Yours sincerely
Geo Finch
Although he had been dumped from the 1924 expedition and its preparations, George had remained a prominent and vocal figure on the sidelines over the years as continued attempts were made to conquer Everest.
It would be nine years after the deaths of Mallory and Irvine before another mission was mounted, and Arthur Hinks was still at the helm in April 1933 when the fourth British expedition sailed under the leadership of Hugh Ruttledge, a civil servant and compromise appointment when Charles Bruce, Geoffrey Bruce and Edward Norton all turned down the role. ‘The lot fell to me,’ Ruttledge would write of a campaign that got no higher than Edward Norton’s mark from 1924, although it found Sandy Irvine’s abandoned axe.
The team had taken redesigned oxygen tanks with them, although reluctantly, as borne out by the bitter remarks of Francis Younghusband that he had regretted siding with George Finch on the issue before the 1922 campaign. Ruttledge wasn’t keen either, specifying that the oxygen would only be used above the North Col and even then only in an emergency. The crates were never opened.
George Finch had retired from climbing by now, his misplaced guilt over the death of his friend Raymond Peto compounded by poor health as a result of his war-time malaria. But his brain and tongue were as sharp as ever as he weighed into the debate on future expeditions and how they should be managed.
He signalled his intent in October 1934 when asked by the weekly magazine The Listener to review Ruttledge’s book on the 1933 expedition. George was typically forthright. While not criticising Ruttledge directly, he insisted that a climber, rather than a civil servant, should have been in command, a decision he blamed on the Everest Committee with the none too subtle observation: ‘A committee is a peculiar organisation which can and frequently does, in its dealings with individuals, act untrammelled by the dictates of consciences.’
His comments about oxygen were equally blunt; he labelled the expedition’s stance as a ‘wretched state of indecision’ and added: ‘Oxygen should be used full blast … or utterly tabooed on moral or material grounds or indeed for any reason which the wit of man can conceive. And if the prospective Everest Committee cannot decide one way or another then sack the lot!’
A reconnaissance mission returned to Everest in 1935, this time led by the climber and coffee grower Eric Shipton, who had been a member of the previous attempt, and included a young Nepalese porter named Tenzing Norgay. But the monsoon season had set in by the time the party arrived and no serious attempt was made on the mountain.
The committee had still not heeded George’s words when they met to decide the composition of the 1936 expedition that again would be led by Ruttledge. Shipton and Tenzing Norgay were again among the team, but yet another early monsoon season put paid to any chance of making a serious attempt on the summit. Amid the frustrations, opinions about the use of oxygen were beginning to shift, albeit slowly. Oxygen tanks were taken and this time used as the party crossed the Tibetan Plateau, as a means of acclimatisation. Ruttledge would report: ‘We came to the conclusion that considerable benefit could be obtained from its use but it is still far too heavy and research is being made to find a more convenient and more dependable apparatus.’
But it was not enough for George, as he told the Morning Post: ‘Our present position is that we are beginning to look ridiculous. Unless we put up a better show it will be difficult to argue that we are justified in keeping Mount Everest to ourselves.’ Until then Britain had managed to control access through its colonial power in the region, but it was clear that the situation would eventually change.
There would be one more expedition before war intervened. In 1938, Bill Tilman, a decorated war hero, adventurer and close friend of Shipton, would lead a party that again included Tenzing Norgay. Tilman favoured small parties (like Shipton) and was a vocal opponent of oxygen, although he agreed, under sufferance, to take two oxygen sets: one an open-circuit set based on the system designed by George Finch, and the other a new closed-circuit system, which was potentially more efficient because it excluded outside air.
Tilman would use neither, but another climber, an engineer named Peter Lloyd, tested both during the expedition, yet another attempt foiled by poor weather, and returned to tell the Royal Geographical Society that he believed oxygen would prove to be the difference between success and failure: ‘I have a lot of sympathy with the sentimental objection to its use, and would rather see the mountain climbed without it than with; but, on the other hand, I would rather see the mountain climbed with it than not at all.’
It would be the last British attempt for thirteen years, as World War II raged and China invaded Tibet, shutting off access to the north face. A new strategy was required and in 1951, after several rogue attempts by individuals and a growing interest by American and European climbers, a fresh British reconnaissance mission was launched under the leadership of Eric Shipton to assess the possibility of climbing via Nepal and the mountain’s southern face.
In the lead-up to their departure, the team members visited Snowdonia for a training camp where they were introduced to George Finch, now aged sixty-three. Cynthia Wood was there with Bunty and recalled the occasion: ‘The weather was misty and the rain fell softy and I remember that we all walked up what George called the cow path to the summit of Snowdon. I don’t know the specifics of what they talked about but it was clear to me that there was an enormous amount of respect for him.’
