George was brimming with enthusiasm about the adventure ahead, as he wrote to Farrar the next day: ‘I am seeing Mallory on Saturday and hope to get numerous tips from him. Re food, at ordinary altitudes where the cold is not excessive, almost anything suits me (except prunes) but at higher altitudes I can dispose of quantities of raw fat-smoked ham. But perhaps I should come round some time next week and see your provision list.’
As usual, George’s messy personal life seemed intertwined with momentous events in his career. On December 12, the same day he informed Hinks that the Imperial College had granted him six months’ leave on half pay (£20 per week), the final decree was issued in his divorce from Gladys May. He was now free to marry Agnes Johnston.
The flurry of correspondence continued as plans for the expedition proceeded. The committee offered to pay the cost of the climbers getting to Darjeeling if they were not able to afford the ticket and would even contribute £100 per man toward the cost of their equipment, including clothes, boots and climbing equipment, but the rest they would have to find themselves.
On December 15, in a letter to George formally offering an expedition position, Hinks enclosed an undertaking that had to be signed by George, and the other climbers, acknowledging the authority of Charles Bruce as the expedition leader and pledging to avoid contact with the media, publishing photographs and articles and delivering public lectures ‘without the sanction of the Mount Everest Committee’.
George was content to sign the document because the request seemed reasonable, particularly as the Royal Geographical Society and the Alpine Club needed to find ways of raising funds to cover costs, such as selling rights to various newspapers, charging for public lectures after the party returned, hopefully triumphant, and even producing a film and a book.
But he was perturbed by a rebuke from Hinks over a story that had appeared in the Illustrated London News in March, a few weeks after Francis Younghusband had publicly announced George Finch was a member of the reconnaissance team. The two-page profile, according to Hinks, had ‘created an unfavourable impression’ when he then had to remove Finch from the team after receiving the controversial medical reports. But rather than acknowledging the obvious – that it was Younghusband’s announcement that had sparked the media interest – he blamed George or an ‘injudicious friend’ hoping to make money by selling a photograph of him to the magazine. The missive ended with a warning: ‘I am sure you will do your utmost to put a stop to anything of the kind.’
It was typically antagonistic – the tense relationship highlighted by Hinks’s addressing his letter to ‘Mr Finch’ rather than using the more friendly ‘Finch’ – but George held his tongue, promising: ‘I will be careful that as far as lies in my power, no pictures of myself shall appear in the Press.’
Besides, there was a far more important issue at stake, although neither would realise it at the time. The committee had decided to send an official photographer, Captain John Noel, with the expedition, and George wanted to know if that meant that the photographs he planned to take, and the sketches and paintings he might want to make, would remain his property. Hinks wrote a lengthy reply, assuring him that the photographs would indeed remain his property, but were not to be published without the consent of the committee, concluding:
I am sure you will find that these provisions are both necessary for the proper conduct of the expedition and that they will not be used by the Mount Everest Committee in any oppressive way. It is however necessary that the committee should, for a certain time, control all the results of the expedition and treat them all as official.
And there lay the important words – ‘for a certain time’.
There would be thirteen men on the expedition, with George Mallory and Henry Morshead the only members of the reconnaissance mission who would return to the mountain in 1922. Along with George Finch, they would be three of the six designated climbers. The others were Howard Somervell, Edward Norton and Arthur Wakefield.
Major Edward ‘Teddy’ Norton had a mountaineering pedigree, his grandfather Alfred Wills being among the first to climb the Wetterhorn and a foundation member of the Alpine Club (although he was probably best known as the presiding judge in the 1895 trial of Oscar Wilde for acts of gross indecency). Teddy had been educated at the Charterhouse School before embarking on a military career. He first learned to climb while staying at the family chalet in the French Alpine region of Haute-Savoie, and was a renowned linguist and bird lover.
Dr Arthur Wakefield was a boyhood friend of Geoffrey Winthrop Young, George’s supporter, and, like him, the privileged son of a wealthy family. As young men the two had attended Trinity College together. Wakefield had climbed in Switzerland for two seasons but it was his endurance as a Fells walker in the Lakes District that impressed Winthrop Young, although it seemed hardly the appropriate training ground for Everest. He was forty-six and had been severely traumatised by his experiences as a physician during the war.
