
Sir Arnold Henry Moore Lunn (18 April 1888 – 2 June 1974) was a
skier,
mountaineer and writer. He was knighted for "services to British Skiing and Anglo-Swiss relations" in 1952. His father was a lay Methodist minister, but Lunn was an agnostic and wrote critically about Catholicism before he converted to that religion at the age of 45 and became an apologist.
He was born in
Madras
Chennai, also known as Madras ( its official name until 1996), is the capital and largest city of Tamil Nadu, the southernmost state of India. It is located on the Coromandel Coast of the Bay of Bengal. According to the 2011 Indian ce ...
,
India
India, officially the Republic of India, is a country in South Asia. It is the List of countries and dependencies by area, seventh-largest country by area; the List of countries by population (United Nations), most populous country since ...
[''Who's Who 1945''. London: Adam & Charles Black, p. 1688, where there is a very large entry for Lunn.] and died in
London
London is the Capital city, capital and List of urban areas in the United Kingdom, largest city of both England and the United Kingdom, with a population of in . London metropolitan area, Its wider metropolitan area is the largest in Wester ...
aged 86.
Early life
Arnold Lunn was born in Madras, eldest of three sons and a daughter of Sir
Henry Simpson Lunn (1859–1939) and Mary Ethel, née Moore, daughter of a canon. His father was firstly a
Methodist
Methodism, also called the Methodist movement, is a Protestant Christianity, Christian Christian tradition, tradition whose origins, doctrine and practice derive from the life and teachings of John Wesley. George Whitefield and John's brother ...
minister and later founder of Lunn's Travel agency (that would become
Lunn Poly), which encouraged tourism in the
Swiss Alps. Arnold Lunn's two brothers were also authors. Hugh Kingsmill Lunn became a noted literary journalist under the name
Hugh Kingsmill.
Brian Lunn was best known for his translations, for his biography of
Martin Luther and for his autobiography ''Switchback'' (1948). Arnold Lunn attended
Orley Farm School, in Harrow, followed by
Harrow School. He studied at
Balliol College, Oxford, and while he was there, founded and was sometime President of the
Oxford University Mountaineering Club.
Skiing
Introduced to skiing by his father, he invented the
slalom skiing race in 1922.
Mathias Zdarsky had been running competitions through poles in the early years of the 20th century, but they were essentially style competitions, though they had to be completed within a specified time. In January 1921 Lunn organized the British national ski championship at Wengen, the first national championship to include a downhill race as well as
jumping and
cross-country. Early slalom events were decided on style, as Zdarsky's pole race had been.
[Hussey, Elisabeth. "The Man Who Changed the Face of Alpine Skiing", ''Skiing Heritage'', December 2005, p. 9.] By 1922, however, Lunn, convinced that there was a real need for a race designed to test a skier's ability to turn securely and rapidly on steep Alpine ground,
[Lunn, Arnold. ''Unkilled for So Long''. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1968, p. 41.] was insisting on speed being the only arbiter. "The object of a turn is to get round a given obstacle losing as little speed as possible," he wrote. "Therefore, a fast ugly turn is better than a slow pretty turn."
On 21 January 1922, the Alpine Ski Challenge Cup, first held in 1920, was transformed into a challenge cup for slalom racing. On the practice slopes at Mürren, Lunn set pairs of flags through which the competitors had to turn, and the flags were so set as to test the main varieties of Alpine ski turns. Lunn's innovation was that the winner was simply the competitor who could make his way down in the shortest time. This first slalom was won by J. A. Joannides.
Lunn was the founder of the
Alpine Ski Club (1908), the
Ladies Ski Club (1923)
[History of the Ladies Ski Club]
, Ladies Ski Club, 1 May 2017 and the
Kandahar Ski Club (1924), and he was the organizer of many ski races around the world. He initiated in collaboration with the Austrian skier
Hannes Schneider the
Arlberg Kandahar Challenge Cup in honour of
Lord Roberts of
Kandahar. Through his efforts, the
Downhill and Slalom races were introduced into the
Olympic Games
The modern Olympic Games (Olympics; ) are the world's preeminent international Olympic sports, sporting events. They feature summer and winter sports competitions in which thousands of athletes from around the world participate in a Multi-s ...
in 1936, although he opposed the
Winter Olympic Games of that year being held in
Garmisch-Partenkirchen
Garmisch-Partenkirchen (; ) is an Northern Limestone Alps, Alpine mountain resort, ski town in Bavaria, southern Germany. It is the seat of government of the Garmisch-Partenkirchen (district), district of Garmisch-Partenkirchen (abbreviated ...
