The Brilliant Outsider

by Wainwright, Robert

  Worse had followed a few days later when George and Max were on their way back down from the mountains. The brothers were on their own, having ignored the advice of other climbers who worried about an approaching storm and suggested they wait it out in an overcrowded mountain hut. Bravado prevailed and the duo waved goodbye and skied off confidently into the grey mist.

  All had gone well at first and they made good time until the storm hit, even then only slowing rather than stopping, intent as they were to be proved right. A few hours later, having battled through the worst of the weather and with safety in sight, George became buried in an avalanche.

  It had come without warning, in a rush of wind from above as they passed beneath the foot of the mighty Eiger. Max, skiing behind, watched in horror as his brother disappeared in a cloud of snow dust, the rope that connected them the only indication of where he might be lying beneath the deluge. Thankfully, George had the presence of mind to keep his arms above his head and move them in a swimming motion as if he was back in Sydney Harbour, creating an air pocket that gave Max the time to find his brother and dig him out. But it had been a close call and left them both shaken.

  Now they were returning six years later as seasoned, even celebrated, alpinists, aged just twenty-five and twenty-two respectively, with a trust in each other that was as unbreakable as it was instinctive. This trip was not a meticulously planned expedition with a goal of conquering a series of difficult summits but was a fun excursion, driven by George’s sudden desire to enjoy the company of his younger brother, probably underpinned by a growing belief that war was inevitable and the future was too difficult to predict.

  They based themselves in the Konkordia Hut set above a sea of glacial ice. They would explore in a different direction each day, skiing ‘in a sheer riot of exhilaration down toward the Jungfraujoch’, ‘humbly pottering across the Konkordia Platz’ and ‘whizzing down on the Aletsch Glacier’.

  There were climbs too, summits like the Weissnollen, Ebnefluh and the Fiescherhorn which they explored with ease, the perfect climbing conditions making most of it child’s play. They might as well have been climbing in midsummer, the rocks so warm they lay basking for hours, and yet there was no green amid the perpetual snow and ice of the Oberland. Neither was there any sign of humanity (save the hut) to spoil the silence, the nearest village at least six hours away.

  They revelled in their week of solitude, so much so that George did not even use his camera, a Folding Pocket Kodak No. 3 which he’d bought in the summer of 1911 when they had taken the American John Case to the top of the Matterhorn and climbed with Val Fynn. He would assiduously document most other trips he made, capturing the contrast between the glorious crystal serenity and the shuddering violence of avalanches cascading down 2000-foot cliffs.

  In the library of negatives that he would leave behind there are scenes of soaring majesty and the terror of gale force winds threatening to tear men from snowy ledges and toss them to their deaths. Some show men improbably balanced on sheer rockfaces while others record tense moments as they prod with axe handles to test for hidden crevasses. Others fix on the grubby, grinning faces of friends triumphant atop stone spires and there is even a shot of Guy Forster, blood-spattered but defiant, after the rock fall on the Bifertenstock.

  But the brothers’ audacity and skill is perhaps best captured in a triptych of images taken at the end of the 1911 summer. The brothers were descending Mont Blanc, at ease with the hard work done for the day. They reached a wide saddle known as Col Maudit where they paused, studying the possible routes and deciding to tackle a steep but short ice slope which appeared to lead directly to a gentle snowfield below. George began cutting steps but soon realised there was another obstacle in their path that had been hidden from above – a large crevasse gaped between them and the snowfield, with no obvious way across.

  It was too late to climb back up and find an alternative. The gap in front of them was about 16 feet across at its narrowest point and could be negotiated if they could find a way to secure a rope and lower themselves past the hole. But there were no rocks around to which they could belay a rope and the ice was too packed to bury an axe handle and create an anchor point. The skies were darkening quickly and there seemed to be no option other than to leap and hope the steep angle would be enough to carry them across the gap, as George later recalled:

  Leaving my axe and climbing irons with Max I screwed up my courage and leapt wildly out into space, to strike with my feet into the deep, soft snow below the bergschrund with such force that I was almost submerged and snow found its way into my clothing in a most disconcerting fashion. Then came Max’s turn. He first threw down the axes, climbing irons and other paraphernalia. Then, while I trained the camera on him, he jumped and landed with such a thud that he likewise was almost buried in the powdery snow. After a rest and a meal to soothe our shattered nerves, we gathered up our belongings and commenced stamping down towards Mont Blanc de Tacul.

