Plan for the future. But don’t forget your past

Steve Keenan

October 16, 2012

By Steve Keenan and Mark Frary

In the headlong rush to improve your company’s SEO, add plug-ins, make video, launch that Pinterest account, supercharge the blog and plan your content and marketing strategy, you could be forgetting something.

Where you’ve come from.

A history lesson is not high on the ever-lengthening social and digital list of ‘must-do’s’ but it’s becoming a critical factor. It’s an annoying phrase, yet curating your past is as important as any of the above.

With a barrage of price-comparison sites dominating Google, travellers are looking for an edge, something more, to help make a decision. Google+ will help, video is another factor and fuzzy/semantic search is (while in its infancy) an interesting development.

But a good story, a sense of history, of having been there-done-that boosts traveller’s comfort and security in making the decision on which travel company to book with.

Which is why we so enjoyed working with ski operator Erna Low in marking its 80th anniversary this year…

THE BOOK

Erna Low was born in Vienna in 1909, the daughter of Jewish parents from what is now the Czech Republic. She loved sport and became skilled in many disciplines: she played handball for Austria’s best team, came second in the javelin at the Women’s Amateur Athletic Association Championships (essentially the world champs at the time) at Stamford Bridge in 1932 and was a super-keen skier.

She came to England to study for her PhD in literature and while here began to think of ways she could fund trips back to see her family in Austria. So it was in November 1932 that Erna placed an ad on the front page of the Morning Post, offering two weeks’ skiing in Austria for £15. Five students came on that first trip but it proved such a success that the company went on to much bigger things, eventually growing by the 1960s to the size where it was taking thousands of people skiing. These included Princess Anne, other famous people and many other “ordinary” skiers.

What a fabulous story and one that was ripe for turning into a book about Erna’s life. That meant interviewing her family, friends and colleagues, searching through newspapers and books at the British Library and the Ski Club of Great Britain.

Erna was also something of a hoarder, keeping all her letters, adverts, press clippings as well as pages and pages of autobiographical notes.

It was a huge project but one that has just come to fruition. The book, Aiming High, is now published and was launched in time for the 80th anniversary of Erna’s first organised ski trip.

Some biographers have a challenge in finding material to fill their books, we had the opposite - what would we have to leave out? Thankfully, you don’t have to stop at the printed page these days.

CINE/RETRO FILM

Erna Low died 10 years ago. Yet for three decades, from 1940, she took cine film of her trips. They span early UK houseparties and summer holidays through to ski, for which the company remains known.

When current MD Joanna Yellowlees-Bound wanted to commemorate the 80th, we uncovered 19 of her films in a cupboard in the office. Half were black & white, the rest in colour and all on 16mm film, the type used by semi professionals. Sadly, all were silent films with no audio.

But what we had was priceless: roughly 10,000ft of film, equivalent to four hours of footage. The quality was generally pretty good. They had been stored in containers in the dark in non humid, dry conditions for decades: it was the first time many had seen the light since.

It took a while to find a machine to view the films on. Short of buying a projector, there are not many around. Eventually, I was guided to the British Film Institute which has two Steenbeck film viewers from the 1970s. And I began to watch films shot by Erna, on average, some 50 years ago.

The first thing I recorded was…. How much I wished Erna had had a tripod. It’s fair to say there was an awful lot of traversing of camera and shaky camera work. But she had a very good eye for filming locals: there are many shots of families and people at work. And a cine camera wasn’t common then, so many did pose for shots.

Only eight of the 19 films concern skiing. In the 50s and 60s, Erna was a prime mover in UK houseparty holidays and there are some fabulous shots of Pimms o’clock and charabanc outings. She was also a big fan of roadtrips, and there are six or seven films recording drives to Tunisia, Majorca, France, Greece and Italy alongside air-based trips to the Canary Islands and Madeira.

But the ski is what interested us most and we weren’t disappointed. The films gave a snapshot of ski fashion, Europe’s first ski lifts, of early learning techniques, curling and apres-ski and chalet holidays in the 1950s. There was even a shot of actor Roger Lloyd Pack aged six or seven, whose mother Uli worked for Erna Low.

By combing through the files, we sorted the best, digitised them, and came up with a 10-minute overview film of the company’s history - plus several shorts by subject. You can see the main Erna Low film here - and a spin-off idea, of taking Olympic skier Graham Bell to the Alps with some pairs of vintage wooden skis.

The company’s past is curated, the film saved and ready for future use. And if I were booking a ski holiday and prices were fairly similar, I know that I would be very heavily persuaded to book with a company that has a sense of deep history and knowledge - and I could see it with my own eyes.