Dr Thomas Longstaff was chosen as the expedition doctor, although he would admit after arriving in India that despite being technically qualified, he had never actually practised medicine. At forty-seven, Longstaff was too old to seriously tackle Everest although he had an impressive climbing record, not only in the Alps but in the Caucasus, Norway, Greenland, the United States and, importantly, in the Himalayas, where in 1907 he had been the first person to climb over 23,000 feet.
John Noel, the expedition photographer, was the son of a career army officer and grandson to the Earl of Gainsborough. He’d been christened Baptist Lucius but changed his name when he entered Sandhurst. He was a reluctant soldier (enrolling at the insistence of his father) who hoped that his posting to India would allow him to pursue his twin passions for exploration and photography, and in 1913 he had disguised himself and travelled with two local guides to find an eastern route to Everest, getting within fifty miles of his goal before being turned back by angry tribesmen. It was his lecture in 1919 concerning this adventurous trek that had reignited public interest in the conquest of Everest.
As expedition leader, General Bruce exercised his right to choose the support staff, selecting mainly soldiers with the experience and local knowledge to be able to handle logistics such as transport and translation services. His first choice was his cousin Captain Geoffrey Bruce, a 25-year-old Indian Army officer who was about to receive a Military Cross for gallantry during the Third Afghan War (although his performance review in 1920 had described a soldier ‘not decidedly above or below average in any respect’). Geoffrey Bruce had never climbed a mountain but was considered to be a fine athlete, able to spear a pig between the shoulder blades from the back of a horse. He had youth and bravery on his side but time would tell if he could turn from horseman into mountaineer.
Captain John Morris was the antithesis of Geoffrey Bruce, a young bank clerk who’d been so bored with his job that he’d enlisted in 1915 and spent the next two years enduring the harrowing life of the trenches of France before joining the Indian Army. The killing hadn’t stopped during the Afghan Wars and the smell and sight of shredded men would haunt him for the rest of his life. His salvation was an obsession with Tibet and its cultures, and the skills he’d acquired in pursuing that passion had impressed Charles Bruce when Morris had shown an interest in the expedition. At twenty-seven, he and Geoffrey Bruce would be the youngest in the party.
The last member of the support staff was Colin ‘Ferdie’ Crawford, a Cambridge graduate aged thirty-two who had fought with the Gurkhas during the war and then joined the Indian Civil Service. He had climbed for seven seasons in the Alps as well as in Kashmir and, like Morshead, had accompanied Harold Raeburn during his Himalayan expedition in 1920.
Although he had not met, let alone climbed with these men, George Finch would find the respect and support from a number of them that was sorely missing from those in charge.
On December 27, a week after the grandeur of the Queen’s Hall reception for the 1921 reconnaissance team, George attende
d a much more private ceremony that would have a much more lasting impact on his life and legacy. For the third time in six years he took the vows of marriage in a registry office, rushing through a brief ceremony before two witnesses, but no friends or family. This time he knew he had chosen the right partner in Agnes Bubbles Johnston, which may be why, vexed by a combination of regret, shame and fear that he might never be happy, George could not bring himself to reveal the secrets of his past.
19.
THE POLITICS OF OXYGEN
In the summer of 1820 a London-based Russian physician named Joseph Hamel organised a party to climb Mont Blanc, in part to confirm the imposing mountain’s height as the greatest in Europe but also to test his belief that a lack of oxygen contributed to muscle weakness at altitude.
‘Mountain sickness’ had first been documented in 1624 by a Jesuit priest and explorer named António de Andrade who reported that while crossing the Himalayas some members of his expedition had become ill because of what local tribespeople described as ‘noxious vapours that rise’.
Little had been done scientifically in the two centuries since to solve the mystery, but Hamel, a savant who had previously published works on mining, education and the manufacture of potassium, wanted to conduct various experiments including measuring oxygen levels in the blood of his fellow climbers. He had also hoped to carry compressed oxygen to test its effects as his party neared the 15,780-foot summit, but couldn’t find a suitable container that could be carried up the mountain.
