Sherlock Holmes creator’s Swiss skiing legacy: fact or fiction?

A statue of Arthur Conan Doyle's iconic character in front of the Anglican church in Meiringen, which is home to the Sherlock Holmes Museum. Keystone / Urs Flueeler

The British writer Conan Doyle learnt to ski during his stays in Switzerland. He helped to popularise skiing and even claimed authorship of skiing in Switzerland. A sports historian takes a more nuanced view.

Doyle, who was in Davos in 1894 because his wife was suffering from tuberculosis, ordered skis in Norway and trained on the hill opposite the hotel in Davos, the Jakobshorn, as can be read in Vincent Delay’s Conan Doyle, Sherlock Holmes and Switzerland.

Spurred on by his success, the writer set off on a ski tour from Davos to Arosa on his skis. “When we got there, we felt the pride of pioneers.”

Doyle wrote an article about this expedition in the Strand Magazine, the London newspaper in which he also published the adventures of Sherlock Holmes. This may have played a role in the enthusiasm of the English for Switzerland. Delay claims in his book that we have Conan Doyle to thank for the introduction of skiing in Switzerland.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle pictured in the year 1922. Keystone

“We probably don’t just owe it to the author of Sherlock Holmes,” sports historian Grégory Quin from the University of Lausanne told the Keystone-SDA news agency. Together with Laurent Tissot, Jean-Philippe Leresche and Daniel Yule, historian Quin wrote the recently published book Skiland Schweiz.

A Scandinavian practice

“The first ski club registered in Switzerland in Glarus dates back to 1893,” explained Quin. A year before Doyle was in Davos. “So there is already a de facto chronological problem.” Scandinavians who came to Switzerland to trade in northern Switzerland brought skis with them in the 1880s and 1890s.

Doyle became interested in skiing when he read a newspaper report by the Norwegian Fridtjof Nansen about his crossing of Greenland in 1888. He was not the only one in Europe or in Switzerland: young Glarner not only founded the first ski club in Switzerland, but also encouraged local craftsmen to make skis – by copying the Norwegians before developing their own expertise – and to organise competitions, Quin explains in his book.

Skiing was initially a sport for students. “And the first ski club in Glarus, as well as the later ones in the rest of Switzerland, were initially clubs for wealthy townspeople,” says Quin.

Better and better equipment

It wasn’t just Conan Doyle who was enamoured of skiing in Switzerland. The French writer Collette also wrote about her skiing experiences in Switzerland three decades later. When she stayed in Gstaad or St. Moritz in the 1920s, she explained in an exchange of letters that she kept falling.

At that time, skiers already had better equipment – “like skis with edges” – and were beginning to venture onto the slopes. Conan Doyle still had to “more or less” tie his skis to his boots. However, it would be several decades before skiing actually became established in Switzerland.