Frith Finlayson was one of the pioneers of ski instruction in the Scottish Highlands. He became a leading and highly influential figure in his field, bringing ski lifts into Glencoe, helping to found the British Association of Ski Instructors and running his own school in Aviemore.

Finlayson was born in a Glasgow tenement in 1929. Like many another tenement-bred hillman, such as the late Tom Weir, Finlayson would escape the smog and squalor of Glasgow by fleeing into the hills to the north of the city at the weekend. Billy Connolly once described these (often rather forbidding) men as being equipped with 30 feet of shipyard rope, a packet of Embassy Regal, and a sarcastic expression. Finlayson and some friends were once challenged by a landowner while camping at Loch Lomond: the landowner ended up, reminisced Finlayson, having “the ass out of his trousers” burnt.

Not all of the “weekend walkers”, however, were quite so intimidating. Finlayson first met his future wife, Jeanie, at the old Café D’Or in Glasgow, a gathering point for Glasgow’s hill walkers. Jeanie recalls that “all the weekenders used to meet there. There was a lot of hill walking up Glencoe. We used to go up as part of a crowd.”

Most Glaswegians of Finlayson’s day had little interest in skiing, a pastime that was then seen as irrevocably middle-class, but he embraced the sport in the 1950s, happy to trudge up the often empty slopes around Glencoe for the joy of skiing down. Finlayson developed his skills in Switzerland, where he gained his ski instructor qualification, and began teaching skiing in Glencoe (and also on a dry slope in Glasgow).

In 1962 Finlayson moved on from Glencoe to Aviemore and the more expansive Arctic realm of the Cairngorms. With the backing of Greaves Sports, he established the Aviemore Ski School d’Ecosse, where his skills and enthusiasm inspired a new generation of young skiers. Later that year Finlayson and other instructors established the British Association of Professional Ski Instructors (BAPSI). In 1967 the organisation became the British Association of Snowsport Instructors (BASI), a more accurate description of its membership profile.

Finlayson ran the first training course in April 1963, often supervising with a pipe clenched firmly between his teeth. One of his early students remembered: “He was a stickler for discipline so we all had to be punctual and well presented. Frith was a larger than life character; tough, determined and totally single minded.”

With the huge expansion of skiing as a sport in the mid-1960s, the Aviemore centre became the locus of ski instruction in the UK, with up to 30 instructors being employed at its highest point. Finlayson, as director of training, became one of the most prominent figures of British winter sports, but eventually resigned in 1975 after a spell of internal disagreements of the sort that can arise in any organisation run by strong personalities. Finlayson said of his resignation: “It was a sad way to go. I lost the right to participate in, and be part of, something very dear to me. I was in a wilderness.”

He continued skiing until well into his seventies and remained a fixture of everyday life in Aviemore, whether driving a taxi or reminiscing in a bar, and was often sought out by former pupils who came to pay tribute to an inspirational teacher.

Finlayson published a lively and highly readable memoir in 1997, The Ski Teacher: an Autobiography.

His last years were clouded by dementia, and Alzheimer Scotland provided much support to the family. On hearing the news of Finlayson’s death, the chief executive of BASI paid tribute to Frith’s achievement as the founder of BASI: “We all owe a great deal of thanks to him for laying such strong foundations.”

Finlayson was predeceased by his only son, Iain, in 1990. He was especially proud that Iain had competed for Great Britain in the 1972 Sapporo Winter Olympics.

Finlayson is survived by his wife.

Frith Finlayson, ski instructor, was born in Glasgow on May 10, 1929. He died of bronchial pneumonia on October 13, 2009, aged 80