For the Glory: The Untold and Inspiring Story of Eric Liddell, Hero of Chariots of Fire

by Duncan Hamilton

Overview

“Hamilton is a guarantee of quality.” —Financial Times

“Duncan Hamilton’s compelling biography puts flesh on the legend and paints a vivid picture of not only a great athlete, but also a very special human being.” —Daily Mail

The untold and inspiring story of Eric Liddell, hero of Chariots of Fire, from his Olympic medal to his missionary work in China to his last, brave years in a Japanese work camp during WWII

Many people will remember Eric Liddell as the Olympic gold medalist from the Academy Award winning film Chariots of Fire. Famously, Liddell would not run on Sunday because of his strict observance of the Christian sabbath, and so he did not compete in his signature event, the 100 meters, at the 1924 Paris Olympics. He was the greatest sprinter in the world at the time, and his choice not to run was ridiculed by the British Olympic committee, his fellow athletes, and most of the world press. Yet Liddell triumphed in a new event, winning the 400 meters in Paris.

Liddell ran—and lived—for the glory of his God. After winning gold, he dedicated himself to missionary work. He travelled to China to work in a local school and as a missionary. He married and had children there. By the time he could see war on the horizon, Liddell put Florence, his pregnant wife, and children on a boat to Canada, while he stayed behind, his conscience compelling him to stay among the Chinese. He and thousands of other westerners were eventually interned at a Japanese work camp.

Once imprisoned, Liddell did what he was born to do, practice his faith and his sport. He became the moral center of an unbearable world. He was the hardest worker in the camp, he counseled many of the other prisoners, he gave up his own meager portion of meals many days, and he organized games for the children there. He even raced again. For his ailing, malnourished body, it was all too much. Liddell died of a brain tumor just before the end of the war. His passing was mourned around the world, and his story still inspires.

In the spirit of The Boys in the Boat and Unbroken, For the Glory is both a compelling narrative of athletic hero'sm and a gripping story of faith in the darkest circumstances.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780143110187
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	05/09/2017
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	400
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.30(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Duncan Hamilton is an award-winning sportswriter and author who has twice won the foremost sports writing prize in the UK (the William Hill) and been nominated an additional three times. He is the author of several books.

Read an Excerpt

Prologue
The Last Race of the Champion
Weihsien, Shandong Province, China, 1944

He is crouching on the start line, which has been scratched out with a stick across the parched earth. 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 feet 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. Afterward, 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. 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. 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 gray canvas “spikes,” almost identical to those he’d used during the Olympics. As surreal as it seems, “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; a prisoner wistfully calls each of them “a speck of glitter amid the dull monotony.”

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 sixty thousand 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 three 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. Weight fell off everyone. Some lost 15 pounds or more, including Liddell. He dropped from 160 pounds to around 130. Others, noticeably corpulent on entering Weihsien, shed over 80 pounds 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. So 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 labors until curfew at ten 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 sports 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 fornot working hard enough.

The internees are so accustomed to his industriousness that no one pays much attention to it anymore; 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 went and whatever he did or had once done was brightly illuminated. The son of Scots missionaries who was 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 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.

Liddell makes only one concession. Previously he has been scrupulously fair about leveling 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 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 onto 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.

Weifang, Shandong Province, China
Present Day

He is waiting for me at the main gate on Guang-Wen Street. 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 a high widow’s peak. 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 onto a big square of metal. It is attached to an iron pole as tall as a lamppost. This is a 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 flatbed truck. He saw nothing but a huge checkerboard 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 three hundred 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. When Liddell arrived in 1943, the locals, living as though time had stopped a century before, parked handheld barrows on whichever pitch suited them and bartered over homegrown vegetables, bolts of cloth, and tin pots and plates. Today’s traders, setting up canvas stalls, sell ironmongery and replica sports shirts, framed watercolors and tapestries, electrical gadgetry and a miscellany of ornamental kitsch. At one end of GuangWen Street is an office high-rise with tinted windows. At the other is the People’s Hospital, its façade whiter than a doctor’s lab 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 that 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 a 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 Chinese peasant’s hats.

The Japanese called it a Civilian Assembly Center, a euphemism offering the flimsiest camouflage to the harsh truth. A United Nations of men, women, and children were prisoners alongside Liddell rather than comfy guests of 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 there 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 coexisted 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. 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 chiseled 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 six feet deep, came next.

A man’s labor 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 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, the camp was filthy and unsanitary, 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 meager portions at mealtimes and also the question of who was in front of whom in the line 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.” He played chess with them. He built model boats for them. He fizzed with ideas, also arranging entertainments and sports, particularly softball and baseball, which were staged on a miniature diamond bare of grass.

Skeptical questions are always going to be asked when someone is portrayed without apparent faults and also as the possessor of standards thatappear so idealized and far-fetched to the rest of us. Liddell can sound too virtuous and too honorable 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 ever recall a single act of envy, pettiness, hubris, or selfaggrandizement 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 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 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 a member of the camp congregation. “Everyone regarded him as a friend,” said another, giving voice to that unanimous verdict. Someone else nonetheless saw an enigmatic side to him amid all this subjugation of the self. 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. 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. He came as close to it as anyone I have ever known.”

In his own way he proved that hero'sm in war exists beyond churned-up battlefields. His hero'sm was to be utterly forgiving in the most unforgiving of circumstances

Table of Contents

Prologue: The Last Race of the Champion 1

Part 1 Faster

1 How to Become a Great Athlete 19

2 A Cup of Strong Tea, Please 45

3 Coming to the Crossroads 67

4 I Wonder If I'm Doing the Right Thing? 78

5 Dancing the Tango along the Champs-Élysées 90

6 Not for Sale at Any Price 112

Part 2 Higher

7 Good-Bye to All That 129

8 There Are No Foreign Lands 143

9 "Will Ye No Come Back Again?" 158

10 There's Something I Want to Talk to You About 174

11 Everywhere the Crows are Black 194

12 The Sharpest Edge of the Sword 212

Part 3 Stronger

13 The Man Who Isn't There 237

14 No More Happy Birthdays 252

15 You Can Run … But You Won't Catch Us, Old Man 274

16 Call To Me All My Sad Captains 304

Epilogue: What Will Survive of Us Is Love 338

Acknowledgments 353

Notes 359

Author's Sources 377

Index 381