At least London offered opportunity. There was plenty of work for a chemist as England geared up toward a possible confrontation with Germany. George was in no hurry but was quickly offered a job as a research chemist with the Royal Arsenal at Woolwich under Sir Robert Robertson, the director of explosives research and later the head of the Government Chemical Laboratory. Again, it would be a short tenure for George – four months – although not because of an ill fit so much as an opportunity he could not resist.
In July 1913 he applied to join the staff at the Imperial College as part of its expansion into chemical technology. George would sign on as a demonstrator in the Fuel and Refractory Fuels section, running a course on explosives for the princely sum of £150 per year. Although the pay was significantly less than what he might earn in the commercial world, it seemed that George had already made up his mind that the freedom to explore the challenges of science provided by the academic world was more important than the financial rewards offered by private enterprise.
The pay might have been meagre, equivalent to £15,000 nowadays, but when added to the annual stipend paid by the family investment in Russian railways it would ensure he had few money worries. It was the financial fillip he needed to pay for his Alpine exploits.
Often it is a quirk of fate that sometimes creates an opportunity. In George Finch’s case, fate delivered a professional relationship that would help define the second half of his life. But it might never have happened.
George Finch’s new boss, Professor William Arthur Bone, had bought a ticket to sail on the maiden voyage of the SS Titanic to New York in April 1912 but cancelled at the last minute because his travelling companion had fallen ill. At the time, the senior academic at Leeds University had been travelling to London once a week to give a lecture on chemical technology as part of the mainstream chemistry course at the Imperial College. It was a natural area for expansion and in 1913 he was asked to join the staff permanently and create a new department.
George Finch would be one of his first appointments. Bone interviewed him in mid July and ordered him to return one month later at 10am. Detecting the importance of following the order exactly, George was outside Bone’s door at exactly 10am on the appointed day, but there was no answer to his smart rap so he wandered the grounds for an hour, knocking again at 11am and then at noon when the door finally opened and Bone appeared, an angry look on his face.
‘And who may you be?’ he demanded.
‘I’m George Finch, your new staff member,’ George replied, confused.
‘Didn’t I tell you to be here at ten o’clock,’ Bone replied, his face reddening. ‘It’s now noon.’
George might have cowered before the onslaught. Instead he bristled at the injustice: ‘Not only was I here at ten o’clock but I also knocked at eleven and now twelve.’
Bone glared, silent for a moment, and then burst into laughter: ‘Come in, come in, young man. Thank heaven for someone who can stand up for himself.’
It would be the first of many ‘sword-crossings’, as Finch would later write, and the beginning of a professional relationship, mutual respect and friendship that was as important as any in his life. William Bone was cantankerous and eccentric, but brilliant and fastidious when it came to pursuing his work, not unlike George Finch who was keenly aware of Bone’s personal shortcomings and argued passionately that they were outweighed by his integrity.
Over time, Bone’s abrasiveness undoubtedly also helped George to realise and curb his own tendency to rub people up the wrong way, although he would always maintain a reserve and an air of authority that was felt by those around him, students and colleagues alike.
Typical of Bone’s decisions was his insistence, when the chemical technology buildings were being constructed on the college grounds, that they be spare and functional, almost shed-like, because he believed the money would be better spent on what was being done by staff and students inside them than on architectural flourishes. The buildings would stand at the back of the college grounds in ‘ugly isolation’, as one former student would remark when Bone retired in 1936; a collection of huts that had an air of mystery and foreboding and which sometimes erupted in unexplained explosions. The teachers to be found inside were often as eccentric in their own ways as the head of the department.
When Bone died in 1938 it was George Finch who wrote his obituary for the Royal Society, reflecting many of his own feelings when he summed up his mentor’s career:
To create something new is the born artist’s real desire whether he be a poet, painter, musician or scientist and into the creation of a new department of fuel technology at the Imperial College, Bone threw himself with whole-hearted vigour. Whither his urge for self-expression bore him the years have amply shown. Under his inspired leadership rose a research school of worldwide renown.
George Finch would be a central component of that success.
10.
THE UPSTART
The Field magazine was founded in 1853 with the objective of being an influential journal for the rising upper-middle class of Victorian England, a ‘sporting, farming, and a sort of high-life-in-London paper with a summary of all that is going on’, as it was described by its founder, the sports writer and novelist-cum-publisher Robert Smith Surtees.
Mountaineering featured strongly in its pages, particularly during the second half of the nineteenth century as the peaks of the European Alps were gradually conquered by moneyed English gentlemen climbers who were the natural readership of the magazine and enjoyed reading of each other’s triumphs, invariably guided though they were.
But times were changing and as the summer climbing season of 1913 approached, the magazine editors decided to ask George Finch, one of the most prominent of Europe’s young alpinists, to write an opinion piece about the new wave of mountaineers who were dismissing the wisdom of their elders and assailing dangerous peaks without guides. The practice had provoked a hostile response from many of the establishment climbers who accused the young climbers of being careless and suicidal, even wicked and immoral.
George did not mince his words in the article, published in the middle of June, lambasting the ‘intolerant exclusiveness of older men’ and ridiculing their climbing as ‘walking uphill’:
A man who climbs consistently with guides may be a great mountaineer but he need be nothing more than a good walker to ‘climb’ any peak in the Alps. The man who has to depend on his own skill, strength and nerve must have the craft at his finger-ends. The guided mountaineer need only follow patiently in the footsteps of a guide. He may and often does climb for years without the power to lead up easy rocks, to cut steps in ice, or find a route up an easy snow route. In the early days mountaineering, because of its expense, was almost exclusively the luxury of men who had made a position in life. It was controlled by men to whom years had brought prudence, men who looked with suspicion on enterprise beyond traditional limits.
George had not finished, writing a blistering critique of the qualifications for membership of the august Alpine Club on Savile Row, dismissing them as ‘a list which proves nothing more than a possession of a good wind and a long purse’. By contrast he cited clubs like the Academic Alpine Club Zürich, from which he had stepped down as president but remained a member, that refused admission unless the applicants had proven themselves able to ‘lead up first class peaks’. European clubs, he added acidly, used funds to build mountain huts and secure cheap railway tickets for climbers rather than providing libraries, plush armchairs and wait staff.
It is no longer the monopoly of rich Englishmen. The younger men are taking up the sport and gradually coming to the front. The development of guideless climbing has brought the Alps within reach of young men with limited means. For good or evil, guideless parties composed of young Englishmen are becoming more and more common. The attitude of the older climbers is changing. The spirit that saw the Alps a preserve for moneyed and middle-aged Englishmen is dead.
Although
his name did not appear as the author of the article, it was clear that George Finch was the young upstart responsible. Its publication would be met with stony silence from the establishment, but their memories were long and George would pay a price for his impertinence. The only saving grace, in the eyes of ‘those moneyed and middle-aged Englishmen’ was an oblique reference in the penultimate sentence to two unnamed, senior English mountaineering figures: ‘Many young climbers owe their introduction to the sport to a great Cambridge mountaineer and good work either on the mountainside or in the written record of exploration never fails to find generous recognition from those who now control the Alpine Journal.’
Geoffrey Winthrop Young was the great Cambridge mountaineer and Percy Farrar the editor of the Alpine Journal, mouthpiece of the Alpine Club of which Farrar would become president. Both men would prove invaluable allies for George Finch some years later when the now silent but clearly angry establishment voices attempted to thwart his mountaineering career.
Even though the Alps had been traversed by men with serious intent for more than half a century and peaks of any significance had been climbed and climbed again, there were still challenges that remained unconquered: routes mainly, formidable faces of formidable mountains that dared men to try to ascend, spider-like, to their summits. Some accepted the dare and most failed, even falling to their deaths. Most would choose an alternative, safer route, preferring the thrill of reaching the top to the fear and thrill of climbing what appeared to be impossible.
George Finch was firmly in the group intent on seeking out the more difficult, and therefore lonely, routes rather than following the throng up well-worn paths and camping in overcrowded huts like the Griinhorn and Fridolin. He dreaded having to listen to what he regarded as the inane conversations of the types who had incurred the wrath of his slashing pen in The Field article; men intent on ‘pouring unstinted abuse upon those who dared indulge in the new form of [guideless] mountaineering’.
In September 1913, during a final summer climb before beginning his new job at the Imperial College, George and his friend Guy Forster went searching for one of these impossible routes. George had known Forster, the son of a well-to-do Wiltshire family, since they were both students in Zürich. They were the same age and despite their different backgrounds had quickly become firm friends, bonded by similar life experiences, including having eccentric mothers, although it took some years for George to persuade Forster to join him on a climb.
Forster was now an enthusiastic convert and had been an almost frenetic climber over the springs and summers of 1912 and 1913. He and George had planned to climb in the Mont Blanc range, but heavy snowfalls had made it impossible so they switched their attention to the northern end of the main Alps chain and a mountain named Bifertenstock, after the mighty glacier which separated it from one of George’s favourite peaks, the Tödi.
The mountain itself was not particularly high, at 11,217 feet barely within the highest two hundred Alpine peaks, and had been conquered from the south, but the western ridge, so far, had resisted any attempt to climb it. In fact, there had been no attempt for more than three decades as the challenge drifted from view, perhaps because the mountain was at the northern extremity of the spine.
It was a day’s climb up the relatively easy first half of the mountain. Now, as he and Forster stood at the base of the ridge assessing the bleak wall, George was awestruck, later writing that it looked as if it had been fashioned for the Titans:
… belted, as it were, from head to foot with girdle upon girdle of bronze-coloured rock besprinkled with the crystal of snow and ice, unique not only in its appearance but in that west ridge, which rears itself up … towards the summit in a series of huge, precipitous, even overhanging buttresses. It had never suffered the imprint of human foot.
