Slow Train to Switzerland

by Diccon Bewes

  A week at the Grand Hotel Bear in that first winter season cost £10 5s 0d (about £600 today), including second-class train travel from London, room (with lights, service and heating), full board and 56lb of luggage. Passengers could leave Charing Cross at 2.20pm and arrive in Grindelwald at 3.10pm the next day, having caught a boat, travelled through the night and changed trains four times. The same train journey today takes ten hours with three changes, in Paris, Basel and Interlaken.

  By 1911 the brochure emphasised the healthy aspect even more: it was now called Health, Sunshine and Snow, which is possibly why Davos and Leukerbad were now included. Adverts for things like “best Swiss knitted underwear” show how quickly companies had responded to the winter sports phenomenon. Debenham & Freebody were selling clothing for skating and skiing that was “proof against snow, sleet, rain and cold winds”. Outfits had to be stylish as well as practical, so for 45 shillings (or £130 today) women could buy a full-length knitted sports coat “in the new cable stitch; perfect fitting. In 50 colours.” Presumably it wasn’t meant to rival Joseph’s technicolour wonder, with all 50 shades in one garment. But not everyone was rigged out in winter gear. The Traveller’s Gazette noted that “Gentlemen may often be seen in the full enjoyment of exhilarating outdoor exercises in their short sleeves, and even ladies gracefully disporting themselves in their summer blouses.” How shocking.

  Accident insurance for mishaps “whilst participating in the Sports” appeared in 1921, though it doesn’t spell out if that covered injuries sustained while egg blowing. I can imagine there were a few, including cheeks frozen to the ice. By 1924, those with an extra £17 (or £380 today) to spare could fly to Zurich instead of slumming it on the train, and then go on to any one of 20 Swiss winter resorts. Three times a week Imperial Airways ran a biplane service with 12 wicker seats, taking 7½ hours each way, though that included an hour for lunch in Paris en route.

  Skating might have started the winter craze, but it eventually had to play second fiddle to the trendy new sport of downhill skiing, even if the skaters looked down their frozen noses at the skiers, or “plank-hoppers” as they called them. While skiing arrived in Switzerland with the Norwegians, it was the British who were instrumental in turning it into a sport. Brits may not have any high mountains or know how to cope with snow, but faced with a combination of the two, they knew just what to do: launch themselves down a slope while strapped to two thin strips of wood. It was exactly the kind of risky activity the Swiss liked to avoid, so it was up to those wacky Englishmen to show them the way. First they had climbed the mountains, then they were sliding down them. What would they think of next?

  The irony is, of course, that the Swiss became much better at both sports. Britain has never won an Olympic skiing medal, although it came close at the Salt Lake City Games of 2002. Alan Baxter won bronze in the men’s slalom (a race first created by an Englishman), but lost his medal after testing positive for traces of methamphetamine. In contrast, the Swiss Olympic Team has won 55 medals in alpine skiing, as the various types of skiing down hills (including the enigmatically named Super G) are known collectively.

  Skiing came to Grindelwald in 1891, thanks to Mr Gerald Fox and his ash-wood skis with leather bindings, while in 1894 Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (of Sherlock Holmes fame) skied from Davos to Arosa. However, it was perhaps Sir Arnold Lunn who was the biggest British influence in Swiss skiing, not least because he invented the modern downhill slalom and was one of the founders of the Kandahar Ski Club in Mürren in the 1920s. He also created what is now one of the world’s oldest downhill races, the Inferno, a daunting 15.8km run from Schilthorn down to Lauterbrunnen. His book, mentioned above, is fascinating not for its overview of skiing history, but for its glimpses into a world long since vanished – a world where formality was the norm, at least until the First World War, and a world that Miss Jemima and other Brits abroad at that time would have recognised:

  It would have been unthinkable for an Englishman not to dress for dinner at any of the leading winter sports centres during the first decade of the century. Such luckless guests as had lost their luggage en route slunk about with miserable and apologetic mien. It wasn’t their fault that they had to dine in their ordinary clothes. We knew that. Still they were under a cloud … I remember one miserable outcast whose registered luggage did not arrive for a week. Everyone was kind to him, but he lost caste. He was slipping. He knew it. We knew it. The head waiter knew it. And then the cloud lifted. His luggage arrived. I shall never forget the expression on his face, when he appeared for the first time in evening dress. He looked like a man who has just been cleared by court-martial of a disgraceful charge.

