Contents
Cover
About the Book
Title Page
Dedication
Map
Prologue: The Last Race of the Champion
Part One: Faster
Chapter One: How to Become a Great Athlete
Chapter Two: Just a Drop of Strong Tea
Chapter Three: Coming to the Crossroads
Chapter Four: I Wonder If I’m Doing the Right Thing?
Chapter Five: Dancing the Tango Along the Champs-Elysées
Chapter Six: Not for Sale at Any Price
Part Two: Higher
Chapter Seven: Goodbye to All That
Chapter Eight: There Are No Foreign Lands
Chapter Nine: Will Ye No Come Back Again?
Chapter Ten: There’s Something I Want to Talk to You About
Chapter Eleven: Everywhere the Crows Are Black
Chapter Twelve: The Sharpest Edge of the Sword
Part Three: Stronger
Chapter Thirteen: The Man Who Isn’t There
Chapter Fourteen: No More Happy Birthdays
Chapter Fifteen: You Can Run … But You Won’t Catch Us Old Man
Chapter Sixteen: Call to Me All My Sad Captains
Epilogue: What Will Survive of Us Is Love
Acknowledgements
Timeline of Eric Liddell’s life
Notes and Sources
Index
About the Author
Also by Duncan Hamilton
Copyright
PROVIDED YOU DON’T KISS ME:
20 YEARS WITH BRIAN CLOUGH
HAROLD LARWOOD
A LAST ENGLISH SUMMER
THE UNRELIABLE LIFE OF HARRY THE VALET
THE FOOTBALLER WHO COULD FLY
IMMORTAL
TRANSWORLD PUBLISHERS
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First published in Great Britain in 2016 by Doubleday
an imprint of Transworld Publishers
Copyright © Duncan Hamilton 2016
Map copyright © Tom Coulson at Encompass Graphics 2016
Cover images: Eric Lidell © Underwood & Underwood/Corbis;
background © MacGregor/Stringer/Getty Images;
Cover design by Tal Goretsky
Duncan Hamilton has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.
All images provided courtesy of the author unless stated otherwise.
This book is a work of fiction and, except in the case of historical fact, any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Every effort has been made to obtain the necessary permissions with reference to copyright material, both illustrative and quoted. We apologize for any omissions in this respect and will be pleased to make the appropriate acknowledgements in any future edition.
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1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
In memory of Florence Liddell.
Some wife. Some mother. Some woman.
HE IS CROUCHING on the start line, which has been scratched out with a stick across the parched earth.1 His upper body is thrust slightly forward and his arms are bent at the elbow. His left leg is planted ahead of the right, the heels of both raised slightly in preparation for a springy launch.
Exactly two decades earlier he had won his Olympic title in the hot, shallow bowl of Paris’s Colombes Stadium. Afterwards, the crowd in the yellow-painted grandstands gave him the longest and loudest ovation of those Games. What inspired them was not only his roaring performance, but also the element of sacrificial romance wound into his personal story, which unfolded in front of them like the plot of some thunderous novel.
Now, trapped in a Japanese prisoner of war camp, the internees have teemed out of the low dormitories and the camp’s bell tower to line the route of the makeshift course to see Eric Liddell again. Even the guards in the watchtowers peer down eagerly at the scene.
In Paris, Liddell ran on a track of crimson cinder.2 In Weihsien, he will compete along dusty pathways which the prisoners have named to remind them nostalgically of faraway home: Main Street, Sunset Boulevard, Tin Pan Alley.
Liddell claimed his gold medal in a snow-white singlet, his country’s flag across his chest.3 Here he wears a shirt cut from patterned kitchen curtains, baggy khaki shorts, which are grubby and drop to the knee, and a pair of grey canvas ‘spikes’, almost identical to those he’d used during the Olympics.
As surreal as it may seem, ‘Sports Days’ such as this one are an established feature of the camp. For the internees, it is a way of forgetting – for a few hours at least – the reality of incarceration; one prisoner wistfully calls each of these days ‘a speck of glitter amid the dull monotony’.4
Even though he is over forty years old, practically bald and pitifully thin, Liddell is the marquee attraction. Those who don’t run want to watch him. Those who do want to beat him.
Though spread over 60,000 square miles, the coastal province of Shandong, tucked into the eastern edge of China’s north plain, looks minuscule on maps of that immense country. Weihsien is barely a pencil dot within Shandong. And the camp itself is merely a speck within that – a roll of land of approximately 3 acres, roughly the size of two football pitches. Caught in both the vastness of China and also the grim mechanism of the Second World War, which seems without respite let alone end, the internees had begun to think of themselves as forsaken.
