They wed on a leaden November day at the Kensington Registry Office, Gladys’s condition impossible to hide even under her modest dress, although the registry official and two witnesses, a married couple who knew the bride, were the only ones there to notice. As with his first marriage, George had insisted on a swift civil ceremony, although for different reasons. Unbeknown to his new wife and contrary to the vows he took that day, George had no intention of making the union last. Just three weeks after the ceremony he moved out of the house they had rented in the town of Witney, west of Oxford, leaving a note rather than face personal explanation for his unfathomable actions.
Gladys waited a week before writing him a brief, entreating letter on December 5, which perhaps suggests that he had admitted to adultery, which she was willing to forgive or simply that she would excuse his running off, provided he come back to her.
My dearest Geof,
I am heartbroken at the way you have treated me and the letter you wrote me after you went away last week has crushed me, and means more than you can possibly realise. I entreat you to return to me and live with me as your wife, letting all that has passed be forgotten. Whatever you have done I am only too willing to forget if you will only come back. Do let me hear at once from you. Ever still your loving wife. G
The diminutive ‘Geof’ mimicked the manner in which her now errant husband affectionately signed his correspondence – a shortened version of Geo Finch. The letter was addressed to his rooms in South Kensington, a pleasant stroll across Hyde Park to the Imperial College. George replied immediately but gave Gladys no hope, coldly signing his note as Geo I Finch. The magic had gone:
My dear Gladys,
I have received your letter of the 5th inst. When I left you I also wrote explaining my reasons for going. I regret to say that nothing will induce me to return and nothing you may say or do would cause me to deviate in any way whatsoever from the course I have taken. I am sorry for having caused you pain. I shall continue your allowance with the note of £100 a year.
Gladys did not include among the court papers her husband’s letter explaining his reasons for leaving her, and they would remain a matter of conjecture. The financial offering he made was more than he could afford, but it would go some way toward salving a guilty conscience. George was almost broke, his modest savings in the form of the family endowment gone because of a now worthless investment in the Trans-Siberian Railway. The investment had been promoted heavily in France and England before the war, encouraged as Russia built a transport artery to feed its economic expansion. But the dream died with the collapse of the Russian economy during the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917 and with it the savings of many Western families like the Finches.
But Gladys wasn’t after money. She wanted her husband back, refusing to accept that he could simply walk away from not only a marriage but also their unborn child. She promptly lodged a petition through the courts, demanding that a judge order him to return to the marital home. Her petition laid out the sequence of events – his sudden disappearance and cold dismissal – but made no mention of George’s reasons for leaving or her pregnancy, concluding: ‘As my husband has not returned to or sent for me I desire therefore to obtain from this Honorable Court a decree of restitution of conjugal rights.’
In the last days of 1920 word reached London that the Tibetan spiritual and political leader, the Dalai Lama, had acceded to the diplomatic pleadings of the British India Office and agreed to open the country’s borders to offer safe passage for an expedition to attempt to climb Mount Everest. The proposal was announced in The Times on January 11, 1921 and made clear just how difficult the challenge would be:
Sir Francis Younghusband, President of the Royal Geographical Society, announced at a meeting of the Society last night that the political obstacles to the proposed attempt to climb Mount Everest have been removed, that a preliminary reconnaissance will be made of the ground this year, and that the actual attempt on the summit will follow in 1922. Such an expedition, said the President, must be essentially a great adventure: ‘High risks will have to be run, and severe hardships endured – risks from icy slopes and rocky precipices, and such avalanches as buried Mummery’s party on Nanga Parbat twenty-six years ago; and hardships from intense cold, terrific winds, and blinding snowstorms. In addition, there will be the unknown factor of the capacity of a human being to stand great exertion at a height more than 4000 ft higher than man has as yet ascended any mountain. The expedition will also be in the highest degree scientific. We may take it as certain that the summit will never be reached unless we have first explored with the greatest care all the approaches to it through country at present entirely unknown; and then examined, mapped, and photographed the mountain itself in fullest detail. In the present year the Alpine Club and the Royal Geographical Society propose to organise a reconnaissance party to acquire this geographical knowledge. Next year we will send to Tibet a climbing party to apply it in a great effort to reach the summit. We hope that the reconnaissance party may cross into Tibet when the passes open, about the end of May’.
