In 1917, I was more or less certain that my wife had gone off the rails again. It was then that I found out that Campbell and my wife had lived together in my house in November 1916, just after Peter’s birth. But as I had already condoned this by living with my wife in February, and as other proofs I had were not valid enough to stand up to court, it had to wait until I found letters of absolute proof. Before the absolute proof, my wife’s object in refusing to divorce me was: to remain my wife, have a good time and do what she liked until I should slip and give her a chance to divorce me. I have now procured legal proof. What I want is to be free of my wife. I want Peter who bears my name now. He is rather a dear little fellow. I cannot bring myself to letting his life be utterly ruined through the faults of others of which he is innocent.
A month later, as the church bells across England rang out joyfully to declare the end of the Great War, George wrote to Gladys again. He still intended taking custody of the boy who shared his name but not his blood, although it was clear that his future wife wanted children of her own and was not interested in taking care of someone else’s child, particularly when he wasn’t her future husband’s real son.
George, reluctantly, gave in: ‘In all fairness to you, and the dream baby we are going to have, you and yours must come first. Peter will not live with us, for my mother, who knows nothing of the truth about him, is going to bring him up in the company of my younger brother Antoine, who is fourteen.’
It was a decision he would regret.
In a letter to his mother, George revealed a hard-nosed streak, softened to some degree by a concern for young Peter: ‘I told Betty that I intended taking proceedings. She fell in quite merrily with the idea until her hearing that it would naturally involve losing all touch with my son. She grovelled. Well she may continue to do so. I cannot take Peter away from her yet. That worries me for he is over two years old and active in mind and body beyond his years.’
George began divorce proceedings on January 3, 1919. His sworn affidavit contained what he said was proof ‘that the said Alicia Gladys Ingle Finch has frequently committed adultery with William Dallas Campbell’. They had been together for eight nights in April 1918 at the Moorlands Hotel in Surrey, then again in early May at the South Western Hotel in Southampton. There was no need to list any further transgressions.
The imminent divorce of George Finch and Betty Fisher had descended into an ugly game of hide-and-seek by the early months of 1919. Betty, advised by her angry husband that he planned to take Peter from her, frequently moved house, sometimes shifting hundreds of miles at a time, to thwart any attempt George might make before the case came to court.
It was clearly the jilted man’s intention to take Peter from her, so confident was he of his legal grounds in a society that had only just given women the right to vote and was still some years away from allowing them the choice to initiate divorce proceedings. His determination was detailed in a statement delivered to the court which showed the time he’d spent trying to find her and the trouble she had taken to avoid a confrontation. It listed several addresses in Southsea, Haslemere, Maidenhead and Brighton to which he’d tracked his estranged wife over several months, adding she had been ‘at divers other places’.
He eventually ran her to ground in the Sussex market town of Lewes, the same town in which he had earlier been convalescing, turning up one day in March 1919 with his sister, Dorothy, and taking Peter who, they would claim, was being fed champagne in a room full of drunken soldiers. It is not clear where Betty was at the time, although years later all she recalled was that Peter had ‘disappeared’ from the garden. She did not deny the presence of the soldiers.
Betty’s only hope for contact with her son was Laura Finch, who did not approve of George’s actions and believed Peter belonged with his mother, no matter how ‘loose’ she may have been. A few months after she began caring for Peter, Laura sent Betty a series of photographs of the young boy with a note in which she described the break-up of the marriage and the treatment of Peter as a ‘sorrow’ in her life. It prompted a heart-rending reply in which Betty described the photos as ‘pleasure and pain’:
I worship my son every moment of his small life. I try not to think of Peter more than I can help because that way leads to madness. But there are still times when the longings to have him are well nigh more than I can bear. I am not seeking sympathy and I intend to rebuild my own life with the priceless possession of loyal friends. I hope you believe that I am sorry to have been the indirect cause of sorrow in your life.
