History of the English churches in Switzerland

In 1845 a London clergyman, the Revd G. E. Biber, sent ninety-nine questions to the English chaplains working on the Continent. Most of the answers from Switzerland were short, but the minister at Lausanne had something to get off his chest. “During my long residence of nearly a quarter of a century,” he wrote, “I have never had the pleasure of seeing one of our spiritual fathers.” No bishop had ever come. When young people in his congregation reached the age for confirmation, he had to admit them to Holy Communion anyway. They came on the promise “that they will be confirmed whenever they may have an opportunity”. The chaplain at Vevey lamented that he could not get his young people confirmed either.¹

The minister does not give his name in the report. He was almost certainly Isaac Kendal Cheesbrough, chaplain at Lausanne from 1822 to 1857.² He looked after a congregation of English people living in a foreign, French-speaking and Calvinist country, with no bishop, no diocese and, as Biber concluded, no money. Biber also found that the law on English marriages in Switzerland “appears to be doubtful”, and that the English living in the country did not exceed “a few hundreds”.³

Less than seventy years later the picture could hardly have been more different. In the Canton of Vaud alone there were English churches and chapels along the lake and in the mountains, from Lausanne to Château-d’Œx. A bishop was living at Territet, on the shore of the lake, and looking after one of them himself.

What a church meant abroad

For the English abroad a church was more than a place to spend Sunday morning. It was where their children were baptised and confirmed, where they married and where they were buried. All of it was done according to the rites of their own Church, and in their own language. The Church of England did not set out to make converts in Switzerland. It saw its duty as caring for English-speaking people wherever enough of them gathered, and its services were held in English.⁴

Miss Jemima Morell, who came out with Thomas Cook’s first conducted tour of Switzerland in 1863, explained what that meant to a traveller. “How refreshing it is,” she wrote, “after wandering for days amongst foreigners to meet again with fellow countrymen and join them in prayer for dear old England, in the familiar language of home.”⁵ For the families who stayed all winter, often because someone in the household was ill, the church was also the centre of their social life. It had its bazaars and sales of work, its library and its choir, and later its Remembrance services and carols.

Who paid

Biber’s answer to why so little had been done was blunt: “There are no funds.” The answer in Switzerland came from the innkeepers. In July 1841 an innkeeper near Thun, Herr Knechtenhofer, asked permission to open a chapel near his hotel and offered to pay the chaplain himself. Schniewind, the historian of the Anglican chaplaincies in Switzerland, calls it “the formula” for the many seasonal chaplaincies that followed. Murray’s handbook for travellers noticed it in 1848: “Several wealthy innkeepers have even gone so far as to build English chapels for their guests, or have endowed a clergyman with a stipend to perform the church services on Sundays as an inducement to English travellers to pass the Sunday with them.”⁶

Vaud followed the pattern. At Les Avants the Dufour brothers of the Grand Hôtel gave the land for a chapel, opened in 1877. The Grand-Hôtel at Les Diablerets built one in the early 1880s, largely with money subscribed by English visitors. Ami Chessex and Alexandre Emery were the two men most responsible for building the Montreux Riviera. In 1888 they put up a chapel beside their spa hotel at Aigle in two and a half months.⁷ A resort without an English service risked losing English families to one that had it. A Neuchâtel paper complained in 1887 that its town was losing them to “Genève, Lausanne, Vevey, Montreux et Clarens”.⁸

Where the English settled for long periods they built for themselves, and it took years of bazaars and subscriptions. At Vevey the church cost 103,000 francs, all of it raised by subscription, and the town council declined to help. At Territet Chessex gave the land and five thousand francs, and English donors and bazaars in his hotel raised much of the rest. At Château-d’Œx the colony held its first sale for a church building fund in 1897, and the Berthod family gave the land.⁹

The chaplains were found by the church societies in London. The Colonial and Continental Church Society and the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel kept lists of their continental chaplaincies and supplied clergy for them. In the smaller resorts the post was often filled a month at a time by English parish clergy who came out for part of the season. The visitors’ paper at Montreux listed them among the arriving guests: “Rev. B. W. Isaac, chaplain for Glion during April.”¹⁰

The bishops arrive

Cheesbrough’s complaint was answered at last in 1883. In that year a suffragan bishop was appointed to look after the English congregations of Northern and Central Europe, on behalf of the Bishop of London. His successor, Thomas Wilkinson, held the post for twenty-five years, confirming and consecrating across a jurisdiction that stretched, as the first bishop put it, from Bordeaux to Moscow. He confirmed at Territet in June 1889, and it was there that a piece of his luggage was stolen, and with it his pastoral staff.¹¹

By then the Lake Geneva shore had become the heart of the English presence in Switzerland. Murray reported in 1873 that congregations of five hundred were not uncommon at Montreux and Vevey. The number of British residents in Switzerland rose from about 5,000 in 1888 to around 11,000 in 1910. In 1907 the chaplain of Territet became the first Rural Dean of Switzerland. In 1912 the new Bishop for Northern and Central Europe, Herbert Bury, took a house at Territet. He wanted to see whether the bishop could be better placed on the Continent than in London.¹²

The churches followed the visitors. By the lake, at Lausanne, Vevey, Clarens and Territet, the congregations came for the winter, many of them for the sake of someone’s lungs. On the terraces above Montreux and in the Alps the season began in summer and then, as skating, tobogganing and skiing caught on, in winter too. At Leysin the English came as patients. Why this corner of Switzerland drew them at all is told on our page Wintering on the Swiss Riviera.

