By pumping air out of the chamber Dreyer was able to reduce the pressure to mimic oxygen levels at 40,000 feet above sea level, well above the height of Everest, but he needed someone inside the tank to light the stove. George Finch seemed the obvious choice, although the structure of the experiment meant he would have to stay sealed inside the oxygen-free tank for two hours.
The solution was to provide George with oxygen through a flexible rubber hose: ‘The biggest surprise was that I suffered barely any discomfort,’ he wrote later. ‘I remained fresh, strong and awake, as though being in a normal everyday atmosphere.’ Not only had the reconfigured stove worked perfectly, but George was now convinced that climbing Mount Everest was possible if there was some way to provide climbers with oxygen. The problem was how to carry it up a mountain.
Dreyer guessed George’s thoughts and asked if there were plans to take oxygen on the 1921 expedition. George shook his head. No. The equipment used by Kellas five years earlier to carry oxygen up Mount Kamet was too heavy to justify its use; the heavy steel containers had been a hindrance rather than a help. Anyway, the present expedition was a reconnaissance mission, with no stated plans to make an attempt on the summit.
Dreyer persisted: ‘I do not think you will get up without oxygen, but if you succeed you may not get down again. And I can prove it.’
George agreed to stay in Oxford overnight and go back into the steel chamber the next day to be exposed to oxygen levels akin to the levels at 22,000 feet and then to be tested for reflexes, blood pressure and composition, physical condition and psychological function.
George would also undergo a proper fitness test, something that the Harley Street doctors, Anderson and Larkins, had not included in their examinations. And the test would be at the simulated altitude of the Everest challenge. First Dreyer, who agreed to use the experiment to assess George’s fitness, set the chamber at 23,000 feet before George, carrying a 35-pound (16-kilogram) load on his back, did a series of twenty step-ups on a chair, first with one foot and then with the other at a rate judged to be similar to a fast climbing pace. His normal heart rate was 68 beats per minute, but in this high-altitude environment, albeit artificial, it was 104 beats per minute, rising to 140 beats per minute immediately after the exercise.
The chamber was then depressurised to mimic 30,000 feet, above Everest’s height of 29,029 feet, and George was given oxygen through the flexible hose before doing the same step-up test. By comparison, his heart rates were 77 beats per minute at rest and 100 beats per minute after the exercise. The result was remarkable, and clearly showed that Finch could function better at the higher altitude with artificial oxygen than at the lower height without it.
There was a witness to the experiment. An Alpine Club member, Percy Unna, had been drafted to help because of his background in engineering. He later wrote about his observations when George was without artificial oxygen at the equivalent of 22,000 feet: ‘The hands and face lose their red colour and become bluish. The subject tends to become incapable of taking exercise … The symptoms, of which the subject is unaware, of the approach of unconsciousness are mental confusion and a tendency to quarrel, while the blueness becomes more apparent.’ By comparison, he said of the second experiment with oxygen: ‘Those taking oxygen retain the red colour in face and hands and the normal colour in their blood. Nor do they exhibit the other symptoms.’
Percy Farrar had also travelled to Oxford for the first day of experiments to watch the Primus stove tests. He reported to Hinks, insisting that Finch’s ability to talk and take notes ‘in the most natural manner’ while inside the chamber, with and without artificial oxygen, was proof that the medical reports should be ignored and Finch should be reinstated to the expedition team: ‘This is the weakling whom we have flung out,’ he noted sarcastically.
But the letter fell on deaf ears, as Hinks made very clear in a missive written to George Mallory on the same day as he received Farrar’s letter: ‘I don’t think Farrar is the only authority. We have seen enough of him at the committee to learn that he frequently talks at random and when he differs on almost every point from Collie and Meade, who have both much Himalayan experience, I do not myself feel that Farrar is the best judge.’
The promised medical report by Dreyer on George Finch arrived in a four-page letter to Farrar on March 28. It was barely a week since the examinations by Anderson and Larkins, yet gave completely the opposite assessment of George Finch’s capacity: ‘Captain Finch is slightly underweight at present but otherwise his physique is excellent,’ Dreyer wrote, before becoming more expansive:
He [Finch] has an unusually large vital capacity. This indicates a high degree of physical fitness, and he should therefore be able to stand great exertion at high altitudes better than most persons. Furthermore, the tests in the low-pressure chamber proved that Captain Finch possesses quite unusual powers of resistance to the effects of high altitudes. Among the large number of picked, healthy, athletic young men which we have examined, more than 1000 in all, we have not come across a single case where the subject possessed the resisting power to the same degree.
There was still time to reverse the decision and send Finch and Mallory together when the Sardinia sailed on April 8. Farrar continued to press for Finch’s reinstatement but even Dreyer’s report would not sway Hinks and Younghusband, so Mallory sailed by himself, now with the choice of two cabins in which to sleep.
The murmurs of a conspiracy grew when Howard-Bury published the official version of events – Mount Everest, the Reconnaissance 1921 – the following year, relegating the controversy to a few inaccurate words: ‘Unfortunately, Captain Finch was for the time indisposed and his place at the last moment had to be taken.’
