“Well, the Chinese don’t have much idea about group sports,” Dr. Hart explained, “so they had no idea whatsoever about sportsmanship. If one team knew it did not have a chance of winning against the other team, it would refuse to play. If there were a few drops of rain, the boys would run for cover as if they were about to melt, or if one player got hurt accidentally, his whole team would take it personally and walk off the field. The referees had a terrible job trying to get either side to obey the rules, and to top it all off, the boys would not wear sports gear.”
“What did they wear?” asked Eric.
“Just what they wore everywhere else, their blue robes. The robes came down to the ground, and the boys were forever tripping over them.”
“Do they still dress like that?” Eric inquired.
“Unfortunately, they do,” replied Dr. Hart. “We still have a long way to go when it comes to sports.”
Eric nodded. Dr. Lavington Hart reminded him very much of his old principal at Eltham College. For both of them, how a boy played sports had a lot to do with how he would play the game of life.
Dr. Hart then showed Eric the classroom he would be teaching in. There Eric got some good news and some bad news. The good news was that he would be able to teach all his classes in English, even though all his students would be Chinese. The bad news was that he would also be teaching several English language classes as well as chemistry. English was Eric’s least favorite subject, and the thought of teaching Chinese students English grammar and Shakespeare’s plays did not thrill him at all. However, he reminded himself he shouldn’t worry too much about it. After all, it wasn’t even certain whether he would have any students to teach when the new school year started. The strike was still going strong. Eric would just have to wait and see how things worked out.
Chapter 8
The Flying Scotsman
The remainder of the summer vacation sped by, and soon the school year was about to begin. As starting day approached, the reality of his new responsibilities struck Eric. He had always enjoyed being with children, talking to groups of children in school assemblies, playing games of rugby on a Saturday afternoon with neighborhood boys, even having tea with the founder of his fan club. But being a teacher was quite another matter. Eric began to wonder whether he would be able to control a classroom full of boys. He knew the boys’ parents were sending their sons to the Anglo-Chinese college to get the best education available in China. Could he give it to them? He hoped so.
On the first morning of school, Eric arrived before the other teachers and had to wait outside until the doors were unlocked. As he waited, other teachers began to arrive. Once they were finally let into the building, Eric nervously waited with the other teachers to see whether any students would ignore the strike and show up for school. Slowly, a trickle of boys began to arrive. A few of them walked to school, but most came in Cadillacs, Rolls Royces, and Daimlers driven by chauffeurs. All of the boys wore the same uniform, a navy blue Chinese robe that hung all the way to the floor. Eric smiled when he thought of the boys playing tennis or soccer in such an outfit. Finally, by 9:00 a.m. one hundred fifty students had shown up. Even though it was well short of the four hundred boys regularly enrolled, Dr. Hart rang the bell, and the teachers and students filed into the chapel for devotions.
It all reminded Eric of his days at Eltham College. The teachers sat in the front rows, while the boys sat in rows behind them according to class level. First they sang two hymns, and then Dr. Hart gave a short talk from the Bible. For many of the new boys, it was the first time they had heard anything about Christianity. The boys listened politely. The talk was followed by two more hymns, and then the service was over.
After the service, Eric was introduced to a group of twenty boys for whom he would be “house-father.” This meant that he would be the teacher they came to if they had problems inside or outside of school. The same group of boys would stay with him for the four years they were at the school.
Over the next week, most of the other striking students returned to school, and things got back to “normal.” With the return of all the students, the group of boys to whom Eric was housefather grew from twenty to thirty-eight.
Eric soon discovered that his fears about teaching had been unfounded. It was easy for him to control and teach his classes. Indeed, he looked forward to each day at school. He quickly became the most popular speaker at the morning chapel service. Many of his talks were based upon things the boys did or saw every day at school.
Just as in Scotland, Eric had the knack for making his talks simple yet interesting. One day, for example, Eric explained the origins of the English word sincere. He told the boys that it was made up of two words, “sine,” meaning without, and “cere,” meaning wax. He explained that in the past when a sculptor made a statue, he would sign the bottom of it and add the phrase “Sine cere.” In doing so, he was guaranteeing that the work he did on the sculpture had no mistakes that had been covered over with wax to disguise them. Eric told the boys that living the Christian life meant that they did not cover up their character weaknesses and mistakes but instead lived sincere lives. This message must have impressed at least one of the students, because years later, when Eric was in Scotland on furlough, one of his former students wrote him a letter that ended with the words, “Yours without wax.”
Eric began a weekly after-school Bible study for the boys he was housefather to. Instead of having them meet at school, he invited all the boys back to the Liddell house so that they could get to know his family and enjoy the special snacks his mother made for them. While only three of the boys in his group came from Christian homes, seventeen signed up to attend the Bible study group. (Some boys lived too far away to attend the group after school.)