  George’s description was typically understated but the photos still exist more than a century later and show not only the drama of the moment but also the skill of George as a photographer. The first of the images is of Max, head down and pensive, ropes hanging uselessly by his side as he considers the jump that his brother has just made successfully. The third shows the relief on his face; he’s wedged chest-deep in snow at the base of the crevasse, but alive.

  But it is the middle photo that is the most stunning, the blurred but distinct image of Max in mid-air, arms outstretched as he plunges down a slope close to 70 degrees, the Alpine spine of Switzerland stretching into the distance behind him. It would have been difficult enough to capture with a modern camera let alone with the foldout bellows model George carried in a coat pocket while balanced on an icy slope.

  There is a difference between the photography of mountains and mountain photography, he would write some years later. Photography of mountains is taken by those who see them from afar – from roads and trains, valleys and pathways – which means the photograph itself is the chief object. Mountain photography, by contrast, is incidental to the main activity – climbing mountains.

  Photos did, however, keep memories ‘fresh and true for all time, enabling us to retain a faithful picture of the many striking incidents, the wonderful surroundings and the fellow actors who have played with us in the great game’.

  By us George probably meant I, although he might have meant the Brothers Finch. They certainly felt almost inseparable during the week on the glaciers of the Oberland where the camera was not needed to record a wonderful sibling relationship, a friendship and a bond created by experience that George could not have envisaged at the top of Mount Canobolas. George would indeed describe the week with Max as glorious, but when he looked back on it in later years it must have been with sadness, because they would never climb together again.

  11.

  A JILTED HERO

  As a young child Alicia Gladys Fisher was nicknamed Betty, most probably because her mother was named Alicia too. Whatever the reason, the name Betty would be a constant in a long life riddled with numerous identity crises.

  Betty Fisher’s father, Frederick, was a barrister from a wealthy Manchester family who took his wife and daughter south soon after Betty was born in 1893, partly for health reasons but also to pursue better career opportunities. The Fishers settled in the pretty seaside town of Margate, and six years later little Alicia was belatedly christened in the local church. Despite the splashing of holy water she remained Betty. By 1901, the family was living the well-to-do life with two maids in a house a few streets back from the beach.

  But life can change suddenly and with far-reaching consequences. The household was torn apart just two years later when the marriage of Frederick and Alicia Fisher ended. Betty would tell people that her father had died suddenly, but official records suggest that he was very much alive, and that the couple had separated. Either way, the family was split up, the house sold, the servants dis
missed and Betty, then aged almost ten, was farmed out to be raised by relatives while her parents went their separate ways. There were no divorce proceedings so custody was never discussed. Instead, Betty was abandoned.

  Frederick moved back north and died aged fifty. His estranged wife wandered, searching for a new life and never settling for long enough to establish a secure home for her daughter, whom she saw rarely. Once doted-upon, Betty Fisher was now alone, unwanted as she recalled bitterly in later years, with the most influential family member being an uncle named Bill, married to a woman whose name she had forgotten: ‘I never really had a home as a child. My father died when I was nine, my mother married again and I was brought up by an uncle.’

  After Frederick Fisher’s death, Alicia quickly remarried and in 1911 reappeared with her new husband, a stockbroker named Conran Smith, to reclaim her now seventeen-year-old daughter. By early April the trio was living in the village of Limpsfield on the southern outskirts of London. But the reunion with her mother lasted only long enough for Betty to be sent away even further, this time to Paris where she spent a year with a French family to be ‘finished’.

