawn to hearing him speak as an ex-sportsman. He filled Edinburgh’s Free Assembly Hall on the basis that anyone who came could shake hands with him afterwards. Thomson imagined Liddell fitting into Studd’s mould.

  The men of Armadale weren’t well educated. Newspapers, rather than books, were read in their terrace cottages. Since Liddell appeared in the papers regularly, Thomson reckoned that curiosity and admiration would draw them to listen to an athlete rather than another earnest clergyman. Thomson could have telephoned Liddell to make his pitch. The number of his digs – 4211 – was in the book.5 But he thought it was imperative to see him face to face. Thomson, who often travelled as a hitch-hiker to save a penny or half-penny fare, thumbed a lift to Edinburgh on the back of a potato truck. He already knew Rob Liddell well, and thought it tactically sensible to approach him first. Would his brother agree to go to Armadale? ‘He really couldn’t tell.6 I would have to see him myself and put it to him,’ said Thomson. Liddell was called into the dining room, and Thomson remembered putting the question to him as ‘directly and as forcibly as I could’. Liddell dropped his head, as if in prayer; he hadn’t spoken in public before and the prospect daunted him. Thomson never forgot the ‘moment’s silence’ as he waited for his answer and then the firmness of the promise Liddell made to him. ‘All right,’ he said in a friendly tone, ‘I’ll come.’ The assurance was as binding as a legal contract. ‘I felt then a sense of immense relief,’ Thomson recalled.

  What Thomson described as ‘a special mass meeting for men’ was held in an unprepossessing town hall which resembled a large house with a high pitched roof.7 Another pitched roof marked the entrance, which had been tacked on long after the construction of the main building. Outside there was a low wall topped with black metal railings and a 25-yard path to the main door.

  No one counted the attendance; Thomson estimated it as ‘60 to 80’. This was a decent number in the circumstances. There hadn’t been much time to advertise Liddell, so Thomson relied on word of mouth. It was also a Friday night. Every worker in Armadale had collected his wages in a brown envelope that afternoon. The temptation to fritter them away on a boozy session in the pub was the counter-attraction. No one noted down a verbatim transcript of what was said either. Thomson remembered only that Liddell talked about ‘what his own faith meant to him’ and also how he reconciled his religion with his athletics.

  This is how it began: Liddell had become a public speaker for God.

  Sometimes it can be difficult to grasp a sense of something when it is actually happening; comprehension often comes only when it is over. But, sitting alongside Liddell afterwards and listening to his easy dialogue with the congregation over cups of tea, Thomson instantly understood the impact of the moment. He also assessed the consequences correctly. Not everyone had known Liddell was a committed Christian. Until Armadale, he’d been ‘a secret disciple’,8 explained Thomson. ‘It was not what happened in Armadale that mattered most,’ he added. ‘It was the fact that every newspaper in Scotland carried the news the following morning. After that, there could be no turning back and there would be no want of an audience wherever he was billed to speak.’

  A mural of the town’s motto, May Their Work Flourish, was displayed in Latin inside the hall. The sentence was appropriate for Liddell. His own work flourished from there. What Armadale started was ‘a life of dedicated service that only death could end’, said Thomson.

  Liddell would say the brief exchange with Thomson in George Square counted as the ‘turning point’ for him. He thought preparing his address for that hard-as-flint workforce in Armadale, and then rising to deliver it, amounted to the ‘bravest thing’ he had ever done. From then onwards he and Thomson became inseparable, almost as close as brothers. The friendship, said Thomson, ‘meant everything to me’.

  Before Armadale neither Liddell nor Thomson was aware of how much each had needed the other. After it, both of them – but Liddell in particular – believed that no earthly coincidence had brought them together. For the morning after accepting Thomson’s invitation, Liddell slit open a letter from his sister Jenny, who was living in Tientsin.9 Included in it was a passage from Isaiah 41.10. ‘Fear not, for I am with thee; do not dismay, for I will guide thee.’ No one posting a letter from China to Britain could know when it might turn up on the mat. Mail could take up to a month or more to complete its passage. Reading and re-reading the quotation convinced Liddell that its arrival that day, over rough lands and rougher seas, was much more than chance. It had come into his hands when he most needed reassurance. For Liddell, the timing was further proof that divine inspiration was shaping his path. He believed God had spoken to him, describing it like this: ‘I was brought up in a Christian home where the stories of the Bible were often told and became familiar to me. The time came when the appeal of Christ became more personal and I began to realise it was going to affect my life.’10

  Somewhat shamefacedly, Liddell conceded that prior to Armadale ‘his whole life had been one of keeping out of public duties.’ But, even as he spoke there, he sensed he was ‘being called to do a piece of work’.

