What did the English do all winter?

In February 1895 the Journal de Château-d’Œx reported something new in the village. “Un club anglais s’est fondé” — an English club had been founded — “et a pour local très-confortable la salle de billard de l’Hôtel Berthod, ouvert pour la pr[emière fois] en hiver.”

Read that last clause again. The hotel was open for the first time in winter. Until then a Vaud mountain village emptied when the snow came; the season was summer, and the English went home. What the paper is describing is the first winter anyone had tried to stay — and the very first thing that happened was that the visitors founded a club and took over the billiard room.

That is the pattern this page is about. British visitors to the Vaud Alps did not simply come and look at the mountains. They arrived for months at a time, found an empty calendar in front of them, and filled it with institutions.

Why the winter needed filling

The reason they were there for months is set out on another page of this site: consumption, and the doctrine that climate was medicine. A prescription of Alpine air was not a suggestion to travel but a course of treatment, and it ran to five months and more. At Davos, winter guests outnumbered summer guests for the first time in 1875.

A season that long is not a holiday. It is a residence, and a residence needs a routine.

The clubs

Skating came first and came early — a skating club appears in the Vaud papers from 1876, on the lake at Lausanne, long before the mountain resorts had rinks of their own. By 1900 the Feuille d’avis de Montreux was carrying one, and by 1905 so was the Journal de Leysin.

The mountain rinks came later. Les Avants and Caux appear in the press from 1904, Territet not until 1909 — which puts the Vaud terraces a good twenty years behind Davos and St Moritz. The Riviera was a fast adopter, not a pioneer.

But by 1914 it had gone well past imitation. Writing in English that December, Les Alpes vaudoises described Villars, “whose rink is the second largest in Switzerland”, as “now regarded as the most important centre of English figure skating” — English figure skating being a school of its own, distinct from the Continental manner — and added that “the English Figure Skating Club has a portion of the rink”.

That last clause is the whole phenomenon in miniature. The English did not merely skate at Villars. They had a club, and the club had its own piece of the ice.

Curling is the clearest British import of them all. At the end of December 1905 the Journal et liste des étrangers de Montreux announced a founding: “Un Curling-club s’est constitué [là]”, and “chaque matin les « curlers » e[ssaient] sur la place de patinage” — every morning the curlers were out on the skating rink. It is the only occurrence of that phrase in the whole Vaud archive. The paper does not say which resort, and we have not been able to establish it; the notice speaks only of “nos stations des Alpes”.

Where curling took hold is worth noticing. Against the name of Les Avants the archive returns scores of references, and a good number against Caux and Territet; against Leysin, almost none. Curling belonged to the smart winter terraces above the lake, not to the sanatorium villages.

By December 1914 an illustrated Vaud paper, Les Alpes vaudoises, was reporting the game in English, and named names: a Bishop, “Vice-President of the Royal Caledonian Curling Club”, in connection with the Villars Curling Club, and a Captain Holmes Tarn. The Royal Caledonian is the Scottish governing body of curling. Here is a Vaud club, in a Vaud paper, run by men who held office in it.

Skiing arrived last and arrived quickly. Les Avants has ski coverage from 26 December 1903; Villars from February 1905. And in November 1921 the Journal de Château-d’Œx names a “Ski Club Anglais” — an English ski club, in our own valley.

Summer had its own institutions. An 1880 advertisement in the Journal de Vevey lists “Lawn Tennis” among a hotel’s attractions alongside pistol shooting. A cricket club appears in 1885, a golf club in 1894.

The lake

Rowing is the exception that keeps the rest honest. The Léman clubs are old and they are Swiss: regattas at Vevey and Ouchy from 1864, a Société nautique at Ouchy from 1882, a Club nautique de Vevey from 1884. The English are unmistakably present — a regatta prize list carried in two papers in September 1900 puts “Anglais” fourth — but no source found so far shows them founding anything on the water. On the lake they were competitors. In the mountains they were organisers.

