But George Finch was there to impress: a tall, svelte and now craggy figure in his trademark bow tie among the uniforms of the top brass at the Pentagon who turned out to listen to his views on adapting the incendiary makeup of the J-bomb to suit the humid environment and lighter furnishings of Japan. The British contingent spent a month in the United States, attending briefings and conferences at venues up and down the east coast, including New York, the Eglin Air Force Base in Florida and Orlando, where George also lectured.
Far from posing any diplomatic problems, George Finch won over the Americans with his forthrightness. Among his papers are two poems written to him ‘in admiration and friendship’, one by a senior Navy Department official in Washington and the second by an anonymous author, but clearly treasured:
We all love the goldfinch
The bullfinch, the chaffinch;
They sing as they search for their ‘gorge’.
But our love growing stronger
And deeper and longer
Goes to Finch who answers to ‘George’.
Amid the acclaim came further recognition. On November 21, as the delegation flew back to Washington from Orlando, word reached them that George had been awarded one of the Royal Society’s highest individual honours. The Hughes Medal, named after the Welsh-American inventor David Hughes who built the first crystal radio receiver, printing telegraph and microphone, is awarded each year for discoveries in the field of physical sciences.
George had been officially acknowledged for ‘his fundamental contributions to the study of the structure and properties of surfaces, and for his important work on the electrical ignition of gases’. The second-choice Everest mountaineer, Nobel Prize judge and unseen war-time advisor had finally been recognised in public in Britain as the genius he had always been.
Bubbles broke the news by cable. The award would be presented on November 30: ‘Please be there,’ she implored. He didn’t make it. The US mission was far more important than individual honours, he decided, arriving home two days after the ceremony, important enough even in war to be reported in The Times.
The accolades would continue as the war ended and the various departments and advisory boards were disbanded and civilian life resumed. The United States Embassy in London expressed its thanks and asked George to continue offering advice; the vice-president of the Ordnance Board, Air Vice-Marshal Bilney, insisted that advances in knowledge of fire ‘are very largely due to you personally’; and there was an offer from the British government of a position as Britain’s senior scientific advisor, which George turned down to return to academic life.
Lord Falmouth, who had run F Division and consistently backed George’s views, at times against loud opposition, provided the tribute George treasured most. The viscount had lost one son and seen another severely disfigured during combat, yet took the time to write: ‘Your advice and assistance have been of the greatest value in dealing with the many problems which we have had to tackle. All kinds of new problems were arriving daily as a consequence of the actions of the enemy … [your work] was of the utmost importance …’
At the beginning of the war, George Finch had been frustrated at being refused permission to fight, but by the end it was clear that his scientific contribution from home was far more valuable than being a frontline soldier.
35.
‘WHOSE SON AM I?’
Bunty Finch met Cynthia Wood in the late summer of 1942 when the two young women found themselves sharing a bedroom as new recruits of the national security agency MI5. They became great friends and, as life slowly returned to normal after the war, Cynthia, whose own father had died when she was young, found herself increasingly involved in Finch family events and coming under the watchful, paternal eye of Bunty’s father, George.
Cynthia, now in her nineties, observed a careful and organised man driven by his intellectual interests but the antithesis of the isolated, haughty academic she had been expecting. She recalls that Finch would joke about his students at the college, saying that if they were struggling in their studies, he would always ensure they were given the chance to ‘scrape through’ the course if they helped him clean the bottom of his yacht, Wasp, which was moored on the Lymington River near Southampton.
Cynthia found herself hurled headlong into a new and exciting world:
He had a way of talking to us about complex and interesting things without being boring. I remember clearly him telling me why the thumb was the most important digit because it set us apart from other animals. He took Bunty and me to a ball at the Dorchester one year and gave me my first glass of Château d’Yquem and then talked to me about it.
We went with him to a lecture at the Royal Society one night. Until then I’d had nothing to do with science but this intellectual world was riveting where nobody cared if you were well bred but if you had brains and wanted to use them. He was a man with a very broad vision and in many ways it was unfortunate that he lived when he did because he would be very, very acceptable now. He was also very modest; confident but modest.
