Transcript
Sunshades on the ice
In 1870, a London doctor named Burney Yeo published a small book about St. Moritz, in the Swiss Alps.
In it, he copied out an entry from the visitors’ book of a hotel there, the Kulm. The hotel belonged to a man called Johannes Badrutt.
The entry’s writer does not give his name. He had come with two or three women, and they had done something very few visitors did then. They had stayed for the winter.
Five and a half months, from the autumn of 1868 to the end of March 1869, at more than eighteen hundred metres above the sea.
They found their sitting room uncomfortable above about thirteen degrees Celsius. Every two hours, they left it for five minutes and opened the doors and windows. On one or two days, a thermometer standing in the sun read a hundred and forty-two degrees Fahrenheit. That was the heat of the sun, not of the air.
Twice in January, they had dinner outside on the terrace. Sunshades were indispensable. One of the party even went skating with one.
The hotel, he said, had made their winter quarters so comfortable that they were loth to leave when spring came.
It is the earliest winter stay at that hotel that we can quote in a guest’s own words.
Most tellings of this story begin four years earlier, with a bet.
That story is first traced almost a century later.
This is Slidensa — stories of ice, gravity and speed.
To most nineteenth-century travellers, the high Alps had one season worth visiting, and it was not winter.
Travellers came in summer, for the air, the views and the mineral springs. In winter the passes filled with snow, and anyone with a choice went somewhere warm.
Within about fifty years, that turned around. By the early twentieth century, thousands of people were crossing Europe every winter, to the same snowbound valleys. They came for the cold, for sun on snow, and for an astonishing list of things to do on ice.
So that is the question for this episode.
How did winter change from a season visitors avoided into a season they crossed Europe to experience? And how did that change give sliding, and many other winter pastimes, the setting in which they could become organised sports?
St. Moritz has a neat answer. A hotelier made a bet.
So there is a second question too. Was that bet the cause of it all, a spark, or simply the story that survived?
The winter already there
The people of the Engadin, the high valley around St. Moritz, had a saying about their climate. It was recorded in the 1860s.
Nine months of winter, and three months of cold.
St. Moritz itself was a summer place. It had a spa, built around a mineral spring, with a bathhouse that opened in 1832. In 1850 the village had two hundred and twenty-eight inhabitants.
In summer, the place could hardly cope. A stagecoach ran from Chur to the valley twice a day, and the journey took thirteen hours. In 1868, spa guests booked their seats days ahead, and the post sometimes could not take everyone.
Getting there in winter was hard. The main road from Chur, over the Julier Pass, had been built for carriages in the 1820s. But a guidebook of 1869 warned travellers about the winter months. From the end of October to the end of May, it said, the crossing was usually made only by sleigh.
People lived through that winter, of course. Hay and timber came down the slopes on sledges. And on the first of March, children went from house to house ringing cowbells, to chase the winter away.
And many young men left. For centuries, boys from the Engadin had gone abroad to work. Some of them founded confectioners’ shops, cafés and banks in the great cities of Europe. Those who did well came home with money, and built.
Over the mountains to the north lies Davos. There, winter could shut the world out completely.
In November 1874, snow fell for five days. One guidebook said that eight to ten feet of it came down. Even the mail sledges could not get through.
So the valley brought back an old law, almost forgotten. Every man had to turn out and dig. Each village cleared its own stretch of road.
The men of Klosters, the guidebook noted, stayed quietly at home for two days.
That was the winter already there: long, cut off, and kept open by local muscle. The visitors would arrive in a world that already knew how to survive it.
What changed was the reason to come.
The bet, examined
Johannes Badrutt was born in 1819 in Samedan, a few kilometres down the valley from St. Moritz. His father was a builder who also dealt in iron. One history says the family business went bankrupt, and that Johannes turned to keeping hotels.
He married Maria Berry, the sister of the spa doctor at St. Moritz.
In the mid-1850s he leased a small guesthouse in St. Moritz. In 1858 he bought it. A family history preserves a friend’s warning. I wash my hands of it, the friend wrote. I will not be to blame if you go under with this business too. By 1862, a guidebook listed it as the Hotel Kulm, with forty rooms. By 1877, a guide to the valley gave it a hundred and eighty beds, and a note: open in winter for visitors.
