For the Glory Page 8

  Hotel accommodation in Paris didn’t compensate for the cheap tailoring. The Moderne on Place de la Republique was a budget affair into which competitors were corralled. According to Abrahams, it was a ‘little miserable’.10 The bedrooms were functional. The walls were as thin as cigarette paper.

  The selection of the uniform and the choice of the hotel seem harmless irritations. To complain about them could even be construed as being over-finicky. But both illustrate the BOA’s tendency to regard the athletes the way a dog regards its fleas. Both also explain why, after failing to place the competitors first and foremost, the BOA either missed or ignored the crisis looming ahead of it.

  Its arrogance, neglect and complacency were to blame for the predicament Liddell faced.

  In Chariots of Fire, Eric Liddell is seen climbing the gangplank on the boat to Paris when an American journalist hollers at him, ‘Mr Liddell, what about the qualifying heats on Sunday?’ We then see Liddell on the quarter-turn. The expression on his face forms a question mark of concern, as though he’s been asked something in a language he only half-comprehends. His mouth falls open. ‘What did you say?’ he asks, without waiting for the reply. On the boat he’s told the programme of events for the Olympics has appeared in that morning’s newspapers, and that to race in the 100 metres requires him to compete on a Sunday.

  The film moves on to the gilt and chandelier finery of the British Embassy in Paris. Liddell has been summoned to a meeting, where the Prince of Wales, the Duke of Sutherland, the Earl of Birkenhead and Lord Cadogan attempt to force him to compete. Liddell is in white tie and tails. He looks like the head butler about to take a drinks order. The Prince goes into a small speech, designed to appeal to the heart: ‘We share a common heritage, a common bond, a common loyalty. There are times when we are asked to make sacrifices in the name of that loyalty. Without them our allegiance is worthless. As I see it, for you, this is such a time.’

  Liddell resists the argument. The Prince looks slightly askance. Cadogan glowers and becomes irascible, a cartoon version of a grumpy old man. You sense the room freezing over.

  Then enter ‘Lord Lindsay’, whom Chariots has earlier depicted winning a bronze medal in the 100 metres hurdles. Lindsay apologizes for the intrusion, appreciates and respects Liddell’s position and so proposes a kind of hey-presto escape for him. Lindsay has his medal. So, for Liddell’s sake, he will give up his place in the 400 metres. The solution elicits handshakes and smiles.

  Each scene is an invention. There was no revelation on the gangplank. No smoky conclave in the British Embassy. No ‘Lord Lindsay’, a fictional concoction based on Liddell’s friend David Burghley. And Burghley could not have donated his 400 metres spot because he’d never been entered for the race.

  The truth is much more prosaic, and the complications arising from it were avoidable – if Cadogan and Reginald Kentish had been administratively alert.

  The draft timetable for the Games was shaped early in 1922.11 The British Olympic Association paid only the scantiest attention to it. Liddell was then barely a contender and the English-dominated BOA didn’t consider a Scot, still to race in front of them, as an important figure. That oversight was prejudiced but understandable. Future oversights, however, were inexcusably slovenly.

  The BOA received the Games’ revised timetable in the first weeks of spring 1923. No one matched the dates of the 100 metres to the days of the week. Only when Liddell received his copy – in late autumn that same year – did he and Tom McKerchar realize the calendar was against him. He alerted the BOA, which was still blithely unaware of the conflict of conscience confronting him. Not only did the schedule prevent Liddell from running in the 100 metres, he couldn’t run in the 4×100 metres or 4×400 metres relays either because both involved Sunday competition. Only the 200 metres, in which he’d always planned to compete anyway, and the 400 metres events didn’t encroach on that day.

  The BOA didn’t understand Olympic history.12 Paris was merely following the template laid down in 1920 in Antwerp, where the 100 metres heats and the relays had also swept through Sunday. The International Olympic Committee was generally unsympathetic towards Sunday non-combatants such as Liddell too. Disputes about it had scarred previous Games. In 1900, coincidentally in Paris, the American Sabbatarian John Cregan declined to run in the 1,500 metres. Another American, Robert Garrett, withdrew from the shot and the standing triple jump. A third American, long jumper Myer Prinstein, though Jewish, found himself barred from the final because his university, Syracuse, was against Sunday sport.

