It was to Christy that the Everest Committee turned to convert the public fascination with the Everest climbers into a commercial gain that would help pay the bills of an expedition that had cost £12,500. The lecture tour and film following the 1921 reconnaissance had turned a decent profit, which had paid for that mission and gone some way toward covering the cost of the 1922 adventure, although there was still a shortfall of around £9000.
Arthur Hinks was keen to involve as many of the climbers as possible, but not all were available, willing or capable. Henry Morshead was still recovering in India, where Howard Somervell and John Morris had also remained ‘John Noel was in Tibet and Teddy Norton in Constantinople. Geoffrey Bruce had rejoined his regiment, Arthur Wakefield had headed straight for his country home in Cumberland, Thomas Longstaff wasn’t interested and Edward Strutt, according to Hinks, ‘would not do it well because he is a bad lecturer’.
That left the two Georges, and to a lesser extent Charles Bruce, to be the public faces and financial hopes of the expedition. Both men had suffered financially more than the others: George reduced to half pay and Mallory, having resigned from Charterhouse, earning nothing while he was away, pinning his hopes on making a living from his celebrity status. Both were happy to accept the committee’s offer of 30 per cent of the net profits plus travelling expenses inside the United Kingdom, as per the agreement they had signed before leaving.
The rush of interest was only heightened by an announcement in early September that there would be another expedition, either in 1923 or more likely 1924, and that Charles Bruce would again be the leader. Given their climbing success and their status as the stars of the lecture tour, it was assumed that Mallory and Finch would again be the chief climbers.
Over the next three months George Finch travelled widely, often catching a train after lessons finished at the Imperial College, to appear in town halls and schools up and down the country. The accounts books of the Royal Geographical Society show that he visited towns and cities in Wiltshire, Gloucestershire, Kent, Worcestershire, Nottinghamshire and Leicestershire, reaping significant income for the Everest Committee.
Mallory was also busy, speaking at events in Wiltshire, Cheshire, the Midlands and Berkshire before he embarked on a three-month tour of America which proved somewhat less successful financially but would result in one of the most famous lines in mountaineering history. When a New York Times reporter asked him why he wanted to climb Everest, Mallory replied, ‘Because it’s there.’ He then expanded on his much-quoted response: ‘Everest is the biggest mountain in the world and no man has reached its summit. Its existence is a challenge. The answer is instinctive, a part I suppose of man’s desire to conquer the universe.’
As his rival headed across the Atlantic, George Finch sailed to the Continent with Gerald Christy, where he was fêted, delivering five lectures in as many nights in Delft, Rotterdam, Amsterdam, Arnhem and The Hague before travelling to Switzerland to speak at three events, each in Geneva and Basel and two in Zürich. Then it was on to Gothenburg and Stockholm in Sweden before events in Paris and Marseilles, all of which earned the committee more than £1000. Returning to England, he began travelling again on weeknights and on weekends, visiting Cumbria, Surrey, Lancashire, the West Midlands, Yorkshire and Warwickshire, and venturing up to Glasgow.
By March, George Finch had given eighty-three lectures and delivered the bulk of the profits that would help pay for the expedition, yet earned just enough himself to compensate for his loss of income and to cover the £200 he had paid for photographic stock out of his own pocket before the trip.
And yet his efforts seemed only to irritate Arthur Hinks, who, despite pocketing a £250 bonus for managing the expedition from behind his desk, turned down George’s request for a minimum fee of £25 per lecture while overseas and then ordered Christy not to accept any more engagements because ‘he has had a good run’.
There was further angst behind the scenes when Charles Howard-Bury, despised leader of the 1921 reconnaissance mission, twice referred in public to Mallory as being ‘the most distinguished climber’ of the expedition, completely ignoring George’s contribution. To compound matters, the official account of the expedition contained three chapters written by George and also used his photographs – for which he received nothing despite having spent his own money on equipment and photographic stock and in the face of Hinks’s assurances that he retained ownership of his work.