It is worth saying plainly, because the temptation runs the other way: a Vaud paper printing English sporting news is not evidence of an English institution. When the Journal de Vevey wrote about a “yacht club” in 1866 it was writing about Cowes, and the Royal Yacht Squadron, founded in 1812.

The churches were part of the calendar

The social season and the religious one were not separate. In May 1890 the Feuille d’avis de Vevey carried the same advertisement three issues running — in English, in a French-language paper — for “a grand Bazar” on the 6th and 7th, with “a fine art-section”, and a concert. The object was “the debt upon the English church”.

The congregation that filled these chaplaincies through the season also raised the money that built them, and did it with bazaars and concerts — the same machinery of committees and fixtures that produced the curling clubs.

Did the patients invent it?

The historian Susan Barton argues that much of this began with the invalids: that people “thrown upon their own devices with long periods of time to kill found ways of alleviating the tedium not only by bobsleighing, tobogganing, skiing and skating, but also by creating clubs, associations and regulatory frameworks within which these activities were organised and carried out”.

The Vaud evidence supports a narrower version of that. Writing about Leysin in February 1901, the Journal et liste des étrangers recorded: “Tous les pensionnaires valides s’ado[nnent aux] sports de l’hiver, luge, patinage, etc. Quant aux malades, ils…” — all the able-bodied boarders went in for winter sports; and then the sentence turns, separately, to the sick.

So the sportsmen were sanatorium residents, but the convalescent ones. And the Château-d’Œx report of 1895 says the same thing in the other direction: “Les malades, car il y en a dans [un certain] no[m]bre, profitent avec modération de ces divertissements” — the invalids, of whom there were a number, took part in moderation.

That is a more modest claim than “tuberculosis patients invented winter sports”, and it is the one the sources will carry. It should be said that even the modest version is not clean. If the sanatorium villages had led the way, their clubs ought to appear first, and in Vaud they do not consistently: a hockey club is reported at Montreux in January 1902, before Leysin’s in November 1903, and a skating club at Montreux in 1900 before Leysin’s in 1905. Leysin leads on bobsleigh and little else. First mention in a newspaper is not the same as a founding, and the sample is small — but the pattern the argument predicts is not yet visible in the Vaud press, and we would rather say so than tidy it.

One piece of evidence points the other way, and it belongs beside the rest. On 9 and 10 January 1910 the patinoire des Avants held the international hockey championships of Europe, and the Feuille d’avis de Vevey reported that the team going to represent Switzerland was drawn from Leysin, Lausanne and Vevey.

A village of sanatoria was supplying players to an international side. That does not show that patients founded winter sport. It does show that by 1910 the sporting life of Leysin was a serious thing and not merely a therapeutic one — which is the strongest version of Barton’s argument the Vaud sources will actually support.

What lasted

The answer to what the British put in place is best given by what happened after they stopped running it.

In January 1929 the Royal Caledonian District Medal was played for French-speaking Switzerland at Caux, between Caux and the “Château-d’Œx Visitors Curling Club” — an English club name, in a Swiss village, competing for a Scottish medal. Eleven months later, in December 1929, the Journal de Château-d’Œx reported the same club electing its committee — a president, a treasurer and their colleagues, with names belonging to the valley rather than to the hotels.

An English club founded in a hotel billiard room in 1895; a British governing body’s competition in the village in 1929; and a Swiss committee running it by the end of that year. The visitors brought the game, the rules and the fixtures. Then they went home, and the village kept playing.

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Sources: digitised Vaud newspapers consulted at Scriptorium, Bibliothèque cantonale et universitaire de Lausanne (scriptorium.ch) — Journal de Château-d’Œx, Le Progrès de Château-d’Œx, Journal et liste des étrangers de Montreux, Feuille d’avis de Vevey, Feuille d’avis de Montreux, Journal de Vevey, Journal de Leysin, Les Alpes vaudoises. Susan Barton, Healthy Living in the Alps: The Origins of Winter Tourism in Switzerland, 1860–1914 (Manchester University Press, 2008), cited via Jill Steward’s review in Reviews in History (no. 796, 2009).