CHARIOTS OF BULLSHIT

Right, you’ve all heard the catchy music and seen the film. All those nice men running along the beach looking like film stars, getting their feet wet in the sea. All those splendid fellows in the British team training for the Paris Olympics. Young lads inspired. On fire with the idea of a medal.

The film certainly inspired the organisers of the recent London Olympics because they used the catchy background music by Vangelis as the sound-off and accompaniment for the medals ceremonies but then of course there was the film itself. Billed by its creators as a true story of the trials and tribulations of a Jew and a Scotsman who both wanted to win Olympic Gold in athletics for their own very different reasons.

You remember the film. You remember handsome Harold Abrahams at Cambridge, a Jew dead keen to be an Englishman, and likewise the saintly Eric Liddell, Scots missionary, passionate believer in God and doing God’s work who wouldn’t run on a Sunday.

It was all very interesting but how much of it was actually true?

This indeed was a story about two young men and their backgrounds, and how their athletics careers came together for the Paris Olympics of 1924. Romantic wasn’t it? Full of good looking colourful characters, sporting aspirations, hopes and dreams, challenges and triumphs, but it wasn’t a documentary. The viewing public were undoubtedly charmed by the script, the music and the actors. It won many awards and made a packet of money, but how many of you simply took it all in at face value? Didn’t ask yourselves any questions about how real it all was. Simply, how truthful the whole thing was?

Defenders of the film can simply say, hey, it’s only a story! It wasn’t exactly meant to be true even though it was presented as such. Fine. Let’s see then what was truth and what was bullshit.

The film opens up with a Church Service commemorating the life of Harold Abrahams after his death in l978 and closes with the hymn Jerusalem sung by a church choir. Strange that, for a Jew, no Jewish burial service in a synagogue, but not so strange really seeing that he wasn’t a Jew when he died.

Harold Abrahams’ father, Isaac, emigrated from Russian occupied Poland to England then spent some time in South Africa before returning and finally settling in Bedford. Abrahams is not a Russian Jewish name. Isaac changed it from Klonimus and set up The Bedford Loan Company. Despite describing himself as a ‘financier’ he was more of a jeweller than anything and highly aspirational for his children. One of Harold’s elder brothers became a famous athlete and inspired his younger to do likewise. After time at Repton public school during which he achieved great athletic distinction he went to Gonville and Caius College Cambridge which is where the film portrayal of his athletic career begins.

So let’s look at the film then consider the reality.

CHARIOTS OF FIRE and Harold Abrahams (aka the actor Ben Cross) protestations about prejudice.

These are conveyed near the beginning of the film as he chats to his friend Aubrey Montague in his rooms at Cambridge and in his College Chapel. Here, the script writers allow Harold to make a big thing about prejudice, particularly when he talks about his father being alien, as foreign as a frankfurter, to which Montague replies, and a kosher one at that… In the Chapel, Abrahams goes on to say, my old man forgot one thing, this England of his is Christian and Anglo Saxon, and so are her corridors of power, and those who stalk them guard them with jealousy and venom… adding, well I’m going to take them on one by one and run them off their feet…

The impression you get here is of a man full of resentment. It couldn’t be any clearer. He feels himself to be a real victim of prejudice and comes over as someone determined to get his own back. Within the context of their conversation there is also the impression that Aubrey Montague is possibly a fellow Jew. Certainly at least a fellow student at Cambridge. The conversations in Harold’s room and in the Chapel are fictitious and never happened. Aubrey Montague was a student at Oxford not Cambridge, and was the grandson of an Irish catholic priest who left the priesthood to marry.

Secondly the script writers intimate that senior staff at Abrahams’ college had anti-Semitic attitudes i.e. queries about his father being a financier and Abrahams playing the tradesman by employing a professional running coach. This is hardly likely as they didn’t have to admit him to the College in the first place knowing his background. Furthermore, Harold Abrahams never said anything in his later life about experiencing racial prejudice at Cambridge.

More important than any of this is that in real life Harold Abrahams had never made a big deal about his Jewish heritage or religion. He never attended synagogue or participated in any Jewish festivals or activities. He was much more concerned to identify himself culturally with activities that were quintessentially British such as the Gilbert and Sullivan operatic society at Cambridge and in the film sings of the virtues of being an Englishman.