Nevertheless, George was capable of his own high-handedness. When Mallory asked if he could use George’s photographs during his own lectures, George wrote him a lofty and sarcastic letter, saying he had carefully considered the request but rejected it in the interests of the committee, arguing that his and Mallory’s lecture styles were different and it would ‘plagiarise them in the eyes of the public’ if anyone besides himself showed them. It was a spurious argument, but the only ammunition George had to fight back the barrage of criticism waged against him.
Mallory complained to Hinks, asking him for a copy of Finch’s report of his climb, because he was unsure of the detail and feared ‘I have made rather a mess of it’. Hinks replied the same day: ‘I certainly have not got Finch’s verbatim reports. I would not touch them. He is now sad because Howard-Bury referred to you as the greatest climber on the expedition and did it twice. He asked me how I justified such action on the colonel’s part.’
Hinks could not do so because the evidence was to the contrary, but it seemed the truth only worsened George Finch’s situation. In March he took a break from lectures for a few weeks with other matters on his mind.
Bubbles was pregnant.
29.
THE BASTARDY OF ARTHUR HINKS
In the late autumn of 1935 a young man named Scott Russell arrived at the rooms of the Alpine Club in Savile Row to introduce himself as a prospective member. His mid-morning timing was deliberate as the club was largely empty before noon when the older members would begin filing in for lunch and an afternoon of reminiscing. The club was usually filled by late afternoon, particularly on Tuesdays when there was an evening lecture.
It was unnerving for the fresh-faced 22-year-old to be ushered into the first-floor lounge and reading room, the wood-panelled walls lined with bookshelves filled with accounts of the splendid adventures of members over the eighty years since the club’s founding in 1857. There were a few stalwarts around and Russell found himself chatting with the Honorable Sydney Spencer, a 73-year-old former club secretary and librarian and now vice-president.
Spencer was pleasant enough and curious about the young man’s background. And Russell obliged; after all, he needed to convince the club committee of his climbing pedigree if he were to be accepted as a member. Russell was London-born, he assured Spencer, but raised at the bottom of the world in New Zealand where the family had moved when he was a young boy, in search of a better climate because of his father’s ill health. He had returned to London to study botany at the Imperial College. His love of climbing had developed in the wild hills behind Nelson on the South Island and been inspired by the adventures of two Alpine Club icons, Geoffrey Winthrop Young and George Finch.
The mood in the room suddenly chilled. Spencer paused, the veneer of friendliness gone in a moment. Winthrop Young was a perfectly reasonable choice and well regarded by his fellow members, but Finch was another matter altogether. No one liked him and he was barely tolerated as a member. The man simply didn’t belong: ‘I hope your proposers told you that in addition to being the oldest mountaineering body in the world, the Alpine Club is a unique one – a club for gentlemen who also climb,’ Spencer explained. His voice was icy, disdainful. Although there was no mistaking his point, Spencer wanted to ensure the young man understood him perfectly. He glanced out of the first-floor window into the street below where a street sweeper was clearing the pavement: ‘I mean that we would never elect that fellow even if he were the finest climber in the world.’
Russell would not forget the encounter, p
artly because of its ferocity but more so because he would not only meet Finch and fall under his thrall but, many years later, would become his son-in-law. Spencer’s comments, therefore, became rather personal.
It is little wonder that Spencer hated George Finch, given that he represented all that George had railed against in his 1913 article in The Field – a ‘professional man of comfortable means and adequate leisure’, as he would be described after his death in 1950. The two men had interests and experiences in common, particularly their love of the Alps, but their generations and social attitudes held them apart. Both had known the legendary Swiss guide Christian Jossi, although their relationships with him were in complete contrast. George Finch regarded Jossi as a mentor, and remained forever grateful to the Swiss for teaching him and Max the art of ice climbing before they took off to explore the Alps. Sydney Spencer simply paid Jossi for the twenty-two summers and fourteen winters he led him safely across mountaintops, including the year they found a new route to the peak of the Aiguille de Blatière near Chamonix in France. The climb passed along a passageway later named the Spencer Couloir, a lasting reminder of the days when, as writer JH Doughty once remarked, ‘the titular honour of a new climb was given not to the man who led it but the man who paid to do it’.
