While he waited anxiously for news below, George Mallory was hatching a plan for one last attempt, even though he was exhausted, having been ill for much of the past month and having already spent almost a week at high altitude. It bothered him that oxygen had not been used in any of the attempts, however frail the apparatus, and he felt he had been wrong about George Finch, led astray by men like Arthur Hinks who were not mountaineers. It might be possible to climb Everest without the benefits of bottled oxygen but not on this visit, he concluded: the weather and conditions were against them as was their poor health. However, there was a window, albeit a small one, to conquer the beast with gas. Mallory had by now climbed with the tanks and experienced the sweet rush of air that made him feel ‘surprisingly fresh’. He wanted to grab the chance and vanquish the merciless peak. Sandy Irvine might have had very little experience, but he was young, rested and strong. Besides, if Finch could take a novice climber like Geoffrey Bruce, then he surely could take Irvine.
Mallory had already laid his plans by the time Edward Norton and Howard Somervell crawled back into Camp IV at the North Col. Somervell kept going down, back to the base camp, but Norton was exhausted and could not open his eyes, a ‘blind crock’ as he lay inside a tent for several days to allow his searing eyeballs to mend. He listened to Mallory’s enthusiastic plan for himself and Irvine to climb, over two days, to Camp VI at 26,800 feet without oxygen (of which there was a limited supply in working order) and then push for the summit early on June 8. As expedition leader, he gave his support to the plan although he was in no condition to argue against it and would later concede that he had experienced a sense of foreboding.
At 7.30am on June 6 Mallory and Irvine set off accompanied by eight porters each carrying a load of twenty-five pounds (eleven kilograms) made up of oxygen cylinders, food, sleeping bags and fuel. The skies were clear and the wind subdued as they made their way comfortably to Camp V. Four of the porters then returned to Camp IV carrying a short note from Mallory: ‘Things look hopeful.’
As Mallory and Irvine pushed upwards the next morning, John Odell moved up behind them to Camp V to act as support. The four remaining porters met him on their way down and passed another note from Mallory in which he laid out his plans for the June 8 assault. He intended to leave early to ensure he and Irvine had enough time to reach the summit and then make a safe descent back to Camp IV: ‘It won’t be too early to start looking out for us either crossing the rock band under the pyramid or going up the skyline at 8. Yours G Mallory.’
Conditions were almost still the next morning at 8am when Odell began climbing toward Camp VI. Back at Camp III John Noel had his telephoto lens trained on the ridgeline as instructed by Mallory’s note. He would sit there for more than four hours and see nothing before giving up when clouds blanketed the view. Meanwhile Odell was making good progress. He was without oxygen but felt well enough to test himself against an extra climb as he neared the north-east shoulder. As he moved toward the top he glanced upwards to the summit, just as the clouds cleared, giving him a brief but clear view of the north-east ridge. What he saw and described in an official communiqué would be debated for the next ninety years:
There was a sudden clearing of the atmosphere and the entire summit ridge and final peak of Everest were unveiled. My eyes became fixed on one tiny black dot silhouetted on a small snow crest beneath a rock step to the ridge; the black spot moved. Another black spot became apparent and moved up the snow to join the other on the crest. The first then approached the great rock step and shortly emerged on the top; the second did likewise. Then the whole fascinating vision vanished, enveloped in cloud once more. There was but one explanation. It was Mallory and his companion …
It would be the last sighting of George Mallory and Sandy Irvine alive.
George Finch was climbing in Corsica with Bubbles when the two men went missing, but had returned to London by the time the terrible news broke on June 21. Whatever differences they might have had in life, George had only praise for the bravery and legacy of Mallory, as he told the Daily News: ‘Some will say that this sacrifice of human life is not worthwhile. I say it is worthwhile. Such struggles keep alive that rejuvenating spirit of adventure without which any nation must decay.’
George also rushed through a reprint of his memoir The Making of a Mountaineer, published only a few weeks before, to include a chapter on the 1924 campaign and address what would become – and remain – the two biggest mysteries of mountaineering: What happened? And did Mallory and Irvine make it to the top?
George thought a slip or fall was unlikely, given Mallory’s experience and also dismissed the idea that the two might have lost their way. The most likely cause of their disappearance and presumed death, he said, was a defect in the oxygen equipment:
To be suddenly deprived of oxygen means a relapse into lethargy, that incapacity of doing more than drag one foot after the other, and even then holding up for every step to pant and pant in the almost vain effort to supply the lungs with sufficient oxygen to maintain life. It is there that I think one must look for the true cause of the loss of Mallory and Irvine.
And did they reach the summit? George thought not, because there had been no sign at the peak which could have been seen with field glasses from North Col.
More than ninety years later, even after the discovery of Mallory’s body, the prevailing view has not changed – that they died during the ascent.
What might have happened if it had been George Finch and not Sandy Irvine who was with Mallory that day? Although it is a hypothetical question, there are some facts that are indisputable. George would not have been involved in the first two attempts without oxygen. As a result, he would have been fit for the attempt that began on June 6. Although Irvine was talented, there can be little doubt that the experience and passion of George Finch would have made him the preferred man to manage and, if necessary, fix the oxygen equipment high on Everest. He had done it before and managed to bring Geoffrey Bruce back alive.