Nonetheless, his very real lack of interest in his heritage does not prepare us for his decision ten years after the Paris Olympics to abandon his faith, minimal as it was and convert to Catholicism. This is not a thing that Jews do. No matter how little they may be committed to it, the Jewish heritage of a Jew is something precious. Almost sacred, even in non-believing, non-observing secular Jews. Jews are proud of their heritage everywhere, despite their history of persecution, so for Abrahams to convert to a religion that has the greatest history of persecuting them is extraordinary. Indeed it throws into question everything intimated in the film about his Jewishness, his concerns about prejudice or anything else. It’s all a carefully contrived piece of fantasy. In real life Harold Abrahams didn’t give two shits about his Jewishness. Two years after he converted he attended Hitler’s Berlin l936 Olympics as a commentator for the BBC knowing full well about the wave of anti-Semitic persecution in Germany but by then of course he wasn’t a Jew.

The film’s portrayal then of his concerns about anti-Semitic prejudice during his time at Cambridge are just plain bullshit. Just as bad was the portrayal of his race with Lord Lindsay, sorry, Nigel Havers, a character actually based on the real life Lord Burghley. In the film they are shown racing against each other round the Great Court of Trinity College Cambridge in the time it takes to strike 12 at midday with Abrahams performing the feat for the first time in history and Lindsay crossing the line a fraction too late.

Another wretched lie. Firstly Harold Abrahams never attempted that run; secondly neither did Burghley or Nigel bloody Havers because he wasn’t even at Cambridge at the time! Not until 1927 anyway. In that year however Burghley successfully made the run for the first time ever and was very upset when somebody else got the credit for it in the film. Never mind, who cares about the truth. In any case the film sequence was never shot at Cambridge just in case you think it was! It was done at Eton, ultra-elite posh public school of the film’s director!

Now then, let’s get to the romance! In the film, while at Cambridge, Harold meets and falls headlong for Sybil, singer at the D’Oyly Carte opera. A real cosy, heated, classy romance. Portrayed as Sybil Gordon she’s seen with him in various poses of pine and languish on the athletics track, in a posh restaurant, and at the railway station after his return from Paris with his gold medal from where, the audience assumes, they’ll definitely be getting it on.

All of it bullshit. Firstly his gold medal was sent to him in the post but more important perhaps, he never met Sybil till ten years later and her name wasn’t Gordon as stated, but Evers, whom he married in l936! The little romance at Cambridge was a complete pack of lies which hid a far more interesting truth. Harold Abrahams’ real romance while he was there was with the serious scholar Christina Innes. They were formally engaged but their relationship ended when he began focussing exclusively on his athletics, and after he left Cambridge, on the coming Paris Olympics.

The script writers therefore invent a totally fictitious scenario for one of its two main characters’ love life. It may have looked good for all the snobby restaurants, expensive cars, aristocratic estates and aristocratic friends, may have pleased all the American lovers of English aristo tradition but it was all a load of bullshit. A piece of slush cinema fantasy that had nothing to do with reality or truth.

So, Harold Abrahams’ Jewishness dodgy in the extreme, his affair with the lovely singer and actress when he was at Cambridge a complete lie and his race round the Cambridge Quadrangle demonstrating his athletic super-star pedigree yet another invention. So what comes next? Please, don’t worry, it gets even better!

Key to the film and Harold’s gold medal triumph in the 100 metres race in Paris was his relationship with professional athletics coach Sam Mussabini. In the film Sam appears out of the blue after watching Harold lose badly to Eric Liddell in a race and suggests he can help him improve his performance. The film suggests that Abrahams enthusiastically takes him up on his offer. In fact it was Eric Liddell who first introduced him to Sam Mussabini after Harold had been watching Liddell race at Stoke-on-Trent in July 1923 and Mussabini’s coaching in reality makes all the difference.