The only darkness Cynthia remembers was when Bunty and her sisters found out about their father’s first marriage and the existence of Peter:
Bunty was upset at first, perhaps for her mother’s sake, but I think more so because it had been a secret all those years. I just thought he’d had a colourful life; after all it had all happened before he had even met Bubbles. And who could blame them? George was a charming man and very good looking. He had the most amazing blue eyes.
If George Finch ever regretted his decision to separate a young boy from his mother then he never expressed it, even when that same boy, now a man on his way to becoming a West End and Hollywood star, turned up on his doorstep thirty years later, seeking answers.
In the grey early winter of 1948, Peter Finch, a theatrical actor and already with a number of movie credits to his name, arrived in London at the encouragement of the stage legend Sir Laurence Olivier, who had been impressed by Peter’s theatre performance in Sydney and promised to take him under his wing, ‘if you ever come to London’.
It was a big risk for the 32-year-old, particularly considering his established fame in Australia, where he had been named actor of the year for the previous two years in the biggest medium of its time – radio. And the leap into the unknown was to become even stranger when, a few days before he and his wife, the ballerina Tamara Tchinarova, were due to sail, he received a telephone call from his Aunt Dorothy, who wanted to see him before he left. When he arrived at her house in North Sydney she gave him a packet of letters, saying they would tell him about his mother and father.
Peter began opening the letters when he boarded the Esperance Bay, and by the time she sailed out through the heads of Sydney Harbour he had decided to track down George Finch and Betty Fisher. Dorothy, who had been a frequent presence in his early life, had told him that her brother could be found at the Imperial College in Kensington. But she had no idea where he might find his mother.
Peter and Tamara arrived in London on November 17 and checked into the Regent Palace Hotel, on the edge of the theatre district, where Peter hoped to find work. Before he could think twice, Peter had telephoned the Imperial College and been put through to Professor George Finch who, although surprised and clearly not warned by his sister, took the call in his stride and arranged to meet Peter and Tamara at the hotel three days later.
In the days before he met the man he believed was his father, Peter travelled to Cambridgeshire to visit the ancestral Finch stronghold at Little Shelford. Charles Finch had told him stories of the family and its roots, and even if there were questions about his belonging, Peter felt comfortable there, in a melancholy moment even contemplating being buried in the church graveyard when he died.
He was about to be disappointed. Tamara could still sense the awkwardness in the cramped hotel room when she described the meeting with George Finch in an interview thirty years later. The professor appeared on time – ‘tall, straig
ht, handsome, grey-haired and very thin’ – and decided to go up to the room rather than meet downstairs, perhaps unwilling to risk his dirty laundry being washed in public. ‘It was very awkward as there weren’t enough chairs so one of us sat on the bed,’ Tamara said. ‘He was very dry and abrupt in his speech. It was a very inarticulate meeting … full of undercurrents without any real communication. Peter was full of questions which the professor evaded answering.’
The trio moved downstairs for tea. That lasted barely thirty minutes as the conversation stalled on the banal: what Peter was doing in London and how long he might be in the country. ‘We just had self-conscious conversation about everything and saying nothing,’ Tamara remembered. ‘And then … he left.’
Peter Finch would tell friends about the meeting, including Enid Lorimer whom he’d known at the Theosophist Society headquarters in Sydney. It left Peter conflicted, unconvinced that the mystery had been solved and wondering why he had become collateral damage of a bad marriage. The older man’s reception seemed cold, measured and totally rejecting: ‘I’m sorry to disappoint you, young man, but you’re not really my son,’ George had said.
‘Whose son am I then?’ Peter challenged him.
The reply was unyielding: ‘Better ask your mother.’
And so it went on, the budding actor who was about to become a Hollywood movie star desperate for answers and the famous mountaineer and scientist unemotional and determined not to explain himself until the subject turned conclusively to his first wife. Then his calm demeanour suddenly cracked. Although more than three decades had passed, it was clear that George still felt wronged by Betty Fisher’s disloyalty and that it was this that had led him to take the boy, albeit with good intentions, and wreak such an awful revenge.