His eldest son, also called Johannes, kept a café open all year round. He recommended it to commercial travellers who might wish to spend the winter there.
Now, here is the story you will hear in St. Moritz today.
At the end of the summer of 1864, Badrutt made a bet with four English guests. Come back in winter, he told them. The sun is so warm you can sit outside without a coat. If you do not enjoy it, I will pay.
They came back. They stayed until Easter. And Alpine winter tourism was born.
It is a wonderful story. The trouble is its paper trail.
The terms change from one telling to the next. In one version, Badrutt promises a free stay. In another, he will refund their travel. Some say Easter, some say March. Nobody names the four guests.
And the story is missing from the places you would expect to find it.
Yeo’s book of 1870 has a whole section on wintering at the Kulm. It never mentions a bet. Neither do the guidebooks of the decades that followed. Neither does Arnold Lunn, a leading British historian of Alpine sport, writing about the English in Switzerland in 1944.
Michael Lütscher wrote St. Moritz’s official book for a hundred and fifty years of winter tourism. According to him, the bet and its date were first mentioned in 1956.
After that, the story grows. In 1963, a newspaper heard it from Badrutt’s great-grandson. By 1965, one of the four Englishmen had become a doctor, and another a baronet. And Badrutt was greeting them in his shirtsleeves.
In 2015, Lütscher told Swiss radio that the story was an invention. The resort’s own tourism association, he said, had spread it later, to celebrate a winter-tourism centenary.
So we cannot say that the bet happened. What we can say is that it is a postwar legend, first traced to 1956, and then promoted by the resort.
Lütscher himself believes the first winter guests really did come, in 1864 or 1865. What we can quote is a little later, and a little smaller.
There is the visitors’ book entry from 1868.
There is a letter that Yeo copied from The Times, in February 1870. It was signed by the president of the St. Moritz Skating Club. Our skating began on the twenty-fifth of October, he wrote. They used a sluice and channels to spread stream water across a patch of ground. They carried lanterns onto the ice at night. A pair of Canadian snowshoes had just arrived.
He mentions an English friend who had spent five winters in the valley. In a footnote, Yeo explained how small that English colony still was. “The English” in the letter meant eight visitors. Four of them belonged to the writer’s own party.
And there is a private letter, written in March 1870. It lists every foreign visitor who had spent that winter in the upper Engadin.
Eleven at the Kulm: English, German, Italian and French. Four more English visitors in the house of the English chaplain. And one family down the valley, at Samedan.
That, the writer said, was a complete list.
There was already an English church on its way. Badrutt had given the land for it, and the foundation stone was laid in 1868. Until it was built, services were held in the salon of the Kurhaus, the spa hotel. Yeo tells of one Sunday when a waiter forgot that the ballroom of the night before had become the English church.
The same letter is honest about the drawbacks. For three months, the only vegetables were potatoes.
And if you can sleep twelve hours out of the twenty-four, the writer added, you can manage to get through the time.
A resort sells itself with stories, and St. Moritz has always been good at that. Its name sold too.
More than a century after those first winters, the name alone could carry a course. Bobsleigh, the 1987 home computer game from episode two, had six courses, and one of them was St. Moritz. It was a compact, invented course, not a copy of the real run. The name did the work.
Thin air
Across the mountains, in Davos, winter had a different salesman. He was a doctor.
Alexander Spengler was German. He had taken part in the revolution of 1848, fled to Switzerland, and in 1853 became the district doctor of Davos.
In a pamphlet dated February 1869, he made his case. He said he had watched the valley’s sixteen hundred people for fourteen years. In all that time, he wrote, he had not seen a single case of chronic tuberculosis of the lungs among them.
But he had seen something else. Davos boys went down to the lowland cities as apprentices to bakers and confectioners. They spent their days in the bakehouse and slept in small, damp rooms. After a few years, some came home with consumption, as tuberculosis was then called.
And at home, he said, many of them recovered.
So Spengler built a theory. Consumption, he argued, was best treated by a long stay in thin, dry air. The place should be high up and sheltered, in a valley where the local people did not get the disease.
