Eric Liddell Part 2: Life Away after the Olympics- Guest post by Neil Bettridge
For this guest post, I am delighted to welcome my friend and colleague, Neil Bettridge. Neil is Project Archivist at the Derbyshire Record Office, and has kindly written a short 2 part series on the life of Eric Liddell, who the film Chariots of Fire is about, to coincide with with 100th anniversary of him refusing to run on a Sunday because of his faith at the Paris Olympic games of 1924. You can view part 1 here.
At the end of the film “Chariots of Fire” the following words were written up on the screen:
ERIC LIDDELL, MISSIONARY, DIED IN OCCUPIED CHINA AT THE END OF WORLD WAR II. ALL SCOTLAND MOURNED.
I am writing this post just to give a flavour of what happened in the rest of his life. If you have seen the film, you cannot fail to have come away with the impression that Eric Liddell wasn’t anything but a good, decent man who stuck by his religious principles. What the rest of his life shows is that it only scratched the surface of the kind of man he was and the extent of his courage, spirituality, and strength of character.
It seems almost inevitable from the start that Eric would have become a missionary. His father, James Liddell, had left Scotland in 1898 to serve as a missionary in China, where he would remain for 30 years. It had been decided by his parents that Eric would be educated with his elder brother, Robert, back in England at what was originally called the School for the Sons of Missionaries, but would later become known as Eltham College. It is said Eric first declared his intention to become a missionary in China at the age of eight or nine. The two brothers followed a very similar path, and Robert would actually become a missionary before him, having studied medicine at the same university and qualified as a doctor.
Although a deeply devoted Christian, Eric had not talked publicly about his religious beliefs. In April 1923, however, he had been approached by the evangelist DP Thomson to consider speaking in public about his faith. Thomson’s aim was to attract people who would not normally attend anything religious but who might be interested in hearing what one of the brightest sporting stars had to say. On being asked to speak, after a tense ‘moment of silence’ for Thomson, Eric firmly agreed to do it. Both he and Thomson thought it was a pivotal moment in their lives.
It is generally said that he was not a great public speaker. He was a shy, young man, not blessed with flashy rhetorical skills, but it seems that he must have been quite an effective speaker. Thomson had advised Eric to “just speak from your heart and use your own experiences to illustrate the Christian message”, and this is very much what he did. He spoke calmly and simply about his sporting life, his beliefs and his faith, without any airs or graces or being in any way “preachy”. Over time he became increasingly confident as a public speaker, always being prepared to work on what he wanted to say before his talks, but not relying on written scripts to be read out.
Although he achieved fame as an Olympic gold medallist, in the summer of 1925 Eric chose to make good on his childhood commitment to return to China. He was offered the chance to become a teacher at the Tientsin Anglo-Chinese College, run by the London Missionary Society, and he accepted. When asked why he was giving up the life he had in Scotland, he simply said, “Because I believe God made me for China”. He left Britain in July 1925 and travelled to Tientsin (now Tianjin), where his father and the rest of his family lived. The Anglo-Chinese College had a school roll of about 500 boys aged between 8 and 18, the vast majority of them being Chinese. It aimed to instil Christian discipline and values, but it was still regarded as a place which provided a good level of education for the local non-Christian population.
Eric taught science at the College as his main subject, specializing in chemistry. He was also asked to take on English lessons and, almost inevitably, athletics and sports. He continued to race in China, but always resisted the temptation to compete at the Olympics of 1928 and 1932, which he felt would take too much of his time away from his responsibilities at school. He felt that he was not a good teacher, he worked hard to become a better one, but his character and Christian values had a great influence on his pupils. He took on after-hours Bible classes, and he was always overjoyed whenever any of his charges professed their conversion to Christianity.
Eric’s physical attributes, character and local celebrity always meant he was regarded as something of a “catch” in Tientsin social circles. He, however, was very choosy in what he required from any potential partner. That partner would be Florence Mackenzie, the daughter of a Canadian missionary, with whom he came into regular contact when she was only 14. It took another three years before Eric started to recognise her qualities, which marked her out as an attractive, energetic and resourceful young woman. After a quietly restrained courtship, he eventually proposed to her in 1929, and she immediately accepted. It was to be a long engagement, as Florence went back to Canada for 3 years to train as a nurse. After the completion of her training and her return to China, they were married in Tientsin in March 1934. It would go on to be a very happy and loving marriage, although there were several long periods when they had to spend time apart. They would go on to have three daughters: Patricia, Heather and Maureen.