Until the Red Cross at last got food parcels to them in July, there were those who feared the slow, slow death of starvation.5 Weight fell off everyone. Some lost 15lb or more, including Liddell. He dropped from 160lb to around 130. Others, noticeably corpulent on entering Weihsien, shed over 80lb and looked like lost souls in worn clothes. Morale sagged, a black depression ringing the camp as high as its walls.
Those parcels meant life. While hunger stalked the camp, no one had the fuel or the inclination to run. This race is a celebration, allowing the internees to express their relief at finally being fed.
Liddell shouldn’t be running in it.
Ever since late spring cum early summer he’s felt weary and strangely disconnected. His walk has slowed. His speech has slowed too. He’s begun to do things ponderously and is sleeping only fitfully, the tiredness burrowing into his bones. He is stoop-shouldered. Mild dizzy spells cloud some of his days. Sometimes his vision is blurred. Though desperately sick, he casually dismisses his symptoms as ‘nothing to worry about’, blaming them on overwork.
Throughout the eighteen months he’s already spent in Weihsien, Liddell has been a reassuring presence, always representing hope. He has toiled as if attempting to prove that perpetual motion is actually possible. He rises before dawn and labours until curfew at 10 p.m. Liddell is always doing something; and always doing it for others rather than for himself. He scrabbles for coal, which he carries in metal pails. He chops wood and totes bulky flour sacks. He cooks in the kitchens. He cleans and sweeps. He repairs whatever needs fixing. He teaches science to the children and teenagers of the camp and coaches them in sport too. He counsels and consoles the adults, who bring him their worries. Every Sunday he preaches in the church. Even when he works the hardest, Liddell still apologizes for not working hard enough.
The internees are so accustomed to his industriousness that no one pays much attention to it any more; familiarity has allowed the camp to take both it and him a little for granted.
Since Liddell first became public property – always walking in the arc-light of fame – wherever he has gone and whatever he has done has been brightly illuminated. The son of Scots missionaries born, shortly after the twentieth century began, in the port of Tientsin. The sprinter whose locomotive speed inspired newspapers to call him ‘The Flying Scotsman’. The devout Christian who preached in congregational churches and meeting halls about scripture, temperance, morality and Sunday observance. The Olympic champion who abandoned the track for the sake of his religious calling in China. The husband who booked boat passages for his pregnant wife and two infant daughters to enable them to escape the torment he was enduring in Weihsien. The father who had never met his third child, born without him at her bedside. The friend and colleague, so humbly modest, who treated everyone equally.
The internees assume nothing will harm such a good man, especially someone who is giving so much to them. And none of them has registered his deteriorating physical condition because he and everyone else around him look too much alike to make his illness conspicuous.
Anyone else would find an excuse not to race. Liddell, however, doesn’t have it in him to back out. He is too conscientious. The camp expects him to compete, and he won’t let them down, however much the effort drains him and however shaky his legs feel. He is playing along with his role as Weihsien’s breezy optimist, a front concealing his distress. Every few weeks he merely slits a new notch-hole into the leather of his black belt and then pulls it tightly around his ever-shrinking waistline.6
Liddell makes only one concession. Previously he has been scrupulously fair about levelling the field. He’s always started several yards behind the other runners, giving them an outside chance of beating him. This time there is no such handicap for him. That alone should alert everyone to the fact that he is ailing.
Liddell says nothing about it. Instead, he takes his place, without pause or protest, in a pack of a dozen other runners, his eyes fixed on nothing but the narrow strip of land that constitutes the front straight.
The starter climbs on to an upturned packing crate, holding a white handkerchief aloft in his right hand. And then he barks out the three words Liddell has heard countless times in countless places.
‘Ready . . . set . . . go!’
He is waiting for me at the main gate on Guang-Wen Street.7
He is dressed smartly and formally: white shirt, dark tie and an even darker suit, the lapels wide and well cut. He looks like someone about to make a speech or take a business meeting.
His blond hair is impeccably combed back, revealing high widow’s peaks. There’s the beginning of a smile on his slender lips, as if he knows a secret the rest of us don’t and is about to share it. Barely a wrinkle or a crease blemishes his pale skin, and his eyes are brightly alert. He is a handsome, eager fellow, still blazing with life.
On this warm spring morning, I am looking directly into Eric Liddell’s face.
He’s preserved in his absolute pomp, his photograph pressed on to a big square of metal. It is attached to an iron pole as tall as a lamp post. This is Communist homage to a Christian, a man China regards with paternal pride as its first Olympic champion. In Chinese eyes, he is a true son of their country; he belongs to no one else.
More than seventy years have passed since Liddell came here. He’s never gone home. He’s never grown old.
The place he knew as Weihsien is now called Weifang, the landscape unimaginably different. Liddell arrived on a flat-bed truck. He saw nothing but a huge chequerboard of field-crops stretching to the black line of the horizon. Narrow dirt roads, along which horse-drawn carts rattled on wooden wheels, linked one flyspeck village to another. Each was primitively rural.
