The last days of Eric Liddell

The most quoted line in the film Chariots of Fire comes from a conversation that never happened, between Eric Liddell and his sister, Jenny. Fictional Jenny has fictional concerns about how Liddell’s running conflicted with his spiritual priorities as a preacher and missionary in training. Liddell reassures her that he still believes “God made me for a purpose — for China.” But he adds, famously, that God “also made me fast. And when I run, I feel His pleasure.”

This line is mostly replayed in a powerful callback over the climactic race, except that the phrase “for China” has been clipped out. It would throw off the pacing in the urgent drive towards “He also made me fast.” All eyes are on the most filmic moment of Eric Liddell’s remarkable life, a spectacular upset victory after giving up his strongest event — the sprint — to honour his strict sabbatarian convictions. The film ends there, yet a whole other film could be devoted to the life Liddell lived after the games, after the glory, in the harsh land he believed God had made him to serve.

Last summer marked the 100th anniversary of Liddell’s iconic Olympic victory. This February marks the 80th anniversary of his obscure death in a Japanese internment camp. He was captured in 1943, along with other missionaries forced to remain in dangerous territory by the disastrously incompetent London Missionary Society. Understanding what his employers did not, Liddell had sent his wife and children to Canada in 1941. They never saw each other again. We have his Olympic gold medal today only because his wife packed it away, sparing it from being seized and melted down.

Liddell was a fixed point in the chaos — offering a sympathetic ear, settling spats and quietly shouldering jobs

After that medal, the young Scottish star could have picked out a career from a limitless buffet of options spreading itself before him. He could have written a book, become a columnist, become a business figurehead. He had his pick of university posts in Scotland or England. Cambridge connections offered to pull golden strings for him, though they knew him well enough to know he’d laugh them off. He could have spent his weekdays mingling at functions and soirees, or training the next generation of young athletes, and his Sundays preaching in King’s College Chapel. All of this and more, he told people he had given up for a purpose — for China.

Liddell started his missionary work as a feted member of Tientsin’s high Christian society. There he became a sought-after guest preacher, met and courted his future wife, and began raising their two daughters. But he was called to follow in his father’s footsteps and minister in the brutal outback of Siaochang, where bodies were a more common roadside sight than flowers, and the only fame attending Liddell was the high honor of being Reverend James Liddell’s son. His Chinese peasant flock lacked even the concept of Olympic Games or medals. To them, he was simply Li Mu Shi: Pastor Liddell.

Through the years of his internment, Liddell’s fellow prisoners would remember him as a man who steadily maintained order and good cheer even as others succumbed to greed, panic, and petty squabbles. The American theologian Langdon Gilkey, in his book Shantung Compound, recalls the place as a kind of grim international social experiment, where nuns and missionaries and businessmen were forced to coexist with thieves, addicts, and prostitutes. Liddell appears in the memoir thinly veiled as “Eric Ridley,” intently focused on organising games and activities for the camp’s restless young people. He even allowed them to play on Sundays, though only after the midday meal. 

In this and numerous other ways, Liddell became a fixed point in the squalor and the chaos — offering a sympathetic ear, settling spats, quietly shouldering odd jobs and menial tasks. One prostitute later recalled how he built a row of shelves for her, the only man to have entered her room without “demanding favours.” Meanwhile, he became “Uncle Eric” to the camp’s schoolchildren, handwriting and binding them their own chemistry textbook. On the dedication page, he wrote, “The bones of inorganic chemistry. Can these dry bones live?”

Liddell entered the camp aged 41, almost two decades past his Paris victory. When a fellow internee awkwardly asked him on his arrival, “Do you do any running still?” he modestly answered that he was “a little past it.” Even still, he was formidable, comfortably out-dashing fit young men half his age in the camp’s makeshift races on “Sports Days.” Liddell still had his old running shoes, now doing double duty as ordinary shoes sans spikes. Later, when he was dying, he would pass them on to one of the young runners.

With no X-ray machine, the cancer in Liddell’s brain went undetected until it was too late. But it became clear that something was wrong, especially when he lost his last race to the camp’s top young gun. In later life, the young man didn’t count this as a victory worth mentioning. For Liddell, that day marked the beginning of the end, though he stoically persisted in the hope that he was going to beat it, whatever “it” was. Yet, day by day, he lost a little more of himself. He measured his memory loss by his deteriorating ability to recall Sydney Carton’s final monologue in A Tale of Two Cities, a passage he’d once been able to reel off flawlessly. His athletic grace was slipping away too. Eventually, he was too unbalanced to walk, let alone run.

He continued to put on a brave show for most of the camp, but he “didn’t have to pretend” with his friend and fellow Scottish missionary Annie Buchan. To her, he openly grieved the lost time with his wife and children, confessing that everything seemed “black” as he thought about the future. Camp doctors maintained his problems were psychosomatic, and he was having a nervous breakdown from “over-work.” But he didn’t believe Christians should have nervous breakdowns. Whatever was killing him, he knew he was powerless to stop it. His melancholy only intensified as letters from his wife belatedly trickled through. 

One of the camp’s young people witnessed his first stroke, which fell upon him as he was doing a devotional study with her, in the middle of the word “surrender.” A second stroke followed not long after. Buchan was there to record his last words: “It’s complete surrender.”

He was buried on a day of stinging wind, wispy snowflakes, and weak sunlight barely slipping through low, black clouds. A pick-axe was required to hack through the frozen topsoil of his grave. As they shuffled forward in half-paces, the pallbearers feared that his roughly assembled wood coffin might come apart on their shoulders. Steve Metcalf, the boy who inherited Liddell’s running shoes, was among them, each detail of the day etching itself indelibly in memory. The pianist playing “I Know That My Redeemer Liveth.” The congregation singing Liddell’s favourite hymn, “Be Still My Soul.” The sound of a distant train rattling and clattering as the mourners bowed their heads and wept. The crude wooden cross laid over the grave, with the name scrawled across it in boot polish.

The camp was liberated six months later. Metcalf explored the countryside in a fresh pair of boots, coming and going as he pleased. One day, he visited the cemetery and found the little cross askew, the plot overgrown with weeds. Again, the question stabbed at him: Was this all? Was this the best the world could offer Eric Liddell?

The grave would disappear into the landscape until its rediscovery in 1989, by Scottish civil engineer and historian Charles Walker. With help from one of the gravediggers, Walker traveled to the school where the camp once stood. There, over four decades later, he pinpointed the great man’s resting place. A memorial stone was subsequently transplanted to the site from Edinburgh University, where it marks the spot still.

Sifting through his belongings, Liddell’s wife found his last bit of handwriting, a jumbled attempt to recall the verses of “Abide With Me” and “Be Still My Soul.” The words are like a child’s scrawl on the page, barely legible or understandable. But one line stands out clearly, written slant across the corner: “All will be well.”