It is almost axiomatic Age of Conan Gold that the British invent a sport, introduce a few people to it, rack up a few victories, and then embark on a sustained losing run. This selflessness has been taken to new extremes with the two blue ribbon events of the Winter Olympics, the downhill and the slalom. Both were devised by Sir Arnold Lunn in the 1920s and, after persistent prompting by him, introduced into the Winter Olympics in 1936. Britain has yet to win a medal in either.
‘He was the man most responsible for AOC Power Leveling turning skiing from the Nordic side to the Alpine side,’ says his friend Elizabeth Hussey. Before Lunn arrived, the Nordic countries preferred to do their skiing horizontal and the Nordic Games amounted to AOC Gold cross-country and then some more cross-country. They did not take kindly to Lunn’s tinkering.Buy Age of Conan Gold ‘One Norwegian complained to Arnold saying how would you like it if an Eskimo changed the rules of cricket,’ says Hussey. ‘And Arnold replied he would be delighted by such an intervention because there were far too many drawn matches at cricket, don’t you think?’ Buy Age of Conan Power Leveling
‘It’s now accepted as so obvious that the thing to do is ski downhill that people find it difficult to think there was ever opposition,’ says his 91-year-old son,Buy AOC Power Leveling Peter, speaking from the Swiss ski resort of Murren, which his grandfather founded. ‘But they used to say that downhill was for people too cowardly to jump and too feeble to do cross-country.’ In reality, they soon found out that moving from the horizontal to the near vertical was fraught with difficulty. Buy AOC Gold
Peter Lunn can remember a German named Luther coming to Murren thinking downhill was ‘an awful bore’. Sir Arnold took him up the mountain, watched him standing immobile and petrified at the top, and with perfect timing said: ‘Here stands Luther,Age of Conan Power Leveling he can do no other.’ He guided Luther down and they became firm frys Hussey. ‘Because he was so busy concentrating on what was happening in the present, other things tended to be forgotten. He would often tie another tie while he already had one on.’
In 1932]. But neither father nor baby could cope with the conditions and they came back to England.’ Having failed to convert the Indians to Methodism, Henry embarked on encouraging the British to ski. To this end, he established The Public Schools Alpine Sports Club, which, by offering hotel accommodation near the mountains, was the precursor of the ski travel business.
‘It was a supreme example of snobbery,’ says Peter Lunn. ‘But then before the war people would talk about class but not sex. After the war they never talked about class and endlessly talked about sex.’ In time, Henry’s operation would morph into the travel agency Lunn Poly - an arguably less exclusive organization.
The hotels attracted a literary crowd. ‘I can remember [Sir Arthur] Conan Doyle coming to stay,’ says Peter Lunn, ‘and he said to my grandfather that he had decided to devote his life to psychic research but he couldn’t think what to do with Sherlock Holmes. And my grandfather said push him over the Reichenbach Falls and Conan Doyle hadn’t heard of them so he showed them to him.’
Sir Arnold’s own skiing career was undermined by a horrific accident, which left him with one leg three inches shorter than the other. He recalled it in a pamphlet, What It Feels Like to Fall: ‘Why should one feel no fear when one is falling to what seems to be certain death? Just as the unborn child, knowing nothing of the life to come, may cling tenaciously to the only existence which it knows, so we fear death. That fear vanished as soon as my fall began.’
He was packed off to Harrow. On leaving he wrote The Harrovians (1913), a book critical of the tyranny imposed by athletes and prefects. ‘He kept a diary at school,’ says Peter Lunn, ‘and unfortunately it was found and they read the text out loud and every time someone was mentioned they gave him a kick. After that he said he could face hostile reviewers with some equanimity.’
Prevented from competing at the highest level, he focused on organizing and devising rules. Yet the Nordic bloc thwarted his ambition for his sports to be part of the first Winter Olympics in Chamonix in 1924, where Scandinavian countries won 28 of the 43 medals on offer.
Undaunted, in 1928 Sir Arnold and his friend Walter Amstutz, who took the main photograph on this page, inaugurated a race called The Inferno, which is still contested to this day. (On finishing the 10-mile course at the age of 89, Peter Lunn described it as ‘bumpy’.).