  There were those who “made it a point of honour not to dress for dinner”, but they had a valid excuse. They were members of the Alpine Club, who couldn’t be expected to bother with dress clothes after hiking across glaciers. Practicality beat formality for once, not to mention the contempt many mountaineers had for skiers: “mountains are things to be reverenced and not treated as slides”. Lunn laments the passing of the age of evening wear:

  In 1939 the revolt against form had gone so far that hotels which were still fussy about evening dress were finding it necessary to provide dining accommodation for those who could not be bothered to change into ceremonial garments. The English began to show a distaste for evening dress in Alpine hotels when ski-teachers began to dress for dinner.

  Dress codes weren’t the only minefield; there was the etiquette of the evening dances: “Young people who had tobogganed together usually addressed each other not as Miss Smith or Mr. Brown but as Miss Mary or Mr. Bobby, which was considered to mark a real advance in intimacy. To dance more than twice with the same partner was faintly compromising.”

  Sir Arnold also had a unique insight into the world of winter sports because his father, Sir Henry Lunn, was “the first tourist agent to discover the possibilities of the winter Alps”. His stroke of genius was to market the trips as something for the elite, even though his tours were disparaged by that class as downmarket. Ski holidays were arranged via the Public Schools Alpine Sports Club, so that Lunn’s Tours (which later became Lunn Poly) never had to appear on a luggage label. It wasn’t a Club for plebs: “The principal qualification for the Club Members was a public school or university education.” As incredible as it seems, some of the best hotels were reserved exclusively for those members, with other clients unable to book rooms there during the season, including the Swiss themselves. Arnold Lunn was himself astonished at a situation “under which Swiss citizens were excluded from many of the best hotels in the most popular winter resorts unless they were members of a British club”. It would be unthinkable today.

  The best part of Lunn’s book describes his father’s attitude to foreigners:

  My father had travelled widely, but had never made the slightest attempt to master any foreign language. He was always happy in America because the Americans spoke English, and he had a real affection for many of the Swiss, but he had no interest in foreigners as such, and looked forward to a distant Utopia when all foreign nations would learn to speak English. … He never felt the need to master enough French or German to ask his way to the station.

  The same could be said of many a British tourist then and now.

  After lunch at the Bär Hotel in Grindelwald, Miss Jemima travelled in

  “the landlord’s bulky carriage to Interlacken. We had a magnificent ride and arrived in time for the steamer to Giessbach, with a little surplus for the fracas with the porteur, who, at the landlord’s instigation, was bent on making an overcharge.”

  The trustworthiness of landlords and charges for extras are topics that exercised nineteenth-century travellers. Cook stated: “I am not disposed very strongly to recommend an inferior class of hotels, where parties often spend as much money as in the first-class establishments, the tariffs of which are well understood.” By that he meant the small-print charges that appeared as if by magic on a hotel bill, someth
ing Murray also warned against: “The practice is now general of the waiter rushing into your room before you and lighting the wax candles without consulting you.” The wax is emphasised as the norm was tallow candles, cheaper and made from animal fat.

  He goes on to list the usual charges at first-class hotels as a guide to “protect [travellers] from extortion and imposition on the part of those innkeepers or couriers who may be disposed to take advantage of them”. Such extras include breakfast (1.50 francs), a candle (1 franc), a night light (50 rappen) and a foot bath (50 rappen; “unreasonable but usual”). And of course there’s service – “One franc a day is usually given to the servants, and is almost always added in the bill. This includes all the servants except the porter, who expects something extra.” Murray continues: “Swiss inns have, in general, the reputation of being expensive, and the innkeepers of being extortionate; of late years, however, great improvement has taken place.” His last words of advice are:

  It is often supposed, and perhaps correctly, that two sets of charges are made – one for natives, or Germans, and another for the English; on the principle that the latter have both longer purses and more numerous wants, and are more difficult to serve.

