The Brilliant Outsider Read online

  While his much younger, beautiful wife slipped comfortably into the free-wheeling and decadent lifestyle of Paris, Charles Finch struggled. He was a socially rigid man who was used to being the centre of attention and in control of his environment. In Paris he was lost, nearing sixty and with little purpose other than as an uncomfortable and unwanted chaperon. It was clear that Laura would not easily be moved so, disillusioned, he decided to return to Australia alone.

  It is doubtful that Charles sought to discuss the decision with his children or considered taking them home with him. It was clear they were content in their new environment, finally doing well at school, and the boys were excited by the prospect of exploring the mountains of Europe. George never commented about his father’s departure, although the fraught relationship with his mother spoke volumes about the loss.

  By April 1903 Charles was back at the New South Wales Land Board, but at the Goulburn office, where he would work for another decade. The newspaper reports of his retirement as a celebrated public servant in 1913 made no mention of a family and none attended the event. Charles Finch would live for another two decades, moving back into the Greenwich house that held only memories of happy summers with a family now settled on the other side of the world.

  He would correspond with his children and send money to his estranged wife but he never returned to Europe and did not see Laura or his sons again. Only his daughter, Dorothy, would go back to Australia, in 1925. She would remain unmarried and live with her father for a time before moving to Inverell in northern New South Wales where she worked as a nurse.

  Soon after her husband’s departure from Paris, Laura took up openly with a French painter named Konstant and in 1904 gave birth to a son whom she named Antoine Konstant Finch. But who was the father? Certainly not Charles Finch who had left before Laura became pregnant, even though he was noted as Antoine’s father on the birth certificate. The painter was a possibility, as was Professor Richet. For Charles Finch, Antoine’s birth was the insulting coda to a trip that began as a unifying family adventure but ended up with its destruction.

  George, then sixteen years old, was devastated and angered by the unravelling of the family and the departure of his father whom he loved. Even though he had no interest in pursuing connections with his father’s English relatives and ingratiating himself with the British establishment, the young man did not understand or approve of his mother’s lifestyle either and regarded her friends mostly as charlatans and theosophy as spiritualist mumbo-jumbo. It’s unlikely he was impressed by Laura’s writings, which included an article titled ‘Should the Dead be Recalled?’, published in the Annals of Physical Science newsletter, and another called ‘The Tendencies of Metapsychism’ in which Laura argued that religion had provided no definitive answers and that science in its various forms was too rigid: ‘Who can say if some day prayer, ecstasy and especially intuition may not take the place of observation, experiment, logic and calculation? We dare affirm nothing, or rather we only affirm that this time has not yet come.’

  George derided dialectic argument and philosophy, both pillars of theosophy, accusing Plato and Aristotle of spectacular drawings and lazy observations that relied on ‘preconceived ideas of how things and men ought to behave’, such as the ignorant belief that the heavier an object the faster it fell to earth. If only Aristotle had asked how rather than why an arrow flew:

  By and large, all that mankind inherited from Aristotle’s barren inquisition into first causes was his voice of authority; a voice that was to drown out the achievements of Archimedes and the now famous words of Horace … and hold back the progress of man for more than two thousand years until Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo and Newton at last began to break down the wall of the Aristotelian authority. Man is ill-served by dialectics which is the art of proving anything. No wonder Dante consigned Socrates, Plato, Aristotle and others of that philosophical family to the first circle of Hell.

  The relationship between mother and son would always be strained, at best, as shown by his terse description of her singing in his late-life reminiscences, and her disloyalty to his father must have been in the back of his mind when he faced a similar situation years later.

  Yet as free-spirited as Laura Finch appeared to be, she could also be strict. When the children were young she would insist that they eat whatever food was put in front of them, no matter how long it took. If their morning porridge wasn’t finished, the leftovers would be placed before them for lunch or as their evening meal until they were consumed. The nauseating memory of cold, lumpy porridge would stay with George, even in later life when he often regaled dinner guests with tales of hardship, including the story of the week that he and Max, then in their late teens, were left in Paris to fend for themselves while Laura went away with her friends.

