On 6 May 1903, twelve men sat down to dinner at the Café Royal in London and started a ski club. It would become the most famous in the world — the Ski Club of Great Britain. Exotic places like Val d’Isère and Courchevel had yet to be invented. Zermatt was a climbing village famous for the Matterhorn (conquered for the first time less than 40 years previously) but not for its skiing. In those days, to the British, skiing was little more than a slightly odd sport practised by English eccentrics. There were no ski lifts or resorts, but nevertheless the British pioneered Alpine skiing so that they could indulge their passion for a craze that was about to grip the world of Winter sports. Over the years, the Ski Club published an almanac, which became a document of fascinating, amusing and downright bizarre anecdotes of the Brits on the slopes as the sport went from being a minority diversion to the worldwide obsession it is today.