  That work was as a preacher and a mentor; though Liddell confessed that he felt ‘absolutely unqualified’ to be either. He nonetheless pressed on, thinking that ‘If He called me to do it, then He would have to supply the necessary power.’

  For Thomson, the influence of divine inspiration had come much earlier.

  D. P. Thomson had been born into a prosperous family from Dundee.11 He was raised in the company of servants – cooks, cleaners, nurses and nannies. His father was a noted lawyer and treasurer of the Home Mission Union. Their house – one of the best in the town – regularly hosted missionaries and evangelists for Sunday worship in the drawing room, where in his early teens Thomson gave Bible readings and preached. In his youth he had a long face and sticky-out ears, a high wave of dark hair and the sort of toothbrush moustache that Charlie Chaplin had already made popular and Hitler eventually made infamous.

  Of the generation who trekked to the Great War – longing to believe the propaganda promise of a Christmas 1914 end – those, like Thomson, born in the first half of 1896 had no real chance to experience adult life before death became their neighbour. At just eighteen years old, Thomson abandoned an apprenticeship, as a junior clerk in a jute factory, to enlist as a private in the 4th Seaforth Highlanders. He was quickly schooled as an officer in the Army Service Corps, the training for which protected him from the front line in France. He got no further than Le Havre, where his duties in the field bakeries were cushy; the most arduous task was censoring other soldiers’ letters. Shipped to Salonica in Greece, Thomson contracted dysentery and began to suffer from a dilated heart and gastric complaints, which led to his medical discharge in the autumn of 1917. After a cardiac examination, the doctors gave him the gloomiest prognosis: he would either die within six months or become a semi-invalid during a foreshortened life.

  War changed the lives of those it did not consume. After it, Thomson asked himself the same questions as every other survivor. How – and why – had he
managed to come through that filth and gore and still be breathing? His elder brother, James, had died at the Somme in 1916, aged twenty-six. Five of his cousins had perished too. Thomson thought it tragically ironic that he, the weakling and the war casualty, came home. He dwelt guiltily on his brother’s death. ‘I have had all the time to live and work that was denied him,’ he said. Thomson concluded he’d been ‘saved’ to become an evangelist. A student of Glasgow’s Bible Training Institute, Thomson was an active preacher, an ebullient, bustling organizer and a can-do promoter of tireless campaigns. He was a bibliophile who never stopped working except to read. His friends said the true meaning of his initials was ‘Dynamic Personality’.

  Thomson seemed this way to Eric Liddell, fooled like everyone else by his new friend’s confident approach, which hid doubt and insecurity behind it.

  Liddell had no notion that Thomson was wrestling with the black dog of depression. A profound personal crisis of faith and belief had engulfed him for disparate reasons. He was lonely after two friendships with women had recently collapsed. He was physically ailing, a terrible hangover from his condition in 1917. Then, without prior warning, his father announced that the family firm was on the lip of bankruptcy, the business facing imminent foreclosure. Thomson was attempting to combine his studies and his preaching with the creation of a small-print publishing house. He saw no solution to either his father’s or his own financial hardships. He waded through all this darkly, brooding about what else might go wrong for him and questioning whether his training for the ministry was worthwhile. There seemed to be an element of sour self-loathing lurking in Thomson too. As well as being a book collector, he was a compulsive diary writer, putting his thoughts on to paper in a crabby, hard-to-read hand. In one entry, after the worst of his depression had passed, Thomson revealed his most mournful thoughts and what he regarded as his duplicity. He chastised himself as an ‘arrant hypocrite’. The self-flagellation continued: ‘My life has been a living lie these many months. Prayer has died down in my heart . . . the cankerworm has been eating at my heart . . . pride has been full blooded and full-blown . . . impurity has had its way’.