The morning broke warm with clear blue skies and the decision was made. They would keep going, albeit with amended plans. George Finch believed oxygen should be used from the North Col camp onwards, but Mallory reckoned they could get at least as high as 25,000 feet before taking short sips of oxygen and then using it steadily from 26,000 feet, near the North Col ridge shoulder where he wanted to establish an overnight bivouac.
First, though, they would have to cross the rest of the Rongbuk Glacier and ascend the steep slope onto the col itself. The conditions were poor; ploughing through the deep snow would be exhausting and the party would have to travel slowly to avoid crevasses hidden by fresh falls. The danger of avalanches from snow lying loosely on the steeper slopes would be ever-present. Mallory was particularly worried about the final slope linking the glacier to the col.
Mallory and Somervell, joined now by Crawford and fourteen porters, set off at 8am on June 7 and quickly realised they were going to struggle even more than they had anticipated in their trek across the glacier, plunging knee-deep into snow with each step. It took more than two hours just to reach the base of the slope Mallory feared would be the most dangerous. The climbers went ahead, testing the surface by cutting a trench across the base of the slope, encouraging any loose snow to give way. It held solid and the party moved on.
As Mallory later wrote: ‘The thought of an avalanche was dismissed from our minds.’
They paused just before 2pm, satisfied that the slope had flattened out somewhat, but aware that they still had 600 feet to climb to get to the camp site. Somervell was leading, followed by Wakefield and then Mallory, advancing straight up the slope rather than criss-crossing back and forth in the manner often employed in avalanche-prone areas. The climbers moved in virtual silence, the only sound their laboured breath in the thinning air, even though the conditions remained still and bright.
Mallory’s account of the next few seconds is chilling:
We were startled by an ominous sound, sharp, arresting, violent and yet somehow soft like an explosion of untamped gunpowder. I had never before on a mountainside heard such a sound; but all of us, I imagine, knew instinctively what it meant. In a moment I observed the surface of the snow broken where it had been even for a few yards to the right of me. I took two steps convulsively in this direction with some quick thought of getting nearer the edge of the danger that threatened us. And then I began to move slowly downwards, inevitably carried on the whole moving surface by a force that I was utterly powerless to resist. Somehow I managed to turn out from the slope so as to avoid being pushed headlong and backwards down it. For a second or two I seemed hardly to be in danger as I went quietly sliding down with the snow. Then the rope at my waist tightened and held me back. A wave of snow came over me and I was buried. I supposed that the matter was settled.
Mallory was tumbled down the slope like a surfer in a boiling wave, his senses confused until he felt the pace slacken and the snow close up about him. The avalanche had slowed and stopped. His arms were free and he began struggling, worming his way toward what he perceived to be the surface. He broke free and stood up, the rope taut around his waist until the porter who had been immediately behind him stood up. Somervell and Crawford emerged nearby, but where were the others?
They looked down and could see a group of sherpas standing 150 feet below. They had been the closest to the climbers and were pointing back down the mountain, where another nine had been swept by the wave of ice and snow. They had been roped together in two groups, and as Mallory and the others quickly descended it became clear they had been washed down an ice cliff and into a crevasse now covered in snow. It was an icy tomb unless they could be dragged out quickly. The process was heartbreaking. Seven of the nine were dead, among them the brave Tergio. The 1922 mission was over.
PART IV
28.
THE UNLIKELIEST OF HEROES
The closer he got to London, the briefer the entries in George Finch’s diary would become. What began as a document full of the wonders of new lands, strange people and exotic customs, and evolved into a story of stoicism in the face of prejudice and achievement against the odds, turned into a weary notation of the towns and villages passed during the long trek back to India. Even the first of many celebratory dinners on June 26 in Darjeeling barely rated a mention: ‘Lunch at Gov House and packing.’ The diary entries petered out altogether after July 1 when the men boarded the RMS Macedonia at Bombay for the voyage home.