. He later wrote, "In 1936 the
Olympic Committee paid
Hitler the greatest compliment in their power by entrusting the
Nazis
Nazism (), formally named National Socialism (NS; , ), is the far-right politics, far-right Totalitarianism, totalitarian socio-political ideology and practices associated with Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party (NSDAP) in Germany. During H ...
with the organisation of the summer and winter Olympic Games." Lunn refereed the slalom in the
1936 Winter Olympics, and his son,
Peter, was the captain of the British ski team, but neither marched in the opening procession or attended the lavish banquet organised by the Nazis.
A double-black diamond trail at
Taos Ski Valley, New Mexico is named for Sir Arnold Lunn. He was a long-standing member of the Committee of the
International Ski Federation.
Agnostic years
Lunn was the son of a Methodist lay preacher, but in his book ''Now I See'' (1933) he writes that the religious instruction he received at school was so "woolly" that "I was never a Methodist, nor, for that matter, an
Anglican
Anglicanism, also known as Episcopalianism in some countries, is a Western Christianity, Western Christian tradition which developed from the practices, liturgy, and identity of the Church of England following the English Reformation, in the ...
, in any proper sense of the term." As a result, when he read
Leslie Stephen's ''An Agnostic's Apology'', "I found myself defenceless – thanks to the miserable deficiency of Anglican education – against his onslaughts." Lunn became an agnostic.
In 1924 he published ''Roman Converts'', which consisted of highly critical studies of five eminent converts to
Roman Catholicism
The Catholic Church (), also known as the Roman Catholic Church, is the List of Christian denominations by number of members, largest Christian church, with 1.27 to 1.41 billion baptized Catholics Catholic Church by country, worldwid ...
:
John Henry Newman,
Henry Edward Manning,
George Tyrell,
Gilbert Keith Chesterton and
Ronald Knox.
Critique of scientific materialism
At the same time, Lunn, who was, in
Evelyn Waugh's words, "restlessly reasonable",
[Waugh, Evelyn (1959). ''The Life of Ronald Knox''. London: Fontana Books, 1962, p. 204.] was becoming increasingly disconcerted by the intense subjectivism of his age, and in particular by what he saw as the abandonment of reason in the realm of popular science (though not of science itself). He saw this as deriving from the philosophy of
scientific materialism — the (extra-scientific) assumption that science points inevitably to materialism and that everything can be explained solely in terms of material processes. (Today the philosophical stance he critiqued would be called
metaphysical naturalism.) In 1930 Lunn published ''The Flight from Reason'', in which he argued that scientific materialism is finally a philosophy of
nihilism: it ends by questioning the very basis of its own existence. If materialism be true, Lunn argued, our thoughts are the mere product of material processes uninfluenced by reason. They are, therefore, determined by irrational processes, and the thoughts which lead to the conclusion that materialism is true have no basis in reason.
[Schmude, Karl D. (1976). ]
Mountaineer of Faith: Sir Arnold Lunn
''. A.C.T.S. pamphlet, No. 1681.
Conversion to Roman Catholicism
In the same year as ''The Flight from Reason'' appeared (1930), Lunn proposed to Knox an exchange of letters for subsequent publication in which he would advance all the objections he could conceive of to Roman Catholicism and Knox would reply. Knox accepted, and for more than a year the letters went to and fro. In 1932 they appeared as a book under the title ''Difficulties''.
This exchange did much to clarify Lunn's mind, but even so, nearly two years were to elapse before he was received into the Catholic Church. In 1932 Lunn accepted a challenge from the noted philosopher
C. E. M. Joad to discuss
Christianity
Christianity is an Abrahamic monotheistic religion, which states that Jesus in Christianity, Jesus is the Son of God (Christianity), Son of God and Resurrection of Jesus, rose from the dead after his Crucifixion of Jesus, crucifixion, whose ...
in a series of letters; they were published the following year as ''Is Christianity True?'' Joad, an agnostic, attacked Christianity on a wide variety of fronts, and Lunn, by now a believing Christian, if uncommitted to any particular denomination, responded. Lunn later wrote: "I can imagine no better training for the Church than to spend, as I did, a year arguing the case against Catholicism with a Catholic, and a second year in defending the Catholic position against an agnostic."
