You might have seen the movie "Chariots of Fire", a 1981 Oscar winner based on the true story of a Scottish runner who refused to run on Sunday in the Olympic contests for his religious conviction, but won a gold medal at another race he was given little chance to win anyway...
A heart warming, spirit lifting story, all right. But did you know this Scotsman was born and died in China (therefore considered by some to be the first Olympic champion for China), and what happened to him after he won his Olympic gold, anyway?
Here's a fuller story I gather from a book I recently read, if your curious mind wanted to know.
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Eric Liddell was born in January 1902 in Tientsin (天津), China, a couple years after the Boxer Rebellion (義和團事件) that killed hundreds of foreign missionaries and tens of thousands of Chinese Christians, to missionary parents.
He returned to Scotland at age five with his family, and was put into a boarding school for sons of missionaries in south London, where he and his older brother Rob spent their formative years, before going on to University of Edinburgh.
Liddell's parents only returned twice to visit them on their furloughs from China throughout this period. Their absence didn’t dissuade Liddell from wanting to be exactly like his own father. He later told a friend that he’d decided to become a missionary in China at “eight or nine.”
He went to Bible class and read the scriptures daily. At fifteen, he was confirmed in the Scottish Congregational Church. As World War I drew to an end, he volunteered to work in a medical mission.
Liddell inherited his father's warm personality and possessed "such a big heart" that "there was no shadow of meanness or narrowness" in him. He gained true satisfaction only "when doing something for others."
Liddell also had a gift for preaching. He could connect with individuals in a crowd who felt he was talking directly to them, with plain words and short sentences, to deliver an uncomplicated message, out of his own sincerity and unswerving pursuit of perfection.
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Liddell had been a great athlete in Edinburgh University while studying for his bachelor's degree there. He played in the rugby team and won some record setting awards in running for the school, and was selected to the British Olympic team for the 100-meter race in the Paris Olympiad in 1924.
The debacle of the Sunday scheduling conflict was probably avoidable if the British Olympic Association had paid heed to such scheduling early enough, or had not the arrogance or misbelief that Liddell would eventually yield under pressure from all sides about not running on a Sunday.
But yield he did not, and he competed instead at a non-Sunday-required 400-meter race where two American athletes were favored to win, and beat them with record setting speed to win the gold medal to everyone's surprise!
After the Olympics and his graduation from Edinburgh University, he continued to run and win several sprint and relay races for Britain and Scotland in 1924 and 1925.
Then he went to China.
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Liddell spent his first 12 years in China teaching science and athletics at Anglo-Chinese College (grades 1-12) in Tientsin, his birth place and a relatively safe city in northern China.
He was then assigned to a middle-of-nowhere village in Shandong Province for field ministry that took him and his brother, now a doctor, a winding journey by boat and on foot through two robberies in ten days to get to.
Besides extreme poverty, the village—Siaochang (肖張镇)—was situated in the middle of pre-World War II political and military conflicts between the Chinese Nationalists, the Communists, and the Japanese.
Under constant rumble of gun shots and bomb shells, Liddell went on to work in a thorough and organizationally innovative way. He drew maps of the area and highlighted safe shortcuts that ducked away from known Japanese patrols, and compiled charts and schedules that enabled him to “systematically” visit churches and regularly hold meetings in them.
Space was created in his diary for ordinary house calls, dropping in on parishioners to whom, “he never expounded elaborate theories but suggested the possibility of a way of life that was Bible-based and God-governed,” said one of his co-workers.
He became confidant, comforter, grief counselor, social worker, diplomat, and problem solver in Siaochang. To the Chinese, who looked on him so fondly, he became Li Mu Shi (李牧師): Pastor Liddell. When any decision had to be reached—and especially if it was likely to stir controversy or required mediation, someone would say: “Ask Li Mu Shi what he thinks about it.”
"It was wonderful to feel one with the people... I have more joy and freedom in the work than I have ever experienced before,” said Liddell himself.