Finch travelled with Longstaff and Strutt, who had been among the more vocal opponents of oxygen. Yet by the time they docked at Dover on the evening of July 16, they had become friends of sorts. Longstaff was now an admirer and a supporter who believed it was only bad luck that had kept Finch from reaching the summit of Everest.
Strutt, who had been so willing to dismiss George as an uncouth cad, quietly acknowledged his achievements in the last days at base camp when he filled out an Alpine Club membership application for George, naming General Bruce as the proposer, himself as seconder and four other climbers, including Mallory, as supporters. Under the heading ‘Qualifications for Membership’, Strutt noted: ‘Everest expedition, record height 27,300ft, many various in the Alps, Corsica etc.’ Despite their differences, the two men would maintain cordial relations over the years.
But the welcome home was far from warm. Two days before they docked, news reached London of the avalanche and death of the sherpas. Charles Bruce, ashamed and worried, had held back the information for several weeks and was now trying to play down the accident and the culpability of the climbers, particularly Mallory. In public he defended the decision to climb and dismissed the accident as the revenge of Everest – ‘a terrible enemy’ – but privately he blamed it largely on an error of judgment by Mallory that had tarnished the expedition’s other achievements. In a letter to Francis Younghusband he concluded: ‘It is altogether a rather humiliating and I am sorry to say a quite unnecessary ending to the expedition.’
Arthur Hinks, in particular, was furious. The time gap between events at Everest and the information arriving in London had been frustrating enough without the general’s delay in revealing the awful truth that now had to be massaged through the media. Hinks had already fired off an angry letter to Bruce, demanding an explanation about the composition of the first two climbs, both of which he regarded as reconnaissance rather than real attempts and ignoring the fact that his own interference had influenced the decisions of Colonel Strutt, backed by Bruce.
The early return of Longstaff, Finch and Strutt only heightened Hinks’s ire and he sent them all telegrams demanding their appearance the following morning before the Everest Committee. At a time when they desperately wanted a quiet reunion with families they had not seen for more than four months, the three men instead found themselves fronting a boardroom inquisition in Kensington Gore.
It was an angry affair, at least at first, as Hinks accused a group of men whom most would regard as brave heroes of being irresponsible, questioning why they had left the expedition earlier than expected and demanding an explanation for Finch climbing with Geoffrey Bruce instead of Howard Somervell or Teddy Norton. Strutt insisted it was due to a combination of factors, including Finch’s illness, worries about the weather and doubts about the oxygen equipment.
Longstaff angrily defended his medical evaluation of the climbers, which had proved accurate, and labelled the decision to approve a third attempt as reckless, as proved by the resulting tragedy, which the trio had been unaware of until they arrived at Dover. The official minutes of the meeting would reveal little of this debate and certainly none of the emotion, although Longstaff later gave an account in a letter to Sandy Wollaston, his medical counterpart in the 1921 mission, in which he castigated George Mallory as stout-hearted, ‘but quite unfit to be in charge of anything, including himself’.
He was not the only man to critique the expedition’s charismatic figurehead: the next day, Hinks sent a memo marked ‘Private and Co
nfidential’ to Norman Collie, Charles Howard-Bury and Edward Somers-Cocks in which he outlined the sequence of events, and the impact of George Finch’s bout of dysentery on the plans:
This explains why Somervell and Norton went for the first climb. When Finch recovered, he chose Geoffrey Bruce as being the most reliable man with oxygen to accompany him. Bruce made a considerable effort but was slow because untrained in Alpine work, and Finch thinks that if he had Somervell or Norton with him he would have got a good deal higher, which seems very likely. In fact Finch’s sickness for a while is probably the most important mishap from the point of view of complete success. Finch has given very much useful and thoughtful information and seems to me to have come out of it very well. A contributory cause of his failure to get beyond 27,300 feet was the want of food. They thought of many things but overlooked the fact that consuming oxygen would make them exceedingly hungry.
