The Brilliant Outsider

by Wainwright, Robert

  By August 1919 official moves were under way, seeking permission from Tibetan authorities for Britain to mount an expedition to the Himalayas. Behind the scenes, George Finch was submitting his own plans to Farrar for the makeup of a possible climbing party and suggesting strategies for including Marcel Kurz, particularly as it was going to be impossible to find enough ‘good Englishmen’ with sufficient skills to make the attempt. Farrar agreed with him, at least privately, but held out little hope of convincing the committee of the Royal Geographical Society, which effectively controlled all aspects of the proposed expedition.

  14.

  THE LOST BOY

  George may have been struggling to find support for his suggestions concerning the Everest expedition, but he had no trouble winning over a divorce court magistrate. It had taken ten months since his application to get a hearing, by which time he had been demobbed with the rank of captain and was back working as a lecturer at the Imperial College, and living in Kensington. More significantly, he had been made a military Member of the British Empire (MBE) ‘for services in connection with the war in Salonika’. King George V would pin the medal on his chest during an investiture ceremony at Buckingham Palace in December 1919.

  It only added to his credibility before the court, although none was needed. The hearing was swift, uneventful and like most cases of the period it was uncontested, allowing Mr Justice McCardie to find that George Finch had ‘sufficiently proved the contents of the said petition’ and decree that the marriage was dissolved because Betty Finch was an adulteress. Jock Campbell, the adulterer, was ordered to pay court and legal costs of £126.

  But it was the final few words of the judgment – ‘that the child, Frederick George Peter Ingle Finch, remain in custody of the petitioner’ – that would prove the most important and far-reaching. George Finch would take custody of a child whom he believed was not his and whom he had no intention of taking care of in the future.

  Peter Finch, then aged four, was already ensconced in the French home of his grandmother. In his dismissal of Betty as a woman incapable of being a decent mother, George was repeating the pattern of disharmony that had affected his own teenage life, but had little option but to leave Peter in a house with an eccentric woman in late middle age and his teenaged half-brother, Antoine, who was studying to be a concert pianist.

  Peter had stayed with George’s sister, Dorothy, during the divorce proceedings as she roamed the English countryside working as a post-war nurse, trying to put aside the grief of losing her fiancé in the fighting, but the young boy would remember none of this nomadic existence. It was as if his memory only began when he walked through the doors of the Villa la Fleurette.

  Laura Finch had long ago moved from central Paris when her grandson arrived on her doorstep. The funds from Charles Finch, which continued to flow despite their long estrangement, would no longer afford a grand apartment and she had found a villa in Vaucresson, an avant-garde commune near the Seine on the far western fringe of the French capital.

  Despite the strangeness of his surroundings, or perhaps because of them, Peter would regard the years with Grandma Laura as happy ones, particularly given his ultimate career as a gifted but tragic Hollywood actor.

  The villa was a crumbling, mottled white and pinky-brown stone building with a big garden filled with cypress trees, lilac bushes, hedges and ivy-covered walls. It was a playground of imagination, always full of wonderfully strange people who attended what became known as Soirées Chez Laura: artists experimenting with Dadaism and Surrealism and musicians, intellectuals and poets; people like the American dancer Isadora Duncan whom Peter remembered dancing semi-naked while his grandmother played the harp dressed in a Grecian tunic and gold headband. The legendary Russian dancer Vaslav Nijinsky was another visitor, a quiet and withdrawn man until the music began when he would leap around the room like a grasshopper. Next door lived an artist who painted animals and kept a tiger in his studio.

  But Laura was perhaps the most colourful of them all, a demanding yet delightful fairy queen dressed in gold lamé who fostered and inspired Peter’s creative spirit: ‘She was the most exotic, marvellous woman I can ever remember and even more of an eccentric egotist than I am,’ he later told his close friend, the actress Enid Lorimer. ‘I must have learned great deal from her subconsciously as an actor and I’m very grateful to George for sending me to her and that I lived with her as long as I did.’