  English purses may be shorter now, but I wonder if we are still so demanding. I hope not.

  The extras are now internet usage and the minibar, as well as the “tourist tax”, often still called a “kurtax” or cure tax, revealing its roots as an old-fashioned levy on visitors coming for curative treatments. The cures might have gone, but the complaint is still there. While not everywhere has a tax, those communities that do can set their own; for example, in Grindelwald it’s 2.10 francs per adult per night. So why not always include it in the room price, like sales tax? Guests must pay it, so adding it on to the bill is a nasty sting in the tail.

  We pay our dues and leave the Sunstar, née Adler, to stroll down the hill to Grindelwald station. The BOB arrives up from Interlaken and is as packed as a rush-hour tube on the London Underground. Everyone piles out, most of them dashing across the platform to the waiting WAB train for the trip up into the clouds. That leaves us with a whole train to ourselves as we clatter down beside the churning Schwarze Lütschine to Interlaken. Having caught an early train, we have enough time before our boat for a visit to the Interlaken hotel where Miss Jemima and friends stayed. “We rejected the famous Jungfrau as also the Belvedere and we had no reason to regret our decision”, she wrote, praising “the comfortable rooms of the Hotel du Lac, with its exquisitely clean, curtained little bedrooms”.

  Before the train arrived in 1890, Interlaken Ost was simply a semi-rural boat station

  The Hotel du Lac is still there, on the riverbank beside Ost station and the boat dock, but it was full when we tried to stay (1 August and all that). Instead, we pop in for a chat with the owner, Ernst Hofmann, whose family has been in charge for almost 130 years. He’s an affable chap, with excellent English, and is happy to share what he knows about the hotel’s history. That it has been in his family for so long is down to his great-great-grandparents being in the right place at the right time.

  In the 1880s they were working in the posh Bellevue Hotel in Bern, a famous meeting point for politicians and businessmen in the capital, and they heard snippets of the big changes coming to Interlaken. They decided to act before it was too late and in 1888 bought the then-bankrupt Hotel du Lac, beside the little-used Zollhaus station, as Interlaken Ost was then known. It was a good move on their part. Back in 1874 the Bödelibahn had been extended from Interlaken out to Bönigen, on the western shore of Lake Brienz, where passengers could change to the boats across the lake. That had made the area around Zollhaus a tourist wasteland and the large hotel near the station didn’t survive the downturn. However, just as had been rumoured, all that changed with the opening of the BOB in 1890 and the relocation of the boat dock from Bönigen to right beside Zollhaus in 1891. Interlaken Ost was born.

  The Hotel du Lac, Interlaken with the current owner’s great-great-grandfather, Peter Hofmann, at the front entrance

  Peter Hofmann had been installed at his hotel for three years by then, and was well prepared for the tourist onslaught that followed the opening up of the Oberland. By 1904 he could afford to add an extra storey and a tower to the hotel, so that it became the building we know today.

  Frustratingly, no records survive from before the Hofmanns took over; another dead end for me in the search for Miss Jemima in Switzerland. Instead, Mr Hofmann fishes out the oldest surviving photo of his ancestor with his hotel, from 1898. Peter Hofmann is standing there, hand on hip and watch chain looped across his waistcoat, at the entrance of a fairly substantial building even before the extension: four storeys high, plus one room in a central gable, and nine windows across, each with double shutters. This is no palace hotel with domes and doormen; it’s a simpler, more traditional affair, as the sign implies: “Hotel et Pension du Lac”. Today, despite the tower and pink walls, you can see the original structure at the heart of the current building, with even the gabled room still there, minus its mini-A-frame roof. This is definitely a hotel that builds on its traditions rather than changing them with each passing fad.

  “About half our guests are English-speaking,” Mr Hofmann explains, “and half of those ones are British. They come for more than two days and we have a nice atmosphere every evening in the hotel. We don’t want to lose that by taking large groups who only stay a day or so and never eat in the restaurant.”

