The Brilliant Outsider

by Wainwright, Robert

  The photo was taken shortly after midday on July 29 as the young men dozed off a big meal before striking out on an audacious bid of ‘boyish enthusiasm’ to climb the north face of the Jungfrau, one of the most challenging ice climbs in the Alps. George would describe the mountain as ‘an imposing edifice built up of glistening, greenish-white terraces of ice and snow of such purity that it were almost desecration to set human foot upon them’.

  It wasn’t as though they were unaware of the dangers of their plan, warned as they were by an older climber they’d met at the hut, Dr Andreas Fischer, who was being guided by two famed local guides, cousins Hans and Ulrich Almer. In recounting his adventure some years later, George recalled negotiating an ice pinnacle at the edge of a yawning abyss by hanging from a rope and swinging a metre-long axe to create hand-holds. Dr Fischer watched with growing concern but was calmed by Hans Almer, the elder of the two guides, who assured him: ‘They are sure-footed like cats, they know how to use a rope, they are quite safe.’

  If repeating the guide’s words was a rare moment of self-congratulation for George, it was apparent to experienced observers that even at this young age George Finch was supremely confident of his own ability in this most dangerous of pastimes. Although he viewed, and felt, the mountains with at times breathless poetry, George’s overpowering sense was one of pragmatism and the desire to pit his puny human strength against overwhelming odds.

  The Jungfrau ice challenge – the five great terraces of ice that formed ‘a wonderful spiral staircase, as it were, betwixt earth and heaven’ – was duly faced and completed. They had set out at 2am under the light of a fullish moon and cloudless sky and stood atop the spectacular peak for the second time by 11am, having climbed almost 8200 feet of ice and snow in just nine hours. It was time to relax, perhaps even doze comfortably under a winter sun for an hour or so, tied to their pickaxes buried beneath the snow in case they slipped or, God forbid, sleepwalked off the top of the mountain. But first a cup of tea.

  While most of his contemporaries were satisfied with their summer sojourns across the peaks of northern Europe, George Finch had already identified a challenge far beyond the view atop the Matterhorn – the Himalayas. As beautiful and difficult as they were, the European Alps paled next to the challenges presented by the behemoths of the Tibetan Plateau – including the ultimate prize, Mount Everest – not just because of their size but because of the likely climbing conditions and their distance from any kind of logistical support. And then there was the political difficulty of getting to the mountain through Tibet, which was closed to foreigners. Although men had dreamed for years of climbing this forbidden monolith, no European had been within 100 miles of her base let alone set foot on Chomolungma (Goddess Mother of the World), as Everest was known in Tibet. That only made it more appealing to the brothers.

  It was the chief reason he and Max would target challenges like the north face of the Jungfrau and a few weeks later the first ascent of the north face of Castor in the Pennine Alps, believing that testing their snow and ice craft whenever possible would hold them in good stead for a longer term vision that went far beyond being merely agile on rock, like the army of summer climbers who followed each other up the same safe routes year after year. George regarded that as laziness – a test of nothing but physical strength and endurance requiring none of the pioneering skills of the ice climber who had to carve his own route every time he climbed. Not only could he carve steps in ice walls swinging a pickaxe, but if he had to, as had happened on more than one occasion, George could fashion foot-holds and hand-holds with a pocketknife or even a sharp piece of granite.

  As much as the Alps provided the practice ground needed to prepare for the dream of climbing in the Himalayas, there was another aspect of that challenge that was more difficult to replicate – the isolation. In the Alps they were never far from civilisation: the established railway routes and numerous towns filled with hotels and stores; the secure mountain huts with straw-filled bunks and wood stoves for waiting out storms. That would not be the case on the slopes of the great peaks of the subcontinent, most of which could only be reached after many days’ march across a bare, harsh landscape in which villages consisted of little more than wind-battered huts inhabited by subsistence farmers.

