“I’ve got about five Bond girls’ numbers in my phone,” says Alan Ramsay, as we glide up the mountain in the gloom of pre-dawn. “But they’re all over 70.”

Despite the early hour, the Scottish-born honorary Mürrenian is already on form. He’s not wearing his kilt – an outfit he’s been known to sport when skiing the Inferno, billed as the world’s craziest amateur ski race, of which more later. Today he’s settled for the understated elegance of bright-red tartan ski trousers.

We’re heading up to the summit of the Schilthorn, and the revolving restaurant immortalised in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. Back in the late 1960s Mürren desperately needed financing to get the final, most ambitious leg of its wildly over-budget cable car project finished; Bond producers, a mountaintop lair from which Telly Savalas’s Blofeld could stroke his white Persian and fine-tune his diabolical plans. It was a tie-up that saw enduring links forged between cast and location, with multiple official reunions since. Hence Ramsay’s notable contacts list.

I’m as Bond fixated as the next middle-aged man, but that’s not why I’m here. I’ve come to delve into the origins of an exclusive ski club established in this intimate Bernese Oberland ski resort a century ago this month: one so cool and coveted that Bond creator Ian Fleming couldn’t help but make his most famous creation a member.  

The cable car bumps to a stop and, skis hoisted on shoulders, we step out into Piz Gloria. Back in the winter of ’69, this svelte, conical retreat was awash with Bond girls, Joanna Lumley and Diana Rigg among them, draped over mountain-chic furnishings segmented by gold-hooped partitions. The latter, pleasingly, are still there; the rest, transformed into a revolving restaurant that, once every 45 minutes, completes a full rotation of what may very well be the Alps’ most compelling panorama.

To the west, the sun is creeping up behind the Eiger, Mönch and Jungfrau, bestowing on the neatly aligned trinity of peaks a messianic glow. To the north, yet to emerge from beneath its snug duvet of morning mist, Lake Thun, with the Swiss Plateau and Germany’s Black Forest beyond. Mont-Blanc Ramsay points out to the southwest, through the saddle of two of the more than 200 Alpine peaks visible from this 2,970m perch. Far below, hidden by a ridge of rock, is the cliff-edge eyrie of Mürren, itself a sheer 800m above the Lauterbrunnen valley floor.

It was amongst these implausible contours that, a century ago, tweed-suited Brits sought to revolutionise competitive skiing. Their driving force was Arnold Lunn, a charismatic mountaineer who had the look of a kindly Edwardian headmaster and the wild-eyed adrenalin lust of a base jumper.