But George Finch, filled with misgivings about his own upbringing by an errant mother, was not about to change his mind, particularly with the expectations and pressures of a new relationship in the background. As far as he was concerned, Betty Fisher was not fit to raise the child and he expected his mother’s support on this. Laura Finch, under the impression that Peter was her ‘blood’ grandson, would eventually yield to her oldest son.
Betty’s bravado was punctured as the reality of her loss set in. Pleas for Peter’s return had fallen on deaf ears and her grief would eventually be replaced by a hardened determination to forget about Peter and begin again.
There was one more twist. At the time Peter was taken from her, Betty was pregnant again. Given the acrimony between them, and even though he might have been in England on leave in the final months of the war, it is hard to imagine that George, in the throes of an angry divorce, was the father of a child conceived some time in the autumn of 1918. Yet the birth certificate, registered two months after the birth of the boy, Michael Roscoe, on June 17, 1919, named him as such. A telltale sign as to its lack of authenticity might be the misuse of the name Ingle as part of a hyphenated surname. Nonetheless, more than ninety years later Michael’s descendants still carry the hyphenated surname and introduce themselves as George’s great-grandchildren.
Michael Ingle-Finch would always believe that his father was George Finch and not Jock Campbell, with whom he lived, along with his mother, for the first eight years of his life. He would remember Jock fondly as the man who played a fatherly role, teaching him to ride and hunt while they lived in the lap of luxury in India.
But when Betty and Jock’s marriage ended so too did the relationship. Michael would never see Jock again, although someone was paying his mother an allowance that meant he could be schooled at Harrow before joining the Hampshire Flying School from where he was recruited into the RAF, becoming a hero during World War II. Michael Ingle-Finch was an ace pilot, flying Hurricanes during the Battle of Britain, and was among the first to fly the next generation fighter, the Typhoon. He was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross (with bar) in 1943 and rose to the rank of Wing Commander. After the war he continued to have an association with the aviation industry, as a test pilot and teacher. He died in 2002 aged eighty-one, never having met the man he believed was his father.
In all likelihood, George Finch never even knew Michael existed.
13.
THE LAST FRONTIER
The Alpine Club of London had been rudderless, at least in a formal sense, during the early years of the Great War. Between 1914 and 1917 there was no president and only minimal activity by its committee, mainly to manage the premises at No. 23 Savile Row in the centre of the city. These had remained open, the comfortable lounge and library filled most days with elderly members. But, as with society in general, the energy and drive of its youth had been stripped away, many younger members never returning from the mud of the Somme and the myriad other sites of mass death.
It was a far cry from the glory days of the mid nineteenth century when the world’s first mountaineering club had been created to harness the interest and enthusiasm of the so-called golden age of climbing, when the imposing phalanx of Europe’s Alpine peaks had been conquered, one by one. The club had hummed with activity and stories of the triumphs and tragedies of men in Norfolk tweed jackets and nailed boots who, carrying only rope and pickaxes, pitted themselves against extrem
es of weather and terrain. The club was devoted not just to the physical challenge of mountaineering but to the recording of climbs and expeditions in volumes of beautiful and gallant prose.
But half a century later all the main peaks had been conquered and the search for fresh challenges had been reduced to finding new climbing routes to ascend the same mountains. Now, as the war years churned on, it was those same old men who’d been part of the golden age who mostly sat in the club, their unread books lining the walls, and the club magazine, the Alpine Journal, forced to fill its pages by retelling old stories, as the Bernese Oberland, Graian Alps and Pennines were largely inaccessible while Europe remained in the darkness of turmoil.
John Percy Farrar edited the journal during these trying times. Born within days of the club’s formation in 1857, he had become its most prominent figure, not only keeping the journal alive, but in 1917 assuming the presidency and breathing new life into the club by creating excitement about what might happen in mountaineering when the war was finally over.
