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latest update: January 2020 ...

Since the 2005 celebrations, many of the URLs mentionned on the website for that date have been archived by their creators. That is to say that those particular pages are now -- no longer avilable.
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Below, are listed the few pages that managed to survive ...

A forgiving man in an unforgiving war camp

By Hamish McDonald
Weifang, Eastern China
August 18, 2005 — 10.00am

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

Among the 25 returnees at 60-year anniversary ceremonies was Stephen Metcalf, now 78, who was in the camp in Weifang 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 by late actor Ian Charleson in the 1981 film Chariots of Fire as the god-fearing athlete who refused to run on the Sabbath at the 1924 Olympics in Paris, but then won the 400-metre gold medal on a weekday.

Liddell was born in Tianjin, China, to a missionary family and returned there to teach. After sending his wife and three daughters to safety in Canada, he stayed on during the war and was interned by the Japanese.

The 2000 inmates of the Weihsien camp in Weifang included 327 children. Like 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 organising 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'," Metcalf recalled.

Within a few weeks, Liddell was stricken by an apparent brain hemorrhage or tumour — he had complained of head-aches for some months — and died within three days on February 21, 1945, aged 43. The hard routine of camp life continued. Joyce Bradbury, now of North Ryde in Sydney, had grown up in privilege as a daughter of the Jardine Matheson trading house manager in Qingdao. When she turned 14, she was handed a brush and told to clean the toilets.

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

On August 17, 1945, a Liberator bomber circled over the camp and dropped seven parachutists — six American officers and their Chinese interpreter. The prisoners were free.

For Stephen Metcalf, it meant persuading the Americans to fly him across China to Kunming, where his missionary parents had remained working in territory held by the Chinese nationalists. He had not seen his father for seven years.

After studying in Adelaide, 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. Metcalf told a local crowd welcoming the 25 former internees that while Liddell had given him his running shoes, "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 heirarchy turned on speeches, a children's choir and fireworks for the remembrance. Asked why authorities were honouring foreign missionaries and other "superstitious" and "imperialist" elements, a local party official mentioned the upcoming Olympics in Beijing, and added a boilerplate Marxist line: "We respect history."

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