Meribel

As English as Henley

Martin Vander Weyer

Lard Brabazon on the Cresta Run, the Kandahar Club at Miiren, the Prince of Wales at Kitzbahl with Fruity Metcalfe; these were the archetypal British winter sportsmen before the war. Brits who skied or bobsleighed invariably fulfilled that part of their annual sporting calendar — some- where between the foxhunting and the Uni- versity boat race — at Swiss or Tyrolean stations. It was only after Hitler's annexa- tion of Austria that one English enthusiast decided to explore the Alpine villages of France instead. The beautiful resort of Meribel-les-Allues in Haute Savoie, the centre of a vast network of ski-runs market- ed as les Trois Vallees, is the result; and, though its development has now for many years been led by Frenchmen, it retains a discreet veneer of quintessential English- ness.

The smartest snow is still, arguably, in more northern parts of the Alps: Klosters

`Isn't is great when you make your friends smile?'

for HRHs and their paparazzi; Gstaad for Taki and the super-rich, including those who go to shop rather than ski. Elsewhere are innumerable chic resorts like populous Verbier or flashy Les Arcs, whose devotees are prepared to risk meeting their hair- dressers on the slopes. But Meribel small enough to be relatively exclusive remains comfortably in the upper-middle class of skiing's social spectrum.

Meribel chalet life is more to do with Scrabble than backgammon, more Famous Grouse than cocaine. It is Dick Francis in hardback, House & Garden and Hello! on the coffee-table and leather-bound visitors' books, in which even paying guests are expected to sign but not to put silly remarks. It is also chalet-girls called Lucin- da and Caroline — 'I wake up and call them all Caroline,' as one energetic friend of mine remarked at breakfast long ago. The British sense of ownership (coupled with stubborn refusal to flirt with foreign tongues) is encapsulated by the fact that until recently many long-standing visitors blithely mispronounced the name of the vil- lage `Mirabelle', like the grand old restau- rant in Curzon Street.

The founder of this Alpine oasis of gen- tility was an enterprising estate agent called Peter Lindsay. With help from the ski pio- neer Sir Arnold Lunn (founder of the Kan- dahar Club) he identified a site in the valley of les Allues which was accessible, pic- turesque and on the north-south axis most favourable to skiing. He bought his first parcel of land there in December 1938, but it was not until 1946, after service with the Irish Guards and SOE in Burma, that he was able to return and start building a ski resort. The insular locals — even now inclined to snarl at rosbif hoorays — were initially reluctant to co-operate, and the business of buying up vital mountainous plots on which to plant lift pylons was tortu- ously slow.

But Lindsay persevered, and among his notable achievements is the architecture of Meribel. He and his collaborators set out to create a distinctive, natural style. The chief architect of the commune, Christian Durupt, now in his eighties, has controlled the external design of every new building in the resort — the angles of each chalet roof, and the use of wood and stone — since 1946. The effect is harmonious without being twee, and mercifully unscarred by the concrete space-stations and pyramids with which the French have experimented else- where.

Lindsay brought in numerous other British investors, the Beaverbrook and Rothermere families among them. But all of his own wealth was sunk into Meribel Alpina, the company which builds and operates the chairlifts and cable-cars, often expensive feats of engineering. Sadly, he made little profit from his creation.

He died in 1971, before Meribel began to realise its full potential. It was in that year that links with the neighbouring valleys (the beginners' paradise of Courchevel on one side; the more austere Les Menuires and Val Thorens on the other) opened up what is now advertised as the largest ski area in the world, some 280 miles of piste, virtually all of it accessible even to unfit, intermedi- ate, ten-days-a-year-if-you're-lucky skiers like me.

Since the 1960s local businessmen like Maurice Front, a successful builder and the reigning mayor, have regained command of Meribel affairs — which, since it is at heart a commune of less than 1,000 electors, pro- ceed in authentic Clochemerle style. The resort has spread, but (partly because the recession came just in time) not so much as to spoil its character. There is still a high proportion of chalets rather than hotels, and, unlike many winter resorts, the num- ber of ski-lifts has increased roughly in pro- portion to the number of visitor beds, which now approaches 30,000.

A handful of Lindsay's original investors still own shares in the Meribel Alpina com- pany, as well as property there. British interests have been represented since the founder's retirement by Colonel Tom Hall, whose family chalet has an envied position right on the piste, its view undisturbed by subsequent developments nearby. A caval- ryman, Hall is a dashing skier who speaks excellent French; he was the only English official in Meribers portion of the recent Winter Olympics. Indeed, he was in full Olympic fig when his two-man team beat mine in breakneck after-dinner toboggan- ing last year, despite a combined age-gap to his disadvantage of more than half a centu- ry.

Hall has tried to counter-balance the nat- ural urge of local commercants to keep on developing. He is happier with the current strategy, which is to attract more summer visitors and to build cable-car links with accommodation lower down the valley, rather than to cram more and more winter visitors into Meribel itself. The Olympics brought a burst of new construction which looked distressingly empty a few weeks after the games were over. It seems likely to be the last for the time being.

Among the Olympic building crop were new hotels which perhaps bode ill for tradi- tional Meribel: the Japanese-owned Antares, with plate-glass lifts in its marbled atrium; and the optimistically multi-nation- al Aspen Park, with restaurants called Fujiyama and Marrakech. Old-time roman- tics stick to the stylish Grand Coeur, with open fires in its bedrooms. Even older timers prefer the Marie Blanche, whose eponymous patronne sold Lindsay his first piece of land.

Encouraged by good early snow, this sea- son's takings to date on Meribel's ski-lifts are reported to be up by 20 per cent on the equivalent figures for the previous two rather depressed seasons. Many of the visi- tors, for the first time, are Italians and Spaniards, and (the pound now buying only eight francs, and eight francs buying practi- cally nothing in a fashionable ski resort) rather fewer than usual are Brits. But the cairn to Peter Lindsay beside the piste and the occasional baying of county voices from the chairlift above — will remind those who do go that the roots of the place are as English as Badminton or Henley.