It was an adventure that began full of promise but would turn to tragedy when three guides in the party, during the final ascent, were swept away by an avalanche. Hamel’s experiments went with them, and though the guides’ bodies would be recovered some years later, the reputation of Hamel, whose conceited attitude was blamed in part for the accident, never did.
It would be another fifty years before mountain sickness was again considered scientifically, but this time in a laboratory. In the mid 1870s the French zoologist Paul Bert used a steel tank pressure chamber to test and prove his theory that hypoxia was caused by low oxygen pressure. Bert mostly used animals and even insects in his experiments but also risked his own life, on one occasion reducing the chamber pressure to the equivalent of that at the summit of Mount Everest (although he didn’t know it) and remaining conscious inside the tank by using piped oxygen.
Bert’s findings were demonstrated in horrific fashion in 1875 when three daring aviators attempted to make a record balloon flight. Gaston Tissandier was a chemist and flying enthusiast keen on setting a new height benchmark. Joseph Croce-Spinelli and Théodore Sivel wanted to study the effects of breathing oxygen at great heights to prevent asphyxiation, so they carried bagged oxygen and planned to use it as the balloon neared the target of 26,000 feet.
The men were already feeling dizzy as the balloon rose past 23,000 feet and they entered the so-called ‘death zone’, but instead of reaching for the oxygen bags they cut free more ballast. The balloon shot skywards and the men fainted before they could get to the bags. Tissandier awoke as the balloon finally began to descend but Croce-Spinelli and Sivel were dead, their faces blackened and their mouths filled with blood.
Altitude experiments continued through the nineteenth century but it wasn’t until 1907 that oxygen was used on a mountainside when the British climbers Arnold Mumm, Thomas Longstaff and Charles Bruce (the latter two both members of the 1922 Everest expedition) climbed the main peak of Mount Trisul in the Indian region of Kumaun, at 23,359 feet.
As well as supplies, tents, sleeping bags and even a stove, Mumm carried an oxygen mask, as he later wrote: ‘I took out, as my special contribution to our outfit, some oxygen generators, or pneumatogen cartridges. They are intended to be employed in mines where the air is foul, but I thought they might be useful at great heights. However, I never could get any of the others to take much interest in them, and no really good opportunity offered itself of testing their efficiency.’
Longstaff and Bruce were both dismissive of the idea of climbing with oxygen – an attitude that would later have great significance for George Finch – but Mumm persisted and would write about the night spent in his tiny tent while a storm raged outside high on the mountain: ‘In the interests of science I tried whether a dose from the pneumatogen cartridge would assist me to enjoy a pipe. I think it certainly did; and I found I could smoke with satisfaction for several minutes continuously, which I had not been able to do before inhaling the oxygen.’
But that would be it, and Mumm’s research went no further than the end of his pipe.
In the spring of 1916, a few weeks before the beginning of the Somme Offensive, a short, slight and bespectacled Scotsman gave a speech to members of the Royal Geographical Society in London. It was Dr Alexander Mitchell Kellas, who in 1921 would join the Everest reconnaissance party, and he had been invited by Arthur Hinks, already the society secretary, who had suggested a topic in his invitation: ‘If you could give us a paper with some general title like “The possibilities of climbing above 25,000 feet” it would be a subject of first-rate interest, especially since no one perhaps in the world combines your enterprise as a mountaineer with your knowledge of physiology.’
There is no record of what Kellas said that day or of how many members, all men and mostly in uniform, were present, but the invitation seems to have piqued Kellas’s own interest because a year later he proposed a scientific experiment in which he would erect a wooden hut on the summit of Mount Kangchenjhau (22,703 feet), where he would live for several months while conducting experiments on the physiology of acclimatisation.
The experiment never happened, cruelled by the continuing war, but Kellas was persistent and two years later was involved in a four-day study held in a low-pressure chamber at the Lister Institute in London. It resulted in a paper that was delivered during an Alpine Congress held in Monaco in 1920 and initially published in French. It began by posing the question: ‘Is it possible for a man to reach the summit of Everest without adventitious aids?’