For Liddell the Japanese were “not to be feared or hated, but sought as sheep far from the fold,” he said. He followed two self-made rules in his dealings with the Japanese soldiers. The first, he said, was: “Take it all with a smile,” referring to crudely deliberate attempts to rile and intimidate. The second was: “However troublesome, don’t get annoyed.”
He once rescued an injured Chinese soldier and an underground resistance fighter, carrying them both on a makeshift cart, crossing a land field of roaming Japanese soldiers, to the safety of his mission's hospital.
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As the Sino-Japanese conflict became part of the greater World War II, Liddell's mission in Siaochang was dissolved and like many other foreign nationals in China he was ordered into an internment camp in Weihsien (濰縣, now called Weifang, 濰坊) by the Japanese in March 1943.
Liddell became a leader and organizer at the camp. He was seen always doing something for others. He scrabbled for coal, which he carried in metal pails. He chopped wood and toted bulky flour sacks. He cooked in the kitchens. He cleaned and swept. He repaired whatever needed fixing. He taught science to the children and teenagers of the camp and coached them in sports too.
In a crammed, strained community of 2000 people living in 200-by-150-yard confinement, Liddell became the camp's conscience without ever being pious, sanctimonious, or judgmental. 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 “you came away from his meetings as if you’d been given a dose of goodness,” said a member of the camp congregation.
Hidden beneath the optimistic outlook and seemingly inexhaustible energy, however, was Liddell's deteriorating health. Toward the end of 1945, he became fatigued easily, slow in speech, and after a virus infection from a flu, bedridden.
Doctors at the camp, with limited resources and anxious to dispatch everyone except the desperately sick as soon as possible, told him he might just be having a nervous breakdown due to over-work and all he needed was rest and recuperation to recover.
He never did, and died in February 1945, three weeks before the X-ray equipment the hospital ordered that would have diagnosed the real cause of his sickness, a tumor in his brain, arrived. He was 43.
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Liddell met his wife Florence, whose parents were Canadian missionaries to China as well, while teaching at Tientsin. She was one of his students and though Liddell was love stricken by her early on it took him a few years before he deemed it appropriate to court and propose and marry her in 1934.
Florence was as tough and mission minded as Liddell and ready to accompany her husband to Siaochang, only to be forbidden at last minute by the missionary organization.
As the war got more intense and life in China became more dangerous in 1941, at the advice of the British government and the missionary organization, Florence, who was pregnant with their third daughter, and their two other daughters, were sent over to Canada to stay with her family, while Liddell stayed behind.
Toward the end of Liddell's illness, he confided in a dear co-worker, that he regretted not having spent enough time with Florence and their children, including the one he never saw. The decision to go to Siaochang in 1937, leaving her in Tientsin, bothered him enormously now. He had begun to look over and across his life, as if striving to make sense of it, and sometimes went into a dark mood and became uncharacteristically pessimistic and doubtful.
Maureen, his third, never-seen daughter, recalled the "huge rage" about the "monstrous (empty) space" her father left her. At her teens, she quarreled with her mother. “He can’t have loved you,” she’d said to her. “He made you leave China without him. He made you come here with us.”
“I used to ask myself: Was he a deluded Christian? Was he as good as everyone said? Then I’d think: How could he have been? He’d let us leave China. I was so confused.”
But Maureen grew to accept his passing. She believes it was “meant to be”; that somehow his premature death had a wider purpose, which the years have gradually revealed.
She remembers a drizzly morning in 2008. Beside Patricia and Heather, her two elder sisters, she’d stood in front of his rose granite monument in Weifang. Each of them laid flowers and held one another in what her mother used to call the “magic circle” of family. “I felt so close to him and, more than ever, I realized what his life had been for. It all made sense. What happened allowed him to touch so many lives as a consequence.”
“All will be well,” says the note Liddell left beside his deathbed.
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The book this excerpt is based on:
Interview with one of Eric Liddell's daughters:
