TAKE IT FROM THE TOP
‘His friends had taken to practising at night to avoid the ridicule of the curious, amused locals’
popular stories about the ingenious pipe- smoking detective, but there was much more to him than that: as well as being a qualified physician, he was a political campaigner, had a fascination with spiritualism and the occult (including a steadfast belief in the existence of fairies) and was also a prolific sportsman. While all of these qualities are well docu-
mented, much less is known about Conan Doyle’s services to skiing. In 1893 he wrote an article for the Strand (the magazine which also serialised his Sherlock Holmes stories) entitled ‘An Alpine Pass on “Ski”’. In it, he described the wonder of skiing: ‘For a third of a mile we shot along over gently dipping curves, skimming down into the valley without a motion of our feet. In that great untrodden waste, with snow- fields bounding our vision on every side, it was glorious to whizz along in this easy fashion.’ Today, some 110 million people ski in more
than 80 countries around the world and the Alps are the biggest ski destination in the world, accounting for 45 per cent of all ski visits. For the vast majority of the Strand’s readers in the 1890s, however, Conan Doyle’s article was the first time they would ever have heard of skiing. The fact that he needed to describe skis shows just how new the sport would have been to his readers: ‘There is nothing particularly malignant in the appearance of a pair of “ski”,’ he wrote. ‘They are two slips of elm-wood, 8ft long, 4in broad, with a square heel, turned-up toes, and straps in the centre to secure your feet. No one to look at them would guess at the possibilities that lurk in them.’ This is not to say that skiing was anything
Left: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle hosts a fashionable ski party in Davos in the mid-1890s.
new in 1893. Cave paintings found in northern Norway and dating from four thousand years ago depict a man on skis, and the remains of skis have been found preserved in bogs in other parts of Scandinavia – the oldest being one discovered in Sweden that is around four and a half thousand years old. The Norwegian military held skiing competitions from at least the 1670s, and the first known civilian ski race took place in Norway in 1843. The invention of skiing in its modern
of finding a high-altitude cure for Louisa’s tuberculosis. While there, he wrote about his experience of a new pastime, skiing. The sport was almost unheard of in Britain at the time, and the Sherlock Holmes writer’s articles did much to popularise both it and the Alps. Born in Edinburgh in 1859, Sir Arthur
I
Ignatius Doyle (he added the ‘Conan’ later on) might be best known today for his hugely
n 1893 Sir Arthur Conan Doyle took his wife Louisa and two young children to Davos, in Switzerland, in the hope
form has been accredited to Sondre Norheim (although there is some debate about this), from Telemark in Norway, who developed the equipment and techniques that led to skiing as we know it today. It was in the 1870s that he developed the short, curved, flexible ski that allowed for easy turning in soft snow. It was on a visit to Norway a few years before
his trip to the Alps that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle had first encountered skiing. Although he only observed the sport he had always harboured a desire to have a go, so when he arrived in Switzerland and realised the geography and
WWW.SCOTTISHFIELD.CO.UK 61
IMAGE - ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE COLLECTION - LANCELYN GREEN BEQUEST, PORTSMOUTH CITY COUNCIL.
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