For the Glory Page 7

  As usual Liddell was restrained about his success. He made it sound as though the weather had done the hard graft for him. The heat, filling Stamford Bridge, meant that Tom McKerchar didn’t have to massage Liddell’s legs to loosen his muscles. ‘It was a grilling, hot day . . . perfect for short-distance running,’28 he said, as though reluctant to take credit for the quality of his performances.

  The AAA Championships was an education for both Liddell and Abrahams. It taught Abrahams about his deficiencies. From somewhere – his start, his stride, his finish – he needed to extract an extra yard to make him competitive in Paris. It taught Liddell that he was a serious contender for the Olympics. ‘I surprised even myself,’29 he said of his winner’s medals. These pushed him into a decision that McKerchar had always said would need to be made eventually: Liddell would have to sacrifice his winter sport, which was rugby union.

  Head up, chest forward, Eric Liddell wins the 220 yards at the AAA Championships at Stamford Bridge in 1923.

  At the end of 1921, after appearances for Edinburgh University, Scotland had selected him for a trial on the wing and then picked him a few months later for an international in France, his pace securing him a place. Liddell was also considered to have fast hands as well as fast legs and to be a dogged defender. ‘When he smother-tackled you, [then] you stayed smothered,’30 said one correspondent.

  In a supreme coincidence, as if Fate was allowing him a dress rehearsal there, Liddell made his debut in the Colombes Stadium. The French and the Scots drew 3–3 in front of a crowd of thirty-seven thousand. Afterwards, as the rest of the team went to a Parisian show, Liddell walked to the top of the Arc de Triomphe. Another six appearances followed in two years, including Scotland’s first win – 11–8 – at Wales’s Cardiff Arms Park since 1890. There was another Eltham old boy in that XV. Called the ‘vital, living force of the three quarter line’, A. L. Gracie, awarded the Military Cross in 1915, proved a mercurial partner to his former schoolmate. Even the Welsh supporters chaired both of them off the field.

  But rugby was a hazardous pursuit, the body unprotected. McKerchar worried whenever he thought of what might happen during a game. Should Liddell be caught up in a ruck or a maul, or get badly charged and fall awkwardly, he could break a leg or tear a cruciate ligament; then his career would only ever be talked about in the past tense. ‘Rugby’, said Liddell, was both ‘a blessing and a small curse’31 to him. If he didn’t play, he could build up his athletic strength. If he did play, he knew his stamina would improve. By eventually deciding it was more curse than blessing, Liddell pleased his coach. As much as he ‘loved rugger’, he explained, athletics held the ‘strongest appeal’ for him.

  D. P. Thomson pointed out that Eric Liddell’s participation in evangelism caused a few to say – and a lot more to fear – that his running was bound to wither because of the extra demands preaching made on him. ‘It had exactly the opposite effect,’32 stressed Thomson, who felt what he labelled as ‘spiritual liberation’ was turning Liddell into ‘a happier and a fitter man’.

  That Liddell was reaching a new peak of performance became brilliantly clear in the unglamorous setting of Stoke, where the red-bricked bottle kilns of Wedgwood and Doulton squatted across the landscape like sumo wrestlers about to grapple one another. After the AAAs, sapping mentally as well as physically, no one expected another gala run from Liddell in a triangular international between England, Scotland and Ireland. The tournament was perceived as nothing more than a chance for the town’s pottery and ceramic workers to glimpse the champion. Liddell adhered to that script. He won both the sprints, never shedding much sweat.

  Less was expected of him in the 440 yards. He’d been entered only out of necessity. Scotland drafted Liddell into it to fill the lanes: the selectors weren’t flush with athletes capable of competently covering that distance. He could have coasted through this obligation and claimed afterwards that he’d been too fatigued to make a fist of things. No one would have complained. What he did instead was produce the race of that summer – and most other summers beside. Those who saw him felt Liddell had summoned up something other-worldly. The Scotsman – and not out of bias or patriotism either – described it as ‘bordering on the miraculous’. It quoted unidentified ‘veterans, whose memories take them back thirty-five years and in some cases even longer’ – the sentence suggests a row of men with white beards and seamed faces who witnessed it through rheumy eyes. According to the Scotsman, these old salts of the cinder acclaimed Liddell’s run as ‘the greatest track performance’ any of them had ‘ever seen’. In fairness, the nitty-gritty detail of what he did makes the feat seem extraordinary.