Hinks, perhaps deliberately because of his own Machiavellian contribution to the debacle, had disguised the real reason for George picking Geoffrey Bruce – that he was the only fit man left. He then went on to make judgments about Mallory:
The people who have come back think Mallory’s judgment in purely Alpine matters was bad and much inferior to Norton of whom everyone speaks very highly, and they are inclined to attribute the accident to this. They evidently had sharp disagreements about the proper way to ascend the North Col, Finch going a different way from Mallory.
Collie replied a few days later, agreeing that George Finch had earned their admiration:
Finch was the most able person besides being a first rate climber; he was I am sure of the greatest value to the expedition, a man who could turn his hand to anything, and a man who was at once capable of sizing up probably correctly the possibilities of any situation that turned up. Before he went out I saw how he at once understood about possible difficulties and how to meet them, and never made any foolish remarks about things. I am sincerely glad that he got on satisfactorily with other members of the expedition.
Charles Bruce had also offered his verdict by letter. As usual, his comments on George Finch damned him with faint praise:
Probably the best snow and ice man on the expedition but has a curious constitution. On his day can probably last as well as any man but apparently very soon shoots his bolt. I should say not a very robust man for a long strain and has a delicate inside. Is extraordinarily handy in all kinds of ways outside his scientific accomplishments. A convincing raconteur of quite impossible experiences. Cleans his teeth on February 1st and has a bath on the same day if the water is very hot, otherwise puts it off until the next year. Six months course as a Lama novice in a monastery would enable me to occupy a Whymper tent with him.
It was an ugly, graceless assessment of a man who had climbed higher than anyone else, rescued the general’s own cousin from certain death, pitched in to help others with photographs and repairs of equipment and survived the attempt on Everest in better physical condition than all but one man. And yet even Charles Bruce could not hide from the conclusion that George Finch, a boy from the Australian bush, had emerged the unlikely hero of the first attempt to climb the world’s biggest and most fearsome mountain.
If George Finch had expected that he would be allowed to simply disappear into the background to wallow in the anonymous comfort of wedded bliss, then he was sadly mistaken. The astounding aspect of his Himalayan adventure, over and above his climbing achievement and scientific genius, was how little it appeared to matter to him compared to his new home life, perhaps as it came after the failure of two previous marriages. For him, the conquest of Everest was important, a realisation of the exhilaration he had felt that spring morning as a thirteen-year-old atop Mount Canobolas. But it was his new life with a petite Scotswoman with curly hair and a can-do spirit which was the goal he could envisage from the summit that day.
There would be barely enough time for George and Bubbles to settle into their tiny Kensington flat as man and wife or for George to reacquaint himself with the staff and students at Imperial College before he was dragged away to attend endless rounds of meetings, grand public dinners and newspaper interviews and to give the first of dozens of paid lectures. Arthur Hinks and his cohorts might not have admitted it, but George, like Mallory, was a hero and the public wanted to hear first-hand his story of monster mountain winds, the bone-chilling deathly cold and the attempt, inch by inch, to stand on top of the world.
The fact that neither man had made it to the top seemed to make little difference, and the tragedy of the deaths of the sherpas seemed only to add to their tale, as did the ongoing dispute about the use of oxygen tanks.
When Mallory arrived in London to present his side of the story in The Times on September 4, he argued that a mountaineer was ‘bound to take risks’ but in doing so ‘must be sure himself that the risks he takes are within reason’. The three climbers – himself, Somervell and Crawford – were all entitled to believe the slope was safe after testing it, he maintained. Privately, he struggled with the accident, as he wrote to Ruth: ‘Do you know the sickening feeling that one can’t go back and have it undone and that nothing will make it good?’ Ultimately, however, he accepted no responsibility and the issue quickly disappeared.