  Much of the controversy was entirely of the IOC’s making. The Sabbatarians in Paris were originally promised that field events beginning on Saturday could be completed on Monday. The IOC was guilty of committing two howlers. First, the policy was abruptly reversed. Second, either through cowardice or cock-up, news of that decision wasn’t communicated properly; a few athletes even turned up on Monday unaware of the committee’s U-turn. A well-run movement would have learned lessons and found a decent compromise thereafter. The IOC was intractable, even though the loss of athletes from Sunday events distorted the results. Even in London’s 1908 Olympics, the American hurdler Forrest Smithson ran, and won, with a Bible in his left hand, carrying it in protest at being ‘forced to compete’ on the Sabbath, and to demonstrate his faith in God.

  Liddell wouldn’t run clutching the Bible; indeed, he wouldn’t run at all on a Sunday. This was scarcely classified information. He’d already stated his opposition to Sunday competition ‘in toto’ and had quoted both the Fourth Commandment – about keeping the Sabbath holy – and the book of Revelation, which identifies it as the ‘Lord’s Day’.13 Anyone doubting Liddell’s conviction was surely enlightened in July 1923 when he dropped out of an international against France in Paris’s Stade Pershing because of its Sabbath staging.14 As Britain beat the French that day, Liddell was preaching at an open-air gathering in Greenock, where he had cantered through a 100 yards race the previous afternoon.15 In his sermon he said there ‘could be no neutrality [where] Christianity was concerned’. His explanation was succinct. ‘Each one comes to the cross-roads at some period of his life and must make his decision for or against his Master.’

  Aware of this, the BOA ought from the outset to have been negotiating to make sure the 100 metres steered clear of Sunday. It ought to have said that Paris in 1924 shouldn’t duplicate the errors of Paris of 1900. And it ought then to have added that Liddell’s absence would detract significantly from the spectacle. The BOA did none of this – at least not until it was too late.16

  In November 1923, Liddell told them of his withdrawal from the 100 metres. Weeks later, so slow on the uptake that the attempt to tinker with the timetable seemed almost posthumous, the BOA finally wrote a begging letter to the IOC. It wasn’t brave enough to specify the scheduling of the sprint as its motivation. Attempting to disguise its embarrassment, the BOA faked a wider altruism, as if it were a megaphone for other countries too timid to speak up. This made it look more imbecilic than ever. The BOA called for ‘any athlete who objected to running or taking part in any game on a Sunday’ to be allowed to rearrange his event. Predictably the IOC saw through the ruse and reacted contemptuously. Their reply was terse, the written equivalent of a slap across the jowls. The IOC said it couldn’t ask Paris to ‘make any such arrangement’.

  Presuming Liddell was vulnerable to tender but firm persuasion, the BOA tried to apply it. There was no use appealing to his vanity. He was neither self-possessed nor interested in athletic posterity. There was no use playing the nationalism card either. He answered to a higher calling than country. Demonstrating a woeful ignorance of his background and his character, the BOA took a third tack, thinking his religion was malleable.

  Liddell received a lecture about the loose strictures of the continental Sabbath. In France, he was told, the Sabbath ended officially at noon, which would enable him to pray in the morning and compete in the afternoon. Liddell deflected the insult of
that suggestion with a put-down dressed decorously. ‘My Sabbath lasts all day,’17 he said. The BOA then tried to find common ground through catechism. Since God had made him fast, wouldn’t he be doing His will by competing? And wouldn’t it be a slight against Him if he didn’t? Such an approach seemed entirely appropriate to anyone non-devout – and entirely misguided to those who were. Liddell liked to recite what he called ‘the three sevens’.18 This is the seventh verse in the seventh chapter of the seventh book of the New Testament: ‘Every man hath his proper gift of God’. Liddell was adamant where his gift had come from, and equally adamant that the Bible forbade him to use it on a Sunday. The answer continued to dumbfound the secularists on the BOA, each incapable of seeing the world as Liddell saw it.