I arrived on the sleek-nosed G-train from Beijing, a distance of 300 miles covered in three rushing hours. What I saw were power stations with soot-lipped cooling towers, acres of coal spread around them like an oil slick, and the blackened, belching chimneys of factories. The city that needs this industrial muscle is the epitome of skyscraper modernity, a gleaming example of the new China built out of concrete and glass, steel and neon. Skeletal cranes are everywhere, always creating something taller than before. These structures climb into a sky smothered in smog, the sun glimpsed only as a shadowed shape behind it.
Guang-Wen Street is the bridge between this era and Liddell’s.8
When he arrived in 1943, the locals, living as though Time had stopped a century before, parked hand-held barrows on whichever pitch suited them and bartered over home-grown vegetables, bolts of cloth and tin pots and plates. Today’s traders, setting up canvas stalls, sell ironmongery and replica sports shirts, framed watercolours and tapestries, electrical gadgetry and a miscellany of ornamental kitsch. There’s a pudgy, middle-aged man with tobacco-stained teeth who tips pocket cameras and mobile phones from a black bin liner. Next to him another man, balding and gut-heavy, is peddling blood-red Manchester United shirts, Chicago Bulls vests and an unsteady stack of New York Yankees peaked caps. There’s also a stooped-shouldered woman with pitted skin who looks ancient enough to remember the Boxer Rebellion. She drapes bolts of coloured silk across outstretched arms, bowing her head at each polite refusal to inspect them. Her neighbour offers the most surreal sight of all. Wearing tangerine-coloured training shoes and a sleeveless black cocktail dress, like a semi-stylish Holly Golightly, she holds aloft pendants and chain-link bracelets. Her fingers, the false scarlet nails tapered into talons, are decorated with broad gold rings.
At one end of Guang-Wen Street is an office high-rise with tinted windows. At the other is the People’s Hospital, its facade whiter than a doctor’s house coat.
What counts, however, is the plot of biscuit-brown land between them. Number Two Middle School is a motley assortment of low, dull structures which look anachronistic and architecturally out of kilter with everything nearby.
The camp once stood here.
The buildings familiar to Liddell were bulldozed long ago. Gone is the whitewashed church. Gone is the bell tower and the rows of dormitories. Gone also are the watchtowers with arrow-slit windows and conical tops, like a Chinese peasant’s hat.
The Japanese called it a ‘Civilian Assembly Centre’, a euphemism offering the flimsiest camouflage to the harsh truth.9 A United Nations of men, women and children were prisoners alongside Liddell rather than comfy guests of the Emperor Hirohito. There were Americans and Australians, South Americans and South Africans, Russians and Greeks, Dutch and Belgians and British, Scandinavians and Swiss and Filipinos. Among the nationalities were disparate strata of society: merchant bankers, entrepreneurs, boardroom businessmen, solicitors, architects, teachers and government officials. There were also drug addicts, alcoholics, prostitutes and thieves, who co-existed beside monks and nuns and missionaries, such as Liddell.
Weihsien housed more than 2,100 internees during a period of two and a half years. At its terrible zenith, between 1,600 and 1,800 were shut into it at once.
The place already had a past.10 It had previously been an American Presbyterian mission. Born there was the Nobel laureate Pearl S. Buck, who wrote the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Good Earth, which made China less mysterious to the millions who read it in the 1930s. Henry Luce, founder of Time and father of its subsequent empire, lived within the compound as a boy. The Chinese had christened it Le Dao Yuan – Courtyard of the Happy Way. The Japanese left the phrase chiselled across the lintel of the grand entrance, as though mocking those forced to pass beneath it. Awaiting them to deter disobedience or escape were armed guards, some with German Shepherd dogs on chain leads, and an electric fence. A trench, dug 6 feet deep, came next.
A man’s labour can become his identity; Liddell testifies to that. Before internment, he worked in perilous outposts in China, dodging bullets and shells and always wary of the knife-blade. After it, he dedicated himself to everyone around him, as though it were his responsibility alone to imbue the hardships and degradations there with a proper purpose and make the long days bearable.
The short history of the camp emphasizes the impossibility of Liddell’s task. In the beginning it was filthy and insanitary, the pathways strewn with debris and the living quarters squalid. The claustrophobic conditions brought predictable consequences. There were verbal squabbles, sometimes flaring into physical fights, over the meagre portions at mealtimes and also the question of who was in front of whom in the queue to receive them. There were disagreements, also frequently violent, over privacy and personal habits and hygiene as well as perceived idleness, selfishness and pilfering.
Liddell was different. He overlooked the imperfections of character that beset even the best of us, doing so with a gentlemanly charm.
