The threat was clear: either toe the line or forget about going back to Everest.
George waited until he was back in London before he replied. He was happy to continue lecturing in England and for the committee to take its share of profits from the European lectures – exactly as he had proposed back in March when Hinks had tried to block him. But he would not be held to an agreement for another two years:
If I may understand that the 3rd para of page 2 of your letter sets me free of any further obligation to the committee I am content. I understand indirectly that for reasons doubtless sufficient to the committee I am not to be asked to join the next expedition, notwithstanding the relative success gained by my own party and my subsequent very willing services in connection with the improvements in the new oxygen apparatus.
It was remarkable that for once he managed to contain his understandable anger and dismay, because, for George Finch, the Everest dream was over.
31.
THE TRAGEDY OF GEORGE MALLORY
George Mallory was having second thoughts about George Finch. His dislike of the man who, logically, should have been his climbing partner had been tempered by the ongoing personal assault by Hinks and others on the Everest Committee. It was boring, he told Hinks in one letter – ‘La question Finch m’ennuie’ – although he stopped short of protesting because, unlike George Finch, Mallory knew his place and the value of loyalty.
There would be accounts in later years that Mallory did protest about the treatment of Finch and refused to climb unless he was also chosen, forcing the intervention of a member (never identified) of the royal family. But there is no evidence of this other than hearsay. Certainly, Mallory now sensed that Finch was not the selfish scoundrel he had been made out to be, but instead was misunderstood and unfairly treated by men who didn’t know what it was like to struggle financially.
As if to illustrate this point, Mallory revealed to Hinks that while in India he had lent Finch £2, and had been repaid with a cheque which promptly bounced, an unforgiveable sin in a society that valued honour above all else. But Mallory did forgive: ‘He has since made good by postal orders … but this explains part of his conduct,’ he told Hinks, suggesting it had been an honest error made by a misjudgment of the financial borderline which they both constantly negotiated, rather than a dishonest ruse. It was naive of Mallory, of course, to believe that Hinks would be as understanding; instead, he used the tidbit to further malign Finch, particularly when Charles Bruce revealed that he, too, had made a small loan to George, who, in the general’s mind, had taken too long to repay the money.
Mallory’s doubts were more about himself than the other climbers. He was racked with guilt about the months he had already spent away from his wife and three young children on what had begun as an adventure but had become a war against an unyielding opponent. He had also come to the realisation that he was not infallible and might not survive another attempt on Everest, confessing to friends that he had doubts but felt obliged to go on the 1924 expedition as if it were his public duty to defeat the mountain on behalf of England and Empire. Ruth also had premonitions of his death, and Mallory’s sister, Mary, begged him not to go. On February 13, just a fortnight before the expedition party’s ship, SS California, sailed from Liverpool, he finally signed up to the ill-fated venture.
On the eve of departure, Mallory asked his wife to invite George and Bubbles Finch to their home, Herschel House at Cambridge, the weekend after he returned. He told her that if he succeeded in conquering the mountain, he wanted to ensure that George’s contribution was properly acknowledged.
The weekend meeting would never take place. However, Ruth Mallory would not forget her husband’s wishes. In 1937, she met George Finch in a chance encounter at the Gorphwysfa Hotel at Pen-y-Pass in Wales, where Geoffrey Winthrop Young was hosting his annual Easter weekend. George and Ruth sat together in quiet conversation for most of the evening, clearly emotional given the tragic end to the Everest campaign that had unfolded thirteen years before.
When they finally parted ways, Ruth Mallory spoke with Scott Russell, who had been watching from the other side of the room, and told him that she had revealed to George her husband’s plans, the misgivings Mallory had expressed about George’s treatment and his regret that he had not spoken out in protest. He had also expressed a desire to climb again with George when he returned from Everest, perhaps in the Alps as they had done in 1919. She had wanted to write to George after her husband’s death, but a letter had seemed inappropriate for such an important message.