His treatment was practical. Walk slowly uphill, to breathe deeply, and rest often. In winter, stay outside from ten in the morning until three. Eat meat, milk, eggs and fat.
And drink wine. In moderate doses, he wrote, he regarded it as a medicine.
It went against the accepted wisdom, which sent consumptives south, to the warmth. Spengler knew he was picking a fight. He wrote that he was going against a view that had, until then, been held to be almost beyond question.
The first two patients had already come, in February 1865, by horse-drawn sleigh. Later resort histories say that both of them recovered.
Three years later, a Dutchman named Willem Holsboer arrived with his wife, who was already hopelessly ill. She died soon after they came. He stayed. In 1868, he and Spengler opened a Kurhaus, a hotel for patients.
At first the patients were mostly German, Swiss and Dutch. The English came in numbers after the late 1870s, when books and magazine articles about Davos reached London.
The town grew fast. A later resort handbook gives the scale of the change. About seventy visitors spent the winter of 1869 into 1870 there. On the first of March 1882, a local count found about a thousand visitors in the town. At the peak of the 1905 winter, there were nearly forty-two hundred at once.
It is worth being plain about what the cure was.
In 1889, a doctor named Karl Turban opened the first closed sanatorium in the high mountains. A timetable printed in 1906 shows a patient’s day.
Up at seven. Breakfast at half past. A shower. An uphill walk. Then the rest cure: lying still, outdoors. Second breakfast. A level walk. More rest cure. Lunch. More rest cure. A walk. More rest cure. Dinner. Rest. Milk at nine. Bed at ten.
More than ten hours in the open air, and nearly six of them lying down. In winter, patients lay out in fur sacks.
Before the sanatoria, patients simply sat out on hotel balconies. Symonds, who lived in Davos for years, described them basking in a hot sun, with a spiky row of icicles above their heads.
Some could not keep still. A local history complains that many a good cure was spoiled by nonsensical mountaineering, by patients trying to prove they were not really ill.
There was fear of infection too. Outside the valley, rumours said that local people, nurses and hotel staff were catching tuberculosis from the visitors. The resort’s own doctors insisted they were not. Their studies said local deaths from the disease had not risen. But they were the resort’s doctors, and the question was argued for years.
Meanwhile, the science moved. In 1882, the German scientist Robert Koch identified the bacillus that causes tuberculosis. Davos began to fear infection.
In 1900, the town’s health rules forbade patients to spit, indoors or out, or on the snow, on pain of a fine. Every patient had to carry a pocket spittoon.
And people died. In 1882, the owner of one hotel, the Belvedere, wrote about his own house. Since it had opened seven years earlier, twelve patients had died there. Their families were charged for the bedding from the deathbed. Some of it was burned, on the doctor’s advice.
Could patients do sport? Officially, hardly at all. A Davos medical handbook of 1906 said lung patients should not toboggan, ski or skate.
In the same book, another doctor disagreed. A little sport, he argued, would free them from what he called the thraldom of the clinical thermometer.
By then the healthy visitors were a separate world. The same book says that sport visitors mostly stayed in hotels set apart for tourists and sport people, away from the invalids.
Today we know that the mountain air did not cure tuberculosis. Rest and food helped some patients endure the disease, and isolation reduced the risk to others. But before antibiotics, about seven in ten people with untreated, infectious lung tuberculosis died within ten years.
Effective treatment began only with antibiotics, starting with streptomycin in the 1940s.
Davos lived with all of that. And something else grew beside it.
In the autumn of 1881, the Scottish writer Robert Louis Stevenson, ill himself, came back for his second winter there. He had stalled after fifteen chapters of a story for boys.
In Davos, he wrote, it flowed from him like small talk. At the rate of a chapter a day, he finished Treasure Island.
He found the valley hard. A mountain valley, he wrote, has a certain prison-like effect on the imagination.
But it was bracing too. The invalid there, he wrote, is perhaps no happier, but he is stingingly alive.
“It may not be health, but it is fun.”
He wrote about the toboggan, too, in a voice addressed to the reader. Perhaps the true way to toboggan, he suggested, is alone and at night.
In a breath you are out from under the pine trees, and a whole heavenful of stars reels and flashes overhead. And all the lights in all the great hotels lie for a moment at your feet.
