Men on a mission

Eric Liddell became an international star at the 1924 Paris Olympics. He famously won the 400m gold medal (and bronze in the 200m) after refusing to compete in his best event – the 100m – because he was a committed Christian and felt it would be wrong to run in the heats on a Sunday.

By the 1930s, however, Liddell had taken a step back from athletics to become a missionary in China. Like Dr Graham, he was an in-demand speaker who gave talks and sermons around the world.

Ordinarily, both Liddell and Dr Graham would have been far away at their mission stations in China and India – not in wintry Scotland! But in 1931, it just so happened that they were both on extended leave at the same time.

Dr Graham had temporarily left his beloved Kalimpong to serve for a year as Moderator of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland. Liddell had returned home to train for the ministry.

“My purpose in coming home is to take a 12 months’ course of special study at Moray House Training College, and at the Scottish Congregational College, Edinburgh,” he told a reporter from the Scotsman newspaper in early November that year. “This study will keep me fully occupied from Monday till Friday, and I find that already all my weekends up to the end of the year are booked for me for speaking engagements… I am only free from my work in China for a year, and this period will leave me no time, I fear, for athletic engagements.”

Two extraordinary lives

History doesn’t record the conversation between Liddell and Dr Graham at the event (at least, we haven’t been able to find one – do contact us if you know otherwise!). But they certainly had common grounds for friendship: both were celebrated teachers, preachers and missionaries, with a lifelong passion for young people. Not to mention that they were both proud Scots.

Liddell and Graham returned to their respective mission stations in the early 1930s. While Dr Graham served in Kalimpong up until his death in 1942, Liddell would go on to dedicate the rest of his life to China. He ultimately died there in 1945, while imprisoned in a Japanese internment camp during World War II.

A fellow prisoner who survived the camp described his memories of Liddell in this way: “Often in an evening I would see him bent over a chessboard or a model boat, or directing some sort of square dance – absorbed, weary and interested, pouring all of himself into this effort to capture the imagination of these penned-up youths. “He was overflowing with good humour and love for life, and with enthusiasm and charm. It is rare indeed that a person has the good fortune to meet a saint, but he came as close to it as anyone I have ever known.”

Something tells us Dr Graham and Liddell would have got on well…