Review

The Maverick Mountaineer: The Remarkable Life of George Ingle Finch by Robert Wainwright, review: 'heroic follies'

Christian House 18 January 2016 • 12:44pm

George Finch with Bubbles in the Alps Credit: Courtesy of Mrs A Scott Russell

Christian House is thrilled by the life of a gentleman mountaineer rescued from the footnotes of history

On a crisp spring morning in 1901, in the middle of a wallaby hunt, 13-year-old George Ingle Finch decided to become a mountaineer. Watching the sun rise over the Australian bush from the top of Mount Canobolas, he experienced a moment of revelation. “I had made up my mind to see the world,” Finch recalled. “To see it from above.” He got his wish. During an attempt on Everest in the early Twenties, he briefly became the highest person on the planet.

Finch emerges from the pages of Robert Wainwright’s The Maverick Mountaineer as a keen explorer of geographical, professional and romantic terrain. In addition to his climbing achievements, he became a celebrated scientist and a wartime inventor. Along the way he put a lot of noses out of joint. Wainwright chronicles it all with aplomb.

George Finch studied under Albert Einstein in Zurich, 1912 Credit: Courtesy Mrs A Scott Russell

Finch was born in 1888, the son of a prosperous Wellington Valley rancher and his much younger wife. After his parents separated during a trip to Europe, his mother settled into bohemian circles in the suburbs of Paris, where she hosted Nijinsky and Isadora Duncan, while her son departed for Zurich to study chemistry.

He would spend his weekends in search of adventure. Handsome, curious and fearless, by his early twenties he had become an accomplished pianist, scaled Notre Dame and Beachy Head and saved a policeman from the rapids of a Swiss river. He had also become a highly respected alpinist.

One of the delights of Wainwright’s book is its depiction of the heroic follies of gentleman climbers during the interwar years. This was the golden age of the well-schooled amateur. Unprepared and poorly equipped, they took precarious routes dressed in tweed suits. Their inevitable accidents were bone-cold and brutal. Fingers and toes fall to frostbite, arms pop from sockets. One young tyro is hit by falling rock, leaving his forehead “pumping out blood, spattering his coat and drenching his handlebar moustache”.

George Finch in a mountain hut, 1911 Credit: Courtesy Mrs A Scott Russell

While Finch understood the dangers and was sure-footed on the rock face, he repeatedly slipped up in his personal life. He left a trail of abandoned children from his first two marriages (a third union was more successful). His oldest son was Peter Finch, the Fifties matinee idol, although George always denied that he was his biological father. “I was passed along the line of Finches like a football through a rugby team,” the actor said of his childhood. Meanwhile the English climbing fraternity dismissed George Finch as an ill-bred colonial with unruly hair and peculiar garb.

The ill-feeling was mutual. Finch claimed that the members of the Alpine Club sitting snugly in Savile Row possessed little more than “a good wind and a long purse”. He respected experience and expertise over age and position. And his modern methods – silk ropes, eiderdown jackets, nocturnal climbs – further riled the establishment. For the most part Wainwright sides with his subject.

The 1922 Everest expedition Credit: Royal Geographical Society/IBG

Having conquered the Eiger, Jungfrau, Matterhorn and Mont Blanc, Finch joined the wunderkind George Mallory on the 1922 expedition to Everest. The Australian was the architect of its landmark use of oxygen cylinders to tackle the high altitude, which some traditionalists considered cheating. Using his bottled air, however, Finch climbed to the then-record height of 27,300ft, within reach of the summit. Yet he turned back to rescue his partner Geoffrey Bruce. Two years later Mallory would perish on those treacherous ridges.

Finch’s scientific ventures, most notably on the staff at Imperial College London, are well handled by Wainwright. There are breakthroughs, eccentric professors and industry spats – even a fist fight. Finch also distinguished himself in both world wars: during the first he blew a German fighter ace out of the sky with a booby-trapped observation balloon; in the second he created an incendiary bomb and developed London’s fire defences.

The 1922 Everest expedition with George Mallory and George Finch sitting next to each other, front left Credit: Royal Geographical Society (with IBG)

These passages, away from the peaks and glaciers, often illustrate Finch’s tendentious character as much as his crevice leaps and rope work. His diligence in the mountains was mirrored in the lab; in both arenas he showed a faith in innovation and incremental progress. “Finch would find his intellectual home [in] a world as far from the extreme physical environment of an Alpine ascent as he could get,” Wainwright observes; “his ropes and axes, sailcloth jackets and nailed boots replaced by Bunsen burners and tweezers, white lab coats and soft leather shoes.”

Although this accomplished biography suffers from the lack of an index and detailed maps of the Alps and Himalayas, Wainwright has done a fine job of rescuing his protagonist from the footnotes of climbing history. He has restored the reputation of a man whose achievements were frequently overshadowed by the romantic fate of Mallory and the later triumph of Edmund Hillary. We rediscover a climber who, as Finch phrased it, had “the craft at his finger-ends”.