In spite of doubts he may have felt about whether he would be selected, and without his champion, Percy Farrar, in the room, George presented a lengthy and passionate twelve-point report detailing his strategy for conquering Everest by establishing two main camps, one at the base of the North Col and the other at 26,000 feet, using a transport officer and a team of porters carrying tents and oxygen bottles.
Waiting below would be six designated climbers working in pairs, as he and Geoffrey Bruce had the previous year. The first pair would begin using oxygen at 21,000 feet and climb past the second camp to 26,500 feet where they would dump six or seven cylinders atop a small shoulder where they could be seen, then return to the 26,000-foot camp.
The second pair – the designated summit team – could then pick up four of the cylinders on their way to the peak. Assuming they made it to the top, the men could dump the empty cylinders when they descended to 26,500 feet, pick up fresh ones and make their way down to the main camp in triumph. If the attempt failed, then it was hoped the men would leave the spare cylinders at the shoulder, enabling the third pairing to make an attempt.
The plan was simple – a relay of sorts – and relied on teamwork as much as individual effort. It was a commonsense approach that would provide fresh oxygen at critical moments without the need for the climbers to haul the cylinders up the mountain.
When Finch was finished, George Mallory gave his views which differed quite markedly. Mallory was concerned about the weight of the cylinders, even though he had never climbed with tanks on his back, and believed the answer lay in acclimatising for four or five nights at 23,000 feet where there was no difficulty sleeping and oxygen was not necessary. The key then was to ensure that a second advance base was established higher up the mountain, at 27,000 feet near the shoulder of the North Col ridge. He insisted that porters should be able to carry equipment that high even though none had been able to do so in 1922. He also wanted three men in each climbing party.
The meeting ended without resolution. It would be the last time that George Finch was asked by the committee for his opinion.
30.
A DREAM IS DASHED
On April 12, 1923 Bubbles gave birth to a baby daughter, almost forty weeks to the day since her husband had arrived back in London from the Everest expedition. Despite their delight, neither could agree on a name for their newborn, so Joyce Nanette Ingle Finch was named by compromise – given names both parents could live with but neither particularly cared for – but it mattered not at all because she soon became ‘Bunty’. She was the first child for whom George Finch would accept full parental responsibility.
He was still making payments to his second wife, Gladys May, who had celebrated the fourth birthday of their son, Bryan, just two days before Bunty’s birth. And little Peter, the boy whose paternity would remain in doubt for the rest of his life, had recently turned seven and was exploring the Vaucresson wonderland in the care of George’s mother, Laura, who would be told of her new grandchild and in later years would make sudden – and brief – appearances in England.
Peter’s mother, Betty Fisher, had recently married Jock Campbell and moved to India with her second son, three-year-old Michael, who, like Peter, would always believe that George was his father and cite his name on the birth certificate as proof. One of the few photographs of the young boy would show a genteel afternoon tea in Jhansi, in central northern India, where Campbell’s Poona Horse regiment was stationed. The wide-eyed, angelic boy is smiling in wonderment at the camera, standing at the side of the handsome Jock, clearly the senior officer of the group of officers resplendent in white dress uniform and lounging in wicker chairs. Betty is seated next to them, the only female adult, smiling coyly and dressed in flowing white chiffon. In another, taken around the same time, Michael wears a pith helmet and stands shyly between Betty and the grim-faced Jock who would divorce his mother several years later, always insisting that although he had bedded and loved Betty Fisher, he was not the father of either of her two sons.
Back in London, Bubbles knew only portions of her husband’s unsettling past as she nursed their first-born. A friend of George had told her about his first disastrous marriage, probably at George’s request, but the existence of Gladys and Bryan would always remain hidden, not out of any shame on George’s part but from a misguided desire to protect his wife. While she took responsibility for communications, George kept his hand firmly on the family’s financial tiller.
