My aunt Eileen Fuchs, who has died aged 92, was a talented violinist and decided, in 1953, to spend a year studying in Vienna. There, she met and married Karl Fuchs, a member of the Austrian Olympic ski team. Moving back to the UK, Eileen and Karl purchased Struan House hotel in Carrbridge, near Aviemore, in the Scottish Highlands, in 1954. Together, they founded the popular Austrian Ski School there.
For 30 years, the couple helped to pioneer skiing in the Cairngorms region; they were dubbed "the mother and father of Scottish skiing". Their two children, Peter and Lisi, both went on to ski at national level. Peter competed for Great Britain at the 1976 Winter Olympics in Innsbruck, in his father's home country. Peter died in a car crash four years later. After Karl's death a decade later, Eileen founded a memorial fund in her husband and son's names to help young Scottish skiers.
Born Eileen Margaret Knowles in Ashford, Middlesex, she was educated at Croydon high school for girls and then studied history at Newnham College, Cambridge, from 1938 to 1942. She was one of a generation of Newnham women who were not allowed to graduate with full degrees, although she did have the pleasure of attending the 1998 event in Cambridge at which more than 900 such women were honoured, to mark 50 years from the granting of full degree rights.
After leaving Newnham, Eileen worked throughout the rest of the second world war, and during postwar reconstruction, in London as a civil servant at the Board of Trade. She inspired a generation of skiers and walkers in her beloved Cairngorms and later lived in Grantown-on-Spey.
Eileen is survived by her daughter, four grandchildren and one great-grandchild.