For the Glory Page 6
Two things dragged him out of this pit in the early and mid-1920s. The first factor was a book called Life Changers. Written by Harold Begbie – best known as the ghost-writer of polar explorer Ernest Shackleton – it explored the teachings of the American Frank Buchman, the founder of what would later become known as the Oxford Group.12 Buchman, a Lutheran evangelist, said that the ‘only sane people in an insane world were those controlled by God’. The second factor in Thomson’s rehabilitation was Liddell. As Thomson’s biographer, Frank Bardgett, astutely said: ‘It may not be too much to say that . . . Liddell saved Thomson for the Church’s ordained ministry.’
Liddell’s liveliness not only inspired his new mentor, but also made him feel less frail and vulnerable than before. His purpose in the Church renewed, Thomson liked to stride around the stage and his bass voice needed no artificial amplification. He could be heard a street away from the podium. But there was a refreshing boldness about Liddell, who didn’t need to be as sonorous or theatrical. Watching him meet and greet parishioners after services, Thomson admired his skills in finding a common conversational thread that bound him and them together without the awkwardness that normally occurs when strangers meet.
Accusation and indignation were the worn tools of the firebrand orators who, swelling themselves into a fake frenzy, built towards the direst warnings of damnation. This sort of act soon blew itself out because the script was so predictable. Liddell approached the task from a different angle. He made individuals in the congregation believe he was talking directly to them. His assuredness at Armadale convinced Thomson that he possessed something rare as a speaker. This became clear as he and Thomson set off on weekly tours to convert the non-churchgoing class of manual labourers in the Scottish heartlands.
The front pages of a lot of newspapers were still reserved for lucrative advertising rather than news, and Thomson regularly booked block ads directly below the masthead to give Liddell the highest possible prepublicity. He was billed as ‘The Great Eric Liddell’. Until he lived in Scotland, Liddell had no hint of the local brogue in his voice. At Eltham, he’d sounded like a middle-class Englishman. But those who heard him now remarked on the light lilt of Scots that had infiltrated his accent.13 He peppered his vocabulary with colloquialisms too. He became known for the slowness of his delivery, the clarity of his diction, the certainty of his beliefs and his egalitarianism. ‘Sometimes,’ said one observer, alive to his ‘quiet earnestness’, Liddell spoke ‘in scarcely more than a whisper’14 that was nevertheless ‘distinctly audible’. His sincerity endeared him to blue-collar audiences. There are speakers who begin each sentence with a trumpet and seem to be saying ‘applause, please’. Liddell wasn’t like this. There was no affectation of power or arrogant superiority when he addressed them. He didn’t conceitedly strut, like a dandy dressed in his Sunday suit, in front of those who’d come to see him. Nor did he ever give the impression of being better than them. He often rose on his tip-toes to make a point and his approach was gently persuasive.
As one correspondent wrote in The Scotsman – making it apparent that Liddell didn’t fall into the same category – ‘there are many who think that being a Christian means being a milksop or a prig’.15 Liddell knew those who were both prigs and milksops and, believing such an attitude deterred would-be worshippers, he separated himself from them. He said he disliked the ‘pious’ and the ‘preachy’ whom, he thought, ‘many will know from their own churches’. He went on: ‘One finds many people about whom it is rightly said: if that is a typical example of a Christian, I am jolly glad I am not one.’
One sermon presented the quintessential Liddell.16 He gave a tutorial on the etymology of the word ‘sincere’, which derives from the Latin sine ceres – ‘without wax’. ‘Some sculptors in ancient Rome used wax to disguise a chip on a statue,’ he’d say, conjuring an image of a craftsman hastily attempting to hide a mistake after a slip of his chisel. ‘No one would see the flaw until the heat of the sun melted the wax or bad weather eroded it.’ The sculptor was indulging in a deception, said Liddell; he was passing off an imperfect work as a perfect one. ‘In this way he wasn’t being truly sincere.’ The audience waited expectantly for the punchline, which Liddell provided after a pause. ‘If we allow cracks and blemishes to appear in our faith, and then ignore them or attempt to cover them up, we aren’t being truly sincere either. We must strive to make our faith the perfect work. We are then sincere to ourselves and sincere to God.’
