Eric Henry Liddell (1902-1945)

Alumnus, Missonary and Athlete

Liddell was born in 1902, in Tientsin, north China, the second son of the Rev. and Mrs. James Dunlop Liddell, who were Scottish missionaries with the London Missionary Society. Schooled in China until the age of five and then at Eltham College, he matriculted at the University of Edinburgh in 1920, graduating BSc in Pure Science four years later, after attending classess both at Edinburgh and Heriot Watt.

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 May 1992 Mrs Patricia Russell (Liddell's daughter) presented to the University the medals won at the 8th Olympic Games in Paris in July 1924.

First Matriculation record for Eric Henry Liddell

Photograph of the Relay Team, 1922, including Eric Liddell

Photograph of the Inter-University Champions, 1923-24, including Eric Liddell

Eric Liddell's Olympic Medals

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All or some of the text on this page originally appeared in the Gallery of Benefactors