  Seeking a location beyond the comparative comforts of Switzerland, in March 1909 George and Max chose the French-held island of Corsica with its wild barren peaks, reached by a five-hour crossing on a cargo boat from the southern Italian port of Livorno. They had considered tackling the mountains of Norway, the Spanish Sierra Nevada and even the Balkans, but had ruled out each region before chancing across a guidebook about Corsica.

  George left Zürich first with a fellow student, Alf Bryn from Norway, who would later write a book about their adventures called Peaks and Bandits. Max followed a week later and by the time he arrived in Corsica George and Alf had already organised supplies for a ten-day crossing of the chain of mountains that formed the backbone of the Mediterranean island.

  The highest peak, Monte Cinto, stood at just under 9000 feet, which would not rank it in the top 850 peaks of the Alps, yet the Corsican ranges were snow-capped and challenging in their own right, not just the climbs but the access through dense tangles of bushes and undergrowth – a wiry, heath-like combination known as maquis – particularly when tackled carrying tents, sleeping bags, spare clothes, cooking utensils and food on the back of a mule.

  The climbing was strenuous and challenging, but the real purpose of the trip was to experience camping each night without the option of retiring to the nearest village hotel. Neither was there a restaurant menu from which to choose, forcing the trio to live off tinned food like sardines and preserves brought out from Switzerland.

  They had set off on April 5 and ten days later, with their supplies running low, the trio had tackled most of what the island had to offer. One peak remained, the curved outline of the Paglia Orba, at 8297 feet one of the tallest peaks on the island. But it wasn’t the height that drew their attention; rather it was the north-east face, an almost perpendicular wall of dark granite capped by snow.

  Most of the peaks on the island had been conquered soon after European climbers began combing the island in the 1870s, but not the north-east face of Paglia Orba. A pair of Austrian climbers had attempted it the previous year but had turned back, and the pioneer of Corsican climbing, a Dr Felix von Cube, had declared it impassable. It was a delicious challenge.

  There is film footage of Max, a grim expression on his face that owed so much to his mother’s dark good looks, dressed in a loose woollen jumper and broad-brimmed hat, making his way up the first snowbound slope using the handle of his axe as a walking stick. But the footage goes no further, the camera forgotten as the climbers ducked beneath a waterfall and began to tackle the wall, littered with chimneys of rock choked with clumps of snow threatening to slide from their precarious nooks.

  By 1pm, after almost five hours of climbing, George, Max and Alf sat, momentarily defeated, on a ledge so flimsy that they couldn’t find a belay to secure their ropes. They munched on dry bread and chocolate, contemplating a sheer face that appeared to have no chink but which they needed to climb to reach a broader ledge 300 feet or so above their heads that would leave a clear route to the summit, still 1000 feet away. The tinkling sound of icicles breaking in the warming air shattered the silence, the shards falling past them confirming that the wall they faced was not just vertical but overhanging.

  The task seemed hopeless, but before they gave in George asked Alf to photograph the ledge where they sat. The Norwegian crawled along its length to get a better view back toward his friends, then glanced up to spy another ledge, tantalisingly just out of reach. He called to the brothers who joined him and decided to ignore their precarious position to hoist Max onto Alf’s shoulders so he could haul himself up to the ledge. It seemed suicidal, balanced as they were on the edge of oblivion, but the young men evidently regarded themselves as indestruc
tible.

  If the trio thought the biggest test had been overcome they were wrong, and were now forced to work their way back and forth across the face, climbing a series of precarious rock chimneys connected by narrow, sloping ledges with little room to anchor a safety rope and encrusted with icicles ‘clustered together like the pipes of an organ’.

  Alf took the lead and, with Max’s rope between his teeth, edged across the final ledge while cutting a path through the icicles. George watched, hardly able to breathe, while Max, below Alf, clung with bare hands to the only purchase he could find, an overhanging icicle.

