latest update for [http://www.weihsien-paintings.org] : January 2020 ...

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Harsh lessons of war prison still vivid 60 years on

August 18, 2005 — 10.00am

On the site of a wartime Japanese internment camp in Weifang, some of the Western children who spent long teenage years behind its barbed wire recalled the lessons of their captivity.

Among the 25 returnees yesterday at 60th anniversary ceremonies was Stephen Metcalf, 78, who was in the camp between the ages of 14 and 18. He recalled a fellow prisoner whose example has inspired him ever since - the great Scottish runner Eric Liddell.

Liddell was famously portrayed in the 1981 film Chariots of Fire as the God-fearing athlete who refused to run the 100 metres on the Sabbath at the 1924 Olympics.

Born in Tianjin to a missionary family, Liddell returned there to teach and, after sending his wife and three daughters to safety in Canada, stayed on during the war to be interned by the Japanese.

The 2000 inmates of the Weihsien camp in Weifang included 327 children. Like Mr Metcalf, about 200 had been boarders at the missionary school in nearby Yantai and were not to see their parents again for several years.

Liddell took charge of recreation for the children. In the last winter in camp, he produced a pair of battered running shoes, repaired with string. "In his very quiet way, he said, 'Steve, you have no shoes, it's January, these will probably last you two or three weeks'," Mr Metcalf recalled.

Within a few weeks, Liddell was stricken by an apparent brain hemorrhage or tumour and died on February 21, 1945, aged 43.

As he lay in the camp hospital, a Salvation Army brass band played his last request, the hymn Be still my soul, the Lord is on thy side to the tune of Finlandia.

The hard camp life continued. Joyce Bradbury and her brother Edmund Cooke, both now living in Sydney, had grown up in privilege as the children of the Jardine Matheson trading house manager in Qingdao. When she turned 14, she was given a brush and told to clean the toilets. "There was no choice," she said. "I actually became quite good at it."

Stanley Fairchild, later a banker in Hong Kong and Australia, got his first business experience in camp, becoming a "runner" in the blackmarket across-the-wire trade for eggs, cigarettes and liquor. "I learnt a lot in the camp," he said.

On August 17, 1945, a bomber circled so low over the camp its nickname "The Armoured Angel" could be read. It gained height then dropped seven parachutists - six American officers and their Chinese interpreter. The prisoners were free.

For Mr Metcalf, it meant persuading the Americans to fly him across China to Kunming, where his missionary parents had remained in territory held by the Chinese nationalists.

He had not seen his father for seven years.

After studying in Adelaide Mr Metcalf went as a missionary to Japan, where he worked for 40 years. He recently wrote a book in Japanese trying to break down what he described as a deliberate blotting-out of Japan's war record in China.

Though Liddell had given him his running shoes, Mr Metcalf said, "the best thing he gave me was his baton of forgiveness. He taught me to love my enemies, the Japanese, and to pray for them."

Weifang's communist hierarchy yesterday put on speeches, a children's choir and fireworks, but have carefully tailored the message of the museum and Liddell's monument to Beijing's anti-Japanese campaign.

Asked why authorities were honouring foreign missionaries and other "superstitious" and "imperialist" elements, a local party official mentioned the 2008 Beijing Olympics and added a boilerplate Marxist line: "We respect history."

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