The reason George believed that he and Forster might stand a chance of scaling the fortress-like ridge was the recent introduction of a simple tool that would revolutionise mountain climbing. The legendary Tyrolean mountain guide and blacksmith Hans Fiechtl had developed the piton, a metal spike that could be driven into a seam or crack of a sheer rockface to anchor a rope. Combined with a metal loop that could be clipped to the piton called a carabiner, it made it possible to climb the previously impossible.
It was an innovation that embodied George’s belief that progress and change should be embraced, including in the form of new and better equipment that enabled climbers to tackle new challenges rather than tread the same, worn path. He and Max had previously felt the wrath of older climbers when they dared try something new, like in the summer of 1911 when George began experimenting with a shorter axe handle to make step-cutting easier using only one hand. The next year he and Max began using silk and cotton ropes that were lighter and yet stronger than traditional hemp. Most controversial of all was the introduction of the piton, which helped climbers pin themselves to sheer rockfaces. George would sometimes return from a climb chanting loudly, ‘Blessed be the piton,’ in defiance of older disapproving onlookers.
George and Forster would tackle the Bifertenstock wall in two phases on separate days. The first day was devoted to finding a route up the first of the buttresses, a giddy precipice that fell away more than 3000 feet to the glacier below. Wearing rope-soled canvas shoes rather than heavy boots, George had no choice but to inch his way onto the face while Forster slowly played out a rope he hoped would hold if his companion slipped on the exposed rocks.
George had edged out almost thirty feet before he spied a narrow fissure above his head, a chimney through which he might be able to squeeze to begin moving upwards. It was an agonising, inch-by-inch climb, the rope around his chest slackening slightly as he gasped from the effort, but he eventually reached another ledge less than a foot wide on which he balanced while Forster made his way up from below.
The ledge on which he stood with his shoulders flat to the rockface was so tiny that at the moment his companion reached out to grab it and haul himself up, George was forced to start climbing up a second chimney. It meant they were now defenceless: if one slipped, they would both fall to their deaths. With no respite and no way back to the bottom of the ridge, George was struggling physically.
It was here that the piton was invaluable. Noticing a seam in the otherwise impregnable wall, George wedged himself into a gap and, using a rock, tapped the steel peg into the crack, threading the heavy rope through the carabiner and testing the anchor point with a sharp tug before putting his full weight on the rope. It held, and they were safe as he contemplated the next move.
But their difficulties were far from over as George continued to use pitons to secure their path, roping and unroping as he moved slowly up the now overhanging wall. As he gained another ledge, George attempted to clear the ground beneath his feet only for the surface to crumble and fall, not only leaving him balanced precariously on the shattered remains but causing the rock fragments to strike Forster, who was climbing directly below. The force knocked the Englishman from his hold on the cliff face and he swung helplessly in space. George had to summon all his strength to hold the rope, but the pitons stayed fast and prevented them both from falling.
The gash in Forster’s head was still pumping out blood, spattering his coat and drenching his thick handlebar moustache, when they finally reached the lip of the first buttress, hauling themselves to safety to stand and howl like wolves in triumph. The duo eventually retreated down the face, leaving the path to the top, which they would complete three days later, now easily accessible, thanks to the trail of pitons that had already saved their lives.
By Easter 1914 George had settled comfortably into academic life but couldn’t resist another climbing stint in Switzerland. On April 9 he boarded a train at Charing Cross bound for Zürich where Max was finishing his studies at ETH before following his brother’s lead and heading for London.
George hadn’t warned Max that he was coming, the decision an impetuous one made in a moment of exuberance and affection.
His arrival the next day was a pleasant surprise to his younger brother and a welcome distraction from study. Max needed little persuasion to close his books and within a few hours they had packed and left for a week’s skiing across the mid peaks of the Bernese Oberland.
They had been here before, back in 1908, then aged nineteen and sixteen, just as they had begun to break free of the shackles imposed by their worried mother, and had made their first major cross-country winter ski trip through the glacier regions. It had been a thrilling adventure, often beneath cloudless skies that seemed to shimmer and change in colour as they lay on their backs, relaxing after a climb, and let their eyes roam from the yellowish-green near the horizon to the pale blue that thickened to a dense hue overhead.
But there were also dangers in the Oberland, like the fish-shaped clouds that appeared in the early afternoon and warned of gusting winds that could quickly turn into what George would describe as the ‘ruthless, deadly force of the elements let loose in winter’ that whipped and shredded and blasted everything into submission. And it wasn’t just the ever-changing weather that posed problems, but surface perils like snow shields, avalanches and especially crevasses concealed beneath the winter snowfall, invisible to all but the most experienced eye that could discern the slight hollowing as the snow compacted and sagged above the hidden chasm.
It was on this first trip that George and Max had experienced the terror of a hidden winter crevasse. In the relative calm of an afternoon, a friend with whom they were climbing suddenly disappeared as a snow bridge collapsed beneath his skis. George, skiing behind, was almost catapulted into the giant crevasse which had opened up beneath their feet. The trapped man swung helplessly, the rope attached to the three men his only lifeline. It had taken two hours for George and Max to haul him free of this frigid potential grave.
The Brilliant Outsider Page 8
