How the British made the

Travel

How the British made the Alps

Rachel Johnson hits the slopes at the birthplace of the skiing holiday

If 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 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

Lift-off: Chamonix, home to Arnold Lunn’s first package holiday, 1897

Lunn, founder of the Public School Alpine Sports Club (PSASC) and the first winter-sports travel agent.

Lunn took a party of tweedy Hoorays from Eton and Harrow to Chamonix on Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee in 1897. Lodgings were booked for exclusive use of the PSASC members, who wanted to climb or sleigh or curl or toboggan by day and dine with their peers by night, and thus a glorious tradition was born – of grand Alpine hotels in a mountain playground laid on for the almostexclusive pleasure and delight of our nation as the Victorian age was drawing to a close.

You can imagine my joy when I finally opened the attachment to the email that set out my itinerary and schedule. I had assumed I was going to St Moritz for a few days for a straightforward skiing weekend, as Prince Andrew might put it.

But the trip I had been invited on in March was to the Engadine valley, ground zero of the English conquest of the Alps, to enjoy the hospitality of not one but two grand hotels which play a central part of the story.

My first port of call was to the Grand Hotel Kronenhof in the medieval village of Pontresina, a cream-and-green Versailles château a few miles from St Moritz.

You don’t need to be told – you may not share my ‘suite tooth’ – what a five-star sublime luxury hotel and spa with breathtaking views of mountains is like, and I will not regale you with descriptions of the bedding, cigar bar and ballroom, but you might be interested to learn that Pontresina was one of the first

Left: Mr Allen left his skis at Hotel Kronenhof before dying in WWI. Above: Rachel in the vaulted cellar where the war heroes’ skis remain

‘cure stations’ along with Davos, after a doctor spotted that meat did not putrefy in the open air in the mountains, and therefore ‘nor do the lungs rot in the living man’.

But I hope you might be as moved as I was to find that, down in the vaulted cellars of the Kronenhof hotel, propped against vast casks and barrels, are dozens of dusty pairs of wooden skis with their stiff leather bindings, left by the English guests before the First World War.

I studied the tags left by Mr Allen, Capt Poulton and Viscount Bridgewater. The owners thought they would be back to ski the following year, but they died in the trenches, and the hotel had kept them in tribute.

It is a short hop from the Kronenhof in Pontresina to the Kulm in St Moritz, also built in the era of grand hotels, during which the Union Jack was planted on every summit, and simply taking the air was not enough. The British piled into the Engadine valley in even greater numbers after the railway from Chur was finished in 1904, and everyone knows what happens when the English get together and boredom sets in.

As Lunn observed, ‘Whenever the English appear, the organisation of sport begins.’

Our nation’s genius for turning everything into a game and a competition was only sharpened by altitude and leisure. When the growing English colony in St Moritz got wind of a tobogganing competition between Davos and Klosters, it was game on.

The English guests at the Kulm Hotel, bored by the ‘cure’, decided to organise themselves into two committees, one for indoor and one for outdoor activities. Aided by the Kulm’s owners, the Badrutt family (the first hoteliers to offer a money-back guarantee to guests) created the Cresta Run course.

When the 1,800m track was completed in 1885, it was really the beginning of something. The St Moritz Tobogganing Club (SMTC) lost to Davos in the first race in February of that year, but that was not the point. History had been made, a history that continues to this day.

On the ground floor of the Kulm Hotel, there is a still private club for the use of members of the SMTC, with a long, wood-panelled bar and booths, the walls crowded with trophies, cups and photographs of the many chins and Hoorays who have slid down an icy path to death or glory, and team photos of winners, all wearing their SMTC claretand-gold cricket jerseys.

In the spring, the grand hotels close as the snow melts, to reopen in winter. I will spend the time between now and then dreaming of the 1930s bowling alley in the Kronenhof, the outdoor pools with their pulsing jets, the champagne air glinting with diamond sparkles, and the blessed relief of taking my boots off at the end of a day’s piste-bashing.

Unlike the young men who left their skis in the cellars, I will be back. A doctor spotted that meat did not putrefy in the open air in the mountains

Kulm Hotel St Moritz (www.kulm.com) or Grand Hotel Kronenhof (www. kronenhof.com); fly with SWISS (swiss.com); Swiss rail travel with STC (www.stc.co.uk)