Time and again Liddell returned to the term ‘be perfect’.17
What he described as ‘the stature of the perfect man’ comprised nine credentials: patience, kindness, generosity, humility, courtesy, unselfishness, good temper, gentleness and sincerity. The imperative on that list was sincerity. He called it ‘the basis of faith, mutual trust and co-operation’. And he regarded a lack of it as negating the other eight qualities, rendering them near worthless. Striving for perfection and an abhorrence of duplicity became paramount to Liddell. He expressed it through his liking for the power of plain words and short sentences.
The way he said all this was as important as what he said. Liddell liked the power of plain words and short sentences. The messages he delivered were uncomplicated. His methodology in preparing sermons never changed. While hours were spent thinking about the content of them, Liddell didn’t write out rigid compositions.19 Having sat through countless formal sermons, he realized that prepared speeches could be stultifyingly dull for listener and reader alike. He preferred to make bullet-point notes in black ink and then speak extemporaneously. If a flare of fresh thought suddenly occurred as he spoke, Liddell could then incorporate it naturally into the text without disrupting his overall flow. He kept a profusion of fountain pens and mechanical propelling pencils in the top pocket of his jacket and the notes he made with them were composed in small, tight handwriting.20 The speed of pen over paper made it look as if one word was threatening to spill into the next. The upward and downward strokes of his letters were narrowly looped, and capital I’s looked like upside down, lower case g’s. To come across the notes, which he’d fold diagonally before slipping them into his Bible, would not necessarily have meant understanding them. One typical, but undated, entry was marked ‘Faith’ and plots his pattern of thought. It read:
A young man of 21. Pale face, tall lithe, serious
A solitary walk – on the edge of a precipice
Introspective – irritated
On the verge of the greatest discovery of his life
The description might refer to Liddell himself. He liked to weave his sermons around everyday happenings, his own experiences, or an item he’d seen in a newspaper, an overheard conversation or a scene he’d witnessed in a street. This, he believed, was always more relevant to people’s lives than quoting the good book to them from the start. It was like stitching together a contemporary fable, the moral of which was always close to home. However circuitous his route to the crux of it, Liddell got there with a biblical passage.
Even as a seasoned speaker, Liddell claimed to lack the attributes to hold an audience, comparing himself to a beached fish. ‘If I take a fish and ruthlessly cast it on to the heated sand, then ask it to breathe, I am asking it to do the impossible. If you take an athlete away from his proper sphere, his thin clothing and his fresh air, give him a stiff shirt and a collar that catches his neck [and] then on top of all that ask him to speak, you are asking him to break what I call the law of environment. He cannot speak. He can only gasp.’21
He was being playfully bashful. Within two months of Armadale, now unafraid of crowds, he was in full song rather than gasping.18 Thomson said he was speaking ‘better than I have ever heard him’.22 As the summer passed, Thomson noticed the difference in Liddell, commenting on the ‘great strides’ he was making: ‘You would hardly know he was the same man as six months ago,’ he wrote in his diary. ‘We are getting on very, very happily together. I have never known a finer character in all my various experi
ence . . . There has never been a hitch or a shadow in our friendship, and it is due to him almost entirely. He is pure gold through and through.’ Liddell even wrote what Thomson called a ‘very cheering’ letter to him. In it Liddell said he was ‘a changed man’ after being asked to speak publicly. He explained that ‘a new joy’ had come into his life because of it. He regarded Armadale as a door that had suddenly materialized before him in a previously blank wall. In saying yes to Thomson, he had stepped through it.
The Paris Olympic Games were only fourteen and a half months away and Liddell’s experiences as a preacher, moving from village to town and then on to city, fashioned his implacable response to them.
When a Scotsman does well, the English tend to call him British to associate themselves with the triumph. When a Scotsman does badly, the English usually refer to him as a Scot. At the beginning of the 1923 athletics season, Liddell was seen south of the border as a Scot.