  In another interview he was equally effusive about his grandmother, who often brought him out to show his skills as a mimic in front of her friends. He revelled in the attention: ‘She taught me to explore the frontiers of experience. She encouraged me to explore new places, to meet new people. I was a ready pupil.’

  But the attention Peter would silently crave was that of the man he believed was his father. All the young boy knew was what his grandmother told him: that his parents had divorced, his mother had married another man and his father was climbing mountains in India. It was true, but avoided answering why he had been left in Paris and why he never saw either parent. Although George kept tabs on the boy through Laura, he never travelled to Paris. The letter titled ‘To my son’ was either never posted or Laura simply forgot to give it to the boy. A stub noting the title inside the notebook from which the letter was torn is all that remains of it.

  Betty Fisher would eventually marry Jock Campbell in 1922 and accompany him to India (with her other son, Michael, who also bore George’s name) when Campbell was appointed regent to a young maharajah after the boy-king’s father had been killed, apparently squashed by an elephant. Any plans the couple may have had to retrieve young Peter had long since disappeared and she never made any attempt to contact him.

  Despite the neglect of his mother and George, who had so righteously petitioned for his custody, Peter would have a happy and carefree existence in Vaucresson until the autumn of 1925 when Laura, in her late fifties and becoming increasingly eccentric, decided to travel to India to attend the 50th International Convention of Theosophists held in the city of Madras. She, Peter and Dorothy left France in December and would not return.

  It was in India, amid her obsession with spiritualism, that Laura lost control of her precocious nine-year-old grandson who one day simply wandered off with a Buddhist monk and was found three days later, sitting in a dimly lit room, wearing a yellow robe and with his head shaved. He declared he was a chela – a disciple.

  Laura decided she could no longer be responsible for the boy she still believed was the biological offspring of her oldest son, but rather than demand that George either take Peter back or return him to Betty she entrusted his care to two Australian delegates at the convention. Captain Dick Balfour-Clarke and a former Anglican bishop named CW Leadbeater agreed to take Peter back with them to Sydney, where the plan was that he would be handed to Dorothy Finch, who had carried on to Sydney and was now living and working in rural New South Wales.

  George knew nothing of the Australian plan. He had remained in contact over the years, and knew that his mother had left for India, but had presumed they would return to Paris after the conference. His interest in Peter, while not completely abandoned, had been pushed aside by a new relationship and children.

  Peter arrived in Australia with the two men in the summer of 1926, a thin, frightened boy in a cut-down white suit with a pith helmet on his shaved head. He had no passport, a cheque in his pocket for £12 and a letter addressed to a group of theosophists who lived in a large house known as the Manor in the suburb of Mosman, where the society would make its Australian headquarters. The letter read, in part: ‘If my daughter Dorothy won’t look after him then please will you take Peter.’

  The cheque was a monthly fee to look after her grandson but it was the only one Laura would ever send. She never went back to Paris to live, instead settling in the city of Darjeeling in northern India. In 1938, in her seventies, she wrote to Peter: ‘Remember your grandmother of thirteen years ago?’ she asked, adding that
she was happy he had found a foot-hold on the slippery path of life through his happy nature and intelligence. He did not reply and never saw her again.

  In Australia, Peter had struck more family troubles. Dorothy thought she had made it clear that she could not take Peter so the boy had to stay in Mosman, now totally alone: taken from his mother and biological father, farmed out by his legal father, cared for and then discarded by his grandmother and unwanted by his aunt. Other children who were living at the Manor would later talk of a happy, imaginative boy who told amazing stories, including that his grandmother had sold him to an Arabian slave market from which he had escaped. Behind the stories and laughter, however, it was a different story. For a start, Peter couldn’t read or write English. Enid Lorimer taught him by reciting Shakespeare to him and later recalled finding him on a verandah mimicking her delivery.