  The boys had very little money and ended up at a backstreet restaurant in a less-than-pleasant area of the city where prices were cheap and they could afford to share one of the meat dishes. The meal was surprisingly good so they returned the following night. The same dish, while still tasty, was not as good. Still, it was cheap and satisfying so they returned for a third night. This time, the meal was inedible. They stormed into the kitchen seeking answers and were confronted with the upper part of a human corpse with one arm hacked off. They both vomited before fleeing. As unlikely as it seems, his friends believed the tale to be at least close to the truth from a man not inclined to exaggeration.

  Despite incidents like this, the move to Europe benefited George in a significant way. He had struggled in the Australian and English school systems but in Paris his mother found a tutor who was not only able to help him to eventually complete high school but to learn French well enough to qualify to study at the Faculté de Médecine. The transformation of George Ingle Finch (as his mother now insisted on referring to him) from struggling student to academic achiever had begun.

  George was still following Whymper’s path in January 1905 when he and Max took a train to the village of Weesen in north-east Switzerland. They were aiming to climb a nearby mountain known as the Speer, as their first tentative step into the Alps. At ‘barely 6000 feet’ it was a relatively modest challenge, but the brothers would soon learn one of the most important lessons in mountaineering – never be complacent.

  After buying a map in the village they set off toward the mountain, a popular climb during the summer months when it was regarded as a realistic six-hour hike to reach the summit. But they had arrived in the dead of a European winter and, despite worsening weather and wearing little more than street clothes and shoes, they continued upwards through knee-deep snow. The wind rose after lunch but still they pressed on into the afternoon, even when it became clear that they could not reach the summit before nightfall, let alone return to the safety of the village.

  It was 5pm, with darkness descending and their ignorance becoming life-threatening, when they stumbled across a disused wooden hut. The building was almost covered in a thick layer of snow, making it impossible to get through the door, so they forced their way inside through the chimney hole in the roof.

  They would spend a sleepless night there, shivering inside the snowbound hut with no warmth and wet clothes and staring at the star-filled skies through holes in the roof. As soon as the sun appeared the next morning they staggered out, stiff and sore, yet not down the mountain, as one might have expected, but continuing upwards. They were determined to succeed, particularly as the weather had cleared and the sun was warm on their sodden backs. The reward was great, as George would later describe in loving detail:

  There, bathed in the warm sunshine, all the hardships were forgotten, and we gazed longingly over the ranges of the Tödi and the Glärnisch – real snow and ice mountains with great glaciers streaming down from their lofty crests. Thence the eye travelled away to the rich plains, the gleaming lakes and dark, forested hills of the lowlands, until details faded in the bluish mist of distance.

  George was reliving the revelations of
Mount Canobolas, only this time he was on the doorstep of his dream to climb the ‘real’ mountains of the Alps. Later that day, after they had descended safely and recovered from their chilling bivouac, the realisation set in that they had learned the first of many valuable lessons: ‘This escapade taught us that mountaineering is a hungry game; that boots should be waterproof, and soles thick and studded with nails; that a thick warm coat can be an almost priceless possession.’

  The lessons would come thick and fast over the next few years, as George and Max ‘scrambled’ among the lower slopes of the Alps, usually accompanied by experienced guides – a requirement demanded by their mother. Still, youthful enthusiasm led to a series of close calls from which George was learning the skills that would one day allow him to tackle peaks far higher than the 10,000-foot limit that Laura had also set for her sons.

  Both were still studying under tutors so there was a certain freedom in their movements around Europe which fed their growing interest in climbing. Even during a sailing trip around Majorca in the summer of 1906, George and Max spent days scouring the rugged cliffs and mountains of the island while their yacht remained anchored in the bays below.

