But if she was hoping the confrontation would frighten her estranged husband into acquiescence, then Gladys was wrong. It merely hardened his stance and the situation quickly descended into farce. Intent on forcing a divorce through the courts, he set up a bogus liaison with a fictitious woman, booking into Room 477 of the Strand Palace Hotel in central London on Tuesday, March 15, for two nights.
It was a common tactic at the time by those seeking a divorce. The newspapers frequently carried court reports of men being ‘caught’ at hotels like the Strand Palace, but the trysts were almost always bogus, set up to satisfy tightly worded divorce laws. Chambermaids happy to make a little extra money were sometimes paid to pose as the love interest or provide ‘eyewitness’ statements that the illicit couple had been sighted together and so create a body of evidence that adultery had been committed.
Gladys bowed to the inevitable and filed for divorce on March 19. Three weeks later, as she prepared to enter a North London maternity hospital, her lawyer lodged a petition that cited the Strand Hotel ‘meeting’ as proof of adultery ‘with a woman whose name is unknown to your petitioner’.
The lawyer was the only person in court for the hearing on April 8 that would last only a few minutes. Magistrates were generally willing to shuffle the unhappy couples quickly through court if the paperwork was convincing, although in this case Mr Justice Barnson didn’t even bother to call for an independent witness or ask how a heavily pregnant woman knew her husband was in a city hotel with another woman. Neither did he check the petition, which did not nominate the Strand Palace as the venue but a non-existent hotel called the Shand Palace. It was presumably a typographical error by a legal secretary but it only confirmed the sad nature of the relationship and its farcical ending.
Two days later, on April 10, Bryan Robert Finch was born. His parents would still be officially married until the decree absolute came through, but he would grow up with only one of them – a mother who would never recover from the disappointment of being abandoned. In the space of six years George Finch had married twice, divorced twice and been named on birth certificates as the father of three young boys he either did not believe were his, did not want and was most probably not even aware of.
Bryan was the second of these options. He would never meet his father but still acknowledged his paternal heritage by adding the name Ingle to official records when he married in 1950, perhaps because George, a man capable of simply cutting off his feelings continued to at least provide some financial support for Gladys.
Bryan and his wife, Margaret, settled in the Dorset town of Poole, raised two children and ran a successful motorcycle business for many years. Bryan died in 1994 after marrying a second time. According to those who knew him, he never spoke about George. Neither did his mother, although Gladys kept and treasured the letters he’d sent her during and after the Great War. She never remarried and died, as Gladys Ingle Finch, in 1971 at the age of seventy-six.
George had indeed been committing adultery – but not with the unnamed woman in the Strand Hotel set-up. He had been pursuing a new relationship since the beginning of the year with a young Scotswoman named Agnes Isobel Johnston, from Coldingham, Berwickshire, on the Scottish Borders.
Agnes was one of four children whose father, a gentleman farmer named Archibald, had died from peritonitis when she was six years old. There were some assets – a modest amount of money and two small farms – but Agnes’s mother, Margaret, would see little of it as she struggled to raise her son and three daughters in a small house not far from the family lands controlled by Archibald’s older brother. Despite the financial difficulties, Agnes (who hated her name and as a child reversed the letters to call herself Senga) put herself through Edinburgh University and gained an English degree before taking a job in London with the Foreign Office.
It was not in Whitehall that she met George Finch, but at the Imperial College, the day in December 1920 that she applied for a job there as a secretary. George was immediately smitten when he met her by chance as she waited to be interviewed, taken by her forthright manner and neatly clipped diction offset by a disarming Scottish beauty and a head of wild curls, for which he would later call her Bubbles.
The first formal indication of the relationship between them is a handful of letters George wrote and that Agnes kept among her personal mementoes. The first was dated January 2, 1921, in which George addressed ‘Dear Miss Johnston’ and invited her to visit him, adding that he had arrived late at the famous Brompton Oratory that morning but had caught the tail end of the service. He had attended, even though he wasn’t Catholic, to hear the music: ‘It was Beethoven and beautiful,’ he commented, before signing formally as George Ingle Finch.
Less than three weeks later he wrote again, but the tone and language had changed dramatically. ‘Miss Johnston’ had become ‘Beloved’ and a polite invitation to dinner was now ‘a desire for such utter abandonment’:
Beloved, I want to write to you just a brief note before I go out. My one, I love you as best I know and with a desire for such utter abandonment and sinking of hopes, dreams and all else of self in just you & your happiness that both our aims & lives may be one. That is all I have to hold out to you, to keep as you will. My beloved dream child, your friendship is all to me. May God bless you and keep you. I love you. Geof
Anyone reading the letter would have questioned whether it could have been written by a man who was regarded by those who knew him well as pragmatic, steely and even aloof, but as sure-footed as he was on an icy mountain slope, George Finch was foundering, his emotions precariously balanced between the regret and remorse over Gladys and the baby and his sense of giddy excitement about the new relationship. He had fallen head over heels again, although this time he couldn’t bring himself to tell the woman he loved that he was already married and that the wife he intended divorcing was pregnant. It was a secret that he would keep for the rest of his life.