  That is of course the dilemma facing every hotel in Interlaken, and across much of Switzerland. The economic crisis and strong Swiss franc have meant that visitor numbers from traditional European markets have decreased sharply in the past few years. For example, in 2008 the Germans and the British were the top two nationalities visiting Switzerland, with 2.3 million and 825,000 arrivals respectively; in 2012 they dropped to 1.8 million and 660,000. In their place are increasing thousands from India, Brazil, Russia, the Gulf States and above all China. In 2008 Chinese tourists were the same in number as those from Norway and Sweden combined; now they are the fifth largest foreign market with well over half a million arrivals, an increase of 350 per cent in four years. Most of them come in groups, and want to eat Chinese food and see Switzerland in two weeks. That might be good news for the watch shops, where the Chinese spend a lot of money, but it isn’t always great for the hotels. As Mr Hofmann says:

  Interlaken used to be a big village with some grand hotels. It was a resort with some character. Now it’s more groups, more beds, more mass tourism. It’s more like a regional centre than somewhere to come on holiday. Other hotels have changed to take in the large groups, so lose their character and maybe close the restaurant. We don’t want that.

  You could see him as Canute trying to hold back the tide, futile resistance to the wave of the future. Or it could be a brave attempt to stop Interlaken selling its soul and becoming an Alpine Costa del Sol, albeit with Asians instead of Brits. The town already has more Chinese, Halal, Korean and Indian restaurants than many Swiss cities, with even the venerable Café Schuh serving an Asian dish of the day. In trying to survive economically, it is in danger of spoiling the very reason it was attractive in the first place: its inherent Swissness.

  The same complaint could be made of that first deluge of tourists in the late nineteenth century, who prompted the building of all those hotels and railways. That wasn’t tourism for the quaint-hearted. They wanted hotels with bathrooms and ballrooms; they wanted Paris in the Alps – and they got it. Luxury as well as landscape became synonymous with Switzerland, so that both are now a fact of life in the twenty-first century. Nevertheless, enough of the traditional aspects of Swiss life survived, particularly once some Swiss reacted to the endless development. It remains to be seen how Switzerland will cope with the latest cycle of tourism.

  Another lake, another boat. Today it’s Lake Brienz, about half the size of its Thun counterpart, and the MS Brienz, a modern incarnation of the paddle steamer
that once bore that name but sadly now without paddles or steam. We don’t mind as, after two days on strike, the sun finally makes an appearance, almost exactly as the captain gives a double whoop-whoop blast on the horn, and we set off on our zigzag route across the lake. My contemplation of the water is broken by my mother.

  Paddle steamers, such as the DS Brienz, were a vital transport link and still criss-cross the Swiss lakes today

  “Listen to this.” She is reading the journal again. “Miss Jemima wrote, ‘The afternoon was a lovely one and we much enjoyed our quiet sail on the lake.’” She puts the book down and sighs. “She took the words right of my mouth. 150 years later and it’s still just as beautiful.”

  I can only nod in agreement.

  Lakes Thun and Brienz are in effect two bulges in the course of the River Aare, which is incidentally the longest river entirely within Switzerland. Only the Rhine, which starts in Switzerland, is longer, but that mighty river is shared by more than one country; the Aare is 100 per cent Swiss for all of its 295km until it meets the Rhine. However, that’s where any similarity between the lakes ends. Not only is Lake Thun larger and its shoreline more developed, but its water is clearer and bluer; Lake Brienz has that typical glacial-lake look going on, as if someone has mixed milk with turquoise ink. And it’s not just the Aare washing down tons of deposits from the mountains: the Lütschine constantly spews out its glacial load into Lake Brienz. At Bönigen the boat glides past the long, thin stream of greyish liquid laden with debris and detritus that intrudes far into the lake before dissipating into the larger mass. Nevertheless, by the time the water has flowed down the Aare to Lake Thun, all the sediment has settled, leaving only crisp Alpine water.