A fortnight later a joint committee of the Royal Geographical Society and the Alpine Club was formed to plan and fund the mission as well as select the reconnaissance party, as Younghusband explained to The Times:
Climbing Mount Everest was a matter which interested both the Royal Geographical Society and the Alpine Club. It interested the former because the Society will not admit that there is any spot on the earth’s surface on which man should not at least try to set his foot. And it interested the latter because climbing mountains is their especial province. It was decided, therefore, to make the Expedition a joint effort of the two societies. And this was the more desirable because the Geographical Society had greater facilities for organising exploring expeditions, while the Alpine Club had better means of choosing the personnel.
The Alpine Club nominated its new president Professor Norman Collie, along with Percy Farrar and Charles Meade as representatives on the new Everest Committee. Collie was a chemist who had been on the first Himalayan expedition with Mummery in 1895, an intriguing character who was said to be the inspiration behind Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes character. Meade had also climbed in the Himalayas, although he had not set eyes on Everest.
The Royal Geographical Society representatives would be Younghusband, Colonel M Jacks, who was the chief of the geographical section general staff, and the society’s treasurer, Edward Somers-Cocks. None had any mountaineering experience although Younghusband had spent time in Tibet where he had led the controversial British military ‘expedition’ in 1904 during which an estimated 700 monks and villagers were mowed down by machine-gun fire while trying to block the British advance with revolvers and swords in what became known as the Massacre of Chumik Shenko.
There were two other members of the Everest Committee. Both organisations nominated their club secretaries, Captain John Eaton for the Alpine Club and Mr Arthur Hinks for the Royal Geographical Society, and it was here that the real political sway would lie, as Hinks, with the imprimatur of Younghusband, quickly assumed the dominant role, which he would not relinquish for the next two decades.
Events began to move quickly. The meteorological window of opportunity was narrow, particularly as no one had ever set foot on the mountain. Nothing was known of its dangers, beyond the obvious, and there was little time to choose the team let alone to do any meaningful work on the equipment that would have to carry the party into the unknown.
Some appointments were made immediately by necessity, although not without controversy. Brigadier-General Charles Granville Bruce, a bear of a man and a career soldier who had been on Mummery’s Himalayan expedition in 1892 and had also ventured to the Himalayas in 1907 appeared the obvious choice to lead the new expedition, but his age (he was fifty-five) and ill health counted against him. Instead, the 39-year-old adventurer, soldier and writer Colonel Charles Howard-Bury, who had made the initial approach to the Tibetan govern
ment seeking access to the mountain, was offered the position. It was a brave choice – youth over the establishment candidate – and inspired by his strong diplomatic links with the Indian government as well as the Tibetans. Howard-Bury had immersed himself in the region, its culture and its languages, even once staining his skin with walnut juice to travel safely through Tibet in the guise of a local, as John Noel had done.
But youth was overlooked in other appointments, most notably with the strange selection of the Scotsman Harold Raeburn to coordinate the climbers. Raeburn, who had been in the Himalayas the previous year, was a hard, stoic man with a grip of iron and a temperament to match, but at almost fifty-six years of age it was unlikely that he would get far up the mountain. But the Everest Committee, led by an insistent Hinks, was trapped by its desire to choose only British men, despite the obvious merits of European climbers like Marcel Kurz (who was also a noted cartographer), as pointed out a year earlier by George Finch and Percy Farrar.
