In which Sid and Doris visit the town museum and find a rival for the Hungarian button museum.
Until Romantics started visiting this end of Lake Geneva there were just farming villages. Lord (George Gordon) Byron came in 1816 and wrote ‘The Prisoner of Chillon’ nearby. It is a 392 line poem about the imprisonment of a Genevan monk. Sid is not familiar with the work. Or ever heard of it, the Philistine.
At about the same time the English Lake District was becoming a romantics’ destination, Montreux became a fashionable resort and stop on the grand tour. Steamers brought people up the lake and there are still seven very fine paddle steamers on regular timetables. In 1861 the railway added more demand. Our Eden Park Hotel was built in 1896, The relative zenith of Montreux as holiday destination was around 1910. The steamers date from that period.
Fans of Gavin Lyall’s Midnight Plus One will know our hero comes to see a retired general in his hotel suite here. The work may not be on a par with Byron’s but the atmosphere of 1970s France and the action sequences are very exciting.
Sid and Doris spend the morning in the town museum. There are room settings as you might expect with a carpenter’s workshop, looms and a very original kitchen plus evidence that Mary Poppins was Swiss.
Sid has picked you out a few exhibits, in case you can’t make it here.
First miniature sewing machines, with the irons for scale…
…and then the pieces of resistance: this phenomenal collection of thimbles…
…where the punchline is that they have been brought together by …
So the Swiss do have a sense of humour.