With infinite patience, he also gave special attention to the young, who affectionately called him ‘Uncle Eric’.11 He played chess with them. He built model boats for them. He fizzed with ideas, also arranging entertainments and sport, particularly softball and baseball which were staged on a miniature diamond bare of grass.
Sceptical questions are always going to be asked when someone is portrayed without apparent faults and also as the possessor of standards that appear so idealized and far-fetched to the rest of us. Liddell can sound too virtuous and too honourable to be true, as if those who knew him were either misremembering or consciously mythologizing. Not so. The evidence is too overwhelming to be dismissed as easily as that. Amid the myriad moral dilemmas in Weihsien, Liddell’s forbearance was remarkable. No one could recall a solitary act of envy, pettiness, hubris or self-aggrandizement from him. He bad-mouthed nobody. He didn’t bicker. He lived daily by the most unselfish credo, which was to help others practically and emotionally.
Liddell became the camp’s conscience without ever being pious, sanctimonious or judgemental. He forced his religion on no one. He didn’t expect others to share his beliefs, let alone live up to them. In his church sermons, and also during weekly scripture classes, Liddell didn’t preach grandiloquently. He did so conversationally, as if chatting over a picket fence, and those who heard him thought this gave his messages a solemn power that the louder, look-at-me sermonizers could never achieve. ‘You came away from his meetings as if you’d been given a dose of goodness,’ said one member of the camp congregation.12 ‘Everyone regarded him as a friend,’ said another, giving voice to that unanimous verdict.13 Someone else saw an enigmatic side to him amid all this subjugation of the self.14 Aware of how ably he disguised his own feelings, she thought him ‘elusive’. She pondered what Liddell was really ‘thinking about when he wasn’t speaking’, which implies how much anguish he bottled up and hid away to serve everyone else’s needs.
One internee spoke about Liddell as though Chaucer’s selfless and chivalrous ‘verray parfit gentil knight’ had been made flesh. ‘You knew you were in the presence of someone so thoroughly pure,’ he explained.15 A second put it better, saying simply, as if Liddell were only a step or two from beatification: ‘It is rare indeed when a person has the good fortune to meet a saint.16 He came as close to it as anyone I have ever known.’
In his own way, Liddell proved that heroism in war exists beyond churned-up battlefields. His heroism was to be utterly forgiving in the most unforgiving of circumstances.
Of course, most of the world sees a different Eric Liddell. It frames him running across a screen, the composer Vangelis’s synthesized soundtrack accompanying every stride. The images, the music, the man and what he achieved in the Olympics in 1924 are familiar to us because cinema made them so.
We know that Liddell, then a twenty-two-year-old Edinburgh University student and already one of the fastest sprinters in the world, believed so strongly in the sanctity of the Sabbath that he sacrificed his chance to win the 100 metres. We know the early heats of that event were staged on a Sunday. We know that Liddell refused to run in them, leaving a gap that his British contemporary Harold Abrahams exploited. We know that Liddell resisted intense pressure – from the public, from his fellow Olympians and from the British Olympic Association – to betray his conscience and change his mind about Sunday competition. We know that he entered the 400 metres, a distance he’d competed in only ten times before. And we know that, against formidable odds and despite the predictions of gloomy naysayers, he won it with glorious ease.
We know all this because the film Chariots of Fire told us so and took four Oscars as a consequence in 1982, including Best Picture.
In it, Liddell claims gold in super-slow-motion; he’s then chaired off in front of a raucous crowd. The story has its perfect full stop – tidy and neat and also clinching evidence that cinema does what it must to fulfil its principal purpose, which is to entertain. To achieve it, the first casualty is always historical fact. Fictional contrivances shape anew what actually happened to create a compelling drama. Most of us are smart enough to realize that film-makers who pick history as their subject tinker with the veracity of it. But our perception of an event or of a person still becomes inextricably bound to the image presented to us. So it is with Chariots of Fire. So it is with Liddell. We’ve ceased to see him. We see instead the actor Ian Charleson, who played him so compassionately.
I regard myself as possessing dual nationality. My birthplace was England, not far from where Hadrian built his wall. My other country is Scotland. My father was born there in a village only 2 miles from the site where Robert the Bruce won the Battle of Bannockburn in 1314. The significance of that date constituted my first history lesson.
In contests between Scotland and England our household always wore tartan. I was brought up on seminal Scots. From architects such as Mackintosh to poets such as Burns and also the writers Scott and Stevenson. From Smith the economist to Hume the philosopher. From the inventors Baird and Bell to the philanthropist Carnegie and the multi-faceted Dr Livingstone.
And then came Liddell too.