  The BOA wasn’t alone in its lack of understanding. Britain was hardly a puritan culture. As Peter Fryer points out in his book Mrs Grundy, a study of English prudery, the new century – and particularly the war – brought rebellion against the starchy gloom of the Sundays before.19 What Fryer described as emancipation from ‘scriptural guidance’ was gradually taking place. The Lord’s Day Observance Society had been influential in Victorian Britain, attempting to crush underfoot anything that interfered with churchgoing. It protested against Sunday cinema, music hall and theatre, and even the running of Sunday trams. The Society’s determination to tell everyone else how to behave shut pubs, art galleries, markets and fairs and also banned concerts and dances. The Society didn’t like housewives hanging out washing on a Sunday, or their husbands reading a Sunday newspaper either. And it took the dimmest view possible of sport of any kind – even recreational cycling. The British Sunday under the old Queen was bleak and boring, the dread of most of the population. Attitudes changed incrementally following her death and gathered a ripping speed after 1918. Sunday strictures were shunted aside. The Society’s members were seen as busybody ‘Mrs Grundys’, the censorious gasbag of a neighbour in Thomas Morton’s eighteenth-century play Speed the Plough.

  That modern mood worked against Liddell. Some of the public saw his attitude towards Sunday as anachronistic, dismissing him as holier-than-thou – a Mrs Grundy of the track – and a sap of a Society of which it erroneously assumed he was a card-carrying member. Some thought he was using religion as an excuse to duck a scrap with America’s sprinters, who were odds on to beat him. Some believed he was sabotaging Britain’s Olympic ambitions for a stance that seemed hollow and pointless to them. And some – expressing an opinion that chimed with the BOA’s own – couldn’t comprehend why Liddell wouldn’t sacrifice one Sunday of kneeling prayer when a long lifetime of other Sundays stretched ahead of him.

  The newspapers were initially slow off the mark, hardly recognizing Liddell’s predicament as a headline story. The Evening Standard’s sports gossip columnist, signing himself ‘Olympian’,20 wrote at the end of December 1923, ‘I learn from authoritative Scottish sources that Liddell will only compete in the Games . . . if the day of his heats is changed.’ The Sporting Life ran an almost identical item in the same week.

  Eventually the penny dropped, the full implication of Liddell’s decision falling into focus. Reporters were dispatched to his rooms in George Square. One of his housemates saw a knot of them on the pavement. ‘They hammered on the door demanding to see him,’ he said.21 The housemate, sent down to clear them off, heard cries of ‘he’s a traitor to his country’. The atmosphere was ‘quite menacing’, he added. He also thought Liddell had become ‘the most unpopular man in Britain’. The religious newspaper Life of Faith remarked on the ‘icy criticism and cheap gibes’ that it said were ‘heard on every side’ about him.22 The word ‘heard’ is significant. Liddell was slandered rather than libelled. The Daily Mail, for instance, level-headedly lamented only the ‘severe loss’ to Britain’s Olympic prospects and refused to revile him.23 The Edinburgh Evening News, in favour of the local boy, announced that ‘every Scotsman . . . respects the champion’s view on this subject’.24

  The BOA continued under the misapprehension that Liddell could be turned. Alfred George was appointed manager of the Paris team.25 George was a fifty-six-year-old ex-runner who had won a dozen titles in England and North America during a career overshadowed by the Herculean feats of his older brother Walter, one of the first superstars of the sport. Walter was an AAA champion before turning professional, clocking a world record in the mile of 4 minutes 12 seconds in 1886.26 No one beat that mark for twenty-nine years. He drank beer excessively, smoked cigars and a pipe regularly and gambled away his prize money. But fame meant his face appeared on cigarette cards and he was hailed as ‘The Champion of Champions’ in a colourful caricature published in Vanity Fair. The artist Ape depicted him as giraffe-necked and knitting-needle thin. Alfred, always six steps behind him as an athlete, turned himself into a po-faced administrator and freelance writer, signing his articles ‘A. B. George’.