George Finch had finally come in from the cold.
John Hunt had been offered the leadership of the 1953 expedition after the Everest Committee lost faith in Eric Shipton, whose demise was clearly a result of the British desperation to reach the summit before a team from another nation claimed the glory. With Indian independence in 1947 the borders were thrown open. There had been a Swiss attempt in the spring, which fell just short of the summit, and the French were due to mount a campaign in 1954. This might be Britain’s last chance to claim the prize and Shipton was seen as too indecisive; he had even admitted that he was bored with Everest and disliked the nationalistic race to the top. He also remained emphatically anti-oxygen.
By contrast John Hunt embraced the idea of technology, as he later wrote:
Whereas it is certainly true that knowledge of man’s power of acclimatisation to extreme altitude has been largely contributed by climbers on Everest, the futile controversy over the ethics of using oxygen, and the failure to accept the findings of pioneers in its application, handicapped for thirty years the introduction of the method which promises to revolutionise mountaineering.
Hunt’s expedition reached the new base camp beneath the southern face on April 12, 1953, and over the next few weeks established a series of camps ever higher on the mountain. By May 21 they had reached the South Col and pegged Camp VIII at just under 26,000 feet. Hunt was broadly following Finch’s strategy of using ‘sacrificial’ climbers, including himself, to continue to push camps higher and higher to make the final assault an easier proposition.
There would be two assault teams, and on May 26 the first pairing of Charles Evans, a brain surgeon, and Tom Bourdillon, a physicist who, with his father, Robert, had developed the closed-circuit oxygen system they wore, pushed upwards, aiming for the summit. The two men managed to reach the lower, south, summit at 28,707 feet and came within a few hundred feet of the final summit before being forced to turn back, exhausted and defeated by oxygen-equipment problems and lack of time.
Behind them John Hunt and a sherpa named Da Namgyal had established another camp at 27,395 feet, where they were joined by the second assault team, Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay, again following George Finch’s blueprint. On May 28 Hillary and Norgay, aided by the ‘sacrificial’ climbers George Lowe, Alf Gregory and the sherpa Ang Nyima, moved further upwards to a ridgeline at 28,000 feet and camped for the night.
At 6.30am the next morning the beekeeper from Tuakau in New Zealand and the feisty and persistent Nepalese sherpa began
their own assault, this time using the open-circuit oxygen system. They had reached the South Summit by 9am before tackling the 50-foot-high rock and ice spur that would become known as the Hillary Step, treating it as a chimney and inching their way up the inside with their backs against one wall and feet against the other.
At 11.30am on May 29 the two men reached the summit, stopping long enough to take photographs and search for any sign that Mallory and Irvine had made it to the top. Hillary then buried some sweets and a small cross in the snow while Norgay made a food offering to the mountain. The two men stood on the roof of the world for barely fifteen minutes.
Asked later about his thoughts at the time, Hillary was succinct and pragmatic: ‘I did not have much time on the peak to think about the achievement. When you get there you are thinking about the return – if there is time, if the oxygen will last and whether the route will still be all right. The real moments of happiness come later.’
News broke back in London on June 2, the same day as the coronation of young Queen Elizabeth, and the few known details were reported by The Times with the note: ‘They were using portable oxygen apparatus of the open-circuit type.’
George Finch was in Delhi three weeks later to greet the returning heroes, as Hunt reported:
It was a particular delight in Delhi to meet again George Finch, veteran of the 1922 expedition and pioneer of the use of oxygen for climbing purposes. His presence among us at the time was the more welcome in that we were so anxious that the tributes with which we were being showered should be shared with those who had shown us the way. As one of the two outstanding climbers of the first expedition to make a definite attempt to reach the summit of the mountain in 1922 – the other was George Mallory – and as the strong protagonist of oxygen at a time when there were many who disbelieved in its efficacy and others who frowned upon its use, no one could have better deserved to represent the past than George Finch. We saluted him.
Hunt made no bones about the importance of oxygen to the campaign: ‘Among the numerous items in our inventory I would single out oxygen for special mention. Many of our material aids were of great importance; only this in my opinion was vital to success. But for oxygen … we should certainly not have got to the top.’
The Royal Geographical Society president James Wordie was equally emphatic when he addressed the society’s annual general meeting. The ascent of Everest had finally broken down the society’s prejudice against oxygen, as The Times noted in its report of his speech:
Mr Wordie said that any doubts about the use of oxygen were finally removed by physiologists who said that no human behaviour at great heights was normal and that the power of thought and reason was no longer possible. Professor GI Finch who was the pioneer in advocating oxygen in the attempt on Everest in 1922 must take a great share in the credit for the success of the method.
George Finch was not in London to participate in the celebrations. He was in Poona, teaching the next crop of scientists.
37.
