Last summer we heard a lot about Eric Liddell’s 400-metre gold medal victory 100 years earlier at the 1924 Paris Olympics, and the brave stand he made in refusing to run on the Lord’s Day. Less is known about the rest of his life, and this article aims to plug the gap.
When Eric won that medal he was 22 years old. No one then would have guessed that he had already lived more than half his life. He died of a brain tumour at the young age of 43 in February 1945. But his short life was devoted to the Lord’s service. He became a missionary to China with the London Missionary Society, and it was there that he died.
At his funeral a senior missionary colleague said this about Eric: ‘His was a God-controlled life, and he followed his Master and Lord with a devotion that never flagged and with an intensity of purpose that made men see both the reality and power of true religion.’
Early life
Eric’s parents had also been missionaries to China, and that’s where he was born. The family lived in Tianjin until Eric was 10 months old, when they moved to Xiaochang in the province of Hubei. That became Eric’s home until he was five years old, when the family returned to Scotland for a year’s furlough.