George was her champion, a man of action, intellect and romance in equal measure, as he had shown with his desperate, heart-torn letters from Everest. So Bubbles didn’t hesitate when George, tired physically by the pace of the lecture circuit and worn out psychologically by the continuing sniping of officialdom, encouraged her to bring their baby and accompany him on a summer climbing trip to Switzerland.
He would spend six weeks rediscovering a corner of his Alpine playground, tackling some of his favourite mountains in a non-stop program of almost two dozen peaks, even encouraging Bubbles to leave Bunty with a sitter while he led her carefully up and over a small peak, the Riffelhorn, in the hope that she would get a sense of the exhilaration of his passion.
It was merely the beginning. A few days later she found herself on a climb via the Swiss Ridge to the summit of the Matterhorn, ‘something not of earth but suspended in the air, splendidly detached from the lowly haunts of men. I could not have imagined myself scaling its precipitous slopes.’ And yet Bubbles was seized by the challenge, as she would write soon afterwards: ‘I was not going to climb the Matterhorn unless I could do so with zest and enjoyment. If one respects a mountain, one ought to approach it with a joyful mind.’
It was a moment that defined their relationship in many ways. Betty Fisher would never have ventured out of the hotel let alone to the summit of one of the biggest mountains in Europe, and the unfortunate Gladys May was not someone whom George believed would share his vision. Bubbles, by contrast, was a resolute and adventurous woman who was clearly a partner in life for George Finch rather than simply his domestic manager.
A letter to a young grandson written many years later would show her strength of character and her deep affinity with her husband. The letter was written to Francis, Bunty’s son, for his first birthday and offered some grandmotherly advice, imploring him to not stand by silently if he thought something was wrong but to ‘shout your head off’. She told him that: ‘The vast majority of folk lack imagination, the most important single thing in one’s mental makeup … It is my earnest hope that you will be blessed with this gift.’
Of her Matterhorn climb, Bubbles would delight at the peak’s dark and quiet beauty – ‘as quiet as whist’ – while embracing the thrill of danger as a landslide of rocks crashed past the hut in which she and George slept, exploding onto a glacier below. She marvelled at her husband’s skills and the sense of security he engendered:
I soon began to lose all consciousness of effort, my body felt light as the cool night air; my feet and hands, as if instinctively, sought and found hold. We mounted higher and higher – right out of ourselves, so to speak. There was none of the straining and panting that I thought must mark my climbing attempts. Here and there, as we seemed to wind our way in and out amongst the rocky towers of the ridge, I was aware of the tingling depth of precipice or chasm, and once I made a false step and dipped my right foot over into nothingness.
It seemed audacious in the extreme taking his wife, a beginner, up such a mountain, let alone so soon after giving birth, but such was George’s confidence, and hers in him. And George wasn’t finished with breaking the establishment’s rules. At the Monte Rosa Hotel in Zermatt he insisted on taking Bubbles into the male-only confines of a room set aside for members of the London Alpine Club, the same men who had all but discarded him. Ignoring the surprised looks, he sat her down for dinner in the midst of the men, Charles Bruce among them. None protested. It would be another fifty years before the next woman was admitted and the sex
ist bar removed.
A MOUNTAINEERING FEAT
Zermatt Aug 4: Captain Finch (of the Mount Everest Expedition of 1922), Captain Forster and Mr Peto yesterday made the first ascent of Dent d’Hérens (13,175 ft) by the north face.
A more devious man might have planned to make one of the few ‘first ascents’ remaining in the Alps as a slap in the face to his detractors back in London, but George Finch’s bold clamber up the north face of the tricky Pennine peak, which made the front page of The Times, was yet another example of his simple joy in a challenge.
In fact, the climb had been in the making since the summer of 1911, when an afternoon lazing in the summer sunshine, scanning the surrounding mountain-scape from a Zermatt hotel, had drawn George ‘irresistibly … as if for relief, from the solemn, dark magnificence of the Matterhorn to the white purity and graceful curve of the hanging glaciers of the north face of Dent d’Hérens’.