  But their eyes were always on northern Europe where the real challenges lay, and they persuaded their mother to allow them to take a tutor to Switzerland where, between lessons, they climbed Mount Pilatus, a peak just shy of 7000 feet which overlooks the city of Lucerne.

  As they climbed higher and higher, the brothers made mistakes that on occasion resulted in serious and even potentially fatal accidents – once almost plummeting to their deaths after slipping on wet limestone slabs, their fall halted by ropes – and yet their survival only added to their youthful disregard for mortality. It didn’t mean that George ignored the lessons of his mistakes: when to climb with nailed boots and when to shed the footwear because ‘stockinged feet’ gave better purchase on the rocks. He grew to appreciate how to use his body, discovering that his legs were his most important asset, providing the muscle power to ascend, and that vice-like fingers to grab hand-holds were preferable to well-developed bicep muscles.

  Half a century later, in a speech to the members of the Alpine Club in London, George Finch would reflect on the early experiences, the ‘pure accident’ of his climb up Canobolas and the ‘ineffectual gropings’ of their early daredevil ascents of Notre-Dame and Beachy Head. By comparison, the Alps were exciting and overwhelming in their scale: ‘Up to this time I had no conception of the colossal scale of mountain architecture. But here at last was a yardstick with which to whet my curiosity in this new world – adventure, discovery, new horizons – everything followed after this, almost as a matter of course.’

  The two boys, so recently from the Australian bush, were introduced to skiing which they quickly mastered and then used to extend their range of climbing possibilities across the lower slopes of the Alps during subsequent visits. Laura Finch, who occasionally travelled with them to Switzerland, continued to insist that they climb with guides and limited their challenges to smaller peaks. It was frustrating, and they occasionally stole away by themselves, but the period spent learning the craft of mountaineering on relatively easy climbs paid dividends in later years when the challenges grew harder.

  One of their most important friendships was with a guide named Christian Jossi, famed for having been in the party of climbers who in 1890 had made the first winter ascent of the ominous Eiger. Almost two decades after Jossi’s climb, George and Max Finch journeyed to the town of Mürren, built in the shadow of the colossus, to meet the legendary guide who had agreed to take the brothers under his wing. It was a relationship that would shape George’s life like few others. ‘Old Christian’, as George and Max would call him, was a quiet, methodical man who embraced the unbridled spirit of the two Australian boys and fed their passion for mountains while instilling a care and respect for the dangers that would otherwise almost certainly lead to their deaths.

  The lessons with Jossi took place on the Grindelwald Glacier where George and Max learned to be wary of seemingly innocuous varieties of snow: it might be packed well enough to be the foundation of a step or it might be loose and dangerous, capable of causing an avalanche. Jossi introduced them to the art of wielding a long-handled axe which could be swung with the minimum of effort to chip steps into hard ice. They spent hours cutting stairways, the steps sloping inwards to allow them to stand safely. It was a skill that had been honed by the pioneers of the mid nineteenth century but had been falling out of favour as climbers increasingly turned to summer ascents when there was less ice to overcome. Thanks to Jossi, ice craft would become a hallmark of George Finch’s career. The brothers learned the art of rope safety, too: how to check a slip and hold up a man on the rope, and how to ensure that ropes were kept taut and not looped and tangled. This was a skill that would save their own lives on more than one occasion. They would also be forced to watch, helpless and in horror, as ignorance and haste caused the death of others.

  The Strahlegg Pass stood beyond the Grindelwald Glacier at over 11,000 feet, an alien landscape of polished blue-ice walls and pinnacles, crevasses, ice tables and glacial streams from which a climber could see out beyond some of the great mountains of the Alps – the Jungfrau, Eiger, Mönch and Schreckhorn among others. It would become the first exception to Laura’s 10,000-foot limit after the brothers had trained with Christian Jossi.