Both men were also avid and pioneering photographers, but it was their differences which mattered most in the early months of 1923, a dozen years before the meeting with Russell, as planning began in earnest for the next attempt to scale the world’s highest peak.
Spencer had become the secretary of the Alpine Club at its annual general meeting in December 1922, succeeding Captain John Eaton who was a friend of Percy Farrar and, therefore, a supporter of George Finch. But times, and political numbers, had changed, and when Charles Bruce succeeded Norman Collie as the Alpine Club president at the same meeting it meant that George’s already fragile support on the Everest Committee was lost, as shown by a missive from Bruce to Spencer on March 1 with his preliminary list of climbers: ‘Somervell, Mallory, Norton, Finch (I am sorry to say but it is those scientific requirements) and Geoffrey Bruce,’ he wrote, adding there was a need for two first-class snow men: ‘Finch is one, Norton, I think is another.’
Given his stinging assessment of George’s personal hygiene habits in his report some months earlier, Bruce was obviously reluctant to include him – but his own words of praise had trapped him. It was clear that Finch was not easily dismissed from the reckoning. Not only was he the best credentialled climber for the snow and ice near the summit of Everest, but he was also the only man capable of taking care of the fragile oxygen equipment. And, as Charles Bruce himself had pointed out, he was the best man in a tight spot, able to turn his hand to fixing clothing and equipment and adaptable in adverse situations.
From an objective point of view, George should have been the first man chosen. This was galling for men like Sydney Spencer and Charles Bruce, who despised what he stood for, as Spencer would make plain with his street sweeper analogy more than a decade later. George Finch had no breeding; he was a rebellious colonial from the bush of New South Wales, educated on the Continent rather than at Oxford or Cambridge, and he not only repudiated the role of gentleman climber but was critical of those who embraced it as a birthright. Percy Farrar’s sheer force of personality had won Finch a place on the 1922 team, but if they could help it, Spencer and Bruce, along with Arthur Hinks, would not let it happen again.
George Finch was keenly aware of the resentment around him. Publicly he said nothing, but privately he would always refer to his nemesis as ‘Little Hinks’, not only because he towered over the bureaucrat but because he regarded him and his behaviour as beneath contempt. George was not interested in class, simply in ability, and what others interpreted as arrogance was a self-belief that could not be shaken – no matter the consequences.
In hindsight, Thomas Longstaff would probably regret writing to Sydney Spencer in late February 1923, asking for a special item to be placed on the agenda of the Alpine Club’s meeting on March 6 to appoint a committee to select the climbers for the 1924 expedition. The reason, he wrote, was that the Royal Geographical Society had an enormous list of tasks to prepare for the trip, including improving equipment, logistics and food as well as selecting team members in support roles. It made sense that the Alpine Club select the climbers.
A few days before the meeting he wrote again to Spencer, repeating his request but this time revealing he had a hidden agenda. The public reason, as he wrote, remained the same: the club was simply helping the Royal Geographical Society in what was a complicated task. He then added:
PRIVATE My real reason for making a move is that there is some dissatisfaction in the club in that they feel that they were not sufficiently directly represented – and kept informed as to plans of – the small Everest Committee. Especially this is the case as to the selection of the climbers. I therefore told the complainers I would move some such motion openly at the ordinary meeting.
Although he was not mentioned by name, the subtext was clearly the controversial selection of George Finch, an upstart who was not a member of either club when selected for the 1921 and 1922 missions. There were others who wanted to go to Everest, and believed themselves capable, and although none would challenge the iconic figure of Mallory, Finch had to be deposed.