  The race began on a bend.33 Liddell, given the inside lane, had travelled less than 10 feet when another competitor came to the kerb, clipped his foot and also pushed him over. Liddell tumbled on to the grassy verge, breaking his fall with outstretched hands. Assuming that leaving the track had disqualified him, Liddell watched the rest of the field carry on without him. In the grandstand, his voice indistinguishable amid the cheering, Tom McKerchar yelled at him to start running again. Liddell, still unaware that the rules permitted his return, continued to look and linger until a suited official chivvied him along. The front-markers were already almost 20 yards ahead – a gap that seemed insurmountable unless Liddell strapped a petrol engine to his back. Liddell tilted his head upwards and started a long, long chase. The crowd began to watch him rather than the leaders, never thinking a comeback was even a dim possibility. But Liddell, blazing like a magnesium flame, slashed the lead to 10 yards and then to 5. At the top of the home straight, he was only two strides off the front. At the line he was 6 yards ahead of everyone else. Even to see all this wasn’t to believe it. The crowd looked at one another incredulously.

  Having poured everything of himself on to that Stoke track, Liddell then collapsed unconscious into its dirt and was carried into the dressing rooms. Half an hour passed before he woke again. His head throbbed. He was offered a sip of brandy. Liddell turned it down. ‘No thanks . . . just a drop of strong tea,’34 he replied. Afterwards, Liddell said he’d felt something go ‘bust’ in his head, which led to his black-out.

  That run confirmed Stamford Bridge as no flashy fluke.

  Eric Liddell’s sprint double at the AAAs, as well as the mesmerizing run at Stoke, brought him more than national recognition. With it came new friendships too.

  Harold Abrahams could never be a bosom buddy with someone capable of licking him in a race. Liddell was the enemy, after all. But, post Stamford Bridge, the other past and present members of Alec Nelson’s Cambridge running clique – the triumvirate of Lowe, Stallard and Butler, plus Arthur Marshall, a quarter-miler, and the hurdler David Burghley – effectively made him an honorary member of the group.

  The unofficial chairman was Philip Noel-Baker, who’d become the non-participating captain of Britain’s Olympic team. As ‘Mr Baker’35 – his wife’s maiden name was added to his own after their marriage in 1915 – he’d been a 1,500 metres finalist at the Stockholm Games in 1912, aged twenty-two. At Antwerp eight years later, he’d carried the flag and won a silver medal at the same distance. He was a former president of the Cambridge Union, a former president of the Cambridge University Athletic Club and a fellow of King’s College. Noel-Baker, though only a dozen years Liddell’s senior, dispensed fatherly wisdom and also pastoral care, as if he was village clergyman and the athletes were his parishioners. He and Liddell enjoyed an immediate rapport. Noel-Baker’s mother came from the Scottish borders. He’d been raised as a Quaker. As a conscientious objector during the Great War, Noel-Baker drove ambulances in France and Italy, winning the Mons Star and Silver Medal. Liddell regarded him as a high-class fellow of unimpeachable character, one of those men other men are proud to know. He listened attentively when Noel-Baker spoke and would quote back the things he had said to him. Like Tom McKerchar and D. P. Thomson, he won Liddell’s unqualified trust.

  These companionships – a
nd Noel-Baker’s influence in particular – were to become important in the coming months. Liddell fitted in and found the company in Cambridge naturally congenial. Lowe and Butler were quiet and unflappable, and neither of them smoked nor drank. Stallard, Marshall and Burghley, the future 6th Marquess of Exeter, were hail-fellows-well-met. Liddell liked each of them enormously.

  There were formal sessions for British athletes at the White City and Crystal Palace. McKerchar’s friendship with Nelson made him open to the idea of Liddell using the Cambridge circuit at Fenners as a convenient stop-over during trips between Edinburgh and London. Liddell learned in the hothouse atmosphere that Nelson had developed. ‘The analogy is similar to that of a three-year-old being put through his paces by an older horse,’36 he explained. His Cambridge pals encouraged him to train on the beach at Hunstanton in Norfolk during days out that were meant to be pleasurably recreational as well as work. In return he invited them to run with him on the sands of North Berwick, close to the place where his parents had once rented a house.