  As it had when they’d hiked up the Speer a few years earlier, the balmy late-summer weather suddenly turned and the young men spent nineteen hours in the middle of a snowstorm. Instead of sheltering and waiting out the storm, fearful that they would freeze to death without the right equipment and clothing, George and Max kept moving through the night, stopping only for brief rests and carefully plotting their way by moonlight and compass. They emerged unscathed, revelling in the fact that they had been able to overcome the conditions, and declaring boldly that with a map, compass and a level head, it was possible to tackle mountain storms and even ‘enjoy’ the experience.

  It was also another reminder of the need to equip themselves carefully, not only with the appropriate tools such as ropes and icepicks but with the appropriate clothing: boots large enough to accommodate several pairs of socks and with high toecaps to allow good circulation. Likewise, a woollen sweater worn beneath a windproof jacket made of material such as sailcloth was not only lighter but warmer and more protective than the traditional garb of tweed jackets. Those belonged in a stroll down the high street rather than on a mountainside where they offered feeble protection from the elements and soon became coated in snow, George concluded. Even at this early age the young man could see that convention should be challenged when it made little sense.

  There were a few exceptions to George’s distaste for his mother’s circle of friends. Although he took no stock in the theories of spiritualism and the occult that many theosophists espoused, he respected the fact that Laura’s obsession was an intellectual pursuit that she took seriously, not to mention the fact that among the believers were a number of eminent scientists. Richet was one and the British physicist Sir Oliver Lodge was another. Laura participated in psychical experiments, helped to edit research papers and was credited as a co-author with Richet and Sir Oliver of a book titled Metaphysical Phenomena: Methods and Observations.

  By 1907, George was getting itchy feet. He had finally completed high school, thanks to the tutors arranged by his mother, and, in spite of his climbing, with grades good enough to enter the University of Paris, la Sorbonne. But he was ready to give up after two years studying medicine, unfulfilled by a science he regarded as too inexact. George was more interested in the black and white of chemistry and sought Sir Oliver’s advice. Should he seek a place at Oxford? No, replied Sir Oliver. Go and study in Zürich.

  George didn’t need to think twice. It meant he could pursue a growing love of chemistry, be free of his mother’s bonds and, most importantly, go climbing every weekend.

  5.


  A ZEST FOR MOUNTAINS

  For most of the year the Limmat River glides gently, almost silently, through the picturesque centre of Zürich. In late spring, however, when the snows in the Glarus Alps that surround the Swiss capital thaw, the flow can become a rush and then a torrent.

  This was the case one night in May 1910 when a group of university students were making their way noisily across the Mühlesteg footbridge that crosses the river, heading back to their lodgings around the university after a night of drinking at one of the many bars in the Old Town.

  They were singing loudly, their alcohol-fuelled voices ringing off the water that acted like a loudspeaker in the otherwise quiet night. A strolling policeman decided to intervene and strode purposefully toward them, stopping them at the end of the bridge and announcing that they should quieten down for the sake of the law-abiding citizens already in their beds.

  It was a reasonable request but one of the student party, described later as large, objected to the directive. Taking the others by surprise, he picked up the officer and hurled him from the bridge into the river below where, unable to swim, the man was swiftly carried away. Acting instinctively, another of the students took off his shoes and jumped over the ornate balustrade in pursuit of the stricken officer. A few assured strokes, learned from a childhood swimming in Sydney Harbour, and George Finch dragged the policeman, who would otherwise have surely drowned, from the ice-cold river.

  The other students, minus the assailant who had fled the scene, scrambled down to the riverbank to help bring the pair back to safety. After a few minutes the sodden, shivering officer recovered his authoritative demeanour, first thanking Finch but then demanding the names of the students and that they identify the offender. None could or, more accurately, would volunteer the name of their drunken colleague, and the officer finally gave up and went on his way. The incident was perhaps one of the first demonstrations of Finch’s natural instinct for decisive leadership and was brave almost to the point of foolhardiness, leaping into the dark waters with barely a pause to consider his own safety. A few days later the local constabulary hosted a dinner to toast his bravery.