citizen and decorated Great War artillery officer, he’d spent so many years climbing and living in the German- Swiss-speaking part of Switzerland before and after the War that he was more comfortable speaking German than English. As Brigadier General Charles Bruce had described the selection committee’s choices, “If at all possible, they, we, wished to keep the Everest expeditions all an Old Boys’ Club, you see. ‘BAT’ we called it amongst ourselves—‘British All Through.’”
According to the Deacon, General Bruce, the same Everest Committee man and 1922 expedition leader who’d argued for a BAT climbing team, had once written to other potential committee and team members (including the Deacon) that George Finch was “a convincing raconteur of quite impossible qualifications. Cleans his teeth on February 1st and has a bath the same day if the water is very hot, otherwise puts it off until next year.”
But Finch’s primary sin in the various BAT-eyes of the committee, according to the Deacon, was, besides a frequently unkempt appearance and an odd German accent, the “impossible qualifications” part—that is, George Finch kept coming up with climbing innovations for conquering Mount Everest. Neither the Royal Geographical Society nor the Alpine Club (nor, for that matter, the Mount Everest Committee) liked “innovations.” The old ways were the good ways: hobnailed boots, nineteenth-century-style ice axes, and thin layers of wool between the climber and the almost-out-of-the-earth’s-atmosphere sub-zero-degrees-Fahrenheit temperatures at 28,000 feet and above.
One such absurd Finch innovation, said the Deacon, was an overcoat the successful alpinist had designed and had made—just for Mount Everest conditions—consisting of a goose-down-layered (rather than regular wool or cotton or silk) overcoat. Finch had experimented with many materials, finally settling on a thin but very strong balloon fabric, to create a long overcoat with many sewn compartments of goose down to trap air pockets of a person’s warmth much as the down had done for the goose in the Arctic.
The result, explained the Deacon, was that at altitudes of 20,000 feet and above on the 1922 expedition, Finch was the only man not freezing in the high-altitude winds and cold.
But the death knell for George Finch’s inclusion in the 1924 expedition, despite his excellent climbing record in the previous Everest attempt (he and young Geoffrey Bruce briefly set a high-altitude climbing record on their bold but unsuccessful May 27, 1922, summit bid), was that it had been Finch who proposed and adapted the Royal Flying Service oxygen equipment that members of the team had used—to very good effect—in 1922 and ’24. (Mallory and Irvine were wearing Finch’s oxygen apparatus, although much redesigned by the tinker-genius Sandy Irvine, when the two heroes disappeared in their summit attempt on that final 1924 expedition.)
Arthur Hinks, the Everest Committee man most in charge of spending (and hoarding) the expeditions’ funds, had written of Finch’s oxygen apparatus—long after it had been proven in altitude-chamber experiments, on the Eiger, and upon Mount Everest itself—with this much-repeated official comment: “I should be especially sorry if the oxygen outfit prevents them going as high as possible without it. If some of the party do not go to 25,000 ft to 26,000 ft without oxygen they will be rotters.”
Rotters?
“Easy enough for a man who never leaves London’s sea level to say,” commented the Deacon as we traveled by rail to Zurich in January of 1925.
“I’d like to transport Mr. Hinks to twenty-six thousand feet on Everest and watch him gasp, retch, and flop around like a fish out of water,” continued the Deacon, “and
This was why we were tentatively planning to take twenty-five sets of the Irvine-improved Finch oxygen rigs and one hundred tanks of oxygen on our own expedition. (This was more than the ninety tanks that Mallory and his team had taken along for their 1924 expedition to serve dozens of the climbers and high-altitude porters. And there would be only the three of us.) “What about ‘Cousin Reggie’?” Jean-Claude had asked, reminding the Deacon of Lady Bromley’s condition that we take Bromley’s tea plantation cousin with us.
“‘Cousin Reggie’ can bloody well stay at Base Camp and breathe the thick yak-scented air at sixteen thousand five hundred feet,” said the Deacon.