Another significant point lies in the actions of the Everest Committee. In their desire to spurn George Finch, they not only ignored his offer to be involved in the redesign and construction of the oxygen equipment, but also delayed the work until it became a rushed job that resulted in leakages and malfunction.
Percy Unna would later accept responsibility for the administrative mistakes, but it was Arthur Hinks who should have been held accountable.
32.
A NEW LEGACY
There was something mysterious about the chemistry department of the Imperial College, London, an air of forbidding isolation and solitude, its ugly functional buildings – some little better than huts – linked to Prince Consort Road by a rough timber bridge and guarded by grim black sentinels: a 10-metre high gas generator and a monstrous riveted-iron gas tank.
The guiding principle of Professor William Bone, that the success of his department should be measured by what it produced in terms of research and students rather than its façade, only became more relevant as the world left the Great War behind and entered an era of rebuilding – economically, politically and socially.
Under Professor Bone, the purpose of the department was to seek answers to the undiscovered, so the professors and students were encouraged to immerse themselves in research, which he also believed should be the cornerstone of the teaching and learning process. George Finch and the rest of the staff embraced the philosophy with gusto.
Walking through the front doors of the main building was an overwhelming experience; it was a place of noises and smells, a place of high-pressure explosions and reactions; of the study by high-speed photography of flame movements in gaseous explosions; of the chemical constitution of coal and gas reactions in the blast furnace. The top floor was the domain of postgraduate chemical engineering, headed by Professors Hinchley and Ure, who would help found the Institution of Chemical Engineers. Professors Newitt and Townend ran the high-pressure laboratory below, a series of stee
l-walled rooms filled with compressors and enormous gas storage cylinders, an environment from which the occasional forgetful smoker was immediately ejected. The basement belonged to the coal and fuel laboratory of Professor Himus, a former power station executive who had turned to academic life and was beloved by his students, particularly when he fired up the head gas generator, dressed in his boiler suit and sweat rag, and wielded his three-metre long poker to stoke the fires, resulting in a great flame of water gas that occasionally burst beside the Queen’s Gate.
George Finch, a rangy, slim and dapper figure in his dark suits, bow ties and pocket watch, had the entire second floor for his electro-chemistry laboratory. As a mountaineer, he’d been seen by some as a long-haired rebel, born in the wrong country and educated at the wrong university – an abrasive colonial who ridiculed those who could not match his fastidious drive for perfection and insouciant daring.
Yet in an academic these traits were respected, and Finch was highly regarded as a man who would not rest on accepted practice but would strive to find a better way; a man excited to explore the unknown in partnership with young minds who knew less and made mistakes, but loved him for his tolerance. Unlike the Alpine Club and the Royal Geographical Society, whose bureaucrats expected definitive answers and saw the world in black and white, the science laboratory was a place where answers were often grey and failure was simply the imprimatur to try again.
How could George’s embracement of youth be reconciled with the man who had twice turned his back on children for whom he bore at least a modicum of responsibility, whether he was the natural father or not? In his mind, George Finch probably justified the decisions in terms of the financial aid he provided and that he was leaving the mother rather than the child. It was the truth, if an imperfect one.
Then again, this might have been his penance, for there was no sense of his legendary abrasive personality on show in the classroom. Instead, his students, including the department’s first female student, who would top her class in the mid 1920s, would have fond memories of a teacher intent on engaging young minds, not only as an instructor but as a collaborator, continually devising new experiments that not only explored a relatively new and rapidly evolving science but doing so with ingenuity and versatility.
Just as he had proved in war and at the top of Everest, George Finch was a master of improvisation, turning part of the tunnel beneath Prince Consort Road into a dark room for his photography experiments and converting a mishmash of War Office surplus equipment into high-tension generators for research into electric discharge.
On another occasion he built an experimental car engine, prompting a string of complaints from the nearby Royal College of Music, where the symphony orchestra rehearsals were shattered whenever the engine roared into life. Similarly, the music students were in uproar when a rudimentary megacycle oscillator, built from spare parts to measure the speed of chemical reaction, filled the air with an undulating thrum that invaded, subliminally, the quiet tick-tock environment of their studios.
The mountain climber had brought his independent and rebellious spirit into the classroom, only here it would be appreciated. Among his students’ favourite recollections was the day a number of them went to visit their lecturer in hospital as he recovered from minor surgery. They walked in to find George sitting up in bed reconditioning the hospital’s supply of headphones, his only tools a penknife and a sixpence, with a halfpenny wedged in a slice of lemon as a test battery.
Perhaps the best example of George’s devotion to young minds was the day he travelled to Yorkshire to plead with the father of a student who had decided his son’s science course was a waste of time and money and that the boy should be working instead in the local coal mines. Such a journey – to persuade a man to allow his son the chance of a good education and stimulating career – was almost unheard of. It worked. The student returned to Imperial College the next semester, passed his course and had a long career as an industrial chemist.