In the midst of his self-made personal quagmire, George was trying to prepare for a journey that could either be the triumph of his life or end it. Thanks largely to Percy Farrar and Geoffrey Winthrop Young he was on the expedition team, and due to leave in early April, just as Gladys was going to hospital to give birth.
The selection of Mallory and Finch as the specialist climbers had been announced succinctly in The Times on February 22 by Younghusband: ‘As members of the expedition on whom we will have to depend for reaching the highest point we have selected two younger men who have made names for themselves by their efficiency in climbing the Alps – Mr GL Mallory and Captain George Finch. Our party for the reconnaissance is thus complete.’
There was also recognition back in Australia, although its significance was either missed or ignored by the city papers in Sydney and Melbourne. Only the Leader newspaper in George’s old home town ran a front-page story headed ‘Mount Everest expedition – Orange boy’s share’, which included excerpts from a letter George had written to his father detailing his selection and the travel plans which would get the party to the foot of the mountain by late July: ‘Then the stupendous task will commence,’ he wrote in acknowledgment of the difficulties that lay ahead.
George had said the same thing, only with more detail, at a meeting of expedition team members in early March. The reconnaissance mission had two purposes: firstly, its stated intent to map the area and establish a route to the mountain; but also to make an attempt at the peak if the opportunity arose. The get-together at the Royal Geographical Society rooms on March 7 was full of bravado, self-congratulation and promises of discovering dozens of new plant and animal species as well as undertaking studies on the effects of altitude on the climbers. Finch was more circumspect, warning of the dangers and hazards they faced and insisting that even the journeys to the North and South Poles could not be compared with what lay ahead. The last part of the climb, where temperatures could be 60 degrees Celsius below zero and they would be exposed to potentially dangerous levels of ultraviolet li
ght, would require ‘a concentrated effort and strain such as no expedition has ever demanded. Every one of us will have to call up all we ever knew about snow conditions.’
It was George Finch at his most precise, a fearless explorer who tempered his adventurous spirit with the pragmatic vision of a scientist. This unique combination should have made him the most valuable member of the team and the first chosen, rather than the most distrusted and the one the others would have liked to dump.
George had only one fear, not of death, which he and the others had faced every day for the more than four years of the Great War, but of the impact on others of his possible death, and, in particular, on his two children, Peter and Gladys’s unborn son. In private, George pleaded with Percy Farrar to help make provision for them in case he did not return from Everest. Farrar agreed and went to the committee asking that they insure George’s life for £5000 at a premium cost of £75. The request was denied. The risk was his alone.
There was one last hurdle for the designated climbers. Mallory and Finch had to pass a medical exam conducted by two doctors chosen by the expedition doctor, Sandy Wollaston. It seemed a belated bureaucratic requirement, with less than four weeks before their departure, and should have been a mere formality. On Thursday March 17, the same day he was supposedly in the arms of a woman at the Strand Palace Hotel, George Finch was examined by Dr H Graeme Anderson who operated from rooms at 75 Harley Street in Paddington, less than a mile from George’s flat in Sussex Street, South Kensington. Anderson was a former RAF officer who two years earlier had written one of the first books to document the effects on the human body of being at high altitude, The Medical and Surgical Aspects of Aviation.
The following day George went back to the same rooms to submit to a second examination, this time by Anderson’s partner, Dr FE Larkins, a physician and pediatrician who, it had been decided, was sufficiently qualified to provide a second, independent opinion. In reality, it was an appointment of convenience rather than rigour.
The examinations were over quickly and George went home without a care, believing he would be passed without question. That night he wrote to Arthur Hinks, telling him that he had arranged adjoining berths – Numbers 45 and 46 – for himself and George Mallory aboard the SS Sardinia which was sailing for India on April 8, the same day his divorce from Gladys May was due to be granted and two days before his child was due to be born. It was an escape on many counts.
But there was a cruel twist in store for him. Far from passing him as fit, both doctors cleared Mallory with flying colours but questioned George’s physical condition and wondered if he was capable of making the trip to Everest. The two handwritten documents were brief and would be questioned for years, first for their competence and secondly as to whether Finch’s selection had been deliberately sabotaged.
Anderson’s report was a few short sentences that began positively enough with the assessment that George could hold his breath for almost a minute, which was regarded as ‘good’. From there the report was almost entirely negative: ‘Sallow. Nutrition poor. Spare. Flabby. Pupils react. Knee jerks present. Cerebration active. Mentality good – a determined type. But his physical condition at present is poor. No varicose veins, no hernias. No haemorrhoids. Movement of all joints full and free.’
Larkins produced a different type of report, which detailed George’s physique and noted his pulse, blood pressure, nervous system, hearing, sight, ear, nose and throat. There were no noticeable abnormalities other than the fact that George Finch had a lot of teeth missing, which was quite normal at the time. But Larkins, seemingly copying his colleague’s language, concluded that he had a ‘sallow complexion and poor nutrition’, ending with this assessment: ‘This man is not at the moment fit. He has been losing weight. His urine reduces Fehling. He is slightly anaemic and his mouth is very deficient in teeth. He may improve considerably with training.’
