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Eric Henry Liddell

(1902-1945)
Olympic athlete and Christian missionary

In May 1992 Mrs Patricia Russell presented to the University the medals won at the 8th Olympic Games in Paris in July 1924 by Eric Henry Liddell (BSc Edin 1924). Eric Liddell was Mrs Russell's father. His feat at the 1924 Olympic Games rang round the world then, and has remained in the public consciousness ever since.

The medals are three: the gold for the 400 metres (in which Liddell broke the Olympic and the world records), the bronze for the 200 metres, and his participant's medal. The medal that ought to have been there also, the gold medal for the 100 metres, was won by the Cambridge sprinter Harold Abrahams. Liddell had made that distance his own. He was looking forward passionately to running it, and the world favoured him to win. However, on discovering that the qualifying heats were to be run on a Sunday, a day which he held sacred, he quietly and composedly withdrew from the event altogether. A week later he ran a sprinter's race to win the middle distance event of the 400 metres, which would never be the same again.

At his graduation later in July 1924 the Principal of the University capped him with a crown of wild olive and the now-famous words: 'Mr Liddell, you have shown that none can pass you but your examiners.' The degree congregation gave him an ovation, and afterwards he was chaired from the University to the High Kirk of St Giles.

His career as a world athlete continued for only a year or two after his graduation. He spent a postgraduate year at the Scottish Congregational College in Edinburgh, and then returned to the London Missionary Society's mission in China, where his parents had been worked and where he had been born, and died of typhoid fever in a Japanese internment camp in 1945.

In the film "Chariots of Fire" (1981) which told the story of Eric Liddell and the Olympic Games, the part of Liddell was played by another Edinburgh graduate, (sadly now the late) Ian Charleson. A third Edinburgh graduate, Sally Magnusson, wrote the biographical account "The Flying Scotsman" (London: Quartet, 1981) which was inspired by the film. The medals are normally held in the Main Library Strong Room among the Library's Special Collections, but are currently on display in Old College. The Library also holds original annotated University athletics programmes which attest to the reductions of Eric Liddell's times over the distances in the events in which he participated at the Olympiad.