Symonds had darker dreams of the same valley. He wrote of one in which he was sledging alone at night on the Klosters road. Past him, on their own sleds, flew the phantoms of the dead who had died in Davos, longing for their homes.
Getting there, staying there
For people to stay the winter, the winter had to be made comfortable indoors. And the valleys had to be reachable.
In 1879, the Kulm at St. Moritz had its own small hydroelectric plant, feeding six arc lamps. A technical survey of 1903 lists it as the first electrical installation in the whole canton of Graubünden.
The hotel tells a fuller story. Badrutt, it says, saw electric light at the Paris exhibition of 1878, came home, and lit up his dining room.
The journey was still a test. A doctor’s guide of 1885 sets out the route from London. Cross the Channel. Lunch at Calais at two. Dinner at Tergnier at six. After the night train, Basel at six next morning. Chur by noon.
From there, a stagecoach left in the early morning for the pass.
Delicate travellers, the guide said, should break the journey. Send a telegram ahead to the hotel in Chur, so that it can warm a room.
Davos’s own roads improved. A local history dates the post road over the Flüela Pass to 1868, and the road down the valley towards Chur to 1872. Then the railways changed everything. A line reached Davos in 1890. The Albula railway, with its tunnels and spiral loops, reached St. Moritz on the tenth of July 1904.
A guidebook of 1905 promised a through train from Berlin in twenty-two and a half hours.
And the hotels grew. The Kulm had forty rooms in 1862. By 1905 it had three hundred and twenty beds. In one winter in the mid-1880s, a doctor reported, it held more than a hundred and fifty guests.
A brochure of 1913 claimed that St. Moritz could take four thousand visitors at once.
The village grew with them. In 1850, two hundred and twenty-eight people lived in St. Moritz. By 1910, more than three thousand did.
The guests brought their own newspapers. In St. Moritz, English residents started the St. Moritz Post. In Davos, Stevenson found the place half English, with the local paper printed in two columns, text and translation.
Healthy visitors came too. Some came for the sport. And some came because someone they loved was ill.
In 1893, the writer Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes, brought his wife Louisa to Davos. She had tuberculosis, and doctors had given her only months. She lived until 1906.
On the twenty-third of March 1894, Doyle set off on skis before dawn. With him were two brothers from Davos, Tobias and Johann Branger. They were heading over a mountain pass to Arosa. The brothers had made the crossing the year before.
A great pale moon, Doyle wrote, was shining in a violet sky.
On the steepest slope, the brothers lashed their skis together into a rough toboggan. Doyle’s own skis, at one point, flew away like an arrow from a bow.
His tailor, he joked, had told him that Harris tweed could not wear out. The tailor would find samples of his wares, Doyle wrote, all the way from the pass to Arosa.
They reached Arosa seven hours after they set out. People there came out with their opera glasses, too late to see them arrive. In the hotel register, Tobias Branger wrote one word for his occupation: sportsman.
That December, in The Strand Magazine, he made a prediction. The time will come, he wrote, when hundreds of Englishmen will come to Switzerland for the skiing season, in March and April.
He was cautious about the numbers. He was right about what followed.
Later in life, Doyle claimed he had been the first to bring skis to the Grisons, the canton around Davos. But skiing was already organised elsewhere in Switzerland: Glarus had a club by then. And in the Grisons, the Branger brothers had crossed the pass before him.
Months into a programme
Once guests stayed for months, the question became what to do with them.
At first, the answer was ice.
The lakes froze first, and they were a bonus when they did. In Davos in 1878, the people who did not skate would light fires on the frozen lake, roast potatoes and chestnuts, boil eggs and make mulled wine. A skating manual of 1892 compared lake skating at St. Moritz to catching a salmon: chiefly a question of luck.
So the visitors made their own ice.
Davos shows how a pastime turned into a place. There was a small skating pond early on. But a guidebook of 1878 says the real rink came with the English.
In the winter of 1876 into 1877, the young men of the English colony at the Belvedere hotel flooded a rink from the river, using sluices. The hotel’s owner took it over and sold season tickets. By 1882, a season on the ice cost twenty francs.