Russell was flabbergasted, not just about what Ruth Mallory told him, but because she had wanted to explain herself to a 24-year-old student who had only known George Finch for two years. (They had met shortly after Russell’s ugly encounter with Sydney Spencer at the Alpine Club and had organised events together for the Imperial College mountaineering club.)
‘Why are you telling me all this?’ Russell asked her.
Ruth Mallory reflected for a moment, as if choosing her words carefully: ‘Because you’re like him [Finch]; you know what it’s like to be an outsider and you would best appreciate the problems he has faced.’
Russell knew what she meant. Although born in England he would be forever defined by his New Zealand childhood. Their Antipodean backgrounds had created a bond between the two men, which was made even closer after World War II when Russell would meet and marry George’s oldest daughter, Bunty. He was the son that, to George’s mind, he had never had. Russell did not speak to George about the evening with Ruth Mallory but later noted that his father-in-law’s greatest regret about Everest was that ‘in their youthful impetuosity, he and Mallory had let others create trouble between them’.
Some years after his father-in-law’s death, Russell would republish George’s memoir, The Making of a Mountaineer, and pen a foreword that attempted to correct some of the misinformation that still swirled around George. In doing so, he would have his own tussles with bureaucracy; documents inexplicably went missing from the Alpine Club archives when Russell tried to access them and were later discovered in the personal papers of a club official.
Despite his personal loyalty, Scott Russell strove to be an objective observer of George Finch:
At first sight he seemed rather formidable. Over six feet two inches tall, broad-shouldered and very erect, he made the rest of us look rather puny, but it was his strong finely drawn features which impressed me the most, especially his expressive cold-blue eyes, which inspected me rather dauntingly at our first meeting. Later I came to realise that they were an excellent barometer of his mood that sometimes changed rapidly. Interest, amusement, suspicion or disapproval were unmistakably conveyed with an appropriate change in voice; silence and a blank, rather stern expression indicated that he was deep in thought. It was no surprise that he inspired great friendships and equally great enmities, for his personality and his appearance made it scarcely possible for him to be ignored in any company.
George Finch not only had to be replaced as a climber but as the man responsible for the oxygen equipment. Despite his disappointment at being excluded from the expedition, which was never expressed publicly even in the memoir he was now writing about his experiences, George indicated a willingness as late as December 1923 to keep working on the oxygen equipment that the team would use without him on the trip. The Everest Committee chose to ignore his offer and assigned the responsibility to Percy Unna, who had long been a believer in the benefits of oxygen. But Percy was an engineer, not a scientist. The equipment would be redesigned without any involvement by George Finch and then built in neglectful haste as the departure day loomed. It was not surprising that the cylinders arrived in India broken, half empty and leaking.
Oxygen management during the expedition would fall on the broad shoulders of a 23-year-old Oxford university student named Andrew ‘Sandy’ Irvine. There was no doubt that Irvine was a brilliant and capable young man, something of a genius mechanically, who at the a
ge of fifteen had designed a mechanism – an ‘interrupter gear’ – that allowed machine guns to fire between the blades of a moving propeller, much to the surprise of military officials to whom he sent details. He was a member of the winning crew in the annual Oxford and Cambridge Boat Race and had excelled during a 1923 university trip to the frozen Norwegian island of Spitsbergen.
But Irvine was no mountain climber; in fact, the highest peak he had climbed was just 6500 feet. He had come to the attention of the Everest officials because an expedition member, Noel Odell, had led the Spitsbergen trip and been impressed by the young man. Odell had first met Irvine four years earlier, in 1919, when the then seventeen-year-old rode a motorbike to the top of a Welsh mountain, the Foel Grach, while Odell and his wife were climbing it on foot. Odell was impressed by Irvine’s bravado and felt he could be the future of Everest expeditions – a youthful ‘superman’ to whom he was happy to delegate responsibility for the oxygen equipment.