On 13 July 1933, Monsignor Knox received Lunn into the Catholic Church. Lunn's story of his conversion is related in ''Now I See'', which was published in November of the same year. Lunn became, in Evelyn Waugh's words, "the most tireless Catholic apologist of his generation,"
and won the applause of fellow Catholic authors like
Hilaire Belloc.
Political views
During the
Spanish Civil War
The Spanish Civil War () was a military conflict fought from 1936 to 1939 between the Republican faction (Spanish Civil War), Republicans and the Nationalist faction (Spanish Civil War), Nationalists. Republicans were loyal to the Left-wing p ...
, Lunn became a dedicated supporter of the
Nationalist
Nationalism is an idea or movement that holds that the nation should be congruent with the State (polity), state. As a movement, it presupposes the existence and tends to promote the interests of a particular nation,Anthony D. Smith, Smith, A ...
side; he wrote many anti-Republican articles for the British press, and was a member of the pro-Franco group Friends of National Spain.
Lunn
visited the Nationalist lines during the war and interviewed the Spanish General
Gonzalo de Aguilera Munro; Lunn praised
Aguilera as "not only a soldier but a scholar".
In 1937, Lunn published ''Spanish Rehearsal'', a pro-Franco analysis of the Spanish war, and
George Orwell
Eric Arthur Blair (25 June 1903 – 21 January 1950) was an English novelist, poet, essayist, journalist, and critic who wrote under the pen name of George Orwell. His work is characterised by lucid prose, social criticism, opposition to a ...
reviewed it for ''
Time and Tide'' together with ''
Storm over Spain'' by
Mairin Mitchell. In commending Mitchell’s well-informed analysis, Orwell savaged ''Spanish Rehearsal'', in particular disputing that the burning of nuns was now commonplace in "red Spain".
Lunn was also a supporter of
Benito Mussolini
Benito Amilcare Andrea Mussolini (29 July 188328 April 1945) was an Italian politician and journalist who, upon assuming office as Prime Minister of Italy, Prime Minister, became the dictator of Fascist Italy from the March on Rome in 1922 un ...
, stating in a 1938 speech that Mussolini's
Fascism
Fascism ( ) is a far-right, authoritarian, and ultranationalist political ideology and movement. It is characterized by a dictatorial leader, centralized autocracy, militarism, forcible suppression of opposition, belief in a natural social hie ...
"has no sense of bullying" and that life in Mussolini's Italy was "largely the same" as it was before Mussolini took power.
[
"Says Life in Italy not Like Germany: British Lecturer Condemns Nazism but Likes System Under Mussolini". ''The Montreal Gazette'', 28 November 1938, pg. 13.]
Lunn was opposed to Nazism for "its excesses", but lauded
Neville Chamberlain for his signing of the
Munich Agreement, saying Chamberlain did "a splendid job".
Lunn later became a friend of
William F. Buckley, Jr. and a contributor to Buckley's ''
National Review
''National Review'' is an American conservative editorial magazine, focusing on news and commentary pieces on political, social, and cultural affairs. The magazine was founded by William F. Buckley Jr. in 1955. Its editor-in-chief is Rich L ...
''. Lunn's
writings for the publication were marked by strong
anti-communist sentiments.
Personal life
Marriages
Towards the end of 1913 Lunn married Mabel Northcote, the granddaughter of
Stafford Northcote, 1st Earl of Iddesleigh. They had three children,
Peter, John and Jaqueta. Though not keen on mountaineering, Mabel shared her husband's love of skiing. She was the first woman to pass the British First Class skiing test, and she was a founder member of the Kandahar Ski Club. When her brother became 3rd
Earl of Iddesleigh
Earl of Iddesleigh ( ), in the County of Devon, is a title in the Peerage of the United Kingdom. It was created in 1885 for the Conservative Party (UK), Conservative politician Stafford Northcote, 1st Earl of Iddesleigh, Sir Stafford Northcote ...
in 1927, she acquired the
courtesy title of "Lady Mabel". Her husband wrote: "In the aristocracy of Mürren she welcomed this modest reminder of the fact that inventing the Slalom was not the only Lunn claim to respect." The Swiss, however, could never understand how Arnold could be "Mr. Lunn" and his wife "Lady Mabel", and their feelings were aptly conveyed by a member of the Kandahar who congratulated him when he was knighted "on making an honest Lady out of Mabel."