I saw Chariots of Fire twice in the week of its release from the cheap seats of the local cinema, where the curling blue-veins of others’ cigarette smoke and showers of casually flicked ash blurred my view of the film-makers’ recreation of 1920s Paris. After Oscar success initiated periodic re-releases, I watched it a third and then a fourth time, never caring then or now about the intentional inaccuracies. On each occasion the price of the ticket reaffirmed one piece of knowledge: the best portrayals of sport are never about the sport itself, but rather the human condition in pursuit of its glories, which is why you can excuse Chariots of Fire its intentional inaccuracies. It captures the inherent decency of Liddell. He is much more fascinating and likeable than the relentlessly driven Abrahams, presented as his implacably bitter rival to ratchet up the drama.
Liddell was never fixated on anyone else’s form the way Abrahams became fixated about his. Losing in Paris would have mortified Abrahams, probably destructively, because he believed his status was dependent on his running. Liddell was no less competitive. But he saw Abrahams as an adversary rather than as the enemy; and he considered athletics as an addendum to his life rather than his sole reason for living it.
Indeed, there are countless anecdotes of his sportsmanship towards fellow competitors that sound a bit like the brightest boy in class allowing everyone else to copy his homework.17 In competition he’d lend his trowel, used to dig starting holes, to other runners who lacked one. He once offered to give up the precious inside lane on the track, swapping it with the runner drawn unfavourably on the outside. On a horribly cold afternoon he donated his royal blue university blazer to a rival, freezing in only a singlet and shorts – even though it meant shivering himself. On another occasion he noticed the growing discomfort of an Indian student, utterly ignored before an event. He interrupted his own preparations to seek him out; their conversation went on until the starter called them both to the line. This was typical of Liddell. He’d engage anyone he thought was nervous or uncertain, and listen whenever the inexperienced sought advice on a technical aspect of sprinting. He’d share what he knew before the bang of the pistol pitted them against each other. In the dash to the tape, however, Liddell suspended friendship. He was fearsomely focused, the empathy he instinctively felt for others never slackening his desire to beat them.
He toiled to become the fastest, testing himself in all sorts of ways. Through hilly Edinburgh he’d audaciously race against corporation buses to spice up his training, challenging the driver from the pavement. If a bus beat him to a traffic light, Liddell would reproach himself for coming second.
Obscure one moment and a feared title contender the next, he lit up athletics like a flash of sheet-lightning, and did it despite the fact that he was so stylistically unconventional as to be a freak.
We prefer our sporting heroes to possess aesthetic as well as athletic prowess. We want to see poetry and hear the song of the body in their movements, the impeccable coordination of mind and eye and limb that enables the fan in the stand to make this specific claim: that watching sport is akin to watching one of the fine arts. The obvious allusion is to dance, usually ballet. That comparison has been made so often, consequently becoming a cliché. But it never invalidates the legitimacy of the argument – even if those unappreciative of sport struggle to understand the idea. The best dancers are performing athletes and vice versa. And what always stirs us, viscerally, is the beauty that exists within them. Think of Roger Federer whipping a crosscourt backhand past a bewildered opponent. Think of George Best on one of those slalom runs from halfway line to penalty box, the defenders sometimes beaten twice. Think of Viv Richards holding his pose, eyes following the arc and drop of the ball after another six has cracked off his bat. Think of Muhammad Ali doing his shuffle.
Sometimes, though, the ugly duckling wins.
Liddell didn’t look like a sprinter before a race started. He was only 5 feet 9 inches, which was considered slightly too short for the distances he ran. In an 11-stone frame, his bull-chest was heavy and his legs were short and thin.
He looked even less like a sprinter when a race got underway.
There was an ungainly frenzy about him. Liddell swayed, rocking like an overloaded express train, and he threw his head well back, as if studying the sky rather than the track. In Scottish colloquialism, this ‘heid back’ approach became his signature flourish. His arms pumped away furiously and his knee-lift was extravagantly high, like a pantomime horse. The New York Times thought Liddell ‘seemed to do everything wrong’.18 In one cartoon the Daily Mail’s celebrated caricaturist Tom Webster sketched Liddell as if he were a rubber contortionist.19 His body is shaped into a capital S, his head tilted so far backwards that it is almost touching his waist and he can see only where he’s been and not where he’s going. The caption reads: ‘Mr Liddell wins his race by several yards. He could never win by a head because he holds it back too far.’ In another cartoon Webster nonetheless highlighted that means, however peculiar, could always be justified by a triumphant end. Liddell, he said, ran a furlong at Stamford Bridge in what seemed to be ‘three or four seconds’ and ‘created a draught that was felt at Wimbledon’. That draught would have swept all the way through the decade and into another Olympics – if he had decided to carry on running.
