Walter Ingham

Walter Ingham (1914-2000) was a UK pioneer and entrepreneur of the skiing holiday. After World War II, Britain saw an emerging demand for organised escorted foreign holidays. He helped develop the skiing marketplace in Britain and the "package holiday".

Walter John Ingham was born in Vienna on 29 May 1914. He was the second son of Frank Ingham and Lillian Grace, née Robinson, who had eloped to Vienna from Burnley, Lancashire in 1909. The family stayed in Vienna during World War I where Frank Ingham was initially interned and then subject effectively to house arrest. The family came back to England in 1919 but returned to Vienna in 1920. It was at school in Austria, with the mountains as his playground, that his passion for skiing, climbing and sailing was born. In 1932, Ingham returned to England to work as a junior salesman for Remington Typewriters (his father worked as their south-east European manager), In 1934, with £25 in capital, Ingham advertised a ‘private ski party to Ski the Tyrol – 14 days for 12 guineas’, in a British National newspaper, Daily Telegraph,inviting participants to join him on a Christmas adventure to Schoenburg, Austrian Tyrol. He discovered that if he took a party of 15 people to the Alps, he could get a free rail ticket and hotel room for himself. The trip was a success – five more to Kuhtai, Obergurgl, Gerlos and other resorts followed - and he banked £80 by the end of the ski season. He organised transport, food, accommodation, ski hire and worked with a local ski instructor teaching the group how to ski.

The business grew with skiing and ski mountaineering in the winter and walking in the summer where overseas reps were recruited from previous customers. Ingham would meet the group at Victoria Station,take them out to wherever they were going and after two weeks he would bring them back, have a quick wash and brush up at the station and collect the next group. In the summer Ingham would take coach parties, primarily around France, and between seasons, he visited the hotels and generally made arrangements for the coming season.

...
Wikipedia