  Peter would stay in Mosman for seven months until his grandfather, Charles Finch, turned up one day bearing papers to prove his identity and their relationship. The old man, now eighty-seven, was angry that he had been thrust back into the dysfunctional family, blaming his irresponsible wife to whom he was still paying a stipend despite not having seen her since he left Paris in 1903.

  He was also bearing a letter from his son, George, who had given his father power of attorney over the boy he still claimed as his own. George was angry that Peter had not been returned to Paris after the conference and appalled that he had then been abandoned in Sydney. The letter read in part: ‘I was most distressed to hear that my mother had sent him to a theosophical school. Had I known she intended doing that I should not have given her control of the boy. She knows, or should know quite well, that I completely abominate anything to do with spiritualism, theosophy or any form of charlatanism.’

  But, like everyone else in the family, Charles had no intention of taking responsibility for the boy. At eighty-seven he was simply too old. Instead, Peter was sent to live with Charles’s younger brother, a 73-year-old retired banker named Edward, who lived with his thirty-something spinster daughter, Betty, who could serve as a mother figure. It was all very confusing for the boy. The carefree magic of his grandmother and her friends was gone, replaced by the strict regime of a well-meaning but socially conservative household. Chores replaced creativity and there were regular beatings with a riding crop from a woman who’d had motherhood forced upon her and couldn’t cope.

  Peter attended a public school and wore a uniform, yet another costume change that only highlighted the sense that he didn’t quite fit anywhere, and wasn’t wanted by anyone. The one relationship he cherished was with his grandfather, whom he visited regularly. It was like a re-run of George Finch’s childhood, with the elderly man encouraging the young boy to learn to swim below Greenwich Point and offering him the freedom of his library, although Peter would recall his angry reaction one day when his grandfather found him rifling through papers in his study ‘trying to find out who I was’.

  He ‘escaped’ when he left school at sixteen and was offered a job as a copy boy with the Sydney Sun newspaper by its editor, who lived near Edward and Betty and felt sorry for a boy he considered to be an orphan. Peter’s journey into the city each day would open the door to the world of theatre. Within a year he had moved out of Edward’s house to live, carefree, in the bohemian vibe of Kings Cross. His acting career, once begun, took him to London in 1947 and, ultimately, fame and a posthumous Oscar in Hollywood.

  It would take almost three decades but Peter Finch would eventually be reunited with his mother when he moved from Sydney to London.

  There are two versions of the reunion. Betty would say it was Peter who tracked her down. She remembered his phone call: ‘Hello, I’m your son Peter. Would it embarrass you if I came back into your life again?’

  Peter’s version was the other way around. He told his second wife, the actress Yolande Turner, that it was during the run of a play called Daphne Laureola in London, in which he had his first big success, that he took a phone call backstage one night from a woman he assumed was yet another admirer.

  ‘Hello, my name is Betty Staveley-Hill,’ the woman began. ‘Are you Peter Finch?’

  ‘Yes I am,’ he replied, a little impatiently.

  ‘Peter, I think you are my son.’

  The statement shocked him: ‘What? I thought you were dead.’

  Betty was living in a cottage in Cornwall. Her marriage to Jock Campbell had ended in divorce in 1928 when she and Michael, Peter’s half-brother, moved back to England. Two years later she would marry the much younger Alexander Staveley-Hill, a former soldier whom she had met in India. The marriage would produce a third child, a daughter named Flavia, in 1934, but it would end as badly as her first two marriages.

  Betty, still glamorous at fifty-six, was waiting on the platform with Flavia when Peter arrived by train a few days later. ‘Call me Betty,’ she said, thrusting out a gloved hand before commenting that he hadn’t cleaned his shoes properly. The conversation was at first stilted, both steering well clear of the past, but relaxed as the night wore on and Michael arrived. The two men ended up getting drunk at the local pub, their camaraderie clear and lasting.

