History Book: The greatest race

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NICK EICHER, HOST: Today is Monday, June 30th. Good morning! This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Nick Eicher.

JENNY ROUGH, HOST: And I’m Jenny Rough. Last July we marked the hundredth anniversary of Eric Liddell’s gold medal performance in the 1924 Olympic Summer Games. This remarkable moment was memorialized in the Oscar-winning film Chariots of Fire.

EICHER: Today we revisit his remarkable life to mark another centennial: this one not on the track, but on the mission field. In 1925, Eric Liddell left behind athletic fame and set off for China as a missionary. He would serve there faithfully until his death in 1945.

Here is WORLD’s Paul Butler.

PAUL BUTLER: On June 29th, 1925, Eric Liddell was heading back to China. He’d been born there, the son of missionaries. But left the country for boarding school at age six. Eric spent nearly all his youth separated from his parents, seeing them only occasionally when they’d return home on furlough.

Liddell loved athletics and made a name for himself on the rugby field and the track. He was fast, one of Scotland’s fastest. He earned a spot on the 1924 Olympic team where he won a gold medal…in an event that was not his best as he refused to run his preferred race on a Sunday.

About a year earlier, Liddell had quietly prayed—telling God that he wanted to serve him…but lacked a clear idea of how…or where. He became a “Christian campaigner”—or travelling evangelist—and his athletic reputation was good for drawing a crowd.

After the Olympic Games he continued speaking but started to contemplate returning to China…as a teacher.

PATRICIA RUSSELL: He went with the London Missionary Society …on a four year contract, I guess, to teach science and mathematics.

Patricia Russell is Eric Liddell’s eldest daughter.

RUSSELL: It was sort of to see if he was a good person to be a missionary. I mean, everybody's not missionary stuff…

It turned out that Eric Liddell was “missionary stuff.” An excellent teacher, and preacher…still using athletics for outreach.

RUSSELL: And then at the end of six years, he went back to Edinburgh on furlough, and … he became the Reverend Eric Liddell, and …when that was finished, he went back as a missionary.

Liddell married another missionary and they served together in Northern China. They lived in the city of Tientsin, with Eric making frequent trips into the countryside for weeks at a time. They enjoyed life in the city and soon had expanded their family with the arrival of two daughters.

Then, war broke out between China and Japan in 1937:

NEWSREEL: Shanghai has fallen to Japan…

As the war dragged on, the Liddells returned home for furlough and struggled with what to do next. Eric decided to send his pregnant wife and children to Canada while he returned to China where things progressively got worse. He and his brother Rob worked in a missionary hospital in the rural countryside.

In 1943 the Japanese took over the mission station. Liddell was sent back to Tientsin and placed under house arrest. Eventually he was interned at the Weihsien Internment Camp—joining many other missionaries, businessmen, and other expats…1800 in total.

The former Olympian, science teacher, and evangelistic campaigner soon jumped into a new role: helping with the children…

92 year old John Hoyt was one of those kids:

JOHN HOYT: We kids loved him very much because he was so involved with us and with our activities, sports activities in particular.

He was committed to redeeming the time. … He was always keeping people's morale up and particularly with the kids because we were basically orphans. We didn't have our mums and dads with us.

Eric Liddell had had the world on a string after his 1924 gold medal victory…yet he offered a simple prayer asking God to use him…

Liddell’s daughter Patricia takes great comfort in knowing how God answered that prayer…

RUSSELL: Why wasn't he with us? Why wasn't he there? And then you hear their story and how he helped them and made such a difference to them. He was there for those children that had nobody. He was supposed to be there.

So many of his various life experiences suddenly came into focus in the cramped Japanese prisoner camp.

John Hoyt once again.

HOYT: He was always very modest about his gold medal. He really didn't want to push that. … I mean, it was by the grace of God he did what he did… but it didn't affect his spiritual life. His commitment to Christ and commitment basically to others, to a life of serving.

Life in the camp was hard, though not unbearable like the military prisoner of war camps to the south. But death was common—from exposure, illness, and malnutrition. In the winter of 1944 Eric Liddell got sick. Very sick. He succumbed to his illness on February 21st, 1945.

HOYT: It affected everyone because people loved him and just was amazed at his life and his modesty about what he had done in his athletics and his commitment for the people... But I think the whole camp mourned for him when he died because he had left such a mark.

Patricia Russell still remembers the day she learned of her father’s death.

RUSSELL: I was in grade four. I was nine, nearly 10, and we'd had a race, and I came first and I thought Daddy will be so pleased with me… So I came rushing home, and that's where my grandmother lived. … and I came in, I thought, gee, the house is quiet. There are people there…and there was mother sitting on the edge of the bed and Maureen and Heather weeping. What? They said: “Daddy's died.” Yeah, all these years, 80 years since then, but you know, for my mother, that was terrible.

When asked how he would sum up Eric Liddell’s life, John Hoyt returns to one of his favorite scenes from Chariots of Fire…

MOVIE CLIP: I feel God’s pleasure when I run…

HOYT: And I think that was sort of the way he lived—to feel God's pleasure in all that he did. And so the running was sort of incidental in a way... It was more to live for God's pleasure and show Christ's love to other people.

Eric Liddell was buried in the garden behind a Japanese officers’ quarters. A small wooden cross marked his grave. In 1991 the University of Edinburgh erected a memorial headstone at the former site of the internment camp. The inscription reads from Isaiah: “They shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run and
not be weary.”

That’s this week’s WORLD History Book. I’m Paul Butler.

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