The family business floundered. ‘The Labour Chancellor asked people not to go abroad and the whole country followed,’ says Peter Lunn. ‘It’s extraordinary to think that then, if it was in the country’s best interest, that’s what people did.’ Peter was removed from Eton and went to work as a clerk in the motor business.
Eventually, in 1936, downhill and slalom made their debuts at the Olympics at Garmisch-Partenkirchen, with father as team captain and son in the team. Adolf Hitler attended and there was the usual problem with how to respond. ‘The British gave a straight-arm salute sideways rather than straight up,’ says Hussey. ‘It was quite difficult for them as they were rather apt to hit the person next to them on the nose.’
‘I didn’t go to the march past for which I always get a lot of credit,’ says Peter Lunn. ‘But in fact I don’t like marching about.’
Britain’s best skier during this period was Jimmy Riddell, who would also leave his mark in another field. While employed at the War Office pasting cuttings for a manual, he mistakenly stuck the head of a dog on the body of a camel. The idea of ‘misfit’ books for children was born.
Throughout his life, Sir Arnold continued writing, publishing, among other books, Was Switzerland Pro-German? (nom de plume Sutton Croft), 1920; The Cult of Softness (with Garth Lean), 1965; Unkilled for So Long (memoir), 1968.
‘He was a very absent-minded individual,’ says Hussey. ‘Because he was so busy concentrating on what was happening in the present, other things tended to be forgotten. He would often tie another tie while he already had one on.’
In 1932, having written books strongly critical of Catholic converts, Sir Arnold published Difficulties with Ronald Knox in which he attempted to sustain his position. Shortly afterwards, he converted to Catholicism and wrote Now I See. ‘Douglas Woodruff, the editor of The Tablet, thought it converted more people to Catholicism than any book written between the wars,’ says Peter Lunn. ‘It was probably his most effective book because he wrote it in a fortnight after converting. When people came over after the war from East Germany to the West they were very good at doing propaganda for a year because they had come to the conclusion that Marxism was rubbish but still had an eastern way of thinking.’
Sir Arnold also embarked on correspondence debates with the philosophers CEM Joad and JBS Haldane, some of which were collected in Science and the Supernatural. This opens:
‘PRELUDE TO BATTLE
The Albany Hotel,
Hastings,
Oct 15 1931
Dear Haldane,
It has always seemed to me a pity that the Christians and anti-Christians so seldom engage in battle on the same ground…’
And many hundreds of thousands of words later ends:
‘CONCLUSION
16, Park Village East,
Nov. 30, 1934.
Dear Lunn,
‘”Blank checks on eternity.” So you end your reply to my last letter. What a delightful example of anti-scientific invective.’
During the Second World War, Sir Arnold was ‘sent quite often by the British Council to America,’ says Hussey, ‘to talk about the development of sport but in fact said, “I expect you all want to hear about the Blitz”.’
Peter Lunn, meanwhile, was billeted with Evelyn Waugh. ‘One of my aunts didn’t trust the chauffeur to blow the horn hard enough so she sat on the back seat with her own klaxon,’ he says. ‘And when I told Evelyn that he said, “Bags, that’s mine”. I think it’s in Scoop. Funnily enough for a highly intelligent person he was a great snob. He came from a middle-class sort of family.’
When I ask Peter about his career he modestly replies: ‘Government service. It’s all in Who’s Who, to be quite honest.’ So it is: Malta, 1939-44; W Germany, 1945-46; Vienna, 1948-50; Bern, 1950-53; Berlin, 1953-56; Bonn, 1957-62; Beirut, 1962-67.’ Which suggests, at the very least, he was in interesting places at interesting times.
His father died in 1974. His friend Walter Amstutz wrote: ‘Taking leave of him implies taking leave of an epoch which went with him to his grave; it was an epoch that bore very much his personal stamp. It began with what he called the golden age of skiing, the gilding of which was done by his own hand. It ended in a triumphal finish on a course which he had set himself.’
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