  Mother and son would stay in touch, although it would take months before Peter finally built up the courage to demand answers. Betty wasn’t going to ask for forgiveness: ‘When you are as old as I am and have made as many mistakes as I have then you can ask me that question.’ She had no choice but to relinquish Peter, she correctly insisted, as the legal system would always back a wronged husband over an adulterous wife. She had tried at various times to get him back but to no avail, and eventually she gave up.

  It would be another thirteen years before Peter met Jock Campbell. Peter would tell friends that Jock confirmed that he was his biological father and that the two men had liked each other. But Irene Campbell, Jock’s wife of forty years (after Betty) and mother of his three other children, insisted that her husband had never accepted paternity. He and Peter had met only once, in 1962 over tea, she said, but there had been no correspondence before or since, and Peter had not visited them in Scotland as he claimed.

  It was typical of Peter, who often resorted to imaginative fiction to sweeten an otherwise sour story, frequently joking about his double heritage, even to those who knew him best, like Enid Lorimer: ‘Peter had a deep-rooted fear of not knowing who he was, of belonging nowhere, always in transit, rootless, defending himself by attunising and with the romantic fantasy of acting every second of his life.’

  In some ways Peter’s private life would mirror George Finch’s, the man he had believed was his father and whom he would eventually meet again. He married three times and had four children, and even named his one son after his Australian grandfather, Charles. Yet he made the same sad choices about fatherhood as George. Peter’s children would grow up feeling abandoned.

  In a coda, young Charles Finch was with his mother, Yolande, when she travelled to Scotland in the late 1960s to confront Jock Campbell.

  ‘My sister, Samantha, and I sat in a small room in front of a big fire having tea. I remember Jock telling me that he definitely was not my grandfather, and that is what I believe.’

  15.

  ‘YOU’VE SENT ME TO HEAVEN’

  Somewhere between the granting of the decree nisi in his divorce from Betty Fisher in March 1920 and the arrival in September of the decree absolute that opened the door for their planned marriage, George Finch fell out of love with the angelic nurse he had nicknamed Eve.

  Perhaps it was the removal of the backdrop of war that changed things; the realisation that the woman whom he had needed so much during his illness in Salonika was not the partner he wanted for the adventurous life that lay ahead. As cruel as it would appear, George seemed to have concluded that they were different – and incompatible – people in peacetime. It was a common enough end to a war-time relationship.

  But there was a complication. Gladys May was pregnant and this time there seemed little doubt th
at the child was George’s; it had been conceived in the middle of July 1920, a few days before he took leave from the Imperial College and headed back to his beloved Alps for six weeks of climbing. George hadn’t been to the Alps since the summer of 1914 and would have been thinking of little else but the challenge and joy of scaling the peaks that had been out of his reach for five years.

  He would not have known that he had left his girlfriend ‘in the family way’, even though there had been so much talk between them about marriage and having children. It was only after he returned to England at the end of August, flushed with the success of a trip that included ascending the Matterhorn, Mont Blanc and another dozen or so peaks, that Gladys’s condition was obvious.

  George must have already had misgivings about the relationship, although he made no mention of his doubts as he settled back into the life of a university lecturer and wondered what to do. He could not in all consciousness avoid the civil ceremony that would make the arrival of a child, and its mother, socially legitimate. After all, he had already taken one drastic parental decision, cutting a young boy off from his birth parents, and even though that situation had not been of his own making he would have to live with the consequences of his decision.

  Whatever his reasons for leaving, George Finch was clearly the party at fault this time. His decision to marry Gladys and give her the legitimacy of being a wife and married mother did not stretch to being a man of his word, to holding to his earlier promise to love her and raise the ‘dream baby’ they’d spoken of a year before. George Finch, so deeply wounded by the disloyalty and infidelities of his first love, Betty, knowingly if naively chose to wreak similar pain on a young and vulnerable woman he believed he had once loved.