Liddell broke away from athletics at the peak of his flight. Sportsmen who reach the summit of their sport usually try to cling on there until their fingernails bleed. Well in advance of the Olympics, Liddell had talked of his intention to abdicate gracefully because his real calling was elsewhere. For most of us that would be an easy vow to make before we became somebody – and an even easier one to break after the blandishments and the fancy trimmings of fame seduced us. Liddell never let it happen to him. He had promises to keep. That he kept them then and also subsequently is testament to exceptionally rare qualities in an exceptionally rare individual. Overnight, Liddell could have become one of the richest of ‘amateur’ sportsmen. But he wouldn’t accept offers to write newspaper columns or make public speeches for cash. He wouldn’t say yes to prestigious teaching sinecures, refusing the benefits of a smart address and a high salary. He wouldn’t endorse products. He wouldn’t be flattered into business or banking either. He made only trivial concessions to his celebrity. He allowed his portrait to be painted. He let a gardener name a gladiolus in his honour at the Royal Horticultural Show. In everything else Liddell followed his conscience, choosing to do what was right because to do anything else, he felt, would sully the gift God had given him to run fast.
Chariots of Fire didn’t have the room to explain any of this. Nor could it expand on what came afterwards for him. So his final two decades were concertinaed into two sentences – white lettering on a black background. Reading it, rather than having it spoken to you, somehow makes the message more powerful still. It is as bleak as the inscription on a tombstone.
ERIC LIDDELL, MISSIONARY, DIED IN OCCUPIED CHINA AT THE END OF WORLD WAR II. ALL OF SCOTLAND MOURNED.
That such a gentle man died such an ungentle death here hardly seems possible. At least not today. Spring has dressed everything in blush pink and peach blossom, the flame-red of early hibiscus and also wisteria, which is a swell of livid lake-purple. Sprays of dense bloom waterfall from the branches of trees, run across gables and guttering, fences and trellising. Alive with greenery, lightly drowning the pale paths in leaf shadow, the bigger trees remind me that I am walking exactly where others, including Eric Liddell, walked decades before. With smaller trunks and spindlier branches, these trees bore mute witness to Weihsien’s woes.
The Chinese, wanting no one to forget them, have created a museum. The exhibits, preserved in a sepulchral half-light, are mostly enlarged black and white photographs, watercolours and pencil drawings fastened behind glass. Liddell has a commemorative corner to himself. I see him winning a race shortly before the Olympics, his head back as always and his eyes half-closed. I see him on his wedding day, super-smart in morning coat and winged collar. I see the short wooden cross carved for his grave, obscured by overgrown foliage.
The earth that held him during the war holds him still; though no one has known precisely where for more than half a century because the graveyard, located in the Japanese quarters, was cleared and then built over during the period when Shandong Province became more difficult to reach for the non-Chinese. No one can identify the date when his cross was removed and the clearance began either. So, instead of a grave, Liddell now has a monument – an enormous slab of rose granite shipped from the Isle of Mull in the Hebrides.
Standing in front of that monument, I am aware of what no photograph of it can ever convey: its hulking size – 7 feet high and 2½ feet across; how age has weathered it; how the heat of the day warms the granite; how its edge, left deliberately rough and uneven, feels against my hand.
One of my favourite stories about Liddell is also the first ever told about him.20 He was supposed to have been christened Henry Eric until a family friend stopped his father on the way to register the birth and asked what ‘the wee man’ was going to be called. The friend gently pointed out that the initials – H. E. L. – were scarcely appropriate for a missionary’s offspring, which is why his Christian names were reversed. This comes back to me as I stare at his name. The sun, at last burning a hole through the smog, appears with impeccable timing and makes the gold lettering glow.
The accompanying inscriptions include the quotation from Isaiah, chapter 40, verse 31, that Chariots of Fire slipped into its script to cap a pivotal scene: ‘They shall run, and not be weary.’ A few, scant lines of biography cover the cardinal points of his forty-three years and thirty-seven days: his birth, his Olympic success, his death. The phrase ‘fraternal virtues’ acknowledges his missionary service.
‘Fraternal virtues’ isn’t the half of it. Everything you need to know about the heart Liddell had – and what he did with it – is contained in one fact.
Every morning in Weihsien, while the camp still slept, he lit a peanut oil lamp in the darkness and prayed for an hour. Every night, after studying the Bible, he prayed again. He did not discriminate. He prayed for everyone, even for his Japanese guards.
How do you pay proper respect to a man as humane as that; a man, moreover, who strove every day for perfection in thought, as well as deed, and whose death engulfed those who knew him in a sadness almost too deep for words? I do the best I can. I place a cellophane-wrapped spray of flowers – gold tiger lilies, white carnations, orange gerbera – on the wide plinth of this grand tower of granite.
When I turn towards the noise and colour of Guang-Wen Street again, I am convinced of one thing above all others. Whoever comes to this corner of China will always leave knowing the full measure of the man who is to be found here.