He’d then realised, after reading what he called ‘mountain literature’, that the face was unconquered. ‘Here truly was a grain fat enough to satisfy the greediest appetite, and I made up my mind to secure it.’
In 1913, he’d surveyed by sight a route from the Schönbühl Hut below the main slope, satisfying himself that there was indeed a way around the giant ice cliffs from a hanging glacier that dominated the face. Then the war had intervened and so it wasn’t until 1919 that he returned and began once more to map an attack. In 1921, he had returned again after being removed from the Everest reconnaissance expedition, but had run out of time to make an attempt.
So here he was for a fourth time, licking his wounds from another unfair mauling by his Alpine elders by challenging social norms and tackling another dangerous climb with a beginner. This time it was a former student and friend named Raymond Peto, nine years younger than George and keen to follow his famous mentor into, or rather up, the unknown. They would be joined by Guy Forster (Smith-Barry), who, fittingly it seemed, had been a sounding board for George’s Everest disappointments in the summer of 1921.
Their first attempt on July 29 from the Schönbühl Hut was abandoned in haste after a few hours, the climbers fleeing the slope as the morning sunshine loosened seracs above them and sent ice, rocks and snow tumbling over their heads. They arrived back at the hut to a chorus of ‘we told you so’ from other climbers, preparing for easier ascents, who declared the north face climb ‘unmöglich’ – impossible.
Undeterred, the trio tried again on August 2, Forster holding a candle clenched between his teeth to light the way while George cut steps into the ice as quickly as possible across the slope before the sun rose, to reach a point where they could climb directly to the summit. It would take more than fifteen hours, and at one stage Peto, the beginner, braced himself against the mountain to hold George steady so he could swing his axe without hand-holds. They celebrated by shouting their triumph into the recesses below, their voices echoing off the stone walls.
Arthur Hinks was fuming. It had come to his attention that George Finch, against his instructions, was planning to conduct lectures in Switzerland during the autumn. He had made it clear in March that he was against the idea of Finch doing any more lectures and that the Everest Committee would not sanction them, particularly as John Noel’s Everest film was now being shown across Europe. To make matters worse, Finch was apparently planning to break the confidentiality agreement he had signed as a condition of his selection and was intending to sign as an individual with Gerald Christy’s agency and keep the proceeds to himself.
There had been an angry exchange of letters between Hinks and Christy in late May when Hinks demanded to see a written copy of the script Finch was using to introduce his lectures. He’d questioned the wording, insisting that it be made clear that the lectures were under the auspices of the Everest Committee. He had then edited the wording of Finch’s promotional brochures to eliminate anything that might be regarded as ‘boastful’.
Christy wrote back, perplexed and exasperated that Hinks seemed unable to grasp the notion of promotion: ‘I am sorry you have cut out, more particularly from the Finch circular, anything which might be described as a “write-up”, either of Finch or the subject. This sort of thing is very necessary – although it may be distasteful – when one makes anything in the nature of an appeal to the public. One has to blow one’s trumpet a bit.’
Christy also disputed Hinks’s claim that lectures by Finch would harm the film: ‘I should have thought it would have been shown in all the big cities so that Finch giving some lectures in September next could hardly have any serious effects on his film. If anything, it might revive an interest in the expedition generally and make it possible for him to show the film again in some towns.’
But Christy’s assurances did nothing to placate Hinks, who, behind the scenes, was under financial pressure. The film had been well received in London but its broader release had been delayed, which was a mistake. Extra costs had come in late for the expedition, too, including a dubious bill for almost £400 for the hire of mules and the discovery that an accountant hired by Hinks had embezzled £700. Even taking into account the success of the lectures that had paid for the 1922 expedition and left a reasonable surplus, the committee was struggling to find a way to pay for the 1924 expedition which Charles Bruce had insisted would cost £1000 per man.