RECOGNITION AT LAST
In December 1959 George Finch was elected the thirty-third president of the world’s oldest mountaineering organisation, the Alpine Club of London. Scott Russell, by now a respected mountaineer himself, watched the reaction to his father-in-law’s triumph amid the Georgian splendour of No. 74 South Audley Street, Mayfair, the club’s latest premises: ‘My grandfather must be turning in his grave,’ one member said of his relative, a prominent anti-Finch figure, adding: ‘I am delighted.’
The public acceptance of George was complete. He had lived to see, and play a significant role in, the conquest of Mount Everest by climbers using artificial oxygen. In 1957 he became chairman of the Everest Foundation that had replaced the defunct and lopsided committee run by his enemies, and he had now been chosen to lead the club whose antiquated principles he had dared to question and whose leadership had despised him and sought his ruin.
There was no glee in George’s response to his ascension. Whatever his personal failings, he was a man who looked ahead rather than to the past. There were no scores to settle. He had always been willing to trade strong opinions in public but had never expressed regret or bitterness in any of his writings or media interviews about the way he had been treated. Although he professed to dislike confrontation it was not in George’s nature to take a backward step and, as his father had taught him when he dropped him into Sydney Harbour as a three-year-old, he would always fight his own battles.
No journalist had ever asked why George Finch had been excluded from the 1924 expedition and George had diplomatically ignored the issue in his own books. He had refrained from crowing when Everest was finally conquered, instead expressing relief and conceding that, given the right circumstances and the right climber, it might also be possible to ascend without oxygen.
As much as this determined looking forward was a strength of George’s character, it was also a curse, demonstrated most sadly by the severing of his bond with his brother, Max, never to be repaired, and the hidden failures of his first two marriages. It was easier to simply move on and forget.
He would make an oblique reference to this in a speech he gave around this time: ‘Memory is that part of the mind which stores up information and guides the search for forgotten data; but it also performs that merciful and alleviating role of forgetting past disappointments, unhappy events and hardships.’
The Alpine Club election capped a satisfying return from India after five years managing the Poona laboratory. In typically pragmatic fashion George had left comprehensive notes for his successor, not touting his own achievements (during his tenure the laboratory published 350 papers, produced 46 patents and served 65 industries), but outlining a strategy for the future and what he believed still needed to be done, step by step. He also included an assessment of his staff and senior pupils, pointed in parts – just as his assessment of his colleagues had been on the road to Everest thirty-seven years before.
The importance of George’s work in modern India could be judged by the swathe of correspondence that arrived at the Finch home each week, frustrating Bubbles who prided herself on managing her husband’s professional affairs. He would return to Poona in 1964 at Nehru’s request to review the country’s scientific and industrial progress and make further suggestions.
George Finch was in his early seventies when retirement finally beckoned. His daughters were married and grandchildren would soon be abundant. He and Bubbles had bought a sprawling old farmhouse in the Oxfordshire village of Upper Heyford, where George created a new workshop, experimented with hydroponics and even attached special plumbing to the house so water softeners might ease Bunty’s arthritis.
His range of interests continued to be broad: he called for lead-free petrol decades before its introduction, fretted about the ‘creeping Americanism’ he feared was undermining society, and deplored socialism as a ‘beggarly creed’, noting this last opinion on the inside cover of Jakob Burckhardt’s The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy.
Music remained a cornerstone of his life, and he was happiest when he sat deep in an armchair listening to Franz Schubert’s masterpiece, String Quintet in C Major. Once he was even drawn to the piano he had abandoned to play a duet with Cynthia Wood – ‘beautifully from memory’, as she recalled. George and Bunty attended the Glyndebourne Festival Opera each year and always sat in the same front-row seats at the Oxford Playhouse whenever a musical production was mounted so George could read the score and follow the music.
Canny as always when it came to money, George bought a van rather than a car to avoid Purchase Tax and drove himself to and from London at least once a week to attend the seemingly endless rounds of meetings and speeches, and only reluctantly relinquished his driver’s licence at the age of eighty.
The one-time outcast from the London Alpine establishment had now become a key voice at its core, a member of numerous scientific committees and organisations and even a member of the exclusive gentlemen’s establi
shment the Athenaeum Club in Pall Mall, which drew its membership from prominent figures in science, literature and the arts. The outsider was now firmly on the inside.
He may have mellowed, but George’s forthright nature flared occasionally such as the day he chastised a senior Alpine Club administrator for his ‘Francophobe’ views about a proposal for a joint English–French attempt on Everest: ‘I regard this circular document as ill-considered, unworthy of the Alpine Club and politically damaging,’ George wrote. ‘It should be withdrawn with all speed and every possible step should be taken to prevent leakage of its contents.’
The Brilliant Outsider Page 34