After 1914

The First World War ended it almost at once. Most English people went home in 1914, and the chapel at Aigle closed that year for good. For a time the only British in some resorts were soldiers. Wounded prisoners of war were interned at Château-d’Œx, Leysin and elsewhere from 1916, and those who died were later brought together in the cemetery at Vevey.¹³ The visitors came back after the war, but in smaller numbers, and after 1929 fewer still. In 1932 the bishop reported “a drop of at least three-quarters” in visitors to the English centres.¹⁴

After the Second World War the chapels passed one by one to other owners. Les Diablerets was sold to the Reformed parish in 1946, Mont-Pèlerin to the parish of Chardonne-Jongny in 1952, and Christ Church, Clarens, to the New Apostolic Church in 1975. Caux was handed to the Montreux Protestants in 1944, and Les Avants was rescued from demolition by a group of Swiss friends. Glion was pulled down around 1960, and the ruined chapel at Aigle after a fire in 1986. The church at Villars became the chapel of Aiglon College.¹⁵

Four of these churches still have Anglican congregations: Christ Church at Lausanne, All Saints at Vevey, St John’s at Territet and St Peter’s at Château-d’Œx. At St Peter’s the service is at half past five on Sunday evening, in English, in the church the colony began raising money for in 1897.¹⁶

If you have photographs, papers or family memories of any of these churches, please write to us at info(a)stpeters.ch.

The English churches of Vaud

On the lake at Lausanne, English services began in November 1816. From 1840 the congregation shared the new church at Ouchy, the Temple de la Croix d’Ouchy, built with a large gift from the English philanthropist William Haldimand. They stayed there until Christ Church, Lausanne, designed by G. E. Street, opened in 1878.

On the Swiss Riviera, All Saints, Vevey was consecrated in 1882, for a congregation that went back to 1823. It has long been credited to Street, though the local papers of 1882 named only the Vevey architect H. Lavanchy. St John’s, Territet, opened in 1877 on land given by Ami Chessex beside the funicular, was enlarged three times to hold its congregation. Christ Church, Clarens followed in 1888. On the terraces above there were chapels at Glion (1887), Les Avants (1877) and Caux (1906). At Mont-Pèlerin services were held in a hotel salon until a chapel was begun in July 1914, on the eve of the war.

The Rhône valley had its spas. At Aigle the chapel of St John the Evangelist stood in the grounds of the Grand Hôtel des Bains. It served the spa’s English guests from 1888 until 1914. It later served as a timber store, and was lost to fire in 1986. At Bex-les-Bains the draw was the brine baths. The English church opposite the Grand Hôtel des Bains was consecrated in 1881; by the 1930s it had closed, and a masonic lodge has used it since.

In the Alps, the English came to Les Diablerets and Villars for the mountains, in summer and then for the winter sports, and to Leysin for the sanatoria.

In the Pays-d’Enhaut, St Peter’s, Château-d’Œx was built in 1899, on land given by the Berthod family. It served a colony that had been coming to the valley since the 1860s, and it is still in use. Its story, from its consecration in 1902 through the internment years to its anniversaries, is told on the history of St. Peter’s. Janet Daenzer’s heritage of St. Peter’s, 1866–1919 is the fullest single account of one parish. The contemporary newspaper reports of the First World War internments at Château-d’Œx are published in full, and free to read, in the Château-d’Œx press archive.

Index of questions

The index below lists the questions each page answers, with a link to the answer. For the churches of Vaud it shows the first two; the full list is on each church’s page.

The phenomenon

How the English learned to love the Alps

Wintering on the Swiss Riviera

What did the English do all winter?

Where did the English send their children to school?

The church societies

The Colonial and Continental Church Society

The Society for the Propagation of the Gospel

Canton of Vaud

Aigle — St. John the Evangelist

Bex-les-Bains — English Church

Caux — St. Michael and All Angels

Château-d’Œx — St. Peter’s

Clarens — Christ Church

Glion — English Chapel

Lausanne — Christ Church

Lausanne-Ouchy — Temple de la Croix d’Ouchy

Les Avants — English Chapel

Les Diablerets — English Church

Leysin — English Chapel

Mont-Pèlerin — English Chapel

Montreux — St. John’s Anglican Church

Vevey — All Saints

Villars — English Church (now the Aiglon College Chapel)

Canton of Bern

Interlaken — English Chapel (in the monastery church)