The place where his faith never broke under the immense weight it bore.
The place where his memory is imperishable.
The place where, even on the edge of death, the champion ran his last race.
THERE WAS AN impish look about him.1 He was slight and lightly built, barely 5 feet 4 inches tall. The flattish features of his face were disturbed only by the shallow rise of his cheekbones and an upturned chin, leaving a hard crease. His nose was a long blade. His mouth appeared to be nothing more than a slit. His eyes had bags beneath them. In profile he had a blankly stony look, like the countenance of an Easter Island carving.
To strangers Tom McKerchar appeared sternly unapproachable, as if any enquiry might produce a grunt in reply. To those who knew him, however, McKerchar was the opposite – a pleasant and helpful gent who’d pass on his expertise to whoever asked for it politely.
In early 1921 McKerchar was forty-four years old, the father of twelve children.2 He worked for a printing firm in Edinburgh, where the ink from the commercial presses stuck to the hand the way coal dust clung to the skin of every miner. He began there as a paper ruler and then became a lithographer.3 Away from the drudgery of clocking on and off, the mainstay of his life was sport. He advised the professional footballers of Heart of Midlothian – once multiple winners of the Scottish League Championship and Scottish FA Cup – and trained amateur athletes in Scotland, including those of the Edinburgh University Athletic Club. The students were expected to take physical excellence as seriously as book-knowledge. In 1887 the university’s elders placed the gilt figure of an athlete carrying the Torch of Learning on top of the dome that rose above its Old Quad – a reminder that improvement of the mind shouldn’t neglect improvement of the body too.
McKerchar, though never an academic scholar, proved to be the perfect coach for the students. Like most of his working-class generation, raised during the final quarter of Queen Victoria’s reign, he’d said goodbye to school at thirteen to bolster the household budget: he’d delivered groceries for pennies.4 Midnight oil came later for him. From books, and also through empirical testing on the track, McKerchar studied the physiology and psychology of the games-player and the training necessary to make him better.5 When he began dedicating himself to it, the subject was seldom treated scientifically. To some sportsmen, climbing into an enamel bath swimming in blocks of ice provided the answer to every question about achieving and maintaining fitness and health. The freezing water was supposed to energize the heart and pump the circulation, harden the soles of the feet and tone the muscles. Advocates of this and nothing else were like those doctors from the Middle Ages who slavishly prescribed leeches for every ailment presented to them. Other Victorian and Edwardian theories for sharpening performance seem now like the ravings of cranks, quacks and charlatans. Some believed smoking cleared the lungs and improved breathing capacity. A couple of pints of beer were considered perfectly acceptable too; the bitter hops were reckoned to be strength-giving. Various potions and so-called pick-me-ups also swirled around the market. Among them were Mrs Winslow’s Soothing Syrup, which included morphine, a French tonic wine called Vin Mariani, which included cocaine, and Anti-Stiff, a kind of rub-on-all-over embrocation, which included petrolatum. McKerchar was nobody’s fool. He didn’t fall for these advertisements, never believing the wondrous promises made on the packets.
Athletics meetings during McKerchar’s early days pulled in crowds able to gamble openly.6 Only the Streets Betting Act of 1909 evicted the bookmakers, making considerably poorer some of those who regularly made a cash-killing either by winning or by deliberately losing. Immediately after the Great War, the carnival and social atmosphere of these meetings continued nonetheless because the organizers became more eager than ever to create it. The country was desolate, discontented and in debt. Those who didn’t come back from the fighting were later described by the historian A. J. P. Taylor as ‘the men of promise born during the eighteen-nineties whose promise was not fulfilled’. Those who did were initially seduced by the catchy, alliterative slogan of ‘Homes for Heroes’, a glib pledge stirring expectations no government could ever meet. There was anger and a sense of futility when conditions after the war were found to be no better – and often far worse – than those before it. Spectator sport offered escape from all this. So even brass bands blared away to accompany both track and field events to provide more razzmatazz. Sometimes this dissolved into farce. One Edinburgh high jumper, unable to concentrate, had to ask for a particularly brisk, jazzy tune called ‘The Hitchy Koo’ to stop before attempting to clear the bar. When another band began playing at the very start of a one-mile race, the competitors found it impossible to run because the rhythm of their stride was incompatible with the rhythm of the over-loud military two-step thumping around them; only a ‘frantic waving of arms’ silenced the music.
The athletes themselves were a sober-looking lot. Shorts were never above the knee. Spikes were always black. T-shirts rather than vests were worn. Instead of today’s Lycra, Spandex or shiny, luminous-coloured tracksuits with fancy piping and sponsors’ names, the runners draped a double-breasted overcoat over their shoulders like a heavy cape. To combat the north-easterly winds of Edinburgh, woollen gloves and extra-long scarves were vital too. The scarves were wound like cladding and then knotted tightly. Ex-servicemen were conspicuous: each wore a military greatcoat with brass buttons that caught the light like the eyes of a cat.