Behind his namesake’s apparent dispassion, however, Peter hoped that there was a measure of regret. He knew from the letters he’d read on the ship that George Finch had expressed affection for him, not just as an innocent victim of a bad marriage but as ‘rather a dear little fellow’. What Peter didn’t know was that it had been protests from Gladys May that prevented George from raising Peter himself. At least, that was the kindest view that could be drawn from the events that followed George’s divorce from Betty Fisher.
‘He must have burned up a lot of his valuable energy putting the knife into my mother,’ Peter told Lorimer. ‘Was it a dog-in-the manger attitude on George’s part, or were they all really convinced I was a Campbell? I was passed along the line of Finches like a football through a rugby team. From age two to age fourteen I changed hands faster than a dud pound note.’
But the meeting wasn’t the last they saw of each other, according to Peter’s only son, Charles, who says the pair rendezvoused several times afterwards, sometimes walking together along the Thames in conversation – ‘walkabout’ as Peter put it. There was a rapprochement, if limited and private, as George attempted to repair some of the damage of his actions without complicating family life with Bubbles and the girls, and Peter tried to make sense of his life: ‘In my father’s mind he was climbing the mountains of life, just as George had climbed Mount Everest,’ says Charles, whose mother, the South African actress Yolande Turner, was the second of Peter’s three wives. ‘There was definitely dialogue between them; I know that for certain. Ultimately there was a great deal of affection between them.’
Charles, named after Charles Edward Finch, also believes that George was his real grandfather:
My father died believing that George was his real father, and that’s what I believe. His mother [Betty] told him that when they met in 1948.
It’s almost as if the family has been under a curse; this question mark over whether George was my grandfather. One of the things that sticks in my mind is my father’s insistence, his anger in a way, [directed] to my mother that, yes, George was his father.
My take is that George was a very vain man who was outraged and embarrassed at the way his first wife had behaved. He took my father from his mother for two reasons: because he believed that Betty could not take care of him and because he believed the boy was his real son.
Despite everything, my father loved George and was proud of his achievements. This is from a man who lived his life as a Buddhist with no desire for earthly chattels. But it was important for him and so it is important to me.
The veteran Australian actor Ronald ‘Trader’ Faulkner was a close friend of Peter Finch and felt compelled to write a biography about his mate’s strange life. Now a sprightly eighty-six, Trader still climbs the stairs to the sixth-floor Kensington flat he bought in 1950 soon after he went to London to try his luck on the stage.
He shakes his head sadly at the thought of his mate who resorted to alcohol to hide his fragility – a little like his mother: ‘I don’t know who was his real father. I suspect it was Jock Campbell but the dates suggest that it could be George, although less likely.’
Then there is the question of where Peter’s genius as an actor was created. George Finch saw himself as a serious man and Jock Campbell carried many generations of military service in his genes. Betty Finch was theatrical in a sense, but it was the flamboyant Laura Finch whom Peter admired who best understood and nurtured his artistic flair.
Peter Finch died in January 1977 from a heart attack. Later that year he won an Oscar for best male actor, the first ever awarded posthumously, for his portrayal of the enraged news anchorman Howard Beale in the movie Network. Particularly memorable is the scene in which he delivers an impassioned soliloquy, exclaiming: ‘I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this any more!’
Trader Faulkner is emphatic about his friend’s motivation for the famous line: ‘There is no doubt that the inspiration behind that speech was his own life. He was still crying out for answers.’
36.
CONQUERED
When he came to power in 1950, the first Prime Minister of India, Jawaharlal Nehru, knew his country needed to establish itself as a modern society with a vibrant and developing economy. Industrial development was a vital part of his vision, and Nehru believed that one of the key elements in unlocking India’s vast potential in this area was the establishment of a national centre for scientific research.
The National Chemistry Laboratory of India was built on a 200-hectare site on the outskirts of Poona – ‘on a beautiful, breezy and healthy plateau in close proximity to the educational institutions of the city’, as the announcement of its establishment would declare with pride. More than one hundred scientists were employed to make a mark internationally across a broad range of disciplines, including chemical engineering, biochemistry, physics and electrochemistry.