Yes, he’d won six Scottish AAA titles, and another three were about to follow. Yes, he’d competed in, and won, the 100 yards in a Triangular International in Belfast. But his times didn’t make poets of the newspaper reporters writing about him or send the Olympic selectors into rapture. To all concerned, he’d merely been running in minor events in minor places, such as West Kilbride, Saltcoats and Greenock, that had to be searched for on a map. His other meetings had been held under the banner of either football clubs, in Glasgow and Edinburgh, or the Scottish varsities. The competition against him was perceived as weak. What happened at Craiglockhart or Powderhall had almost no currency in London. Liddell agreed with his critics, saying that his times were ‘not first class’ and he was ‘never up against the strength of the opposition’ he’d later encounter elsewhere.
Apart from that boat trip across the Irish Sea, Liddell hadn’t run anywhere except Scotland. The Olympic selectors didn’t think of him as a future champion. Liddell knew it. He thought the Amateur Athletic Association regarded it as a ‘waste of £5’23 to send him to London for the British Championships at Stamford Bridge in July. ‘The week before I had put up a miserable performance and the sporting writers were rightly pessimistic about the outcome of my trip,’24 he said. Liddell was treated as another Scottish athlete who would make up the numbers and catch the train home again afterwards.
The British 100 yards record stood at 9.8 seconds. In May Liddell had clocked only 10.6 seconds in the 100 yards at Craiglockhart. In June he’d improved, registering 10.1 – a Scottish record – and then won the Scottish AAA race in 10.4 seconds. The hyper-critical thought it revealed inconsistency. Absent from that assessment was Liddell’s time in a handicap 100 yards at Hampden Park, sandwiched between the first two races. Because of that handicap, he came second. His time, however, was 10 seconds flat.
Liddell said he was often asked why championship times in Scotland were ‘so much slower than in England’.25 He was certain the rain and the chills of its unreliable summers and the frosts and snows of its winters were the cause. ‘I am inclined to think it is mostly that. In our cold northern climate training is not nearly as interesting a business,’ he said, suggesting that in the bleakest months – from November to the end of February – athletes had to chip away ice and shovel snow drifts simply to accomplish an outdoor stretching exercise. He also thought his home track, Powderhall, was ‘meant to be a slow one’, which adversely distorted results there.
On his way to Stamford Bridge, Liddell was aware of one thing above all others. These championships were ‘the thing’, he said, because ‘there was never any doubt about the calibre of men I was drawn against’.
In Chariots of Fire, Liddell’s duellist is Harold Abrahams. The two of them are portrayed as if locked in the athletic equivalent of an irresolvable Montague and Capulet-like feud – the roots of it lodged in Abrahams’ shaking fear of losing to his rival. Chariots of Fire has Abrahams travelling to Edinburgh to spy on Liddell. He is seen in suit and straw boater discreetly taking his seat in the wooden stand. Liddell runs, and wins convincingly, on a grass track that resembles a suburban lawn gone to seed. Abrahams reacts to Liddell’s speed as if someone has shot him, and his brain has been slow to tell the rest of his body about the bullet. His eyes widen. His teeth clench. He begins to scrunch up the event programme, wringing it in his hands as if rinsing out a dishcloth. ‘He runs like a wild animal,’ says Abrahams. ‘He unnerves me.’
In fact, he had never seen Liddell run before Stamford Bridge.
Abrahams was twenty-three, gaunt and dark-haired, the hairline razor-straight across his forehead. As a Jew, the anti-Semitism he repeatedly encountered both at his public school, Repton, and his university, Cambridge, was appalling. Abrahams insisted one boarding house at Repton turned him down because of his religion. Some of the bigotry was sly and insidious, such as a stray remark or a social snub veiled as though neglect or an oversight, rather than prejudice, had caused it. Abrahams, though a Repton prefect, wasn’t permitted to read the lesson during assemblies. As his faith didn’t recognize Jesus as God’s son, he was deemed unsuitable to say the line ‘through Jesus Christ our Lord, Amen’. Abrahams offered a compromise to the headmaster. He’d say instead ‘through Jesus Christ your Lord, Amen’. The headmaster refused. These were nasty bites, which left marks ever after. Abrahams admitted to having ‘a chip’ on his shoulder because of them. The slights he suffered propelled him towards ‘something where I could score off people’ and ‘justify myself’, he said. That ‘something’ was athletics.