1937 would turn out to be a pivotal year in Eric’s life, one in which when he would leave his teaching post and take on the role of a missionary in the Chinese countryside. He believed that education was important work and he doubted his own skills would be up to the task. The London Missionary Society prompted him to consider his situation, such was the need for missionaries in the field, and, after months of prayer and consideration, Eric eventually felt it was God’s will that he take that final step.
It was no small step. China was not a particularly welcoming place for missionaries. Many Chinese resented the influence of foreigners on the government of their own country, and missionaries were seen as the ultimate representation of what was wrong. During the Boxer Rebellion (1899-1901), several hundreds of them were killed, as were thousands of those they converted. From late 1927 China was wracked by civil war between the Nationalists led by Chang Kai-Shek and the Communists led by Mao Tse-dong, and there were plenty of bandits and warlords in the countryside. To cap it all, just after Eric had made his decision, full-scale war broke out, as Japanese military forces invaded China, and many atrocities were committed at that time, such as the notorious Rape of Nanking.
In spite of the chaos, Eric set off to his posting at Siaochang (now Xiaochang), where his father had worked early on in Eric’s life and where his brother Robert was working as a hospital doctor. The two brothers actually travelled together from Tientsin to Siaochang.It was an incredibly difficult journey for them, which highlighted the dangers faced by missionaries. Thwarted in their attempts to get there on train by the Japanese, they travelled by boat, were robbed at gunpoint twice by separate gangs and threatened a third time. Short of food and exhausted, they eventually arrived at their destination
Once they had reached Siaochang, Eric enthusiastically took on his new job as a country missionary. Having been reluctant to make the change, he now found that it really was what he was meant to do in life. Although he was now without his wife and young family, who had not been allowed by the London Missionary Society to accompany him, he was able to throw himself into the regular work of a missionary; leading services, preaching, tending to the spiritual and physical needs of his flock, and training Chinese preachers and converts. He covered a large area, often having to travel many miles to carry out his work, and shared the poverty, privations and troubles of the people he served. His open-hearted nature, compassion and commitment made him much loved and respected, helped by his increasingly proficient Chinese language skills.
Danger was ever-present, and he took many risks to help his community, especially with the presence in the area of Japanese soldiers. Missionaries were viewed by them with great suspicion, and on his travels he was interrogated many times about where he was going and why. He always tried to face down any hostility from them with calmness and a smile. He accepted all the minor humiliations with patience and good grace. He usually won his would-be persecutors over with his dignity, forbearance and cheerfulness.
He showed great courage and took many risks in his travels. The biggest one he probably took was when he was told about a wounded Chinese soldier who had lain 5 days in a derelict temple. Eric persuaded a local man to use his cart and help him take the wounded man to the hospital at Siaochang 20 miles away. Along the way he heard of a second wounded man, the victim of a botched execution who had been left for dead, and he was taken up as well. In spite of heavy Japanese military activity in the area, Eric and the local carter managed to skirt the soldiers and against all odds arrived safely at the hospital. Unfortunately, the first man died of his wounds, but the second managed to survive in spite of his face being heavily scarred. He converted to Christianity, inspired by Eric’s example and bravery.
The mission at Siaochang was closed down by the Japanese in February 1941, so Eric had to return to Tientsin, where he was happily reunited with his family, which then consisted of Florence and the two elder daughters. With the announcement that his wife was pregnant with a third child, the couple took the decision that she and the daughters should return to Canada. Eric was to remain in Tientsin as a missionary, working, as he said, for “my people”. On 7 December 1941, the bombing of Pearl Harbor changed the situation drastically. Japan was now at war with Western powers, and the activities of foreign nationals in China were now heavily restricted. This meant that Eric was no longer able to operate as a missionary for the local Chinese population as before.