Six Nobel Laureates attended the opening of the laboratory, and by the end of 1951 the centre had been fully staffed and the National Council of Scientific and Industrial Research was looking for an eminent scientist and administrator to lead its research division. Nehru insisted on making the final decision himself. He chose George Finch.
Whether there was any previous connection between the two men is uncertain. They were about the same age and Nehru had studied natural sciences at Cambridge before spending some years in London as a young lawyer. And George Finch and William Bone had been instrumental in encouraging young Indian scientists to study at the Imperial College as early as the 1920s.
There was, however, a strange connection through the theosophist movement. Annie Besant had been a friend of the Nehru family, and Nehru had joined the movement and been influenced by its teachings as a young man. Then there was George’s hippie-like mother, Laura, who had continued to spend most of her time in India until her death in the 1940s and had been involved in the Indian nationalist movement as a devotee of Mahatma Gandhi.
Whatever the connection, Nehru was aware of George Finch and his scientific work, and knew that he was ready to retire, as an Emeritus Professor, from the Imperial College after a career spanning almost forty years. George accepted Nehru’s offer with glee. Although he had only b
een to India once, fleetingly, for the 1922 Everest expedition, he felt an affinity with the country and jumped at the chance to be involved in the development of a research facility.
When George and Bubbles left London in September 1952 on board an Air India flight, the pilot, apparently under instructions from Nehru, set a course which took the plane directly over the top of Mont Blanc as a tribute to the professor and his wife. George would recall the experience: ‘It was a beautiful clear day and for a few joyous moments we looked down on the Aiguille du Goûter, the Tacul and Mont Maudit, the Innominata and Peteret routes spread out below. It was a sight that quickened the heart.’
They were celebrated on their arrival at an official reception hosted by Nehru, who would become a frequent visitor to the apartment above the laboratory at Poona, where the Finches would live for the next five years, on occasion bringing his daughter Indira Gandhi and his grandson Rajiv, both future political leaders of India.
India would also unexpectedly take George back to his carefree boyhood as he spent weekends hunting and fishing in the company of his adoring hosts. For the first time since he left Australia as a teenager, George felt drawn to the country of his birth and began planning a trip home.
But first there was Everest. George and Bubbles had only been in Poona for three months when he received a letter from Colonel John Hunt, an army officer and mountaineer, who had been chosen to lead the ninth British expedition to conquer Everest. The party was leaving on February 12, 1953, and Hunt, whose own mountaineering exploits had been inspired by George Finch’s adventures, wanted to pick Finch’s brain about strategies on the mountain. George was only too pleased to give his opinion and repeat the theories that had been so utterly ignored in 1924:
My dear Hunt,
I have read your problems with much interest. You are our chosen leader in absolute command in the field and, as such, I would like you to consider the following suggestions. Past expeditions have always thought in terms of two, three or even four attempts. But if it were only possible to pick out the best assault party (of only two or at most three men) the lift above 21,000 feet could be greatly reduced by using the rest of the climbers and porters sacrificially in the sense that their job would be to carry loads up to as far as say 27,000 feet where the highest camp would be established; and then to return as quickly as possible to advanced base so as to make as little inroad as possible on the supplies deposited in the camps they established. Members (climbers and porters) of the sacrificial parties should go … straight through to South Col (26,000 feet) with 2lb of oxygen per man and return unladen the same day. The real point is that the chosen assault party must go lightly laden from Advanced Base. It would be splendid if a sacrificial party could equip oxygen at 28,000 feet. The generous oxygen consumption I have suggested should be reserved only for the assault party – the sacrificial parties should only use O2 at about half their rate – given that is more than Bruce and I used. Don’t forget the hot liquids (and plenty of them). But how you will manage this is a problem – but it is nearly as critical as oxygen. I’ll meet you in Bombay and hope you’ll be able to stay with me in Poona for a day or two.
The Brilliant Outsider Page 33