In the privacy of Eric’s study, which was in the attic room next to his bedroom, many of the boys began to ask serious questions about Christianity. When word finally got around the school that Eric was an Olympic gold medalist, the boys began asking even more questions. Why would a person who had so much “honor” at home come to a foreign country to teach chemistry?
After several months of Bible study, some of the boys came to Eric and asked if they could be baptized. When Eric had satisfied himself that they knew what they were doing, he visited each of their parents to explain the situation. Eric had expected them to be angry that their sons would want to join the Christian religion. Instead, their responses surprised him. At each home, Eric heard the same answer. The parents told Eric that their sons were so much happier and better behaved since they had been going to his Bible study that they wanted them to become Christians. Eric arranged with a local church to hold a baptismal service.
If Eric’s Bible study group was going very well, his athletic training at school was not. In fact, he was very frustrated with the boys when it came to sports. He announced one day that he would start teaching them how to play rugby during P.E., but it turned out to be a disaster. Eric dressed in his normal sports gear, white shorts and a tee shirt. But when he walked out onto the sports field, the boys all burst out laughing. They had never seen a white man’s knees before! Eric groaned. It seemed ridiculous to even attempt teaching rugby to a group of boys all dressed in robes, but he had little choice.
Things didn’t go well from the start. The boys complained bitterly, and privately Eric had to agree with them. The ground they played on was open, and the wind seemed to howl across it, whipping the fine sandy topsoil up into the eyes and mouths of the boys. When the wind was blowing, everyone was soon covered from head to toe with gray dirt. And not only was it windy on the field, but it was also usually either too hot or too cold to play. Tientsin had a difference of more than 100 degrees Fahrenheit between summer and winter temperatures. Even Eric found it too cold to enjoy being outside sometimes.
As for the techniques of rugby, the tackling, the scrum, and rucking the ball, they were nearly impossible to perform in a robe. The boys were constantly tripping over their own or each other’s robes. In the scrums and rucks, they would grab the robe of the player next to them and would not let go. The robe would rip, and an embarrassed boy would scurry off the field, vowing never to play rugby again.
Eventually, after more than a year of trying, Eric did manage to convince the boys to wear baggy shorts like his and a shirt. But this had its problems, too. Now the boys didn’t have a robe between them and the hard ground when they were tackled or fell. There were many skinned knees and elbows, and the boys could see no point whatsoever in going through so much misery to get a ball from one end of the field to the other. But Eric did not give up on his students—or sports. He, like Dr. Hart, believed that boys could learn a lot about life from sports. However, he did wish there were a few people around who liked playing sports as much as he did.
Fortunately, Tientsin was a very international city. After the Opium Wars, many foreign countries had demanded their own piece of land in China. Such land was known as a concession. Eric lived in the French concession, but there were many other concessions in the city. In fact, thirty countries, most of them from Europe, had concessions in Tientsin. Each concession was guarded by troops from its home country, and inside its walls, the customs and laws of that country were observed. The concessions were southeast of the old Chinese section of Tientsin, and Chinese people were allowed into them only with an invitation and proper identification.
Because of the concessions, Tientsin was a fascinating place to explore. The British, French, and Japanese concessions were located on the right bank of the Haiho River, and across the river from them were the Russian, Belgian, and Italian concessions. The buildings in each concession were modeled after the architectural style of the particular country that controlled it. A person walking in Tientsin could find himself walking along Victoria Park Road and thinking he was in England, the Rue du Baron Gros thinking he was in France, or the Via Vittorio Emanuele thinking he was in Italy.
Fortunately for Eric, the troops who watched over their particular country’s concession liked playing sports with their counterparts from the other concessions. Eric joined the British rugby team and quickly became the fastest wing ever to play rugby on Chinese soil. Playing rugby again brought Eric a great deal of personal satisfaction.
As for his students, Eric felt that they might enjoy sports more if they had a better field to play on. He asked around to find out whether there was a stadium somewhere in Tientsin, perhaps at one of the three universities located in the city or at another boys’ high school, where he could take his students to play sports, but there was none. After discussing the situation with Dr. Hart, Eric was given permission to organize for a stadium to be built. He soon formed a committee and found a large tract of unused land near the river. He began to draw up plans. He’d always liked the Stamford Bridge stadium in London, and so he used that as his model. When the stadium was finished, it was by far the best sports stadium in North China, and probably in the whole of Asia. Eric was proud of it and excited to be one of the first to compete in it.
In 1927, the annual International Athletic Games were the first event to be held in the new stadium. Eric was competing in them, and for the first time in his life, his entire family was there to see him run. His brother Robert made the long journey by motorcycle from his mission station in the country to Tientsin to see Eric race.
