FAMOUS ATHLETE, ERIC LIDDELL, DIES IN JAP INTERNMENT CAMP

Bay of Plenty Beacon, Volume 12, Issue 25, 27 February 1948, Page 3

FAMOUS ATHLETE, ERIC LIDDELL, DIES IN JAP INTERNMENT CAMP

(Contributed by the Ministers’ Association) In May 1945 there came news of the death in a Japanese internment camp at Weihsien of a missionary named Eric Liddell. This man who died there at the age of 43 was the most famous and best-loved athlete Scotland has ever produced—a great international football threequarter, and a supreme runner—the holder of the present world record of the 100 yards (in 9.7 seconds) and the 400 metres (in 47.6 seconds), For the last 20 years of his life he worked as a missionary teacher at Teinlsin in China —doing a missionary work of great value.' Here, however, I wish to tell rather of Eric Liddell’s young manhood—the days when he won his fame as an athlete of the first rank, and a Christian whose qualities of character were purest gold. Teintsin, the city -in which, his work as a missionary was done, was the city where he had been born in 1902. His parents were missionaries from Scotland. When Eric Liddell was seven years old they took him and his elder brothers back home and left them at school for the sons of missionaries near London —Eltham College. For twelve years he was at school there, and before he was fifteen he was playing in the first XI and first XV. Before he left school he was senior prefect, captain of both teams, and the outstanding runner. The headmaster of the school described him then as being entirely without vanity and enormously popular. “Very early he showed signs of real character. His standards had been set for him long before he came to school. There was no pride or fuss about him, but he knew what he stood for.” In the student magazine he was described in 1923 like this: “Ninetynine men gifted with Eric’s prowess would now be insufferably swollenheaded, but here we have the hundredth man. Here is a man .who hates praise, and shuns publicity, yet is deserving of both. Here is a

man with a mind of his own, and not afraid to voice his most sacred feelings on a platform if, by so doing, he thinks he will help his fellows. Here is a man who has courand delights to accept a challenge be it for the sake of his school his ‘varsity, his country, or his God.’ And lastly, here is a man who wins because he sets his teeth, quietly but firmly and always plays the game. Everyone is fond and proud of Eric.” Nine months before this Eric Lid del had accepted a challenge to serve God in an active and public way. It was a spiritual decision which made him a stronger and bigger man in every way.

Liddell was training for the 100 metres —his great distance; but soon it became known that the heats of the 100 were to be run on a Sunday. When he heard of the arrangement he said quietly but firmly, “I’m not running.” There was no changing his decision; he stood firm for his conviction on the right use of Sunday. But what he did was to train for another race, the 400 metres, which he won in the world’s record time. A paper at the time said of him—“ This is the crowning distinction of Liddell’s great career on the track, and no more modest or unaffected world champion could stq dn *i!nq seq ipppvi aq career by hard work and perseverance, and although hardly a beautiful runner he has even triumphed over his defects.”

That was in 1923. After news of his death in the Japanese internment camp came through two years ago, the man who had been his captain at the Olympic Games said of him—“ Eric Liddell was a man whose intense spiritual conviction contributed largely to his athletic triumphs. While his ability must have been great, but for his profound intensity of spirit he surely could not have achieved so much.”