There was silence for the next four days until Arthur Hinks received an urgent, staccato letter from Wollaston, which read:
Medical report of climbers has only just reached me. It was delayed by the marriage of one of the consultants. Mallory – excellent in every way. Finch – described as ‘not fit at present’. I enclose reports of both physician and surgeon. This is very serious and I am strongly of the opinion that a substitute should be found, if possible. It is of course conceivable that he may become fit by training, but there is a risk of failure. The two medical people knew nothing more of these two young men than their names at the time of their examination.
Hinks moved swiftly. Rather than questioning the report or seeking George’s response, he took the result as the opportunity he needed to get rid of the man he heartily disliked. Over the next week there was a flurry of letters between committee members as Hinks directed traffic and hurriedly arranged a replacement, 48-year-old Arthur Ling who was president of the Scottish Mountaineering Club. Finch was outraged, accusing members of the committee such as Hinks and Bruce of colluding to exclude him and the doctors of being bought off. It was an extraordinary explosion in such circles but did little to force a rethink, even though Mallory threatened to pull out.
He had initially been supportive of Finch’s selection, telling his mentor Winthrop Young in a letter that ‘Finch and I have been getting on well enough and I am pleased by the feeling that he is competent. His scientific knowledge will be useful and has already borne fruit in discussions about equipment.’
Likewise, his first response to the medical report was disappointment that Finch wouldn’t be going and a growing worry about the quality of any replacement. He wrote to Hinks on March 27:
Since receiving your letter telling me that Finch is not coming with the expedition to Mount Everest I have been thinking very seriously about my own position. We ought to have another man who should be chosen not so much for his expert skill but simply for his power of endurance. I have all along regarded the party as barely strong enough for a venture of this kind with the enormous demand it is certain to make on both nerve and physique. I wanted to have Finch because we shouldn’t be strong enough without him. You will understand that I must look after myself in this matter. I am a married man, and I can’t go into it bald-headed.
The proposed selection of Ling only hardened Mallory’s concern, and he told Hinks that the party was now seriously weak, even if there was no intention to ‘push to the top’. The expedition was in jeopardy but there was no turning back on the Finch decision as far as Hinks was concerned. He had to save face, convincing Ling to decline the invitation and then placating Mallory by agreeing to his request for an old school friend named Guy Bullock to be drafted in as the replacement. Satisfied, Mallory then rewrote history, claiming he had always harboured doubts about George:
Finch always seemed rather a gamble. He didn’t look fit and I had no confidence in his stamina. I feel sorry for Finch. The medical exam ought to have been arranged at a much earlier stage. But he forfeits any sympathy by his behaviour. We shall be weaker on ice and in general mountaineering resources without him; but we shall probably be stronger in pure physique and much stronger in morale.
Percy Farrar was deeply worried about the calibre of the expedition party and its safety. Even before the negative medical reports on his young protégé, he had warned Francis Younghusband that if either Mallory or Finch were forced to drop out he feared there would be no climbers capable of taking their places, adding, ‘I speak probably with an unrivalled knowledge of the capacity of every British climber, and a good many foreign climbers of the day.’
Now Finch had been ruled out, he argued that the committee should consider abandoning any notion of a major assault on Everest and instead concentrate on exploration and wait another year until the best climbing team could be assembled. His chief worry was how the party would cope in snow conditions without a team member like Finch, ‘who has as wide a knowledge of the condition of winter and summer snows as any man … and if there is insufficient knowledge in the party
of such conditions then there is going to be an accident’.
They would prove sadly prophetic words.
For all the criticism levelled at George Finch for being abrasive, he quickly put aside his personal disappointment at being dropped and continued to help work on improving the expedition’s equipment. In particular, he had offered to use his scientific skills to experiment on ways to improve the small camping stoves the men would need to cook simple meals during the long trek to the base of Everest and as they scaled the mountain and established the tented camp sites at various heights, which would be essential to survival, not just on the ascent but also on the way down.
The Primus stove had been devised in the 1890s, designed to act like a grounded blowtorch, but sturdy and rugged enough to operate in adverse weather conditions. It had been used successfully in the Alps and on expeditions to the North and South Poles, but at the higher reaches of the Himalayas it weakened and spluttered in the thin oxygen and could not be used at all above 20,000 feet, barely two-thirds the height of Everest.
George reconstructed the burner to use a mixture of benzene and kerosene in the lower camps and a newly created chemical compound in tablet form called Meta, an aldehyde which bonds carbon, oxygen and hydrogen, in the virtually oxygen-free heights up to 30,000 feet. On March 25 he travelled to Oxford University to test the adapted stove with Professor Georges Dreyer, a Shanghai-born Danish scientist who, in 1907, had been appointed the university’s first professor of pathology. Dreyer had constructed a large steel pressure chamber in his laboratory, the first of its kind in Britain, in which he had conducted research in an effort to help pilots combat the effects of hypoxia during the Great War.
The Brilliant Outsider Page 14