In the paper Kellas discussed the theoretical composition of air in the lungs of a climber as he reached the summit of Everest, the amount of oxygen in his blood and its rate of consumption by the body. Kellas even made predictions about the speed of climbers making their way up the mountain, encountering ever-thinning levels of oxygen, concluding: ‘Mt Everest could be ascended by a man of excellent physical and mental constitution in first-rate training, without adventitious aids if the physical difficulties of the mountain are not too great, and with the use of oxygen even if the mountain can be classed as difficult from the climbing point of view.’ (It would take almost six decades to confirm that Kellas’s calculations were remarkably accurate when, in 1978, the Italian Reinhold Messner and the Austrian Peter Habeler became the first to ascend Everest without supplementary oxygen.)
In the years immediately after the Great War thoughts once again turned to peacetime frontiers, and an attempt on Everest and the use of artificial oxygen to get there became the source of great debate. Was it humanly possible to reach some altitudes and was it cheating to rely on artificial supplies of oxygen to defy nature’s physical boundaries?
Kellas would try again, this time on the remote Mount Kamet (25,446 feet), tucked away on the Tibetan Plateau. In the autumn of 1920 he took seventy-four tanks of oxygen with him, each weighing twenty pounds (nine kilograms), and tested the effects of their use when he reached an altitude of 21,000 feet. The conclusion was emphatic and pessimistic: the cylinders were ‘too heavy for use above 18,000 feet and below that altitude they are not required. They would be quite useless during an attempt on Mt Everest.’
Kellas conducted two other experiments at about 20,000 feet. The first was overly simple: he took a breath from a ‘rebreather’ – a rubber bag filled with the chemical compound oxylithe to help create oxygen – and then climbed thirty feet. He then climbed another thirty feet without taking a breath from the bag: ‘The times were practically i
dentical,’ he concluded. ‘The excess amount [of oxygen] in the lungs at starting was of negligible value in promoting ascent.’
But when he carried the bag beneath his arm and continually used it while climbing, the results were very different: ‘The gain while using oxygen was quite decisive, the advantage being up to 25 per cent … and clearly indicates that the light oxygen cylinders might be of considerable value as regards increase of rate of ascent at high altitudes.’
Kellas, of course, never got to test his theories on Everest, dying in the early stages of the 1921 reconnaissance mission and buried within sight of three giants he had climbed, his equipment abandoned as the others moved on toward the behemoth. His analysis lived on, however, eventually being published in the Geographical Journal back in London and read by George Finch as he fumed over being dropped from the expedition team.
It was in the superficially polite surroundings of Lowther Lodge, the Royal Geographical Society’s headquarters in Kensington Gore, that the question of whether the 1922 Mount Everest expedition would use artificial oxygen was discussed on January 26, 1922. There were a dozen men around the oak table that dominated the council room, upstairs along the corridor, past the glass-walled exhibition rooms and well-stocked library, but only eight of them would vote on this most contentious aspect of the 1922 assault. It was clear that Percy Farrar would say yes to oxygen, just as Arthur Hinks would say no, but the remaining committeemen – Francis Younghusband, Edward Somers-Cocks, Colonel Jacks, Charles Meade, Norman Collie and John Eaton – were harder to pick.
The three others in the room were there to persuade the committee members to follow Farrar’s lead. Howard Somervell, one of the climbers chosen for the expedition, had been convinced of the need to take bottled oxygen by the continuing research of Georges Dreyer that had again shown the benefits of oxygen. Along with George Finch, Somervell had recently submitted to testing in Dreyer’s steel tank. This time the altitude was set at the level of the base camp on Rongbuk Glacier. George did the step-up test first, doing twenty repetitions with a thirty-pound (fourteen-kilogram) pack on his back to simulate carrying oxygen. Somervell followed but could only manage five step-ups before he collapsed and had to be given oxygen, recovering quickly.
The Brilliant Outsider Page 17