He was the right man for a difficult time, a decorated soldier during the Boer War with an engaging personality and an impressive climbing record. He was credited with four first ridge ascents, including the north ridge of the Wetterhorn, in a career that would eventually tally more than three hundred expeditions across Europe, South Africa, Japan and Canada.
On February 15, 1918, in a typically expansive letter to one of the main contributors to the Alpine Journal, the Swiss-based American writer Henry Montagnier, Farrar revealed there were influential men, particularly in the rival Royal Geographical Society, who were considering new climbing frontiers outside Europe now that the war seemed, at last, to be coming to an end: ‘There are rumours flying about that there is to be a big mountaineering expedition to Everest directly after the war, but I do not know what truth there is in it. Possibly it arises through the death in action of General Rawling who, you remember, made a very adventurous journey down the Brahmaputra.’
Farrar was right on both counts. Brigadier-General Cecil Rawling, a larger-than-life figure whose career represented everything that the British establishment regarded as romantic and heroic, had been killed in action at Passchendaele the previous October. A man of adventure in the Victorian mould, he had explored the foothills surrounding Everest in 1904 when part of a British expedition to survey the mountains of Tibet and had even considered attempting to climb Everest, had it not been forbidden by the Tibetans. His death had sparked renewed interest in the ambition of reaching the roof of the world.
Rawling had been a prominent member of the Royal Geographical Society, and it was probably at the society’s premises in Kensington where Farrar, who was a member of both clubs, had heard the rumours, although it would be another ten months before a letter was drafted by the society to the Secretary of State for India to ask for leave to submit requests to the Tibetan government to mount an Everest campaign.
The letter’s contents revealed the complexity of the challenge of tackling a peak that no European had even seen in its entirety, given the access restrictions. It had been mapped in 1841 by the Surveyor-General of India, Sir George Everest; observed on the horizon through a theodolite from huge towers erected to complete the great survey of India, and its height determined from calculations made more than 100 miles from its base. The best guess was that it would take two or three years to prepare, not only mapping the mountain and its geography and surrounds, and improving climbing equipment, but also pondering the question of oxygen and specifically ‘the construction of an oxygen helmet to enrich the attenuated air and thus minimise the distress hitherto produced by physical exertion at altitudes above 22,000 feet’.
Everest was a challenge British alpinists had been eyeing at least since 1885 when the surgeon and mountaineer Clinton Dent, in his book Above the Snow Line, concluded: ‘I do not for a moment say that it would be wise to ascend Mount Everest, but I believe most firmly that it is humanly possible to do so.’
But it would take time and diplomacy to open the Tibetan borders and the issue had been put aside until the war wound to its bloody end, the celebrations had died and the reality of the decimation of society had set in. By 1919 it seemed here was the opportunity the British establishment had been longing for. Everest was the early twentieth century’s final frontier. Man had been to the extremities of the earth in every direction except up, including to the North and South Poles, and this was the chance for an Englishman – Britain had been beaten to the Poles – to be the first to conquer the highest summit and stand on the roof of the world. In the post-war years Britain was struggling to find a pathway to economic and social recovery and the conquest of Everest would provide a much-needed fillip, particularly as they controlled India, the only known way of access.
In March 1919 the idea was raised publicly when Captain John Noel, a soldier, adventurer and photographer, addressed a packed meeting of the Royal Geographical Society to speak about his adventures in the Himalayas. Disguised as a local in the forbidden land, he had got within fifty miles of Mount Everest in 1913 and glimpsed the top 1000 feet of the monolith through the haze of biting winds before being forced to retreat, but not before photographing the mountain for the first time – a ‘glittering spire of rock fluted with snow’.
Noel insisted it was time that an attempt on the summit was made, if not by a British climber then someone else: ‘It cannot be long before the culminating summit of the world is visited, and its ridges, valleys and glaciers are mapped and photographed. This would perhaps have already been done, as we know, but for the war.’