In his own account, written some years later, George would also play down the incident for the sake of diplomacy, commenting only that he ‘became unable to participate in this first expedition at the very last moment’.
As he retreated to his laboratory, George was already looking to the future. The reconnaissance expedition couldn’t possibly make it to the top of Everest, he’d decided. Dreyer’s experiments at Oxford had convinced him of that. There would be another attempt, probably the next year, and he wanted to be ready for it. As he wrote a few years later: ‘I had been completely converted to Professor Dreyer’s viewpoint, the problem of climbing Mount Everest was now changing within me into the problem of how a lightweight and easy to transport apparatus for our goals could be constructed.’
17.
THE THRESHOLD OF ENDEAVOUR
In early July 1921, a few days after the Imperial College campus closed for the European summer, George Finch headed for Switzerland. He longed for the solitude of the Alps to soothe his soul, unable to bear staying at home in London to wait for news of the Everest reconnaissance mission. It was not that he did not care or that he wished the others ill – quite the contrary – but the indignity of his rejection was too raw and he felt the need to prove to himself that Hinks, Younghusband and others against him on the committee were wrong and that his selection should have stood.
He also needed the support of a close friend to steer his mind in a positive direction, a mate like the redoubtable Guy Forster with whom he had made the pact to enjoy climbing while they sat on the seafront in Alexandria in January 1916. Forster was in Ireland tending to a family dispute created by his inheritance of a large estate (which would also mean changing his surname to Smith-Barry), but he promised to be in Switzerland by the end of the month. In the meantime George would ease his way back into climbing, although he believed it was a mental rather than physical attunement he needed: ‘In spite of a sedentary occupation, wholly unrelieved of any form of sport, I am always ready to start climbing by climbing and not by indulging in a ramble.’
By July 31 Forster had still not arrived and George was getting impatient, his annoyance heightened by Percy Farrar, of all people, who was in Grindelwald, about fifty miles north but refusing to climb, as George compl
ained in a letter to Agnes Johnston: ‘Farrar’s an infernal nuisance hanging about the hotels … I am so fed up wasting this glorious weather doing nothing.’
On the bright side George had met four other climbers, Englishmen Stephen Courtauld and Edmund Oliver, and two Swiss guides, the brothers Alfred and Adolf Aufdenblatten. Courtauld, a wealthy philanthropist who would become George’s close friend, invited George to join them and they’d been on ‘a rattling good climb’ over the Col Tournanche, which crosses the Swiss–Italian border between the Dent d’Hérens and the Matterhorn, before descending into the Italian town of Breuil. It was the boost, mentally and physically, that he needed.
The next morning the others left to catch a train east to Courmayeur from where they planned to make an ascent of the south face of Mont Blanc, a difficult route that was rarely attempted and had been completed but a handful of times. George was eager to join them but first had to return to Zermatt across the mountains on foot to check on Forster’s whereabouts and retrieve his luggage. He would then take a train via Milan back across the border to Courmayeur.
He had two options: either to take the Theodul Pass, a snowbound eight-mile track carved between two mountains – the Matterhorn and the Breithorn – or to take a higher pass, the Furg Joch, which ran beside the eastern ridge of the Matterhorn. As soon as he had mailed a letter to Agnes he planned to set off – alone:
I hope to land up there in time for dinner tonight. Am feeling awfully fit & managed yesterday’s climb without the least effort. I love you, dear one. Write soon and give me all your news. The fields here are thick with a thousand different flowers. St George thrives!
My love,
Prof
Agnes would not have been concerned about his welfare because she would not have received the letter until a week or so after he had arrived in Zermatt, but his trek had not been as smooth as George had imagined. He had never made the Furg Joch crossing before, let alone by himself, and conditions meant it took him almost five hours to reach the top of the main ridgeline, only to find that the descent to Zermatt was full of cliffs and ice slopes that were impossible to tackle alone.
Luckily he found a slope further along the ridge that was passable, although he had to negotiate a giant bergschrund, which required more than an hour of carefully cutting steps into the ice before he could cross and make his way into the town. He arrived in the evening, exhausted, only to be confronted by the very people he was seeking to escape.
He lamented the experience in a second letter to Agnes: ‘Zermatt is filled with non-climbing trippers and crowds of hoary-headed Alpine Club has-beens who seem to delight in discouraging would-be climbers as much as possible – a beastly atmosphere!’
Worse still, he was challenged by a pair of those same hoary heads about his perhaps rash decision to cross the Furg Joch alone. His typically heated response to them risked far-reaching consequences, given he was hoping to be chosen for the 1922 expedition to Everest, a possibility he conceded in his third missive to Agnes in as many days, this one decorated with pressed sprigs of the white mountain flower, edelweiss:
The 1st August is a Swiss national day, hence the uni-colour bouquet of edelweiss. Next year we’ll hunt for real live ones together. There will be no Himalayas for me – I was rude to two most important old boys of the AC who said I should not have come over the Furg Joch alone. I wound up by asking one of them point blank if he measured my capacity as a climber by his view. If it wasn’t for my promise to you I think I would have started off right away to traverse the Matterhorn alone, just to spite them.