He put Irvine’s name forward to the committee and the young man was accepted within a month, just in time for the expedition party to be formally announced. Not everyone agreed with the choice, one committeeman, Godfrey Solly, noting Irvine was ‘a very nice, strong looking fellow, but only twenty-one. I think twenty-one is rather too young and so does Somervell.’ But Hinks was delighted because it killed off Finch and satisfied George’s own arguments for youth and science in a single blow. Any potential dissent about Irvine’s inexperience could be crushed by referring, in a cruel twist, to George’s achievement; after all, it was Finch who had taken Geoffrey Bruce, a novice, almost to the top of Everest and brought him back safely.
Irvine embraced his job as oxygen officer by taking home a sample oxygen unit, stripping it down and making a series of recommendations to the manufacturer, Siebe Gorman, for improvements. It was impressive work, but behind the scenes Irvine made it known that he despised the use of oxygen as much as Hinks and co: ‘I really hate the thought of oxygen,’ he would write to a friend. ‘I’d give anything to make a non-oxygen attempt. I think I’d sooner get to the foot of the final pyramid without oxygen than to the top of it … still, as I’m the oxygen mechanic I’ve got to go with the beastly stuff.’
As preparations continued there was a ceremony that almost passed unnoticed and yet embodied the incredible achievements of the 1922 campaign as seen by the world outside the fusty British establishment. The first Winter Olympic Games was held in Chamonix in late January 1924, and twenty-one members of the expedition, including the seven dead sherpas, were awarded gold medals for ‘the greatest feat of alpinism’.
Colonel Strutt was the only expedition member to attend. He accepted the medals on behalf of the others in a ceremony hosted by the International Olympic Committee president and architect of the modern Olympics, Pierre de Coubertin. Arthur Hinks may have regarded George Finch and his oxygen as unsportsmanlike but the father of the world’s greatest sports event did not hold the same opinion. Science and heroism went hand in hand:
We salute the most beautiful kind of heroism, that which confronts scientifically calculated danger step by step without hesitation or sensationalism. At the foot of the highest mountain in Europe, we present you and your wonderful companions with this small testimony of the admiration with which all nations have followed your journey towards the untouched peaks of the highest mountain in the world. We accompany this gesture by prayers for the completion of a work that will honour not only your country but all humanity.
George’s medal, eventually delivered by mail, did not suffer the same fate as his Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule honour which had been melted down for its gold to fund his Alpine escapades. It is still kept in its green velvet presentation box by his family, nestled among a dozen more of varying importance bestowed on him for his achievements in science and mountaineering. On inspection it is clear that de Coubertin regarded the ceremony as significant in Olympic history. It was not the medal handed to the winners of the various sports at the Winter Games, but marked VIII eme Olympiade Paris 1924 – the gold medal handed to the winners of the Summer Games held in Paris a few months later. Among the various athletic images on the front of the medal are a ski pole and skis. Appropriately, the back of the medal features a triumphant athlete helping another athlete to his feet. It might as well have been George Finch saving the life of Geoffrey Bruce.
George Mallory arrived at Rongbuk Glacier with the other expedition members on April 28. The journey had been full of regret and worry about his marriage, compounded by the curse of dysentery that had felled his companions one by one: Bentley Beetham, Noel Odell, Edward Shebbeare and even the youthful Sandy Irvine. He’d had his own health scare, a brush with what he feared was appendicitis, and Charles Bruce had been struck by malaria and replaced as leader by Edward Norton.
But it had all turned around on the road between Kampa Dzong and Tinki in late April while Mallory pondered how best to attack the mountain and how to split up the climbers. In a moment of epiphany, George Mallory suddenly became a convert to oxygen. It was a brainwave, as he explained to Ruth before thrashing out a plan with Norton that would involve twin attempts on the summit, one with oxygen and the other without. In a complete reversal of his earlier position, Mallory wanted to lead the oxygen party – and take Sandy Irvine with him – perhaps in a piece of one-upmanship on Finch’s climb with beginner Geoffrey Bruce.
