George was wasted at Charterhouse, where, in my time at least, he was generally despised by the boys because he was neither a disciplinarian nor interested in cricket or football. He tried to treat his classes in a friendly way and that puzzled and offended them. There was a tradition in the school of concealed warfare between the boys and the masters. It was considered no shame to cheat, to lie, or to deceive where a master was concerned; yet to do the same to a member of the school was immoral. George was also unpopular with the house-masters because he refused to accept this state of war and fraternized with the boys whenever he could. When two house-masters who had been unfriendly to him happened to die within a short time of each other he joked to me: ‘See, Robert, how mine enemies flee before my face.’ I always called him by his Christian name, and so did three or four more of his friends in the school. This lack of dignity in him put him beyond the pale both with the boys and the masters. Eventually the falseness of his position told on his temper; yet he always managed to find four or five boys in the school who were, like him, out of their element, and befriended them and made life tolerable for them. Before the final Everest expedition he had decided to resign and do educational work at Cambridge with, I believe, the Workers’ Educational Association. He was tired of trying to teach gentlemen to be gentlemen. I spent a season with George and a large number of climbers at the hotel at Pen-y-Pass on Snowdon in the spring of 1914. This time it was real precipice-climbing, and I was lucky enough to climb with George, with H. E. L. Porter, a renowned technician of climbing, with Kitty O’Brien and with Conor O’Brien, her brother, who afterwards made a famous voyage round the world in a twenty-ton or five-ton or some even-less-ton boat. Conor climbed principally, he told us, as a corrective to bad nerves. He used to get very excited when any slight hitch occurred; his voice would rise to a scream. Kitty used to chide him: ‘Ach, Conor, dear, have a bit of wit,’ and Conor would apologize. Conor, being a sailor, used to climb in bare feet. Often in climbing one has to support the entire weight of one’s body on a couple of toes—but toes in stiff boots. Conor said that he could force his naked toes farther into crevices than a boot would go.