  Cambridge also charmed him for another reason.

  Raised in that all-male environment of Eltham, Eric Liddell, the boy, had been so shy that he’d dropped out of the tennis team picked to challenge the nearby girls’ school.37 Liddell the teenager, while running for Edinburgh University, hadn’t joined in when his fellow athletes waved back at half a dozen women in flapper dresses at a train crossing. But Liddell the young man had begun to call on the artist Eileen Soper at the home she shared with her parents and sister in Harmer Green, Hertfordshire, only 35 miles from Cambridge.38 Liddell had known her since his schooldays.

  Eileen was born in 1905, the second daughter of the acclaimed artist George Soper, who illustrated children’s classics such as Grimm’s Fairy Tales and Charles Kingsley’s The Water Babies before becoming synonymous with paintings of horses and the farmers and land-labourers who ploughed until the turned fields resembled wide bolts of brown corduroy. An early conservationist and botanist, with a special interest in ferns, he built the house that Eileen eventually christened Wildings. Its grey stuccoed walls were planted in 4 acres. It became the family’s sanctuary, a small world within the world. The garden was deliberately allowed to grow semi-wild. There was a meadow, a lawn, a feeding ground for birds, a deer shelter, an orchard and a spinney, a rose garden, a water garden and a summer house on the property’s western boundary.

  Eileen inherited her father’s talent. He taught her to paint, etch and draw, nurturing her into a child prodigy. Aged fifteen, Eileen became the youngest artist ever to exhibit at the Royal Academy, making her famous on either side of the Atlantic. Good Housekeeping magazine called her ‘A Schoolgirl Among the Masters’.

  Her face was elfin. Her hair, dropping almost to her waist, was a vivid red-gold and centrally parted. She often heaped it into side bunches. Her cheekbones were sculptured. As well as her looks, she turned heads because of her intelligence and a love of motor cars and driving. But she was a bit of a prude, recoiling from ribaldry, however harmless. She condemned even Shakespeare for his ‘coarse expressions’. Eileen didn’t swear. She didn’t drink either. This didn’t deter suitors, towards whom she could be picky and prickly, offering cold rebuffs on first sight.

  Liddell was the exception.

  She was smitten with him. He was intelligent, decent-looking, respectable, mannered and kind. The two of them talked, drank tea and strolled in the garden and the surrounding countryside. Even though Eileen knew of Liddell’s Christian beliefs and his intention to go to China eventually, she began to think that a formal courtship, engagement and marriage might come from the relationship.

  Eileen Soper, who became one of the most prominent wildlife painters of her generation.

  COURTESY OF THE CHRIS BEETLES GALLERY, ST JAMES’S, LONDON ON BEHALF OF AGBI AND THE SOPER ESTATE

  Life now seemed set fair for Liddell; for him there were blue skies everywhere. He had found his religious direction. He had a new set of friends – and a ‘girlfriend’ too. He was among the favourites for the Olympic 100 metres title.

  What could possibly go awry?

  CHAPTER THREE

  Coming to the Crossroads

  THE MAN WHO ended 1924 as an Olympic champion began it as an Olympic scapegoat, a victim of others’ incompetence.

  From January to late June, some considered him to be a traitor. By mid-July, he was a role model and a crowd darling. In between those wild poles of opinion neither he nor his principles ever changed. To dwell on those simple facts now is to admire more than ever what Eric Liddell overcame to win that gold medal in Paris – the abandonment of two years’ work on a point of principle, the gamble of tackling another event as a novice, the thick-skinned will to resist criticism and coercion.

