Onwards and upwards

The Maverick Mountaineer: The Remarkable Life of George Ingle Finch: Climber, Scientist, Inventor. By Robert Wainwright. Allen & Unwin; 409 pages; £17.99.

PEOPLE are not made to survive at the top of Mount Everest. At 29,000 feet (8,840 metres) above sea level—just below a commercial jet’s cruising altitude—exposure to the elements can be lethal. Lucky climbers miss snowstorms, avalanches and crevasses. But one killer is inescapable: lack of oxygen. Atmospheric pressure at the summit is two-thirds less than at sea level. Breathing, sleeping and eating become nearly impossible; the body pumps more blood to the brain, often causing fatal swelling. Climbers call anything above 8,000 metres the “death zone”. For every 100 people who conquer Everest, four never return to base camp; more than 200 bodies lie amid the ice and rock.

Those who survive owe much to George Ingle Finch, an Australian chemist who used portable oxygen tanks on the second of three British expeditions to Everest in the 1920s. It was a time when climbers dined on quail and herring, and wore pyjamas under tweed. Finch was different. He wore innovative, custom-made, windproof gear produced from gossamer and down. The oxygen cylinders he designed, although they weighed hefty 16kg for eight hours’ supply, made the death zone a little less deadly. After the original breathing masks were found to be faulty, he saved his expedition by fashioning replacements from bladders of toy footballs halfway up the mountain. Finch was the best technical climber of his time, and he reached farther up Everest than anyone had done before—stopping only to carry a novice companion to safety.

Few Western climbers have contributed as much. But as Robert Wainwright shows in “The Maverick Mountaineer”, Finch’s achievements have been overshadowed by the legend of George Mallory, who died on the third campaign in 1924. Mallory’s obsession with conquering Everest (“because it’s there”, he once explained) is the mountain’s greatest story, more powerful even than the first ascent by Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay in 1953. Mallory’s status has remained as unblemished as his body, discovered only in 1999.

Finch’s legacy was downplayed. Mountaineering in the early 20th century was dominated by gentlemen who had been to Oxford or Cambridge and had a hefty supply of family money. Finch, a colonial farm boy who trained in the Alps while studying in Zurich before taking up a teaching post at Imperial College, London, was an outsider. His willingness to challenge received wisdom irked members of the Alpine Club in Mayfair, who barred him from two expeditions to Nepal. They believed that using artificial oxygen supplies was cheating, and their comments reveal their prejudice against Finch. “I always knew the fellow was a shit,” said one. “Anyone who climbs to 26,000 feet with oxygen is a rotter,” sneered another.

Mr Wainwright’s biography is detailed, at times too much so. Several chapters are devoted to Finch’s unhappy early years: he married three times in six years, and always denied that Peter Finch, who grew up to become an Academy Award-winning actor, was his biological son. The best passages, though, are those that describe the battle of scientific progress against entrenched snobbery—a fight that may have cost Finch the chance to stand on top of the world, but ought to be remembered.