James Riddell (skier)
W. James Riddell
Skiing achievements
In 1929, he raced for
He worked with Lunn and the Kandahar Ski Club to overcome Scandinavian objections to downhill-only skiing: they saw the sport being as much uphill as down. Finally, Alpine skiing was admitted at Garmisch, but only on the basis of combined results in downhill and slalom, a word coined by Lunn for a race with shorter, sharper turns through gates of twin poles.
Riddell was a winter sports
Education
Riddell was born in
Wartime and writing
During the
In 1948, with the writer Nevil Shute, he made a six-month flight to Australia and back in a single-engine Percival Proctor monoplane. From that experience, Riddell wrote a travel book, Flight of Fancy, and Shute the novel, A Town Like Alice. Riddell's 1957 book, The Ski Runs of Switzerland, was the first detailed guide to Swiss resorts, followed by a similar book on Austria the following year.
Marriage; and further books
He married another former ski racer, Jeanette Kessler, in 1959, and their combined knowledge of the Alps resulted in a Penguin handbook, Ski Holidays in the Alps, a source book for many skiers and travel writers. In it, Riddell wrote: "You do it because, once you have tried it and taken to it, there is not any other game to compare with it in the world."
Riddell was president of the Ski Club of Great Britain, the Kandahar Club and the Alpine Ski Club in postwar years, and was awarded the Pery medal and Arnold Lunn medal while continuing his career as writer and traveller.
He gave up skiing in his 70s, though he often returned to Muerren, the Kandahar Club's Swiss Alpine headquarters, where he spent time painting
, he worked on a unique ski stamp collection.After the death of his first wife, he married Alison in 1973 and his daughter Jemma Jeannette was born in 1976. He died on 2 February 2000 aged 90.
Rediscovering James Riddell
In 2009, James' wife, Alison Riddell, asked Antony Nasce to adapt one of his books, Animal Lore and Disorder, into an application for iPhone and iPod touch, some 60 years after its initial book release. In 2010, the sequel Hit or Myth was also converted into an App for sale on the iTunes Store.
Publications
- Animal Lore and Disorder (1947)
- Hit Or Myth: Family of Imaginary Beasts (1948)
- In The Forests of the Night (1948)
- Very Wild Life. An Unnatural History Book for First and Second Childhood (1948)
- Flight of Fancy (1950)
- Many, Many Times (1953)
- The Holy Land (1954)
- London in Colour – A Collection of Colour Photographs (With Notes by William Gaunt) (1955)
- African Wonderland (1956)
- Dog in The Snow (1957)
- The Ski Runs of Switzerland (1957)
- The Ski Runs of Austria (1958)
- Ski Holidays in the Alps (1961)
- Ski Lore and Disorder (1962)
Sources
References
- ^ SR/Olympic Sports: James Riddell Archived 6 January 2009 at the Wayback Machine
- ^ Anthony, Leslie. White Planet: A Mad Dash Through Modern Global Ski Culture, page 122