In the thick of everything, McKerchar was known among the university athletes as a coach who didn’t take short-cuts; who didn’t tolerate time-wasters, late-comers or shirkers; and who didn’t waste sentences for the sake of them, as if wanting to prove that Shakespeare was right to say ‘men of few words are the best men’. He also liked to get as close as possible to the action, frequently appearing as a starter for races in which his athletes competed.
He put his faith in proper preparation. It wasn’t common for runners to ‘limber up’ in advance of an event; McKerchar, though, insisted on the procedure. He saw the relationship between himself and the athlete as an equal collaboration of talent and, like the good teacher nursing the promising pupil, he cared about general welfare.
What also set him apart from the pack was an innovative spirit.
In the early 1920s, there were coaches who believed the size of the heart and the capacity of the lungs wouldn’t allow a human to run a mile in under four minutes. Reaching that mark was as unthinkable to them as the prospect of rocketing to the moon. But McKerchar knew his athletics history. He was not only aware of how athletic performance had evolved, but also appreciated that the athlete of tomorrow – through better nutrition, better sports science, better equipment and technology – would always be fitter and faster than his predecessors. He embraced the future. When massage and physiotherapy were dismissed as crass fads, McKerchar championed them. When the mechanics of coordination could be inspected through sequential photography and slow-motion film – after the photographer Eadweard James Muybridge pioneered them – McKerchar benefited from it, spotting weaknesses in a stride pattern or deficiencies in arm and upper body movement. When new training methods were introduced elsewhere, particularly in Europe, McKerchar adopted them rather than wailing – as a platoon of insular coaches did – that importing them was unnecessary because nothing could possibly trump the superiority of British thinking.
This attitude and approach matched those of two of his contemporaries.7 The first was the quixotic Sam Mussabini. The second was Alec Nelson. Mussabini was an eccentric, his mind sparking a dozen ideas between breakfast and lunch and then another dozen before supper. Nelson was a different personality, less boisterous and more methodical. He’d been a professional half- and three-quarter-miler before becoming coach at Cambridge University, orchestrating Varsity dominance over Oxford. He had an especially dry humour. His instruction to one less than promising high jumper was the laconic ‘Throw your leg over the bar . . . and follow it as soon as possible’.
McKerchar was an ‘amateur’, sandwiched between these two ‘professionals’, only insofar as he took no payment. He nonetheless punched equal weight alongside them, and the triumvirate respected one another unequivocally. Tips and gossip were amicably traded and one coach was freely able to offer advice to another’s athlete without generating friction.
Eric Liddell always saw them as a trio.8 ‘What these three trainers don’t know about getting their charges fit, and telling them how to run their races, isn’t worth knowing,’ he said. He was convinced nonetheless that timing and geography had serendipitously given him the best of these sages. He called McKerchar ‘my friend’. In return McKerchar would call him his ‘wonderful boy’.
The admiration began in June 1921.
McKerchar could be found almost every weekday evening at one of Edinburgh’s two stadiums, Craiglockhart or Powderhall, where he observed training discreetly and then gave his impressions at the end of the session. Craiglockhart was a spacious expanse of grass, a throwback to the pre-cinder era.9 The track was lime-marked. The focal point of the arena was a mock Tudor pavilion with twin gables, a central white-faced clock and a shallow tier of black wooden seating. Powderhall was the pros’ domain, the dark grey cinder making it so. There was a rickety low grandstand and a banked ridge surround. Edinburgh’s castle and the outline of the Old Town were a single dark shape in the distance. Scotland was searching for another Wyndham Halswelle, winner of the 1908 Olympic gold in the 400 metres. Halswelle, while born in London, was an adopted Caledonian. He’d trained in Edinburgh, where Powderhall became his natural habitat. Halswelle won his title in a walk-over. The final had to be controversially re-staged after an American rival was disqualified for elbowing him in the ribs during the closing stages. The two other Americans in the race, peeved at the decision, refused to run again in a display of solidarity. Halswelle, who’d broken the Olympic record during qualification, consequently had the track to himself. The Americans complained the team had been ‘rooked, bilked, cheated, swindled and robbed’;10 Scotland merely saluted its champion and expressed contempt for the cheat. A sniper’s bullet during the battle of Neuve Chapelle in France killed Halswelle in 1915. He was only thirty-two.
McKerchar made it his business to know every runner who came to either Craiglockhart or Powderhall, for the next new face might be the next Halswelle.
It didn’t take him long to pick out the choice candidate.
Eric Liddell was Edinburgh University’s reluctant athlete.11