Later, some regular winter visitors bought a field for a bigger rink. They wanted a reservoir higher up, to flood it properly. But they could not raise the money.
So they handed the field to the town, and the town built the reservoir.
What followed was enormous. By 1913, the Davos rink covered twenty-nine and a half thousand square metres. It had a racing track four hundred metres long. By 1908, four of the five world records in speed skating had been set there.
Both resorts could sell something lowland cities could not reliably promise: cold.
Coaches noticed. In November 1889, the Dutch skating association sent two of its skaters to St. Moritz to train. The next year, an English organiser sent two professional skaters from the Fens. It was an early ice-training trip abroad.
In 1899, the men’s world figure-skating championship was due to be held in Vienna. The weather was too mild. So it moved to Davos. Only three skaters turned up.
At St. Moritz, the ice belonged to the hotels.
In January 1882, the writer John Addington Symonds, whom we met in episode one, visited the Kulm. It had about twenty winter guests, he wrote, and felt like a country house.
Caspar Badrutt, one of Johannes’s sons, had fashioned a rink on a raised terrace.
“Ladies sat and worked or read on seats upon the ice.”
A doctor’s guide of 1888 describes the day. A walk in the sun after breakfast. At eleven, a glass of warm milk.
Then the rink. Some guests skated. Others sat in shelters, protected from the glare by smoked-glass spectacles and parasols. An earlier guide describes the spectators on the benches at Davos, reading newspapers, criticising the skaters, watching flirtations, and laughing heartily at the small misfortunes of beginners. Those who wanted as much fresh air as possible had their lunch sent out to them on the ice.
In the afternoon, a toboggan, a sleigh drive, or a picnic. Dinner at half past six. And in the evening, amateur theatricals, concerts and balls.
On carnival nights the rink itself became the ballroom. Benson describes hundreds of electric lamps, or lines of Chinese lanterns, and couples dancing on skates, their lanterns making a series of luminous loops as they swung to the music.
At least eighty in every hundred winter visitors, he reckoned, either skated or curled. Women were among the competitors. In 1906, Davos held the International Skating Union’s first ladies’ championship. An Englishwoman, Madge Syers, won it.
Then came the clubs. In Davos, skaters could take graded tests, set by the National Skating Association in London. In St. Moritz, rival skating clubs had their headquarters in rival hotels.
They argued about style, too. The English school was severe: great power, and perfect quietness, with the free leg, as one manual put it, kept in its proper place. Visitors from the Continent skated a freer, international style. Benson regretted that some experts on each side compared the two with what he called robust vilifications.
Curling arrived as well. At the Kulm, as the hotel tells it, it began in the early 1880s, when a former guest sent Badrutt two granite stones.
Soon, hotels treated a curling rink and a set of stones as standard equipment. But a writer in 1908 warned what happened when there was no real curler among the guests. They invented weird and childlike games with the stones.
The most spectacular step came last.
In 1906, Swiss radio has reported, thirteen riders on skis were towed by galloping horses. They went from the middle of St. Moritz to the next village and back. The organisers date the first official races on the frozen lake to the following winter.
By 1908, printed guides were describing trotting races and “driving on ski” on the lake every February.
Benson describes the skier behind the horse as a charioteer with only his skis as chariot. A guide of 1913 was blunter. If a fallen rider stayed attached to the reins, it warned, he could be dragged to death by the galloping horse.
By 1913, St. Moritz had a racecourse on the lake, a racing society, a skijoring club and a riding hall. In 1910, an Austrian sports club told its members that the skijoring harnesses it had bought in bulk from St. Moritz had all sold out.
What began as an afternoon’s fun had become an event, with a programme, officials and crowds.
That is the moment a pastime turns into a spectacle: when it is made to be watched.
In Slidensa, the game we make, the track at Igls is built with that in mind. Along the run there are grandstands, huts, flags and lamp masts, and about seven hundred and fifty spectators.
They turn to watch the sled come down. They cheer as it passes, each in their own way, and they cheer again at the finish. A race is not just ice and speed. It is the people around it.
Who built the new winter
None of this ran by itself.
The English writer E. F. Benson, who spent winters in Switzerland, described how a rink was made.