  He had a lofty view of his own contributions in the All Sports Illustrated Weekly, as though his pronouncements on the Olympics had been typed atop Mount Olympus. In one piece about Paris, George said the team ‘feared we shall lack the services of E. H. Liddell’,27 who ‘hesitates to compete on the Sabbath’. Liddell had never hesitated. And George knew he’d scratched from the 100 metres already. The BOA wouldn’t explicitly criticize Liddell in public. But nor – and this was glaringly apparent – did it offer support in public either. George’s line, slipped in like a long blade, was mischief making.

  Not everyone was anti-Liddell. A vicar in Aberdeen addressed his congregation on ‘World Wide Christian Patriotism’ and advocated that Liddell upheld ‘the best traditions of the country’ with his adherence to his faith.28 He was likened to ‘Daniel’,29 pushed into the lions’ den because of his refusal to abandon prayer. The lyrics of the Salvation Army hymn were even quoted in his honour:

  Dare to be a Daniel,

  Dare to stand alone,

  Dare to have a purpose firm,

  Dare to make it known.

  In a widely syndicated column called The Way the World Wags, a collection of gossipy titbits and wry asides, the unidentified writer waved another flag for him.30 He wrote:

  The French artisans are content to work six days a week, and then to hold their sports, their races, their football matches and all other forms of sport on Sunday afternoon. Churchmen claim a free hand after High Mass and non-churchgoers take no notice whatsoever of Sabbath observance. We have travelled too far ourselves on that same road, and it is refreshing to see a young man abandon his chance of success at the greatest sports meeting in the world rather than compete on a Sunday. He will be laughed at; but we are certain it takes more courage to stand up for conscience sake than to win the Olympic sprint.

  He ended the piece with the words ‘Good Luck’.

  Luck could take care of itself. What Liddell needed most of all was sensible advice and good coaching. Without it Paris would be purgatory for him.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  I Wonder If I’m Doing the Right Thing?

  PARIS EXPECTED NOTHING from Eric Liddell. He had chosen the 400 metres only because no other replacement distance was feasible for him.

  The prospect of transforming a sprinter into a quarter-miler over only five months of competition – and shaping him into an Olympian – would have pushed most coaches into squawking panics and sleepless nights. Had the voluble Sam Mussabini been asked to do so, on Harold Abrahams’ behalf, there’d have been a pyrotechnical display of agitation, a stomp and a strop and then several weeks of agonized planning.

  Tom McKerchar was a phlegmatic as well as a practical man. The logistics of this late challenge didn’t fluster him. He wasn’t whiny or pessimistic about Liddell’s chances either. And, aware of Liddell’s devotion to the Church, he didn’t attempt to change his mind about Sunday competition. This was not only important to their partnership, it also demonstrated his loyalty. McKerchar was a British Olympic Association coach. The BOA expected its interests to be promoted. In declining t
o act as an advocate for them on the issue of Liddell’s withdrawal from the 100 metres, McKerchar risked its wrath and possible excommunication from the coterie of officials bound for Paris. To his fabulous credit, McKerchar accepted Liddell’s situation, changing tactics on his behalf as easily as a commuter might change trains. He even thought that the 400 metres would be a better fit for him than the 200 metres, immediately making it their priority. As Liddell would later confess: ‘What his knowledge meant to me . . . can hardly be set down in cold print.’1

  No one is immune from needling criticism. It always leaves a trace, even if the mark isn’t visible to the naked eye. Liddell had been naive. He’d expected his decision to be seen as an honest matter of integrity. He consequently assumed it would pass without much adverse comment, which goes to show that those incapable of malice rarely suspect it in others. However much he pretended otherwise, the backlash wounded him. Only much later did Liddell admit this to a friend. He was ‘hurt’,2 the friend said.

  He made an ally in the News of the World’s athletics correspondent, the bespectacled, trilby-wearing Joe Binks, a former world record holder in the mile who’d become an authoritative voice in the press box because of his knowledge rather than the gleam of his prose.3 Unlike most London-based writers, Binks had taken the train to Scotland to study Liddell long before the AAA’s championship made him an Olympic candidate. The two of them exchanged letters, and Binks occasionally quoted these in his weekly column. He alluded to Liddell’s puzzlement and his sensitivity towards the flak the papers and the public had fired at him. In a letter to Binks he had complained tartly about those purporting to know ‘somewhat more about me than I do myself’.