Mallory was also keen to play down the difficulties of climbing at altitude – and thus the need for oxygen – insisting that the reason he did not climb the final 3000 feet to the summit was not because of altitude but because of the effort already expended in getting to 26,000 feet: ‘The factors which will tell against the climber on this last section are his efforts on the previous days, from which it may be supposed he will not have recovered completely and, possibly, ill effects from sleeping at these very high camps.’
It seemed that the unquestionable success of oxygen only intensified the opposition to it, The Times even adding parentheses around the word ‘record’ when describing Finch and Bruce’s climb, as if it were not legitimate. Not one to stay quiet, George used the pages of Arthur Hinks’s Royal Geographical Journal to hit back at the ‘anti-oxygenists’ in an article laced with sarcasm:
There are those who do not believe in oxygen. Perhaps it is because simple obvious facts render them uneasy in their unbelief that they rush into print with a wholesale condemnation on the grounds that its use in high mountaineering is what they rather loosely term ‘artificial’ and therefore unsporting. Now, few of us, I think, who stop to ponder for a brief second, will deny that our very existence in this enlightened twentieth century with all its amenities of modern civilisation is, in the same slipshod sense of the word, ‘artificial’.
Most of us have learned to respect progress and to appreciate the meaning and advantages of adaptability. For instance, it is a fairly firmly established fact that warmth is necessary to life. The mountaineer, acting on this knowledge, conserves as far as possible his animal heat by wearing specially warm clothing. No one demurs, it is a commonsense thing to do. He pours his hot tea from a thermos bottle – and never blushes. Nonchalantly, without criticism, he doctors up his insides with special heat and energy-giving foods and stimulants.
From the sun’s ultraviolet rays and the wind’s bitter cold he boldly dares to protect his eyes with Crookes’ anti-glare glasses; further, he wears boots that to the average layman look ridiculous. The use of caffeine to supply just a little more buck to an almost worn-out human frame is not cavilled at despite its being a synthetic drug the manufacture of which involves the employment of complicated plant and methods.
If science could prepare oxygen in a tabloid form or supply it to us in thermos flasks that we might imbibe it like our hot tea, the stigma of ‘artificiality’ would, perhaps, be effectually removed. But when it has to be carried in special containers, its whole essence is held to be altered, and by using it the mountaineer is taking a sneaking, unfair advantage of the mountain!
In answer to this grave charge, I would remind the accuser that, by the inhalation of a little life-giving gas, th
e climber does not smooth away the rough rocks of the mountain or still the storm; nor is he an Aladdin who, by a rub on a magic ring, is wafted by invisible agents to his goal. Oxygen renders available more of his store of energy and so hastens his steps, but it does not, alas, fit the wings of Mercury on his feet.
By contrast to the British coverage, the American newspapers trumpeted the achievement, explaining to their readers that the men had got ‘within four or five city blocks’ of the summit: ‘No more desperate or magnificent effort against the mountains was ever made,’ said the New York Times. ‘A fearful struggle but with great heroism succeeded in climbing higher than man had gone afoot before,’ said the Washington Post.
The Australian media was also captivated by the adventure, although none of the Sydney or Melbourne papers realised that George Finch was a home-grown hero. It was only the regional papers that made the connection, like the Northern Champion in Taree which trumpeted him as ‘a native of the western district’ and the Gundagai Independent which declared ‘Australia will be there!’, suggesting the unlikely scenario that George had shouted the name of his homeland from the icy heights.
In the days when cinema was in its infancy, and decades before the technology that would create television, the lecture tour was a form of entertainment that brought to life the stories of daredevil adventurers. Thousands queued in villages, towns and cities across the United Kingdom to see and hear their heroes, who more often than not used the revenue raised to help fund the cost of their adventures to come or pay for those just completed.
Gerald Christy was the best known of the London managers who arranged these tours, his agency at one time managing two hundred celebrities, including the likes of Robert Falcon Scott, Douglas Mawson, Ernest Shackleton and even Winston Churchill.
The Brilliant Outsider Page 26