  It took fifteen minutes to climb the last chimney, which was infused with an iced waterfall, before Alf reached blindly to loop a rope around a rock at the top to secure them safely as they finally gained the broad ledge spotted a few hours before. They rested a few minutes then scrambled up the last slope, their hands warming on sun-kissed rocks, and stepped out onto the summit as the sun began to set.

  A fresh wind made conditions uncomfortably cool, but nothing could detract from the joy of their achievement as they built a cairn of rocks at the highest point, inside which they placed a piece of paper with their names and details of the climb. A piece of rope was looped around a rock placed atop the cairn to alert future climbers.

  George Finch’s self-confidence was not misplaced, if judged by the accolades of his contemporaries. Despite their youth, or perhaps because of it, the Finch brothers were already being identified as among the elite climbers in Europe. Aldo Bonacossa, an Italian aristocrat and widely respected climber, was one who heaped praise on George who was still only twenty-one years old. Count Bonacossa was studying in Munich but in the summer of 1909 had taken an overnight train to Zürich to join a group of experienced climbers opening a new mountain hut.

  Even among this group of elite mountaineers it was George Finch whom he noticed, as much for his ‘exotic’ appearance as his climbing ability, as he set himself apart from the others by almost every measure: his style, his clothes, his hair and his heritage. Finch was clearly not one of those English climbers who hired guides to explore the Alps, but as an Australian was ‘quite unlike other men’, as Bonacossa would recall more than half a century later in an article for the Alpine Club’s magazine:

  The recognised number-one mountaineer and the most outstanding personality among them by far was George Finch. He was tall and wore his hair long and untamed, quite unlike other men in Switzerland who used to wear their hair cut quite short, and never took off their hat, as we can see in old photographs of mountaineers and guides; this gave him an exotic look. Moreover he came from the Antipodes and as a result was nicknamed ‘the Australian’. He was also known to have introduced the anorak to replace the usual heavy jacket, which in hot weather became rather a nuisance.

  As part of the opening ceremony the assembled climbers pitted themselves against one another by climbing a fifteen-foot wall at the back of the hut, erected as protection against avalanches from a nearby mountain. One by one, each man hauled himself up by two ropes as quickly as possible. Not all would make it. Bonacossa was one of the first and made easy work of the challenge. He then sat and waited for the others; in particular, for George Finch: ‘I kept watching Finch’s strenuous efforts to work his way up. In that moment I certainly felt quite important, to have been a match for the famous Finch.’

  7.

  KING OF HIS DOMAIN

  Maxwell Bruce Ingle Finch was destined to live in the shadow of a dominant elder sibling, forever at his feet on or off the slope of a mountain, although it would not become a problem until later in life. For the moment, Max fearlessly accompanied his brother in their all-weather assaults on the mountain ranges of Europe, an even-tempered balance to George’s demanding perfectionism It was on one of the rare occasions they were not twinned that the differences between the two men became apparent.

  The winter of 1910–11 had been frustrating for the two eager young men aching to test themselves at every opportunity. A run of foul weather had made it impossible to tackle their latest challenge, an ascent of the Tödi on skis. It was a task with some practical purpose, not only for the obvious advantage of quickly traversing flat and downhill sections, such as glacial aprons, but to test the notion that by distributing a climber’s weight across the length of a ski it would ease fatigue through thick snow, particularly if seal skin was attached to the underside of the ski, with the animal hair laid toward the front to prevent slippage against the slope. The length of the ski might also lessen the chances of falling into hidden crevasses, the brothers reasoned.

  It would be the first days of spring before there was a break in the weather. On the morning of Saturday March 11 the conditions seemed to have cleared enough to make an attempt. Max checked four times with the meteorological office in Zürich before he was convinced that it was safe to plan an assault, although it would have to be without his brother who was busy studying for his final exams at ETH.