But instead of embracing George Finch’s popularity in Europe, perhaps even allowing him to front the film as suggested by Christy, Hinks saw it as further proof that he was not suitable for the next Everest expedition. He sent one last stinging letter, demanding that ‘it be fixed’, and left for a month’s holiday.
George had stayed out of the debate to this point, preferring to allow Christy to bear the brunt of Hinks’s attacks in the hope that the bureaucrat might see reason. But as he prepared to leave for Switzerland with his wife and baby daughter, George decided he’d had enough and fired off a blistering letter to his nemesis in which he revealed he had spoken to his lawyers about his obligations. He knew the move was provocative, but what else could he do?
I am advised by counsel that the agreement which I entered into with the committee on joining the expedition is not legally binding in respect of the restraint of my activities contained therein, on the grounds that it is neither reasonable as between the parties nor consistent with the interests of the public. I myself always understood that the restraint was not intended to stand for more than one lecture season following the return of the expedition and in these circumstances I consider myself now free, morally as well as legally, to lecture on my own account, free from control of the committee. I therefore should be glad if you will inform the committee that I propose to do so on or after July 16th next (which is one year after my return from the expedition) unless before that date the committee take steps to obtain an injunction. If the committee decides to take this latter course, in view of the advice I have received, I shall defend the proceedings and my solicitors, Messrs Warren, Merton, Miller & Foster of 45 Bloomsbury Square, have instructions to accept service on my behalf.
In the absence of Hinks, the letter landed on Sydney Spencer’s desk with a thud. The Everest Committee had never faced a crisis like this. No one had ever had the audacity to question its authority. A hurried meeting was organised and a prominent lawyer named Withers, a member of the Alpine Club, was engaged to give his view of the strength of the agreement signed by the expedition members. His opinion was swift, as Spencer reported a few days later to Hinks and Charles Bruce:
Withers said that our position was anything but a strong one as the agreement which Finch signed contained no stated limit of time and area and consequently [is] too indefinite and of very little value, and he thought it was very doubtful whether we should obtain an injunction. On this point I must say that Bruce expressed a very strong wish that the matter should not be taken into court and one or two of the others seemed to share his feelings.
In the meantime, Percy Farrar had implored George to withdraw his initial
missive and pen a slightly more diplomatic one: ‘There has been, as I anticipated, constant friction with Hinks, who is a man of great ability and strong personality, though not of equal tact in handling men of independent spirit,’ he wrote to Spencer, adding that the new letter should be given ‘every consideration’.
The replacement letter was much longer than the first, withdrawing the threat of legal action but pointing out that the issue had come to a head because Hinks had refused to allow George to lecture, even though he was happy to do so under the terms of his agreement with the committee: ‘This proposal was declined, of course to my loss.’
George explained that Hinks had told him he was bound by the agreement ‘until the mountain is climbed’, which was excessive, particularly as he had already completed more than eighty lectures on behalf of the committee, written three chapters for the book and allowed the publication of his photographs. He had also earned an income from lecturing long before he went to Everest, as confirmed by Christy, so the agreement was unfair.
Hinks’s reply was swift and pugnacious: the committee would not yield. The contract had not been written as a legal document but as a gentleman’s agreement which he was expected to honour. It was imperative that the committee maintain control over publicity because the Everest expeditions were self-funding. Yet he was still refusing to allow George to lecture in Switzerland even though there were a dozen events already booked and the committee desperately needed money.
The hammer came in the third paragraph of page two:
Any breaking away from the agreement by a single member of the expedition would do some damage to the future of the enterprise as a whole, but infinitely more damage to the station of the individual by his comrades and the committee. The committee believe that you have not taken into account these wider aspects of the question and that you will now be willing to agree that for the next two years at least you should not lecture in public on your experiences on the Mount Everest expedition except under the auspices of the committee on the same terms of division of profits.
The Brilliant Outsider Page 28