The speech was a set-up, the brainchild of the Royal Geographical Society president Sir Francis Younghusband, who wanted to inject some urgency into a plan that seemed to have been languishing for years. He had been agitating for some diplomatic action for some time and on the back of the enthusiastic response that night he arranged another mission in India to negotiate with the Tibetan government. Others like Percy Farrar immediately began discussing possible climbers, and a week later he mentioned the challenge again in a letter to Montagnier:
I shall strongly support the inclusion in the party of the two brothers Finch (George and Max). They are at present gunners, but I believe we could easily get them seconded. I know them both very well and they are, in my opinion, two of the best mountaineers we have ever seen and much more likely to carry out a job of this kind than other men I know, whether a guide or a mountaineer of any nationality. They are both under thirty and the very men for the job. You might casually sound Kurz out as to his opinion of the two Finch brothers. I think you would find he would not wish for better comrades.
Marcel Kurz was the man to whom George Finch had written in January 1915 when he raised the suspicions of his superiors by mentioning howitzers in the same breath as his Swiss mountaineering friends in the Academic Alpine Club of Zürich. He had also mentioned visiting Farrar (at the offices of the Farrar family’s mining company in East London beneath London Wall).
The Farrar–Finch friendship appeared a strange one, at least on the surface. Farrar was more than twice the age of Finch and very much a part of the British climbing establishment that the younger man despised. The pair had met several times during the summer climbing seasons, often at the Monte Rosa Hotel in Zermatt. They had been introduced by Val Fynn, a close friend of Farrar who had been impressed with the boys during their climb in 1911.
There was another, compelling, connection between them. Farrar’s only son, John, was twenty-seven when he was killed in action in April 1915. He was the same age as George Finch and, in his grief, the older man clearly saw the daredevil climber as a son of sorts and a kindred soul.
Finch felt the same warmth and admiration for Farrar. Even before the war when he wrote his controversial appraisal of British climbers in his article for The Field, George had found praise for a few individuals, including Farrar, and it was obvious that he regarded the older man as something of a saviour of modern mountaineering.<
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Farrar was also not blind to the shortcomings of his fellow Alpine Club members, and acutely aware that many of them, as pointed out so robustly by Finch, were not mountain climbers in the strict sense but gentlemen rich enough to pay guides to ease their way. He was also embarrassed that only British climbers were being considered for the Everest expedition and wondered why the Royal Geographical Society didn’t seek out the best possible team. After all, the task was monumental and would not be decided in the homeland of the climbers. In any case, the climbs in Europe were higher and tougher than those in Britain. French, Swiss and even Italian climbers should be considered, he believed.
The way forward was the young, he argued in another letter to Montagnier, written in May 1919, in which he revealed that he had sounded out George about taking up the Everest challenge: ‘As to the Himalayan business, nothing more has been done. I saw young George Finch who is about to be demobilised, and I think he would be quite willing to go. If he and his brother Max and young Kurz cannot do the job then we have nobody who can.’
The expertise of Marcel Kurz was well known to members of both the Alpine Club and the Royal Geographical Society, but the fact he was Swiss, not British, would make him the first of Farrar’s preferred trio to be ruled out if an expedition was ever mounted, as Farrar pointed out to Montagnier in another letter, marked ‘Confidential’: ‘Apparently the Geographical people are very intent on this Himalayan expedition, if it comes off, being purely British. Moreover, I understood from [fellow Alpine Club member Douglas] Freshfield that Kurz had made an unacceptable proposition.’
Farrar had begun discussing Everest with George Finch just as George was orchestrating the removal of Peter from Betty Fisher. The possibility of being chosen in the climbing party to tackle Mount Everest, as theoretical as it was at the time, must have been on his mind when he decided to shunt Peter off to his mother in Paris. How could he take responsibility for a child – someone else’s child at that – when he would be attempting the greatest adventure of his life? And he knew that Gladys May did not wish to take care of him.
The Brilliant Outsider Page 11
