Grandma's Grindelwald

Tweedjackets,plusfoursandaninsanelyfashionableskiscene...

RichardBathtravelsbackthroughtimetojoinoneScottishadventurer onherfirstskiseasonattheturnofthecentury witzerland," said celebrated Crans-Montana resident Roger Moore, "would not be Switzerland without the British".

When it comes to his adopted nation's status as a winter wonderland, the former James Bond actor has a point. The first man to climb the iconic Matterhorn was Edward Whymper in 1865.The Cresta Run in St Moritz was started by bored Britons in 1884.

The world's first ski race, in Crans-Montana in 1911, saw Cecil Hopkinson win a trophy donated by Field Marshall Earl Roberts of Kandahar (which lives on with Murren's legendary Inferno race, hosted by Alfred Lunn's Kandahar Ski Club).

There's also a good case that the British invented ski tourism through an 1893article on 'ski-running' by Sherlock Holmes author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle for The Strand magazine, which ignited a craze for what was then a virtually unknown pursuit. Almost overnight, upper-class British tourists flocked to the Swiss Alps for the ski season, and have been doing so ever since.

I was about to follow the crowd on a trip to Grindelwald to try the new Eiger Express cable car -which takes 15minutes to get to the top of the mountain rather than 47 minutes using the joyously quaint Jungfrau cogwheel train, which has serviced the resort and neighbouring Wengen for 110years -when I was collared by my wife, Beatrice. "Where are you going again?" she asked, perking up when I told her. "Grindelwald? That's where my grandmother learnt to ski. There's a big entry in her diaries. I'll try and dig it out for you. I think there are some pictures too."

I'd almost forgotten the exchange by the time I settled down to do some work on my train from Geneva airport, only to be reminded when my email pinged. On my laptop screen were a dozen pin-sharp sepia images of a ski resort, with the pukka Edwardian gents wearing tweed jackets and plus fours, while the women wore furs and enormous hats.

The last file contained a month's worth of Bea's grandmother's diaries. On the bookshelves at home there is one leather-bound volume for every year of her life, each one embossed in gold with the year and her name, Laura Tennant. This one related to January and February 1912,when the Tennant family travelled from Scotland to Switzerland for the first time.

In an extraordinary day-by-day account of her time that covered a remarkable 13,000 words, this genteel 20-year-old Scotswoman managed to encapsulate the essence of British ski tourism. Her writing is crisp, vivid and alive with detail. She writes memorably of the winter pursuits of skating, curling, tobogganing, lugeing and, of course, skiing, but she also paints a rich picture of what it was like to undergo a month-long whirlwind of athletic heartiness and frenetic alpine socialising.

Nicenessofrealwintertime

From the moment Laura and her sister Beatrice climbed aboard the train in the small Ayrshire village of Fairlie,

Britishski tourismatthe turnofthe centuryis exquisitely capturedin Laura'smusings they barely paused for breath. After lunch at Harrods in London, they were joined for the journey by their friend Marjorie Maitland and her aunt, Mrs Neville. The party then "taxi'd to Charing Cross where the Folkestone train was crammed, but we had seats so had no trouble in that direction. Nearly everyone seemed Switzerland-way bound -skis, skiing sticks, books on winter sports and so on were much in evidence."

The Swiss Alps were packed with British winter sports enthusiasts, and Grindelwald was no different. Formerly a place packed with Britons seeking clean mountain air to ease their respiratory ailments, skiing reached this quaint little village when Englishman Gerald Fox put his skis on in his hotel bedroom in 1881and walked out through the hotel bar to the slopes wearing them.

It was to this place that Laura and her sister Beatrice travelled in 1912,to join another sister Sheena and their parents at the imposing Alpenruhe Hotel. Thanks to their industrialist ancestor Charles Tennant, whose discovery of bleaching powder bequeathed wealth to generations of his family, they led a blissful existence in the carefree years before war.

Skiing was insanely fashionable, so a host of friends, family and acquaintances joined them in Grindelwald and nearby Wengen. Laura's excitement at the prospect of her first ski season was palpable.

"Our train wound up the valley, between overpoweringly high rocky peaks and mountains, patched with snow and besprinkled with dark fir trees, past little chalets, neat wood piles outside the doors and little green burns running past," she wrote. "The Wetterhorn and the Eiger looked glorious with the sun on them. It is too extraordinary here -a certain amount of snow on the ground, quite a frost and yet even without a jacket you aren't cold. It's like having all the niceness of real wintertime without any of the nastinesses."

Firsttasteofskiing

What followed was a month of relentlessly heartiness. Within hours Laura was skating on the rink before the three sisters piloted luges down the road, Sheena crashing into a house and having to pay damages to the irate homeowner. "It is great fun," wrote Laura. "Youyell out 'Achtung' if there is anybody or anything in front of you and they have to clear out."

If the sisters were not curling, skating, bobsleighing or being dragged along on their toboggans by unfeasibly large St Bernard dogs, they would take hot chocolate and cakes on the hotel verandah. A highlight was a walk on the nearby glacier, "a thing too lovely for words -in the distance it looks pale green but when you get near it looks a beautiful blue green colour, more blue than green really. The guide led us inside by a little tunnel and it was like being in fairyland."

The evenings were furiously sociable. Although the British predominated, the village was packed with other Europeans, with the fun-loving Dutch featuring prominently in Laura's diaries, as does the evening when they all toasted the Kaiser's birthday.

The nights were a whirl of fancy dress parties, billiards, games like Cat and Mouse, Steps, Blindman's Buff, Animal Noises and Fox and Geese, or waltzing to a band to

Grindelwald haslongbeen afavouritewith usBritsandstill retainsacertain vintagecharm

"the strains ofYip-i-addy-i-ay and other dance music".

A few days in, Laura and her sisters had their first taste of skiing. With the railway not finished until that summer, the party was taken up the hill by horse-drawn sleigh before a 45-minute hike up the hill dragging heavy wooden skis. Then, "off we went, flying down the hill. I started brilliantly, lost both my sticks, my balance and fell. We were all flying in all directions, falling about all over the place. Bea had to be extricated from a ditch and Sheena from a seemingly impossible position among the snow where she seemed to be tied in dozens of knots."

The sisters quickly mastered "stemming turns" and even tried their hand at telemark skiing. ''I'm quite bitten with the skiing mania," admits Laura as she entered downhill and slalom races. Laura's regret when "at last the train got a move on and we trundled away from the dear old Alpenruhe" was heartfelt.

The Alpenruhe still stands in the centre of Grindelwald, these days renamed the Grand Hotel Regina, but despite the railway and the ski lifts criss-crossing the mountain, the village retains much of the charm that so endeared it to Laura Tennant.

More than a century later, my visit was not as long or as sociable as Laura's, but it was made memorable by the sense that I was walking in Grandmother's footsteps. grindelwald.swiss