Eric Liddell's Sunday Refusal and Witness

I stood on the cinder track at Edinburgh University with Eric Liddell one afternoon in the spring of 1923, watching him mark his steps for the 100 yards. His spikes dug clean lines into the surface. When he finished the run he came back breathing hard and asked if I had seen the letter from the Glasgow students. He wanted to speak at their meeting even though the idea made him quiet for a long minute afterward.

We trained together through the next winter. He played rugby for Scotland on Saturdays and ran for the university on other days. The papers called him the fastest man in the country. He never mentioned the attention except to say the Lord had given him strong legs and he ought to use them. When the Olympic schedule reached us months before we sailed, he read the dates once and set the paper down. The 100-metre heats fell on a Sunday. He said he would not run.

The team manager came to our lodgings in Paris two days before the heats. Rain had kept us inside most of the morning. Eric listened, nodded, and repeated what he had already told the selectors. He would take the 400 metres instead. Outside the window the pipe band of the 51st Highlanders practised on a patch of grass. Their drums carried through the shutters while the manager argued and then left.

On the morning of the final I found him in the dressing room beneath the stands. A masseur handed him a folded note. Eric opened it, read the verse from Samuel, and folded it again without speaking. He pinned his number higher on his vest than usual so the cloth would not ride up. When the call came he walked out into the warm air with the rest of us.

The outside lane put him at a disadvantage on the first bend. He came off the turn already clear of the field by several metres. No one expected him to hold that lead through the back straight, yet he did. On the final bend the Americans closed. I watched from the straight opposite the finish and saw the gap shrink to nothing inside the last twenty yards. He crossed first. The time board showed 47.6.

After the medal ceremony we returned to the same lodgings. Eric answered the letters that arrived from Scotland and from China. He told anyone who asked that the race had been a gift, not a victory he had earned. Two weeks later he sailed home, finished his degree, and began the ordination process. In 1925 he left for Tianjin.

I saw him once more on his first furlough. He had married by then and spoke of the school where he taught mathematics and science. He still ran when the local meets allowed it, though he no longer kept a stopwatch. When someone asked whether he missed the crowds he answered that a life counted for more in the work he now did. He returned to China before the next Games.

Letters came irregularly after that. In 1941 his wife and daughters reached Canada. He stayed at the mission station farther inland. Japanese forces took the station in 1943 and moved him to Weihsien camp. A man who survived the same barracks later wrote that Eric organised games for the children, taught Bible classes, and settled arguments over food by giving away his own share first.

He died inside the wire on 21 February 1945. The camp doctor recorded the cause as a brain tumour. Five months later the gates opened. One of the boys he had taught carried a small wooden cross made from packing crate slats to the burial ground. The marker carried only his name and the date.