In the film, Sam, portrayed as waiting silently and alone in a room at the Olympic Stadium in Paris while Harold ran and won his 100 metre race then congratulates him when the two men immediately get together afterwards. So much for the film only that never happened either. Sam Mussabini wasn’t even in Paris at the time and neither did Harold cloister himself away from everyone. In reality he ran in the final of the 200 metres race first, finishing last before getting his big chance in the 100. He didn’t meet up with Sam until much later and neither did he return to the lovely Sybil waiting for him all posh and agog at the rail station.

But hey, never mind! You all loved the handsome Ben Cross defying racial prejudice and coming home to his gorgeous blonde bird with gold safely in his pocket so who gives a shit for the truth anyway?

But wait. You haven’t heard it all yet. There’s the other side to the story. This time it’s about the great Scots athlete Eric Liddell who runs to glorify God, played in the film by Ian Charleson. He’s entered for the 100 metre race in the Olympics but it’s only when he’s boarding the boat for France that he hears the heats for the event will be run on a Sunday. In the film the devout Scots missionary refuses to participate despite being summoned to a meeting with the Prince of Wales and a British Olympic Committee ropping with aristos and put under heavy pressure. The day is saved by good old Nigel Havers playing the entirely fictitious Lord Lindsay who offers to yield his place in the 400 metres. Liddell gratefully accepts and his religious convictions in the face of national pride make media headlines around the world.

It all helps make a great story. The resentful Jew on one side, the Scots holy man on the other. One man runs to fight prejudice the other to glorify God. That’s the way the film tells it. Alas, even the Eric Liddell part of it is bullshit only with him it’s possibly worse. The race schedules were published months before he got on the ship. None of it came as any surprise as portrayed in the film. True, the pressure he faced from the aristos was real enough but there was no meeting with the Prince of Wales or the British Olympic Committee. He’d already made the decision to switch races long before going to Paris and spent several months training for the 400 metres race, a distance in which he’d previously excelled. 

That’s missed out in the film. The impression you get of Liddell is that he’s a completely honourable man without a scheming bone in his body and all the while he’d had it sussed out. He could keep his reputation as a man of God and run for him at the same time which is no doubt what he intended. The film makes no attempt to tell it as it is. Like Abrahams, Liddell represents a simple idea. A hero athlete fighting for a cause. In one case a fiction, in the other a twisted reality. None of it mattered. The public enjoyed what they got and believed what they saw. As for the producers, they rode their Chariots of Money Making Bullshit all the way to the bank.

Alas, in real life someone stole Harold Abrahams’ gold medal.

One of the real unsung heroes of the Paris Olympic Games story was Douglas Lowe, Britain’s third athletics gold medal winner. The fictional character of Lord Lindsay was created when Lowe refused to have any involvement in the film. Clearly, they had to get Nigel Havers in somewhere!

Two other pieces of nonsense. At the memorial service for Harold which opens the film, Lindsay says that he and Aubrey Montague are the only members of the British 1924 Olympic Team still alive. Bit of a problem there as Montague died in 1948, 30 years earlier.

And even more dodgy! In the film, before the Olympics 400 metre final, Jackson Scholz an American competitor is shown handing Eric Liddell an inspiring Bible quotation, “It says in the good Book, ‘He that honors me, I will honor.’ Good luck.” Completely untrue. The note came from members of the British team and was given to Liddell before the race in the British team’s Paris hotel. The change was made purely for dramatic purposes. When Welland the screenwriter asked the American who was still alive at the time if he was willing to be shown handing Liddell the note Scholtz was dead keen. “Yes, great, as long as it makes me look good.”

That was what the film was about really. Making a story look good by substituting fantasy for reality.

The only real truth in it was that Harold Abrahams and Eric Liddell won athletics gold medals at the Paris Olympics in 1924. The rest was a manufactured drama that was loved by the public, won awards and acclaim for its creators and participants and was simply a plain load of hogwash. A bit like making a film about the political career of Margaret Thatcher using Marilyn Monroe in the lead role.

A more important consideration than much of the above is this. Why did Harold Abrahams, born a Jew of Jewish parents, spend most of his life after Cambridge as an active Christian yet still receive the accolades of the British Jewish Establishment when he’d so clearly and contemptuously turned his back on his heritage?

If you’re interest is stirred by this post, forget the film and google up some reading. You can always get back to the bullshit anytime!