George Finch (chemist)


George Ingle Finch was an Australian chemist and mountaineer. He was the first person known to climb to a height exceeding 8,000 metres. His obituary in The Times describes him as "one of the two best alpinists of his time".

Education and military service

He was born in Australia to Charles Edward and Laura Isabel Finch, educated in German-speaking Switzerland, and studied physical sciences at the University of Geneva. He started studied medicine in Paris but decided he preferred the physical sciences.
During the First World War, he served with the Royal Army Ordnance Corps. He was appointed a Member of the Order of the British Empire in the 1918 New Year Honours for services in connection with the War in France, Egypt and Salonika. In the Second World War he investigated fire defence.

Career

A member of the second British expedition under General Charles Granville Bruce to Mount Everest, on 23 May 1922 Finch and Captain Geoffrey Bruce reached an elevation of 27,300 feet on the north ridge before retreating. Finch fell out with the Everest Committee after 1922, but his pioneering work on oxygen, which he pursued with messianic zeal, remained crucial to future expeditions. In the Alps, Finch was on the first ascent of the North Face Diagonal or "Finch Route" on the Dent d'Hérens, which he climbed with T. G. B. Forster and R. Peto on 2 August 1923. Finch was also a keen skier and was a founding members of the Alpine Ski Club in 1908. He was a lifelong advocate and supporter of the Alpine Club and would later become its president.
Between 1936 and 1952 he held the position of Professor of Applied Physical Chemistry at Imperial College London.
He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1938. His candidacy citation read
Finch was awarded their Hughes Medal in 1944. He was president of the Physical Society from 1947 to 1949.

Personal life

Finch was first married to Alicia "Betty" Fisher, from London. By the time he returned from the front in 1917, she had given birth to a son from a relationship with another man, Wentworth "Jock" Campbell, an Indian Army officer. That boy was the future Oscar-winning film actor Peter Finch. George separated the infant from his mother, and had his relatives raise him as his own son, even though he was not the biological father. Peter did not see his parents again until he returned to Britain and found fame in his thirties. He remained close to his mother and met both George Finch and his biological father briefly. George divorced Betty when Peter was two years old, and married Gladys May, a nurse, after she became pregnant with their son Bryan. George left Gladys and the boy soon after the birth, but supported Bryan financially.