New Ski Club of Great Britain chat forum

A BRIEF HISTORY OF DECLINE not by Stephen Hawking
The SCGB’s post-1950s fall from grace. Part 1: The Bronze Age

When I joined the Ski Club of Great Britain as a non-comedic 9-year-old boy in 1962, there seemed to be no limit to the wonders of the Alps. These huge mountains were beyond any human scale – massive, stormy, scary and awe-inspiring. Some genius with a cable and a pair of tugging cabins had turned them into the biggest playgrounds of snow imaginable. As a small boy, nothing was more exciting and more opposite to life in The Smoke ... but skiing was no walk in the park.

Fitted out with lace-up leather ski boots (there were two sets of laces on each boot to do up – inner and outer) and a pair of all-wood skis with screw-on edges, I did my best to make progress. Early lessons were conducted by severe but friendly Austrian instructors and were strictly lift-free – hours of side-stepping and snowploughing before you went anywhere near a ski lift. Learning new technique was a struggle – the step from stem turn (snowplough) to parallel (via the stem-christie turn) seemed to take forever, because the equipment was so hard to handle. Every evening in the hotel you put your damp black leather boots outside the bedroom door. A member of staff would whisk them away, dry them out during the night, and freshly polish them at the crack of dawn. That ritual was rewarded with a good tip at the end of the week.

My father – Rudy Goldsmith, a Berlin-born pioneer of computerised market research who had originally worked for Gallup - had quickly made money in the 1950s. It earned him the opportunity to introduce me to his favourite sport. In pre-WW2 Germany my dad had himself skied as a child and was passionate to take me to the best places, having me as his schussing companion. My first close encounter with a nursery slope was in 1959, on a seemingly huge but gentle pasture in Kitzbuhel. The U-shaped valley had ideal slopes for learning. By the end of the week I’d progressed to the mid-mountain. Poling and gently schussing through the woods, I vividly remember hearing the call of a cuckoo – is that possible?

But it was tough going. The first thing to do every morning was to lace up those boots (maybe 10 minutes work) and then tighten them all after about 30 minutes skiing. Obviously all that had to be done with gloves off – just imagine, in mid-winter. Then there were the cable bindings that pulled the boots onto the skis. These had a loop of cable which went around the heel of each boot, controlled by a lever at the front, which could take all one’s strength to close. I recall trying so hard to shut that lever that it once induced a nose-bleed. But all that graft was rewarded one day in 1962.

Taking the SCGB Bronze Test, 1962

To pass the bronze test of the Ski Club of Great Britain you had to prove that you’d grasped the basics of ski school during the week. But you probably wouldn’t take this test on your first ski holiday – it took that long to make progress on the old equipment. And so it was, one Friday in 1962, on a slope at St Anton in Austria, that I first met a representative of the Ski Club of Great Britain. A group of us (mainly) kids were lined up and asked to perform a number of rudimentary (not my father’s full name, which was Rudolph) techniques ... straight-running, stem, stem turn, kick-turn, side-step and so on. You didn’t take the test unless you could pass it, and the awards ceremony (there were also silver, and extremely demanding gold, medals) was a big occasion for British skiers every week.

The SCGB rep was a king of the hill, warmly hosted by the tourist office in each Alpine resort - a real boost to the village’s ski school. If you didn’t do lessons, you didn’t pass the SCGB tests. The Swiss and Austrian ski villages all offered their national tests - also with bronze, silver and gold medals - but the medals of the Ski Club of Great Britain were more sought-after. They were tougher to pass than the ‘tourist medals’ and operated to 'proper British standards'. All this stuff was the brainchildren of Sir Arnold Lunn - the Great British ski pioneer - and his fellow travellers. One has to remember that Lunn's forefathers essentially introduced skiing to the Alps, by transporting Norway's invention - the ski - to places that had never thought of this wheeze. The Brits were revered!

A gold-qualified British skier, with a gold SCGB medal, was simply the best British skier on the mountain and well up with the locals. For example, to pass the 'gold' you had to ski breakable crust (on those wooden skis), and perform perfect parallel turns. The Brits were serious players in the soon-to-boom industry of winter sports. But what hadn’t happened at this point was the explosion of charter flights, package holidays, and mega resorts to accommodate thousands. Things were, however, starting to take off. People were starting to make money and enjoy a lot more recreational time. In Scotland, in particular, skiing was on the threshold of mass-participation. Maybe that's where the rot first set in for the Ski Club of Great Britain. The toffs were about to lose control to the Jocks, on home ground.

[to be continued in 10 days: 'Part 2. The parallel swinging Sixties']

The father of Comedy: http://www.research-live.com/news/mil-founder-rudy-goldsmith-dies-aged-82/3004040.article

Skiing in 1962-3 - a British winter (the most severe for 300 years):
http://i.guim.co.uk/static/w-700/h--/q-95/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/pictures/2010/12/15/1292426263687/Skied-Milk-013.jpg

GOOD READING
on the history of the SCGB/British skiing history [often available on eBay or abebooks.com] ...

Ski Story. 1950-2000 by Rob Tillard (a one-time secretary of the SCGB). Privately published
Snow Crazy by Arnie Wilson.
The Story of Ski-ing by Arnold Lunn

Update from SIGB insider - to coin a phrase - about this week's Slide trade exhibition at Telford.
Slide is the UK's snowsports trade show, opening tomorrow Tuesday 27 Jan ... until Thursday 29 Jan. It's organised for Snowsports Industries of Great Britain (SIGB).

Slide info: http://www.slideuk.co.uk/

On Wednesday, there's a special event involving SCGB research ...

SIGB update: http://www.raremanagement.co.uk/SIGBupdate60.htm

Quote:

On Wednesday evening, following the brief formalities of the SIGB AGM, there is to be a presentation of some extensive consumer research into snowsport by Frank McCusker, CE at the Ski Club of Great Britain, as well as an update on the SnowCamp bursary recipients, supported by SIGB. It's also an opportunity for the industry to share views on a range of ski and snowboard related topics.