And now, in the cold first month of the year in which we’d try or die on Mount Everest, the Deacon wanted us to meet and speak with George Finch in his adopted hometown of Zurich. (The Deacon had invited him to London, offering to pay his expenses, which made sense since there were three of us and only one Finch, but the irascible climber had cabled back, “There’s not enough money in all of England to induce me to return to London now.”)
We met George Ingle Finch at the Restaurant Kronenhalle, an upscale place even by Zurich’s high standards for fancy restaurants, and one well known throughout Europe. The Deacon had informed us that, despite its once proud history, Kronenhalle had become pretty run-down in recent years and during Germany’s era of hyperinflation, the old restaurant floating by on its nineteenth-century reputation for excellence. But then a certain Hilda and Gottlieb Zumsteg had recently purchased and renovated the place, bringing the whole large establishment, including a new chef, a menu that was a combination of the best Bavarian, classic, and Swiss cuisine, and superlative service, up to the true standards of Swiss and Zurich excellence. So while Germans were starving a few miles across the border, the Swiss bankers, merchants, and other upper-class citizens could dine in luxury.
Restaurant Kronenhalle was situated at Ramistrasse 4, less than a mile southwest of the University of Zurich (where two of Jean-Claude’s three older brothers attended classes before returning to France to die in the Great War) and precisely where the Limmat River flows into Lake Zurich. The late January wind blowing off that lake, blocked only intermittently on the broad Ramistrasse by softly rumbling streetcars, froze me to the bone despite my heaviest wool formal overcoat.
It’s at this moment that I found myself wondering,
I thought I’d dined well in Boston, New York, London, and Paris—all on my aunt’s bequest money or through the largesse of Lady Bromley with the Deacon picking up the actual tab—but the Kronenhalle certainly had to be the largest and most formal-feeling restaurant I’d ever set foot in. The day we met Finch was the only day of the week when they served lunch, and still the waiters, maitre d’, and other personnel were dressed in tuxedos. Even the tall potted plants configured here and there, in this corner and next to that pillar and over near that window, looked too formal to be mere vegetable matter; they seemed to wish they were also wearing tuxedos.
I was wearing the dark suit that the Deacon had purchased for me in London, but crossing the vast open spaces of Zurich’s Restaurant Kronenhalle, its luncheon tables filled mostly with formally dressed men but also a few elegant women, made me realize how insecure I still felt in European high society. Even though I was wearing my best (and only) pair of highly polished black dress shoes, I suddenly thought how clodhopperish and scuffed they must look to everyone in the huge restaurant.
Sitting alone at the white-linen- and silver-service-covered table to which we were led was a short, thin, sharp-faced man. He was ignoring the glasses of wine and water already poured and seemed to be lost in a book he was reading. Finch was the only man in the room wearing a regular daytime-wear tweed suit and waistcoat— neither looking all that clean at the moment (there were cigarette ashes on his waistcoat)—and his posture was the comfortable, oblivious, cross-legged sprawl that I associate with the very, very rich or simply the very, very self-confident. The Deacon cleared his throat, and the gaunt-faced man looked up, folded the book, and set it on the table. The title was a long one in large-word German that I couldn’t translate.
Finch removed his reading glasses and looked up at us as if he had no idea who we were or why we were standing by his table. I couldn’t be sure if the smudge under his nose was the rough sketch of a brownish mustache on his tanned face or simply more of the brownish stubble that already stippled his jaw and cheeks.
The Deacon reintroduced himself, although the two men had spent the entire 1922 Mount Everest expedition in each other’s company, and then introduced each of us. Finch didn’t bother to get to his feet but raised what looked like a limp hand dangling—almost as if he expected it to be kissed rather than shaken. Still, his handshake was surprisingly firm—almost shockingly firm, given the long, thin fingers. Then I noticed the damage to those hands and fingers and nails; if nothing else this man was an alpinist who’d spent years jamming his bare hands into cracks and holds in granite, limestone, and sharp ice.