Peter Lunn later became a noted British spymaster.
"Mabel," Lunn wrote, "was invincibly English and I was much consoled during the dark days of 1940 by the fact that her confidence in final victory was never shaken." Lunn once said something nice to their daughter Jaqueta about the latter's courage during an air raid. For this he was later reproved by Mabel. "I want Jaqueta to feel," she said, "that the only thing which calls for comment in war time is cowardice." Lunn was an agnostic when they married, and Mabel a devout Anglican, which she remained all her life. Lunn wrote: "Mabel's husband, brother and three children became Catholics, but I never expected her to follow our example. Humanly speaking, she was bound to remain a member of the Church of ''England''." An Anglican vicar once asked Lunn to preach in his church. "I asked you," he said, "because you have never written anything unpleasant about Anglicanism since you became a Roman Catholic." But Lunn could never have written "anything unpleasant" about Mabel's Church, and when the first shock of his conversion was over, "Mabel soon yielded not merely notional but real assent to the belief that the
doctrinal differences which separated Mabel the Anglican from Arnold the Catholic were infinitely, yes ''infinitely'', less than those which had separated Mabel the Anglican from Arnold the agnostic."
Lady Mabel Lunn died on 4 March 1959.
Two years later, on 18 April 1961, Lunn married Phyllis Holt-Needham. In the early 1930s, Lunn was on the point of advertising for a secretary when his wife told him that she had found the perfect secretary for him, the niece of a friend of hers. As his wife had made up her mind, all that remained was for Lunn to demonstrate his "manly independence by a formal interview before engaging ''her'' candidate for the job." Two days later "a rather shy-looking young woman" was ushered into his office, Phyllis Holt-Needham. An account of the interview is given in Lunn's book ''Memory to Memory''. At the time Lunn was exchanging controversial letters with
J. B. S. Haldane, published later under the title ''Science and the Supernatural''. Phyllis, who was an agnostic and very familiar with modern attacks on Christianity, confidently expected that Haldane would demolish Lunn, and was "both surprised and annoyed" by his inability to do so. Her first reaction was to find fault with Haldane as a controversialist and to be "unduly complimentary" about Lunn's controversial talents. Gradually, however, she began to suspect that it was the weakness of Haldane's case which enabled Lunn to get the better of his "intellectual superior," and this was the first step in her return to the Christian faith.
Although Phyllis was only mildly keen on skiing and never an accomplished practitioner, she was Assistant Editor to Lunn of the ''British Ski Year Book''. In recognition, the Club elected her an Honorary Member.
Not long before his first wife died, Lunn wrote, she "confided to a friend that if anything ever happened to her, Phyllis would take me on, and few second marriages have been so warmly welcomed by the husband's children and friends, and for less obvious reasons by the husband's hostesses."
[Lunn, Arnold. ''Unkilled for So Long''. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1968, p. 116.]
Publications
*''Guide to
Montana
Montana ( ) is a landlocked U.S. state, state in the Mountain states, Mountain West subregion of the Western United States. It is bordered by Idaho to the west, North Dakota to the east, South Dakota to the southeast, Wyoming to the south, an ...
'', 1907.
*''Oxford Mountaineering Essays'', 1912 (editor).
*''The Englishman in the Alps'', 1912 (editor).
*
The Harrovians', 1913. Novel.
*''Ski-ing'', 1913
Full text*
The Alps', 1914.
*''Loose Ends'', 1919. Novel.
*''Was Switzerland Pro-German?'' 1920 (as Sutton Croft).
*''Auction Piquet'', 1920 (as "Rubicon").
*''The Alpine Ski Guide to the Bernese Oberland'', 1920.
*''Alpine Ski-ing at All Heights and Seasons'', 1921.
*''Cross-Country Ski-ing'', 1921.
*''Roman Converts'', 1924.
*''Ski-ing for Beginners'', 1924.
*''The Mountains of Youth'', 1924.
*''A History of Ski-ing'', 1927.
*''Things That Have Puzzled Me'', 1927. Essays.
*''Switzerland: Her Topographical, Historical and Literary Landmarks'', 1927.
*''John Wesley'', 1928.
''The Flight from Reason'' 1930.
*''The Complete Ski-Runner'', 1930.