It may have surprised the others but Irvine had impressed Mallory as a man who could be depended upon ‘for everything perhaps except conversation’. Besides, he was the only one capable of managing the problematic oxygen apparatus with which he had continued to tinker.
But a month later his mood had changed and the fear of failure or worse had resurfaced. By May 21 Mallory stood atop the North Col, eyeing the ramp-like slope to the north-west ridge beneath which he had been forced to retreat two years earlier. Four camps had been established from base camp to 23,000 feet, with plans to establish three more advance camps, the highest at the altitude reached by George Finch and Geoffrey Bruce, from where Mallory would launch the final assault.
But they were running out of time and morale had been sapped by the extreme cold that plunged temperatures to minus 56 degrees Celsius, and by the debilitating effects of altitude sickness. Mallory had dismissed predictions of an early monsoon as the rantings of ‘meteorological people’, but he was wrong. On May 24, after risking their lives to rescue four stranded porters, the men were driven all the way back to base camp by a blinding snowstorm.
The men were thin and weak; Mallory and Somervell both had bronchitis and Irvine diarrhea, Odell was not sleeping and Beetham had not recovered from dysentery. Only Geoffrey Bruce was fully fit, according to Mallory, who penned what would become a telling appraisal for The Times on May 27 as the party made plans for an assault as soon as the weather cleared.
The article, published on June 16, read like a soldier’s letter home from the Front: ‘The issue will shortly be decided. The third time we walk up East Rongbuk Glacier will be the last, for better or worse. We have counted our wounded and know, roughly, how much to strike off the strength of our little army as we plan the next act of battle.’
Mallory was now partnered with Geoffrey Bruce and Somervell with Norton. A third, reserve, group of Odell and Irvine would wait at Camp III while the two lead teams made separate attempts on consecutive days, supported by the remaining sherpas who would carry tents and supplies to establish two advance camps. Oxygen had been abandoned because of the loss of men to carry the cylinders up the mountain.
Mallory and Bruce set out from Camp IV just after 6am on June 1 and were immediately confronted by a wind that bent them double as they forced their way up the 45-degree slope. At 25,000 feet four of the sherpas sat down, unable to go on. Mallory and Bruce kept the others moving but could go no further than another 300 feet where they pegged a site for Camp V and erected two tents. Six of the porters were then sent back down while the remaining three crawled into one
tent and Mallory and Bruce the other. The next day, June 2, was clear and bright, but the sherpas would not budge. All hopes of establishing Camp VI at 26,800 feet had gone and the attempt was abandoned.
Norton and Somervell set out under the same clear skies on the morning of June 2 but soon found themselves battling a gale almost as fierce as the day before. They passed Mallory and Bruce who were on their way down, exchanging few words as they crossed to save energy and because of the futility of trying to be heard above the roar of the wind.
They spent the night at Camp V and were able to continue upwards the next morning as the wind died and the skies cleared, reaching 26,800 feet where they pitched a single tent to mark Camp VI. Only Finch and Bruce had been this high and Norton and Somervell were in excellent spirits that night as they watched their sherpas descend to safety and pondered their chances of reaching the summit the next morning.
June 4 dawned clear and still but with a cold that neither had previously experienced. They broke camp with optimism, deciding to traverse across the face and stay below the ridgeline where they would be less exposed if a wind developed. Despite the favourable conditions, the combination of thin air and heavy snow made progress painfully slow.
At 28,000 feet Somervell was defeated, barely able to breathe. He sat down on a ledge and urged Norton to keep going alone. Norton nodded and plodded on, battling not only the conditions but deteriorating vision because he had removed his goggles and was becoming snow-blind. He managed to reach 28,126 feet before he turned back, realising that he had no chance of climbing the extra 900 feet and descending safely in the fading light. He had eclipsed Finch and Bruce’s height by 800 feet and without oxygen, a record that would last almost three decades, but he would barely make it back alive.
The Brilliant Outsider Page 29