Forced to remain inside the ‘foreign concessions’ district, Eric took the opportunity to begin writing what would become “The Disciplines of the Christian Life”, which was originally intended to be for the benefit of Chinese preachers and converts, setting out what he believed every Christian should know and how Christian ways of thinking and living should be developed. It included twelve chapters listing scriptures from the Bible to be studied for every day of each month. It provides a vivid insight into the way he thought about his life as a Christian, one of selfless dedication and growth in the service of God and his fellow human beings.
It was only a matter of time before the Japanese stranglehold over western foreigners got even stronger. In March 1943, Eric and the other missionaries were rounded up and sent to what was essentially a concentration camp for civilians called Weihsien in the Shandong province. The camp was run by the Japanese Consular Service, which meant that the inmates were not to suffer the brutal degradations inflicted on Allied soldiers by the Japanese military in the railway-building camps. This, though, does not mean that the inmates of Weihsein did not suffer deprivations of their own. They were housed in a former American Presbyterian mission station. This was not designed to fit the 1800 inmate population within its small compound. There was very little privacy, poor sanitation and acute shortages of everyday goods. Hunger was a constant factor, with not enough food or variety in the diet to provide anything but the most basic level of sustenance. In this environment, however, Eric proved his real worth.
A passage in Duncan Hamilton’s excellent biography outlines just some of what he did.
“So he took extra turns at pumping water. He cleaned the latrines. He chopped wood and rolled coal balls before taking that fuel to the elderly. He swept floors. He took away garbage. He carted sacks and food supplies and helped out in the kitchen. He played chess to stoke the competitive spirit of those who seemed resigned to giving up as prisoners. He did numerous odd-jobs – shifting furniture, hanging washing lines, completing fiddly repairs. He put up a row of shelves for one of the prostitutes. She said afterwards that Liddell was the only man there to have come into her room without ‘demanding favours’”.
As the inmates were left to organise themselves and their own activities, Eric became the ‘official’ maths and science teacher for the children, and he became an inspirational mentor for many of them. He also organised sports for them to do in the limited space available. Occasionally athletic races were held in the camp, in which Eric took part in and usually won. Given his stance at the Olympics on competing on Sundays, it is instructive that he once refereed an impromptu game of hockey on a Sunday to stop the boys from getting too rowdy. For him, it was a question of the greater good overriding his own scruples. He earned the respect of everyone else in the camp. He would listen to inmates express their feelings of despair, depression and anger, and try to provide what comfort he could to them. He became known as someone who could arbitrate in minor disputes, whose judgement was respected by all.
Although he was almost invariably cheerful, he began to experience problems with his health towards the end of 1944. Like all the other inmates receiving an inadequate diet, he became painfully thin and consequently lost much of his strength, but he had also begun to get severe headaches and suffer memory loss. Increasingly weary and weakened after a bout of influenza, his health deteriorated. At the end of January 1945 he was hospitalised and on 10 February he suffered a partial stroke. In spite of seeming to recover over the next few days, on 21 February 1945 Eric Liddell suffered more convulsive stroke attacks and went into a coma, and died at 9.20pm. At the post mortem it was found that Eric had been suffering from a brain tumour.
Eric Liddell was a truly extraordinary man. In our very cynical age it would difficult not to think that he was just too good to be true. Two of his biographers feared that there would be some shadow on his life, something which might expose him as having feet of clay after all. Fortunately, the truth is that nobody ever had a bad word to say about him, and that he really was as good as he seemed. I have found him to be a truly inspiring figure, one who whose character encompass every word listed here: compassionate, decent, honest, principled, humble, courageous, selfless, faithful, kind, loving and forgiving.
Sources:
Duncan Hamilton, For the Glory (Black Swan: 2017)
John W. Keddie, Finish the Race (Christian Focus Publishing Ltd: 2014)
John W. Keddie, Running the Race (Christian Focus Publishing Ltd: 2020)
Eric Liddell, The Disciplines of the Christian Life (SPCK: 2007)
Sally Magnusson, The Flying Scotsman (The History Press: 2007)
Chariots of Fire, film produced by David Puttnam, directed by Hugh Hudson, released 1981
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