Travel How the British made the Alps Rachel Johnson hits the slopes at the birthplace of the skiing holiday
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f pushed to choose between mountains and sea, others may go low but I go high – a preference I can trace back to my schooldays at the European School in Brussels. Every winter, it relocated children en masse to the Alps for a fortnight. I cannot convey the excitement this tradition of classes de neige in Saas Fee roused in the breast of this stodgy, ill-favoured English girl. Skiing in the morning, lessons in the afternoon, broken by the regular arrival of tartines – baguette stuffed with chunks of chocolate – to keep the wolf from the door. The snow, the skiing, the sport all seemed to me the very peak of continental sophistication, glamour and excitement. Fast-forward. Some years ago – around the turn of the millennium – we rented a simple chalet in the Swiss Alps in a charming hamlet between Lake Geneva and Gstaad. It was owned by an English couple, and in the cosy den I found a book called How the English Made the Alps. What with self-catering duties and finding the lost gloves, goggles, ski passes and so on
80 The Oldie May 2022
Lift-off: Chamonix, home to Arnold Lunn’s first package holiday, 1897
for four dependants (five, if you include husband Ivo) in the party, I didn’t get round to finishing it, even though I said to Ivo it was ‘the best book I’ve ever read on any subject’. Reader, I stole it. Please believe me when I say that I still fully intend to return it to Paul and Mary Langston, La Cassine, 1865 Les Diablerets. How do I
still know their names and postal address? Because they had carefully stickered every book in the house with it to guilt-trip rotters like me. Imagine my joy when I discovered, thanks to this book by Jim Ring, that much of this spritz and volupté I had loved as a child was not Continental. It was English! (The clue, perhaps, is in the title.) Just as the sun was setting on the British Empire, the English were taking over the Alps, climbing every mountain, driving railways, and introducing institutions such as churches, tea, baths, lawn tennis, clubs – and, above all, pioneering winter sports and inventing new and preferably lethal games such as the Cresta Run. While we can’t claim to have patented sliding on the snow on two planks attached to your feet (the Norwegians of Telemark can lay claim to that), we did invent the idea of the Alps, downhill skiing, winter sports as a holiday and ‘excursionism’ – ie package holidays – thanks to the pioneering spirit of Arnold
