One late night sometime in the early 1980s, I was standing with a young lady, with whom, to use an archaic expression, I was “walking out”, on a platform in Edinburgh’s Waverley Station. I can’t really remember the occasion, or whether we were coming or going, but I remember glancing across to the platform from which the London sleeper was about to depart, and seeing Eric Liddell bid somebody farewell, and board the train. Perhaps he was going down to the White City to take part in the 100 yard dash. To be clear, it wasn’t really Eric Liddell; it was Ian Charleson, who played the Scottish athlete in the 1981 film Chariots of Fire. Who does not recognise Vangelis’ music to the opening credits of that film, against the backdrop of athletes in training running along the sands of St Andrews? Nigel Havers is mud-bespattered, and looks as if he is enjoying himself. The scene is supposed to be set in Broadstairs, Kent, but everybody recognises the view from St Andrews’ Old Course. I once met an athlete who had been a film extra on that set, running along the beach, and taking part in subsequent scenes. He told me that Ben Cross, who played Harold Abrahams, had natural athletic ability, but not Ian Charleson. Still, Eric Liddell was not a pretty runner, but, with his arms flapping and his head held back, he could achieve extraordinary speeds.
Eric Liddell featured yesterday in BBC Radio 4’s Sunday Worship, on the last day of the 2024 Olympic Games in Paris. The programme came from Liddell’s old church at “Holy Corner” in Morningside. Of course he was famous for his appearance in the Paris Olympics a century ago in 1924, when, as a devout Christian, he refused to run in the sprint, because the heats were to take place on a Sunday. He switched to the 400 metres, which he went on to win. The 100 metres was won by Harold Abrahams. The story in Chariots of Fire is built round the progress of these two athletes towards their respective Olympic finals. Liddell had to resist pressure from the British establishment, including Lord Birkenhead, and no less a figure than the Prince of Wales, the man who was to succeed to the throne, as Edward VIII, in 1936. Abrahams had to endure anti-Semitic barbs from his masters at Cambridge, who disapproved of his thoroughly modern, scientific approach to sport. Of course they thought his coach, Sam Mussabini, was common as muck. “Your approach, Mr Abrahams, is altogether too plebeian.” And before his final, the Prince of Wales said to him, “Do your best, Abrahams. It’s all we can expect.” At least, so the film has it.
Back on the Waverley platform, I think I amused my old friend by hamming up my Scottish accent and quoting from the film: “Of course we’ll go to China. But Jenny, I’m fast, and when I run, I feel God’s pleasure.” She also rather liked my rendition of a line from a film of similar vintage, the cold war drama The Tamarind Seed, in which Omar Sharif said to Julie Andrews, “Group Captain Patterson, was he a good lover? Did he please you?” Forgive these idle reminiscences.
Sunday Worship concentrated rather more on Liddell’s subsequent career than on the 1912 Olympics. He did indeed go to China, to become a missionary. But then the Japanese invaded China, and Liddell found himself in an internment camp. His ability, and devotion, to help people in the direst of circumstances, reminds me of Viktor Frankl’s descriptions, in Man’s Search for Meaning, of people in Auschwitz who were able and willing to give fellow prisoners their last piece of bread.
I have a notion that Liddell’s positive effect on people continues on down the ages. In a remote part of New Zealand, I once did a weekend locum for a doctor who had been born in China during the war, born, in fact, in that same internment camp, and who as a child had sat on Eric Liddell’s knee. And there is another New Zealand connection. In the famous, perhaps infamous, 1936 Berlin Olympics, the great New Zealand middle distance runner Jack Lovelock won the 1500 metres, in a race which is still considered by some to be one of the most perfect ever to be executed. Lovelock was a deeply mysterious character, an Oxford student and insomniac who would run through the town, past the beautiful spires, by night. Subsequently a doctor, an orthopaedic surgeon, practising in New York, he tragically fell to his death under a train in the New York underground. His story is beautifully retold in two books by the New Zealand writer James McNeish, The Man from Nowhere, and Lovelock. His connection with the 1912 Olympics? For Lovelock’s great 1936 race, the radio commentator for the BBC was Harold Abrahams.
Anyway, we’ll always have Paris. The Olympic torch is on its way to L.A., by motorbike, courtesy of Tom Cruise. I didn’t watch the closing ceremony, tuning in instead to the BBC London Prom, in which Daniel Barenboim conducted the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra. While young Jews and Arabs sit together in the Royal Albert Hall to play Brahms and Schubert, US warships are full steam ahead to the eastern Mediterranean. The world is on full alert. I wonder what Eric Liddell would have made of the world today. I suppose he would have kept calm, and carried on. In his internment camp, there was a kid running around in bare feet, in the deep mid-winter. So Eric gave him his running shoes.
jamescalumcampbell 