*''Family Name'', 1931. Novel.
*''Venice: Its Story, Architecture and Art'', 1932.
*''Difficulties'', 1932 (with
Ronald Knox).
*''The Italian Lakes and Lakeland Cities'', 1932.
*''Within the Precincts of the Prison'', 1932.
''Is Christianity True?''1933 (with
C. E. M. Joad).
*''Public School Religion'', 1933 (editor).
*''Now I See'', 1933.
*''Ski-ing in a Fortnight'', 1933.
*''A Saint in the Slave Trade:
Peter Claver 1581-1654'', 1934.
''Science and the Supernatural'' 1935 (with
J. B. S. Haldane).
*''Within That City'', 1936. Essays.
*''Spanish Rehearsal'', 1937.
*''Communism and Socialism: A Study in the Technique of Revolution'', 1938.
*''Revolutionary Socialism in Theory and Practice'', 1939.
*''Whither Europe?'', 1940.
*''Come What May: An Autobiography'', 1940.
*''And the Floods Came: A Chapter of War-Time Autobiography'', 1942.
*''Mountain Jubilee'', 1943.
*''The Good Gorilla'', 1943. Essays.
*''Switzerland and the English'', 1944.
*''The Third Day'', 1945
Full text*''Is the Catholic Church Anti-Social?'' 1946 (with
G. G. Coulton).
*''Is Evolution Proved? A Debate between
Douglas Dewar and H. S. Shelton'', 1947 (editor).
*''Switzerland in English Prose and Poetry'', 1947 (editor).
*''Mountains of Memory'', 1948.
*''The Revolt against Reason'', 1950.
*''The Cradle of Switzerland'', 1952
Full text
*''The Story of Ski-ing'', 1952.
*''Zermatt and the Valais'', 1955.
*''Memory to Memory'', 1956. Memoirs.
*''Enigma: A Study of
Moral Re-Armament'', 1957.
*''A Century of Mountaineering 1857-1957: A Centenary Tribute to the
Alpine Club'', 1957.
*''The Bernese Oberland'', 1958.
*''And Yet So New'', 1958. Memoirs.
*''The Englishman on Ski'', 1963 (editor).
*''The Swiss and Their Mountains: A Study of the Influence of Mountains on Man'', 1963.
*''The New Morality'', 1964 (with Garth Lean).
*''Matterhorn Centenary'', 1965.
*''The Cult of Softness'', 1965 (with Garth Lean).
*''Unkilled for So Long'', 1968. Memoirs.
*''Christian Counter-Attack'', 1968 (with Garth Lean).
*''The Kandahar Story: A Tribute on the Occasion of Mürren's Sixtieth Ski-ing Season'', 1969.
Selected articles
"Switzerland in War Time,"''The Living Age'', Vol. I, 22 January 1916.
"Ski Tours with the British Interned,"''The Cornhill Magazine'', Vol. XLVI, 1919.
"Downhill Racing,"''The Atlantic'', 1 February 1949.
"Amateurs on Ski,"''New Statesman'', 12 January 1962.
Miscellany
"Mountaineering on Ski,"in Geoffrey Winthrop Young, ed., ''Mountain Craft''. London: Methuen & Co., Ltd., 1920.
''Is Evolution Proved?'' with an Introduction by Arnold Lunn. London: Hollis & Carter, 1947.
He was a contributor to the ''Encyclopædia Britannica'', and editor, from 1920 to 1971, of the ''British Ski Year Book''.
See also
*
Phrop
References
External links
*
*
Works by Arnold Lunn at
JSTOR
JSTOR ( ; short for ''Journal Storage'') is a digital library of academic journals, books, and primary sources founded in 1994. Originally containing digitized back issues of academic journals, it now encompasses books and other primary source ...
Sir Arnold Lunn Papersat Georgetown University Library
BBC Sporting Witness episode, ''The birth of skiing'', about Lunn
{{DEFAULTSORT:Lunn, Arnold
1888 births
1974 deaths
20th-century British male writers
20th-century British non-fiction writers
20th-century Roman Catholics
Alumni of Balliol College, Oxford
British autobiographers
British male alpine skiers
British male non-fiction writers
British mountain climbers
British non-fiction outdoors writers
British Roman Catholic writers
Converts to Roman Catholicism from atheism or agnosticism
Knights Bachelor
People educated at Harrow School