The Bernese village of Adelboden sits on a terrace at the end of a long valley. It is surrounded on three sides by mountains and overlooks a deep gorge. For more than 600 years the only way in and out of the village was over the mountains. Life was hard, people were poor and by 1900 the population was in decline.
In 1902 Adelboden had a stroke of great good fortune when Henry Lunn, a Methodist minister from Lincolnshire, arrived in the village. Lunn had made several visits to Grindelwald as part of the annual English church leaders’ conference and, in the winter of 1902/03, he brought 400 visitors to Adelboden.
He subsequently founded the Alpine Ski Club, which marked the beginning of the British trend to combine health with winter sports.
The Swiss of course didn’t need an Englishman to teach them how to ski – they used their skiis all the time in order to travel from A to B. However, the concept of climbing a mountain and skiing down it, purely for amusement, was not something that had occurred to them.
Twenty years later, in the neighbouring village of Muerren, Henry Lunn’s son, Arnold organised the first downhill slalom race and, in 1931, the first world championships. He was knighted for his services to British skiing and Anglo-Swiss relations.
Early visitors to the Swiss Alps were predominantly members of the British aristocracy with time on their hands and money in their pockets. As downhill skiing grew in popularity, the well-to-do guests needed appropriate accommodation and this prompted the construction of what are today known as the Belle Epoque hotels.
The Nevada Palace in Adelboden was built by the Richert brothers in 1911 for CHF 200,000 and advertised itself as “The Glorious Winter-Beauty. The Fountain of Eternal Youth”. The seven-storey hotel boasted a ‘resort doctor’ and an outdoor swimming pool, designed to offer guests a Mediterranean experience (sand was imported from Marseille) alongside magnificent mountain views. During the winter, outdoor areas were transformed into skating rinks.
In the mid 1930s my mother and her friends went skiing in Adelboden on day trips from their hometown in Biel. My parents later moved to the village for a winter season with the intention of offering combined courses in English and skiing. Unfortunately the only applicant was an English lord whose interest lay in skiing rather than learning English.
I was christened in the 14th century church and, every year until I left home, my family spent Christmas in Adelboden.
The outbreak of WWII ended the era of the grand hotels and visitors disappeared practically overnight. In 1943 the government announced that all foreign troops, captured on Swiss soil, were to be interned. Adelboden served as the first internment facility and, over the next two years, more than five hundred US airmen were sent to live at the Nevada Palace.
Apart from a night-time curfew, the Americans were free to walk the hillsides, attend church services and visit neighbouring villages. The men installed a woodworking shop and a dark room in the cellars of the Palace. They formed their own ice hockey team, played baseball, took up skiing and learnt German. Every morning they met for coffee at the Alpenrose cafe where they charmed the Adelbodener women by calling them ‘Sweetie’ and ‘Darling’.
As serving members of the US government, the men continued to receive military pay which, much to the delight of local shopkeepers, they spent on watches and sports equipment. Markus Klopfenstein sold so many cameras to the Americans that his supplier, Zeiss suspected he was trading in the black market and sent a representative to investigate.
Ernst Oester of Oester Sport recalled that the young American GIs declined to use his changing rooms, preferring to strip down to their underwear in the shop. “They wore jockeys, which were unknown in Switzerland at the time and they stood there, bare-chested and hairy-legged. It was too much for one farmer’s wife who was so shocked by what she saw that she walked backwards out of the shop.”
The internees formed a swing band and invited the Adelbodners to dances in the Palace ballroom. At Christmas they arranged a screening of Snow White and the Seven Dwarves for the children. Nobody in Adelboden had ever seen a motion picture before; neither had they tasted chewing gum or used a biro. With the aid of dictionaries, love affairs blossomed and some of the local girls married airmen. In 1946, young women like Irma McLaughlin and Doris Scott followed their husbands to America in what came to be known as the ‘Bride Ships’.
The Nevada Palace never fully regained its former glory. WWII bankrupted the Richert brothers. Henry died and Jacques ended his days as a waiter in an Interlaken cafe.
In 1996 a major fire destroyed the hotel’s upper floors. Charred and abandoned, it was finally torn down in 2001. There was talk of building a family hotel, in keeping with the character of the village. Instead the land was sold to The Pearl of Kuwait Real Estate Group, which went bankrupt a few years later.
The Nevada Palace Hotel has gone but the views across the valley, to the Engstligenalp and the Wildstrubel, are still there, just as they were in the 13th century when the first settlers arrived.
Reference:
American internees in Adelboden, Schweizer Radio und Fernsehen (SRF Dok)1991
Adelboden, Berner Oberland Ed. Klopfenstein, 1992
Bieler Tagblatt, ‘Geblieben sind Ruinen’, August 2001