At fifty-three, Scotsman Alexander Kellas was yet another ageing participant, although he seemed to be a necessary addition, not only for his considerable climbing expertise but also for his theories about oxygen at altitude. Kellas, short, slight and bespectacled, looked like the academic he was and yet he was also an intrepid mountaineer who had been one of the first to tackle the Himalayan peaks in the early years of the twentieth century, having made eight summer sojourns in the Indian provinces of Kashmir and Sikkim by 1916, often climbing alone except for local porters. In 1911 he reached the top of Mount Pauhunri which measured 23,386 feet, an achievement that only a few years before had been thought impossible because of the thin oxygen levels at extreme altitudes. Besides, Kellas was already in India. He had been there since June 1920 conducting a series of experiments on the practicalities of carrying oxygen bottles up Mount Kamet. His conclusion was that the weight of the bottles offset any advantage that oxygen might give the mountaineer.
Alexander ‘Sandy’ Wollaston, chosen as the expedition doctor, was forty-six and another of Hinks’s choices, although age was perhaps not as important for a medic as for the men who would undertake most of the climbing in the party. He was Cambridge-educated but had largely eschewed medicine for adventure as a botanist, ornithologist, climber and incessant explorer throughout Africa, Japan, Lapland and Papua New Guinea.
There was no controversy about the selection of the men who would accompany the climbers to study and map the landscape. Alexander Heron, Henry Morshead and Edward Wheeler were all plucked from the ranks of the Geological Survey of India. Heron was a 37-year-old Scottish geologist as quiet and worthy as his career, twenty-three years of which were spent completing a geological survey of the state of Rajasthan. Morshead had joined the Survey of India in 1906 at the age of twenty-four and never left except for the years of the Great War during which he attained the rank of major, fought at the Battle of the Somme and was awarded a Distinguished Service Order. He was climbing Mount Kamet with Alexander Kellas when invited to join the expedition. Wheeler was a 31-year-old Canadian who had climbed in England and the Pyrenees, but mainly in his homeland. He had fought with a British regiment during the war and had been awarded a Military Cross as well as winning membership in the French Legion of Honour, which was probably why his birthplace was ignored.
George Finch was interviewed by the selection committee on February 9, 1921, aware that his candidacy was controversial despite his spectacular climbing record. It was not only the manner of his mountaineering exploits, unguided as they were, but his background and, above all, his prickly relationship with the establishment that might stand in his way. His 1913 appraisal of English mountaineering published in The Field had come back to bite him; the older committee men who had been his target had long memories.
Arthur Hinks, in particular, could not stand George Finch and didn’t hide the fact. It was surprising in some ways as both were men of science – Hinks was approaching fifty years of age, a brilliant Cambridge astronomer credited with determining the mass of the moon and the distance of the earth to the sun – but George stood for everything that Hinks disliked: he was a long-haired upstart colonial who had been educated on the Continent rather than at Oxbridge, a modern-thinking man (Hinks even hated the telephone) who dared challenge social norms and held scant regard for his elders and presumed betters. Hinks, who had never climbed higher than his chair, as writer Wade Davis later observed, was a fleshy, humourless and bitter man who had taken the Royal Geographical Society post after resigning from Cambridge because he had been overlooked for a senior position in favour of a younger scientist.
Whatever his reasons, Hinks set about trying to kill off George Finch’s candidacy by character assassination, even writing to George Leigh Mallory, the most promising English alpinist of his day and the obvious favourite to lead the climbing party, asking if he was prepared to share a tent with Finch. Mallory, to his credit, replied that he didn’t care who he slept with provided they reached the summit of Everest.
Mallory had no doubt about George Finch’s skills and was clearly content to climb with him. They had met in Wales in 1912 during a weekend climbing event at Pen-y-Pass beneath Snowdon. Two years later, as editor of the Climber’s Club journal, he had published George’s account of climbing a difficult route up the Aiguille du Dru, a peak of the Mont Blanc massif in the French Alps. They had also climbed together during the summer of 1920 when both were part of a group that had ascended the Matterhorn.