The reporter from the Westminster Gazette was ushered into the neatly cluttered workshop where the two white-coated scientists waited. The newspaper, small but politically influential, had been invited to witness a demonstration of the dangers of potentially explosive chemicals packaged in the cartridge of a child’s toy gun. George Finch, the younger of the two scientists involved in the consumer protection stunt, placed a mound of the contentious mixture of barium nitrate, magnesium and aluminum onto an anvil then stood back and watched his boss, William Bone, take a small hammer and rap the compound sharply. The reporter was startled by the crack of the explosion, amplified in the confines of the small room. The scientists smiled, their point made.
The resulting article, published a few days later, seems innocuous, unlikely to force a change in the law but perhaps sufficient to influence the thinking of policymakers and parliamentarians who were among the paper’s modest but loyal readership. Even so, George Finch regarded the exercise as significant enough in his life to have kept a carefully cut out copy in his personal papers, alongside the headlines that lionised his achievement of standing higher than any man before him.
It was more likely a symbolic memento, serving as an acknowledgment that his life had changed and that he would probably never conquer the mountain nor stand on the roof of the world as he had hoped all those years before. But George was also determined to ensure that the bastardy would not dictate or sully his future – he wanted to leave a legacy by climbing very different mountains.
The first challenge was to be a family man. Years later, Bubbles would recall her husband’s initial awkward attempts at fatherhood in a society that maintained clear parental demarcations and distinctive roles for men and women. Most memorable was the ‘tight fit’ as he shed his professional uniform of a jacket and bow tie to climb into Bunty’s playpen and laugh with his daughter after arriving home from the college in the evening. It was clear that he wished to be a more ‘hands-on’ parent than Charles and Laura had been.
George would become far more comfortable with his role as Bunty and the two sisters who would follow – Paola Jean in 1924 and Felice George in 1929 – grew older and he took the family on climbing holidays, spending every Easter in Wales below Snowdon and one summer month in the Alps. In later years, after he had given up climbing, he rediscovered the sailing he had loved in childhood summers on Sydney Harbour and bought an ageing eight-ton gaff-rigged cutter named Wasp, big enough to sleep the family and guests, and sturdy enough to sail on the open ocean, which he did on typically meticulously planned and mapped trips across the English Channel to northern France. He captained his vessel with customary zeal, and enjoyed telling of the day in 1939 that he rescued a stricken yacht attempting a difficult channel and facing almost certain tragedy. George admonished ‘the ass’ owner in the hope he would never sail again.
Bunty would grow up to be her father’s likeness in female form, tall and rangy with a physical adeptness that would prompt Geoffrey Winthrop Young to announce that she was the best female rock climber he had ever seen, nimble and sure-footed with a keen eye for finding routes over difficult terrain, just like her father.
Now aged ninety-one, Bunty still smiles fondly when recalling her father’s encouragement to explore and discover the world for herself, as George had learned from his own father: ‘George and I didn’t climb together very often because by the time I was a teenager he had stopped climbing on medical advice. But that didn’t stop him from making sure I was trained properly. I always climbed with people he trusted. He was always very careful. It was his trademark.’
Bunty’s sisters would have different relationships with their father, whom they would refer to as George on reaching adulthood. The youngest, Felice, or Colette as she would be known in the family, has passed away, but Paola, now aged ninety, remains intellectually sprightly: ‘I haven’t answered to that name in my entire life,’ she snaps with her father’s famed bluntness, in a sharp reminder that she was always known as Moseli, afte
r a family joke about the baby in the bulrushes.
It is unsurprising that she would butt heads with her father, as two strong-willed people often do: ‘George and I got on well, as far as it went. He was open-minded about many things but could be rather dogmatic at other times, quite prepared to insist that black was white if necessary,’ she remarked, reminiscing over a photograph taken of the two of them in the 1950s, enjoying lunch on an upper level of the Eiffel Tower, where George, his pale blue eyes startling even in a black-and-white image, is clearly intent on the discussion rather than the view out toward Notre-Dame, the scene of one of his first ‘climbs’ all those years before.
Another of the clutch of memories she keeps in her home is an image of herself with Bunty, aged perhaps eleven and twelve respectively, during their annual Easter holiday in Wales. Bunty is grinning triumphantly atop a rockface while Moseli stands beneath, sour-faced and clearly miffed: ‘I threw a bit of a tantrum that day,’ she laughs. ‘I didn’t take to climbing like my sister and our mother. Colette and I preferred the sailing we did after George gave up climbing. We loved it on the water when we were allowed to take the tiller.’
At home her father was a man of quiet purpose who rarely lost his temper and yet maintained an authoritative air that was not often challenged by anyone other than his equally strong-willed wife. He spent much of his time in the reading room, stocked with books notated with the date and place of purchase, like a travel diary of his life. It was where the household often gathered in the evenings after dinner to read, as other families might play board games. There was a piano in the house, which his daughters learned to play but George rarely touched, although he would often be seen reading music scores and listening to records played on a home-built gramophone.
The Brilliant Outsider Page 30