  Betty dreamed of being an actress, inspired as an impressionable teenager when she accompanied her uncle to an opening night performance at a West End theatre. She pored over magazines featuring actors and actresses, dreaming of a glamorous life on the stage and it all seemed possible when she met a theatre agent one night at a party who invited her to audition. The next day she headed off down the street in her best dress only to be stopped by Uncle Bill who was having none of it. Little did she know that her own son would one day achieve what she could only dream of.

  It was not surprising then that Betty Fisher, the young adult, was always seeking the attention and affection she had lost so early in life and so desperately craved. If she could not be an actress then she could still behave as she thought one would behave, batting her eyelashes and coquettishly tossing her pretty mane of ash-blonde hair. She was constantly surrounded by men who couldn’t see, or more likely didn’t care, that hers was a mask to hide uncertainties and an emotional fragility. When war was declared in August 1914, the mask became permanently fixed.

  ‘I was living on the Isle of Wight and at an age when you go to a lot of dances,’ she recalled in 1977, aged eighty-four. ‘I had lived a sheltered life and had no idea or thought about anything outside my limited, shallow circle. Suddenly the war came and everything changed radically forever. At first we thought it would all be over by Christmas but in 1915 men were dying by the thousands. You do mad things, and my first marriage was the sort of thing a young girl of my background and temperament did. No one knew what was going to happen and we all went mad. Boys were going off to the Front and they were dead within a week.’

  It was very unlike George Finch to be rash, but these were different times. He had barely cemented his place on the staff at the Imperial College when the world was upended by the assassination of the heir to the throne of Austria–Hungary, Archduke Franz Ferdinand. Britain entered the war on August 4 – George’s twenty-sixth birthday.

  He resumed teaching at the Imperial College in early September after the summer break, but felt uncomfortable sitting on the sidelines. If there was one area where he and William Bone differed in their views it was the subject of war. Bone was a pacifist, only willing to participate in research on behalf of the military on two conditions: that his students and staff were excused from active service as their work was of national significance, and that they not be involved in any research work associated with poisonous gas.

  George Finch felt otherwise about the need to fight and in late September 1914, along with five of his students, he applied for a temporary commission. The enlistment papers described the 26-year-old as ‘pure European’ and living at the Royal College of Science in West Kensington. They noted his preferences to be in either the cavalry or an artillery unit, but he would eventually serve on the frontline in neither. An accompanying medical report was brief and positive – six feet tall, of medium build, with good hearing, vision and teeth. The final conclusion – ‘fit’ – was something of an understatement.

  Second Lieutenant Finch was assigned to the Royal Field Artillery and spent the next few months as a riding instructor at Woolwich before being sent to Portsmouth. George hated both places and by January 1915 was bored and frustrated, stuck in barracks and wanting desperately to either see some action or, more importantly, for the war to be over so he could return to the spartan laboratories of the Imperial College and his climbing holidays in the mountains of Europe.

  It was at an officers’ dance some time in the spring of 1915 that George Finch met Betty Fisher. It was the first indication that he had an interest in anything beyond outdoor adventure or chemistry, let alone in the fairer sex, but he was obviously smitten. Years later Betty was still effusive about George, describing him as ‘a remarkably handsome man, brilliant, tough and exceptionally brave’, although even in the first flush of love she’d noticed there was something distant about him – ‘indifferent to comfort’, as she put it.

  Despite their obvious differences, George and Betty quickly fell for one another and were married in a rush at the Registry Office in Portsmouth on June 16, 1915. The union, like many of the time, was a hasty, ill-considered product of war and almost certainly doomed. A century later the marriage certificate remains a revealing document about their mindset and misgivings: there’s Betty’s longing for the late barrister father whom she listed as being alive and a ‘man of independent means’ and George’s frustrations and irreverent sense of humour, giving his address as ‘No Man’s Land, Fort Spithead’, in rebellious reference to the historic floating seaports moored off the coast of Portsmouth.