But George was not just planning his mountaineering future. Before leaving for Europe he had proposed marriage to Agnes, and she’d happily accepted. There was no need to ask for permission from her father who had died some years before, but he was worried about how he had broken the news to her mother in a letter: ‘I would far rather have told her personally [and] I’m afraid now that my letter was very formal. Will you put that right for me? It was strangely difficult to write of our love to a third person. I am counting the time to the New Year.’
In spite of his engagement to Agnes ‘Bubbles’ Johnston, George’s life was, in reality, at a crossroads. There was the mess of misfortune and misjudgment that included two broken marriages and at least two children who were now without a father, along with the loss of his financial lifeline – the endowment from his father – which had vanished with the Russian revolution of 1917. The couple would be forced to rely solely on his modest income from teaching.
And now his mountaineering aspirations had been stymied unfairly too.
To add to this was George’s faltering relationship with his brother Max, who had fallen in love and married soon after the war. His wife was a professional pianist and the daughter of a Serbian diplomat, and by 1921 the young couple was living in the village of Frascati, near Rome. They were about to have their first and only child, a boy they would call Edward.
But the imminent birth was not the main reason that George had not asked his brother to meet him in the Alps that season. It was far more complicated and, sadly, permanent. The last time the brothers had climbed together was in April 1914 when both knew war was coming and they’d spent a joyful week skiing and climbing in the Bernese Oberland. It had never occurred to either that it would be their final climb, and even though both had come through the war unscathed, things had changed.
The loss of the family endowment had hit Max harder than his older brother. Although far from financially secure, George had already established his career as an academic before the Great War. Max, by contrast, had barely completed his degree and there had been no time for him to even get a job, let alone consolidate a career. And despite appearances, his wife had no access to funds, which meant there was simply no money to be spent frolicking in the Alps. The most significant block, however, was his wife’s vehement opposition to a pastime she feared would kill her husband and leave her as a widow with a young child.
It was an attitude that would all but end the relationship between the brothers even when Max later moved his family to London and worked in the banking industry. The bond had been broken and they simply lost contact, their lives drifting in separate directions.
Many years later a family member asked George about the rift. Instead of upsetting him, the subject seemed to invoke pleasant memories. It was clear that the old man, then in his late seventies, was enjoying reminiscing about his youth and the uncanny abilities of his brother. He recalled the pair’s ability to negotiate difficult terrain without speaking, seemingly just sensing the other’s movement and needs. So why hadn’t they spoken in more than four decades? Wouldn’t he like to see his brother again, the relative asked.
George didn’t answer immediately and the conversation moved on, but he would revisit the subject a few days later. Their bond – the difference between life and death so many times in the Alps – had been broken by the fact that they no longer needed one another. He felt certain that Max would feel the same way; after all, there had been no attempt by either of them to make contact in the years since. There had been a relationship of glorious youth when they were inseparable and invincible. Now they were just old men. Sadly, George would not be aware that his younger brother died before him, in Brighton in 1966.
Percy Farrar may have been reluctant to drag his 64-year-old body up an Alpine peak alongside George Finch in the summer of 1921 but he was quick to point out his young charge’s accomplishment in climbing the southern flank of Mont Blanc in a letter to Arthur Hinks when he returned to London in mid August: ‘Our invalid Finch took part in the biggest climb done in the Alps this summer,’ he wrote sarcastically.
It was a pointed remark that rankled Hinks who did not reply, not just because it was yet more evidence of his mistake but because of his worry about the reconnaissance mission, which was still circling the base of Everest and would not make an attempt for another month, far too late, as the monsoon season approached.
Hinks had desperately wanted immediate success, making it clear to Mallory and Raeburn before they left that although it was officially a reconnaissance mission they had his permission, indeed his strong encouragement, to make a serious attempt for the summit if the opportunity arose – ‘full liberty to go as high as possible’. Howard-Bury was also told that the ‘first objective is to ascend the mountain and all other activities are to be made subordinate’.
But that was now improbable. There had been delays from the start when the stores were held up at the Calcutta docks and then had to be sent by rail north to the town of Darjeeling, where the team of nine white men waited with one hundred mules, forty coolies, four cooks and two interpreters. They had finally set off from Darjeeling on May 18 on a 300-mile march to the base of a mountain that Europeans had only glimpsed from afar.
The difficulties on the trek began almost immediately, the trail alternately plunging and then rising hundreds of feet at a time through steamy tropical forests in a roller-coaster of the spectacular – scarlet hibiscus, mauve solanum and rainbows of orchids, rhododendrons, primulas and magnolias – mixed with unrelenting heat and deluges of rain that turned the track to mud. Within days the mules began waning; some were left behind and others died from exhaustion. The men, too, struggled, mostly with stomach complaints. Kellas, in particular, had looked exhausted when he’d arrived in Darjeeling only two days before they were due to leave.
They crossed the state of Sikkim, heading toward the Tibetan Plateau and beyond to the Himalayas, their snow peaks visible in the distance through the subtropical foliage. The route took them through the Tista Valley and over a mountain pass known as the Jelep La, which connects India and Tibet, and on into the Chumbi Valley.
The Brilliant Outsider Page 15