First, a row of men with arms linked trampled the fresh snow flat. Then it was flooded, layer after layer, until there was about eighteen inches of solid ice. That took about a fortnight.
On cold nights, Benson wrote, the head iceman sat up through the dark hours. He kept himself awake with coffee, and watched the thermometer.
He watched over his rink, Benson wrote, like a mother over a sick child. He insisted he was not exaggerating, and he named one such man: Rudolf Baumann.
After eighteen inches of snow, a guide of 1892 reckoned, clearing an acre of rink would occupy thirty men. It would take them at least two days.
On the curling ice, a writer in 1908 saw men polishing and flooding it, morning and evening. And a boy with a wooden spoon and a pail of water, filling up the little cracks.
Many of those workers were newcomers to the valley.
A St. Moritz guide of 1877 noted something about the people who served the visitors. The landlords, waiters, chambermaids, guides, drivers and porters had mostly arrived only recently, from other parts of Switzerland. Italians came as masons and labourers. Village schoolmasters took jobs in the hotels during their holidays.
In Davos there were nurses, from Protestant deaconesses to Catholic sisters. From 1900, there were also staff employed to disinfect the rooms of patients. From 1887, Davos had a hospital for its own people, its employees, servants and workpeople.
There was friction, and it is recorded from both sides.
An English guidebook writer at Davos in 1878 complained about the local labourers. They could be neither coaxed nor driven, he wrote, into what they considered over-exertion.
On the road to Klosters, a tobogganer who hit a standing sleigh could expect its driver to demand damages, according to one English rider. An exorbitant amount, he added.
In Davos, English and German guests quarrelled over the visitors’ tax. The Germans wanted it raised, to pay for German actors.
And on Sundays, a skating writer complained in 1908, the public rink at Davos was in very bad condition, because of the crowds of children let loose upon it.
And the people of the valley answered back.
In 1869, the village of Pontresina, near St. Moritz, staged a winter procession. About thirty sledges took part, and it was called Past and Present.
The present was played by Englishmen with red guidebooks under their arms. And by landlords, polite and smiling, with the right hand ready for a greeting, and a bill in the left.
The 1877 guide admitted something else. Some people, it said, had used the great demand for rooms in a way that could not be justified. And with the influx of foreigners, it regretted, the old customs of the valley had mostly been given up.
Who profited most? The sources cannot tell us that. They show jobs and investment, hotels growing, complaints about overcharging, and old customs fading. They do not show wages.
From entertainment to sport
Now put the pieces together.
Once guests stayed for months, hotels, visitors and towns built rinks. Hotels paid for some runs. Guests formed clubs and wrote rules. Conflict on crowded roads helped push racing onto dedicated tracks.
That is part of how the sliding sports grew.
Episode one followed the toboggan race on the road from Davos in 1883, and the first bobsleigh club at St. Moritz. Episode four followed the Cresta Run, which the Badrutts paid to build and staff until a club took it over in 1887. Episode six followed the German-speaking sledders who turned the same habit into a sport of their own.
Each of them unfolded inside part of this larger winter world. Visitors with time and money. Workers and institutions. And places where an amusement could acquire a course, a calendar and rules.
One host, four guests
So, was it the bet?
The evidence points somewhere else. It points to a winter that took decades to make, and many people, in more than one valley, to make it.
A doctor who noticed boys coming home coughing. Patients who lived, and patients who died. Hoteliers with buildings, and nerve. Railways and electric light. Workers from near and far, who opened roads, made ice and served dinners. And guests who brought skates, curling stones and their own rules.
Davos gave people a reason to endure a whole winter. St. Moritz taught them to want one.
The bet survives because it turns that long, shared change into something you can tell over a drink. One host, four guests, one promise.
And it has one advantage over the evidence. In the story, nobody is ill, and nobody has to dig.
Go back to that visitors’ book, and the winter of 1868. A woman skating on the ice, under a sunshade. And a guest who wrote that they were loth to leave when spring came.
That is not a legend. It is the earliest winter stay at that hotel that we can still hear in a guest’s own words.
Sources, a transcript and the project are at slidensa.com.
Slidensa is an independent game about bobsleigh, luge and skeleton.