Francis Younghusband also argued against Finch behind closed doors, as did Charles Bruce who, although smarting from not being chosen to go on the expedition, still had a powerful voice within the Alpine Club committee. He felt that he was among the targets of Finch’s antagonism toward the older ‘gentlemen climbers’ and agreed with Hinks that Finch would be a disruptive influence, even though there was no evidence he had ever caused friction or been incompatible in any climbing party of which he’d been a member.
Younghusband revealed the level of angst about George Finch in his 1926 book The Epic of Mount Everest, although without naming him:
As a mountaineer this other was all that could be desired; but he had the characteristics which several members of the committee who knew him thought would cause friction and irritation to the party and destroy the cohesion which is vitally necessary in an Everest Expedition. At high altitudes it is well known that men become irritable. And at the altitudes of Mount Everest they might find it wholly impossible to contain their irritation; and an uncongenial member might break up the party.
George’s champion inside the committee was Percy Farrar, supported enthusiastically by Geoffrey Winthrop Young who had been the second man praised by George in his 1913 article. Winthrop Young was not on the committee that made the final decision, but he was an influential figure, admired not only for his own pre-war climbing exploits but for his insistence on continuing to climb, having lost a leg in the war, with an artificial limb. He was also the man who had persuaded an initially reluctant Mallory to accept the Everest challenge and was in no doubt of George’s skills, even including a chapter about George’s Corsican adventures with Max and Alf Bryn in his book Mountain Craft, which had just been published. Finch, he declared, was the pre-eminent ‘snow and ice man’ of his generation and the perfect foil for Mallory whose own strength was climbing on rock.
For once Arthur Hinks would not get his own way. On February 16 the committee met and decided on the final composition of the team. When they emerged some hours later, the two Georges had been appointed the designated climbers for the mission. The men were very different: George Mallory, aged almost thirty-five, was a member of the establishment, a Cambridge graduate and the son of a clergyman, flamboyant and naturally gifted as a climber, and was once described breathlessly by the writer Lytton Strachey as ‘six foot high, with the body of an athlete by Praxiteles, and a face – oh incredible – the mystery of a Botticelli, the refinement and delicacy of a Chinese print, the youth and piquancy of an imagi
nable English boy’. By contrast the younger George Finch, though an equally fine physical specimen and natural climber, was an outsider in terms of birth and education and a man of detail and intensity who did not crave acceptance, only respect for his achievements.
But for all their differences, the two men were similar in two important aspects that would prove significant in their destiny on one of the great modern adventures. Both were working men who struggled financially in a world where most participants were wealthy aristocrats with little empathy for their kind, and both had an unflinching confidence in their own abilities.
Their individual responses to being chosen for the expedition were also starkly contrasting. Mallory was invited to lunch with Younghusband on February 17, and the Royal Geographical Society president later wrote of the conversation: ‘When the invitation was made he [Mallory] accepted it without visible emotion. He had the self-confidence of assured position as a climber. He had neither exaggerated modesty nor pushful self-assertiveness. He was conscious of his own powers and of the position he had won by his own exertions.’
George Finch was also invited to the president’s office, although not for lunch: ‘He was a tall, well-made athletic man with a determined look about him,’ Younghusband later reflected. ‘His keenness was evident from the first moment. For a few seconds he seemed unable to speak from the intensity of emotion that was surging within him. Then he said, “Sir Francis, you’ve sent me to heaven.”’
16.
‘DEAR MISS JOHNSTON’
A fortnight after being selected to make the first attempt to climb the highest mountain in the world, George Finch was brought back to earth with a thud. The magistrate who had heard Gladys Finch’s conjugal rights case issued an order on March 2 directing him to return home to his heavily pregnant wife who was now just five weeks from giving birth. Despite her condition, or perhaps because of the public embarrassment it might cause him, Gladys personally served George with the document on March 3 as he walked down Prince Consort Road on his way to work.
The Brilliant Outsider Page 13