  Still, he was respectful enough to write to his father, Charles, about the marriage, but only after he and Betty had returned from the honeymoon. He had very little to say about his new bride:

  My dear father,

  I have some quite startling news for you – I was married last week quietly by special licence to Miss Fisher to whom I have been engaged but a comparatively short time. We spent our honeymoon – three days was all I could get – in London. My wife is staying at Southsea [a suburb of Portsmouth] and will remain there until I get my marching orders, which I hope will not be long now.

  Little remains of George Finch’s war records. Like the records of so many men who served in the Great War, the handwritten file which detailed his service was destroyed during a German bombing raid over London during World War II. But one thin file survived, an intriguing collection of documents tucked away in a manila folder at the National Archives in Kew, among them his pink enlistment papers and the green notice issued on the day in May 1919, almost five years later, when he was demobbed. But the surviving document of most interest is a copy of the letter he wrote to Marcel Kurz, his climbing friend from ETH days, on January 9, 1915. In it George describes his frustrations at being in Portsmouth in the damp cold of an English winter:

  Dear Marcel,

  Many thanks for your welcome card (thanks also to the fool of a censor who let it pass!). Lord! What a dull life in this godforsaken hole, and I’ve got to stay here till the spring. The powers that be imagine that I can’t take the cold in France. At the end of March I shall probably go across with a 9.2 inch Haubtize – at present however the beastly thing is not yet ready. Just think, I have not seen snow this whole winter. Heaven knows when I shall see it again. Next summer will certainly be no good. Last week I had two days’ leave. Of course I rushed straight to London, saw Farrar [and] Max too, who by the way looks jolly well and will soon be over there. In the nights I raced about like mad & danced in all the nightclubs and now I am back again as dull as usual. I have been promoted and have my second star as a Lieutenant. I caught a spy (an Englishman who turned out to be an awful fool and not at all pleasant), and I fired upon two disobedient steamers – that is the sum total of my activities on Long Curtain battery. How is the
AACZ? Remember me to everybody – Theo, Jeanne, Kalamer, Egger, Miescher, Heller & Phuty (I should like a letter from him). And how is Mantel, and where?

  Love and good luck to you and the AACZ.

  Yours

  Geo Finch Lt. RGA

  The letter was not posted to Kurz, at least not initially. It was stopped by army censors at the Portsmouth base who were shocked first by the fact that George had written it not in English but in German and, secondly, that he had discussed weapons. (The haubtize was a howitzer, a short-barrelled cross between a gun and a mortar.) There are several memos on the file that reveal the concern his superiors felt about what was an innocent letter, penned for a Swiss man who spoke German by a friend who had studied at tertiary level for three years in the language. Instead it was read as a possible missive written by a double agent.

  The first memo was written by a senior officer at Portsmouth who wanted the letter translated into English. A second memo was written by a ‘concerned’ officer further up the chain of command: ‘The writer knows German unusually well. Attached is a copy of the letter. Perhaps the War Office should see the letter.’ By January 21 the translation was on the desk of the Officer Commanding-in-Chief of Southern Command, based in Salisbury. Finch’s letter had been marked with red lines drawn under phrases that caused concern: the howitzer, his criticism of the censors, ‘my activities on Long Curtain Battery’ (part of Portsmouth’s sea defence system) and references to the AACZ (the Academic Alpine Club of Zürich).

  It was here that common sense finally prevailed and the investigation was dropped. George was cleared and the letter sent to Marcel Kurz. It reveals much about the character of George Ingle Finch, as he now referred to himself more often than not to distinguish himself from other branches of the family, including his flippant disdain for officialdom. And George’s downplaying of having captured a spy was typical of his pragmatic personality as well as demonstrating a genuine modesty, just as his description of the howitzer as beastly demonstrated his disdain for violence. Mostly, the letter highlighted his love of the mountains and his respect and affection for his climbing colleagues, contradicting those who would claim that he had difficulty making and keeping friends.