  From the outset everything went wrong. Two of the four climbers were novices, inadequately outfitted and equipped. Max managed to lead them to their mountaintop goal but it took much longer than expected, climbing through the night and arriving just before dawn. More alarmingly, the weather changed. Clouds broiled below as a mist rolled toward them, bursting through the valleys and gaps between the glacier walls with the pent-up fury of a dam that had broken its walls. In what had seemed like a moment, the beauty had turned into a beast and what should have been a careful descent suddenly became a hurried retreat. It was almost impossible to retrace the route of their ascent. Finding their way by instinct, the climbers at times were forced to their knees to avoid being blown into the now half-hidden crevasses. They had no tents or supplies and were forced to use their skis to dig a trench in which to wait out the storm.

  Somehow they made it back after being at the mercy of the mountain and its elements for thirty-five hours. Max escaped with few serious injuries beyond some frostbite and broken teeth but the two novices were in a bad way, with one losing most of his toes from both feet because of tight, ill-fitting boots, and the other losing all but two fingers at either the first or second joint.

  The spring of 1911 was a defining moment in Max Finch’s life, as it would be for his older brother, but for different reasons and outcomes. Max returned from his almost disastrous ascent of the Tödi in quiet disgrace, his undoubted climbing talent overshadowed by questions about his risk-taking. It was an inauspicious beginning to his post-school years, given that he had followed his brother to Zürich and would study at the ETH for the next three years, leaving in 1914 in haste as it became obvious that war was about to be declared.

  George would never have made the same mistakes: not assessing his novice companions, forgetting to take lamps and cooking equipment, failing to ensure the party wore loose-fitting clothes and waterproof gloves made of sailcloth and lined with wool. Most importantly, he would have carried a barometer to warn of changing weather patterns.

  As the recently installed president of the Academic Alpine Club, George had also been placed in a difficult position. If he was to preserve his integrity as a climber, he had little choice but to publicly rebuke his brother’s poor judgment. The event would mark the beginning of a change in their personal relationship that would not be obvious to either man for some years.

  George’s studious efforts that spring, when he had declined to accompany Max to the Tödi, paid off when he was awarded the gold medal as the university’s top student for the diploma course in chemical technology. It was a major award and its presentation was an event on the university’s academic calendar but there is no hint in the family records that his achievement was celebrated. Certainly, it was a vicarious triumph for both parents, vindicating Laura’s decision to stay in Europe and Charles’s encouragement of his eldest son’s inquisitive nature. Indeed, George had not lost touch with his father, maintaining a steady exchange of letters that would keep the older man aware – and proud – of his
son’s adventures.

  George had already been singled out as a young scientist of promise and was encouraged to take up a position as a research assistant with one of the senior academics, but first there was a summer of climbing to be had, paid for in part by the clandestine sale of the university gold medallion to a local dealer to be melted down for its precious metal content.

  As far as George was concerned he would always have the achievement of topping the class and the medal was a more useful award if it provided him with the funds to pay for his climbing. He and Max had been living off an endowment fund provided by their father, earned largely from the efforts of their pioneering grandfather, the late Charles Wray Finch. The money had been carefully salted away, invested in Russian railway bonds that provided the security of government-backed dividends, but they were forbidden from using the funds for equipment, food or train fares as they travelled up and down the Alpine spine of Europe searching for adventure.

  Besides, George believed he owed much more to the mountains than a freedom of spirit, as he ventured many years later in a speech in which he reflected on his education:

  Looking back over the years, I see that the learning of my school days came too easily. It never occurred to me to question the voice of authority by probing into the significance of the first principles. In short, my memory was my stronghold, with only a modest appeal to reason. Fortunately, well before beginning my academic career in Zürich, I already had some experience in the, to me, new and strange world of mountains. It was then that the desire to survive, inborn in all creatures, and anxiety for the welfare of my climbing companion impelled me to keep my mind on the work in hand. So, with the years, my power of mental concentration grew and helped me to deal with the problems of a scientific career.