Meiringen — English Church

Mürren — English Church

Wengen — St. Bernard’s

Canton of Geneva

Geneva — Holy Trinity

Canton of Valais

Arolla — St. George’s

Belalp — Church of the Good Shepherd

Chandolin — English Chapel (chapelle des Daillettes)

Zermatt — St. Peter’s

Canton of Grisons

Pontresina — Holy Trinity

English services without a church

Not every place where the English worshipped built something. In the resorts a Sunday service was often simply an amenity of the hotel, advertised alongside the telephone and the sulphur spring. It was taken by whichever clergyman happened to be staying that month. In four places in the Canton of Vaud the press records English services but no church:¹⁷

La Comballaz, above Aigle, where the Hôtel de la Couronne advertised “culte anglais” from 1 May to 1 October. It is attested in 1893, and again in a different paper in May 1895.
Les Rasses, above Sainte-Croix. In January 1911 the town’s official weekly list of services carried an “English Church Service” at the Hôtel du Mont-Blanc, between the National and Catholic churches. The notice gave Morning Prayer, Holy Communion and sermon at half past ten, and Evening Prayer at half past five, taken by the Revd Q. A. Bienenmann, M.A.
Chexbres, listed in resort promotion of 1910 and 1911 as offering “culte protestant et culte anglais”.
Morges, where in May 1925 a notice in English and French offered a service “if no less than eight (8) persons can be expected to be present”. At it, the hopes for a boys’ home and “a small English Church for Morges” would be explained. Whether anything came of it, we do not know.

The Revd G. E. Biber’s inquiry of 1845 into the English Church on the Continent, as quoted in Paul W. Schniewind, Anglicans in Switzerland (Berne, 1992), pp. 6–7. ↩
Schniewind, p. 5, which lists Cheesbrough at Lausanne from 1822 to 1857. The Biber report does not name the minister, and the identification is ours. The forenames are independently attested at Lausanne: the town’s register of deaths, printed in the Feuille d’avis de Lausanne of 11 August 1857 (Scriptorium item 42200), enters “Isaac-Kendal Cheesbrough, ministre anglais, âgé de 64 ans”, and the Archives cantonales vaudoises list him as “1822-1857: Isaac Kendal Cheesbrough (1790-1857)”. The English papers give only an initial. A notice of February 1857 records a testimonial to “the Rev. L Cheesbrough, at Lausanne, in Switzerland, on his resignation of the English chaplaincy at that place, which he had held for 35 years” (Saint James’s Chronicle, 24 February 1857, p. 1, read in the British Newspaper Archive’s OCR text, where the initial may be L or I), and the vacancy lists of that August call him “Rev. J. Cheesbrough, dec.” Those thirty-five years confirm the span of 1822 to 1857. ↩
Schniewind, pp. 7–8, quoting the Biber report. ↩
Schniewind, p. 3. ↩
Jemima Morell, Miss Jemima’s Swiss Journal, as quoted in Schniewind, pp. 9–10. She was writing of the English service at Interlaken on Sunday 5 July 1863. Schniewind heads the entry 6 July, which was a Monday; on p. 90 he gives 5 July. ↩
Schniewind, p. 8, quoting Murray’s Handbook for Travellers in Switzerland (1848), paragraph 11. ↩
The details, with their sources, are on the pages for Les Avants, Les Diablerets and Aigle. For Chessex and Emery, see the Dictionnaire historique de la Suisse and Wintering on the Swiss Riviera. ↩
La Suisse libérale, 7 October 1887. ↩
For Vevey, Schniewind, pp. 52–56, and the chaplain’s letter to the Vevey council of July 1879, both cited on the Vevey page; for Territet, Dave Lüthi, St John the Evangelist, Territet-Montreux: Historic Study (Lausanne, 2003), p. 4; for Château-d’Œx, the Journal de Château-d’Œx, 1897, cited on the Château-d’Œx page, and Schniewind, p. 79. ↩
Journal et liste des étrangers de Montreux, 31 March 1906, list of arrivals (Scriptorium, item 430044), read on the page image. At least twenty-five chaplains of Glion can now be named, most of them from such lists and the rest from the British press; see the Glion page. ↩
Schniewind, pp. 3, 11–12, quoting Bishop Wilkinson’s journals, Twenty Years of Continental Work and Travel (1906). ↩
Schniewind, pp. 14–15, citing Murray’s handbook of 1873 and the English Herald of 5 October 1912. ↩
Schniewind, pp. 16–17; the Aigle and Vevey pages. The British military cemetery at St Martin’s, Vevey, was created in 1921 and inaugurated in June 1923 with seventy-eight graves; see the Vevey page. ↩
Schniewind, pp. 17–18 and 21. ↩
Details and sources on each church’s page, linked below. ↩
Service time as given on the Château-d’Œx page, September 2026. ↩
Found in the digitised Swiss press in July 2026. None of the four has a page of its own, because in each case the sources support a service rather than a building, and calling a hotel drawing room a church would overstate what they say. ↩