Just after 5pm on March 6, as George prepared for a lecture in front of a decent crowd seated politely inside the town hall of Burton-on-Trent, Staffordshire, the Alpine Club elders met in London and agreed that a sub-committee of ordinary members and committeemen should make the decision about which climbers would represent the club on the next expedition, because ‘it would give the members of the club a better opportunity of taking a personal interest in the expedition’. Among the twelve appointed to make the decision was George Mallory, who was still in the United States on his lecture tour and would only arrive home in early April as the committee met to make its recommendations. These were passed to the Everest Committee in time for its monthly meeting on May 2.
Percy Farrar was not in attendance when General Bruce read out the selected names. Three of the four men were from the list Bruce had submitted on March 1 – Somervell, Mallory and Norton, who had climbed together without oxygen. There were two other names: the geologist Noel Odell and the ornithologist Bentley Beetham. Odell, who had climbed mainly in England, was a member of the Alpine Club committee and about to leave with an Oxford University team on an Arctic expedition. Beetham was a good friend and climbing partner of Somervell.
George Finch’s name had disappeared. There was no comment or minuted discussion about why he had been omitted, noting only ‘names of other candidates would be submitted for consideration early in the autumn’.
Farrar promptly resigned from the committee, although he would later make one last attempt to have Finch included in the climbing party as a late consideration. In a letter to Spencer he wrote:
We must not assume that there are plenty of men available or forget that he rendered splendid service and brought his party safely out of a most perilous adventure. With a less competent and resourceful leader than Finch we might have had to record the loss of other than porters. I put his name forward with a full knowledge of his thorough competence in Alpine matters so that nothing should occur to prejudice the name of the club. That is always my main concern.
Spencer did not reply.
The formal minutes of the Everest Committee’s meetings give no hint of any dissent or that anyone even raised George Finch’s name. He had simply disappeared from all discussion.
Perhaps, the answer lay in a letter written more than three decades later by Alice Bullock, widow of Guy Bullock, the man drafted into the 1921 reconnaissance at Mallory’s insistence to replace George Finch. Together, Mallory and Bullock had managed to climb to the North Col, but their relationship was not as close after the expedition as it had been beforehand.
In September 1960, Mrs Bullock wrote to the Alpine Club
in response to a request to publish her husband’s diary of the 1921 mission – the only diary kept by a member of the party. Bullock had refused to let Mallory use it as a reference during his lectures after they returned, insisting that he had not read it himself, but Mrs Bullock hinted at a different reason:
My husband considered Mallory ready to take unwarranted risks with still untrained loaded coolies in traversing dangerous bits of ice. At least on one occasion, he [Bullock] refused to take his rope of coolies over the route marked by Mallory. Mallory was not over-pleased. He did not suffer a critical difference of opinion readily. In the second expedition Captain Finch as a physiological chemist considered that Mallory did not know what he was talking about in his opinions on the use of oxygen at high altitudes. The result of this was, according to Mallory’s own statement to us, when the third expedition was being prepared, Mallory refused to join it if Finch were to be a member.
George Finch’s expulsion was complete.
Within his steely and intellectual character there seemed to be a touch of gentle innocence about George Finch, borne out by his belief during the 1922 expedition that Charles Bruce was an ally and by his writing that despite the party having conflicting views on oxygen, ‘complete harmony existed among us – too valuable a thing to be disturbed by the friction into which, under the circumstances, a sense of rivalry might well have degenerated’.
He also seemed unaware of his rejection by the Everest Committee; either that or he was holding out a forlorn hope that his name would be added to the expedition list later in the year, because he accepted an invitation to attend the committee’s meeting on June 14 to explain his plans for the use of oxygen. The committee had already given him the task of improving the design of the cylinders and he had also agreed to work on his designs for ‘cold-resisting clothes’ and more appropriate food.
The Brilliant Outsider Page 27