Edinburgh University’s magazine, the Student, said of Liddell that ‘everyone is fond of him’. The same was never said of Abrahams at Cambridge. He found it impossible to be modest about his prowess. His entry in the Dictionary of National Biography explained curtly: ‘If the road to popularity at university lies in never inculcating a sense of inferiority into one’s contemporaries, Abrahams stood little chance of being popular.’
Cambridge, under the track tutorials of Alec Nelson, produced the crème de la crème after the war. As well as Abrahams, there were the middle-distance runners Henry Stallard, twenty-two, and Douglas Lowe, twenty-one, and the twenty-four-year-old Guy Butler, who had won the 440 yards AAA title as a whippy young fellow in 1919. He had a reputation for being a bit of a scatter-brain. One story – surely apocryphal – has a starter asking him whether he is ready to race.26 ‘Of course,’ he replied, ‘why do you ask?’ The starter looked at him quizzically and then said, ‘Because you haven’t tied up your laces.’ Once he was said to have gone on to the track without his glasses, which he’d left in a jacket pocket. The race was delayed while he went to retrieve them.
Each of these athletes, like Abrahams, was a certainty to go to Paris. The difference between them was personality. Stallard, Lowe and Butler were convivial and clubbable and well liked. Abrahams was abrasive. When The Times asked him to write anonymously for them – a piece headlined ‘Sports at Cambridge’ – he committed the ungentlemanly error of saluting himself in the article. ‘H. M. Abrahams did well to win the Hundred Yards race in 10.2 seconds against [the] wind and his winning leap in the Long Jump was a good effort,’ he said. This counted against him when the Hawks Club, the elite union of Cambridge’s sportsmen, debated his membership. He was black-balled.
Abrahams’ focus on winning Olympic gold in the 100 metres was monomaniacal and he believed no one in Britain could match him, including Liddell. His opinion changed only when he watched Liddell run in the 220 yards during the AAA Championships. He’d later describe what he’d witnessed as ‘the most misplaced direction of energy I had ever imagined possible . . . as a runner he had about every conceivable fault of form except the irresistible will to win’.27 He christened Liddell ‘The Human Spider’, a nickname meant to be derogatory because he considered him to be a ‘complete model of everything that should not be done’. Liddell nonetheless won his opening heat in 22.4 seconds. This was deeply troubling to Abrahams, who had been the playground bully as far as British sprinting was concerned. No
w he cringed at the prospect of being bullied himself. In the semi-finals – recording 21.6 seconds – Liddell demoralized Abrahams, 4 yards behind him at the tape. ‘I realised his power to the full when I had a back view of him,’ said Abrahams, who still had a chance of facing Liddell again because his own time – 22 seconds – qualified him for a run-off against another fastest loser. Abrahams bottled it. Not wanting Liddell to embarrass him again, he made his excuses and pulled out. The following morning he withdrew from the 100 yards as well, citing a ‘bad throat’ – an ailment that, somewhat curiously, reoccurred whenever the possibility of losing loomed ahead of him. The psychosomatic nature of it was confirmed later that same day when Abrahams arose improbably from his sick bed to win the long jump. The side-on photograph of the leap captures someone who looks to be the fittest human being on God’s earth.
Abrahams liked to swallow a teaspoon of Easton’s Syrup, the advertisements for which trumpeted it as an innocent, universal pick-me-up. This was no equivalent of the modern glucose drink. Easton’s was a sinister and foul-tasting concoction containing a drop of strychnine (a banned substance for today’s Olympians), which was liable to corrode the gullet and the stomach wall. Abrahams took it to pep himself up directly before a race. It was just as well he didn’t take on Liddell over 100 yards; an industrial quantity of Easton’s would have been needed to get close to him. The three timekeepers logged him at 9.67 seconds, 9.65 seconds and 9.65 seconds. This was officially levelled off to 9.7 seconds – a new British record. He then won the final of the 220 yards as well – his sixth sprint in less than twenty-four hours – in 21.6 seconds.