  This amateur sport required a professional outlook. The British Olympic Association, however, were slack and inconsistent about providing it. Comfortably settled in the upholstered leather of London’s gentlemen’s clubs such as the Garrick and the Carlton, the higher echelons of the BOA were supposedly the great and the good of society, anointed so automatically at birth without the inconvenient need for achievement to precede such status.1 The president was George Sutherland-Leveson-Gower, the 5th Duke of Sutherland, then the government’s Under-Secretary of State for Air who had, conversely, been a Royal Naval Commander. Its committee was an amalgam of the upper crust: peers, knights and Conservative members of Parliament with country houses and swathes of land. There was the Earl of Birkenhead, then the Lord Chancellor. There was the 5th Marquess of Cholmondeley, a direct descendant of Britain’s first Prime Minister, the periwigged Sir Robert Walpole. There was Cholmondeley’s brother-in-law, Sir Philip Sassoon, a cousin of the war poet Siegfried. Sir Philip’s mother was a Rothschild and he had been Sir Douglas Haig’s private secretary during the war. There was the courtier Lord Tweedmouth – his mother was Winston Churchill’s aunt – and also Viscount Curzon, brother-in-law to Churchill’s father, Randolph. So it went on – a parade of the gentry, who regularly appeared in Tatler and Country Life and basked in the advantages of the old boys’ network, the snaky tendrils of which spread throughout the British Establishment. As a group, the BOA was nevertheless pretty damn pathetic.

  Lavish dinners were held at the Savoy, where peers invited other peers.2 The problem was this: most of the BOA’s upper crust existed for show, seldom dirtying their white-gloved hands. Birkenhead, though initially the face and voice of the Appeals Committee, didn’t do much heavy lifting. The grind of the work fell chiefly on the chairman – Gerald Oakley Cadogan, the 6th Earl of Cadogan – and the secretary, Reginald Kentish, a Brigadier General with a DSO. At least Kentish was an enthusiastic grafter. In the war he’d also been solicitous towards the plight of the ordinary Tommy in the trenches. In contrast, Cadogan was a Grosvenor Street toff from the tip of his long nose to the toes of his hand-made shoes. He was the sort of man for whom appearances mattered. He was fifty-five, but already looked well past sixty. When the royal photographers Bassano Limited snapped Cadogan in 1921, his hair was so sparse that his high forehead gleamed, beacon-like, in the overhead light.

  Funding for the British Olympic team was generated through public subscription.3 In spats and a flat-topped silk hat, the cane-carrying Kentish toured towns and cities eliciting donations.4 In some of them the response was apathetic. ‘No one seems to know or care about them,’5 he said, exasperatedly, of the Olympics. Despite the enormous personal wealth of the BOA’s blue-bloods, and also its friends in high places, raising £30,000 for Paris proved arduous. The King, George V, tried to set an example. He gave £100. The Prince of Wales, the future Edward VIII, chipped in £50. The Daily Mail handed over 1,000 guineas and published numerous articles, each swaddled in the flag of patriotism, asking readers to contribute for the sake of Britain’s competitive pride. But, less than seven weeks before the Games began, the BOA was still £2,000 adrift of its target – an amount most of its grander big-wigs would have spent without a quibble o
n the annual hunt ball.

  From day one the preoccupation with money and the arrangement of peripheral matters in Paris, such as hotels for dignitaries and glad-handing on the cocktail circuit, consumed the BOA’s thoughts. To judge from the minutes of Association meetings, as well as its public proclamations, the business of winning medals was almost secondary. There was a debate about who should travel first class – certainly not the athletes – and the choice of coloured ribbon to decorate the straw boater of the official uniform.6 The Association hired the London department store Gamages to make these uniforms.7 It was a penny-pinching option. Clothes didn’t maketh the British men or women of these Olympics. The team went to the chicest city on the globe in outfits that looked to have been cut by a myopic tailor with a grievous grudge against both them and the Games. ‘Ghastly,’8 is how Harold Abrahams described his blazer and white flannels. In one photograph Abrahams resembles the silent movie comedian Buster Keaton. Nothing fits him. His three-button jacket is too tight, even straining around the flatness of his belly. His trousers are too short. The turn-ups rise almost above the ankle, exposing his black socks. His boater is too big, casting such a wide shadow across his eyes that he seems to be wearing a mask that pre-dates the Lone Ranger’s. It’s as if Abrahams has borrowed each of these items from men of a different shape and size from him. The Association seemed chuffed with itself nonetheless. Cadogan called the uniform ‘serviceable and neat’9 – presumably because he didn’t have to wear it – and the Association boasted that ‘no undue extravagance’ had been permitted in purchasing it.