Where did the English send their children to school?

In November 1907 a small advertisement appeared in the visitors’ paper of Montreux, in English, between a hotel notice for Adelboden and a bank’s terms of deposit.

Château d’Oex — Tuition. The Rev. E. Dudley Lampen M.A. Cantab: Chaplain for Winter will receive two Pupils into his chalet or give tuition to boys whose parents intend passing the Winter in Château d’Oex. Excellent climate. Boys ages 9–14 preferred. None very delicate taken as boarders. Address: Châlet le Verger.

The man placing it was the winter chaplain of the English church at Château-d’Œx. He was advertising for pupils in the same paper that listed his services, and he was doing it because there was a market: British families were spending whole winters in a Vaud mountain village, and their sons had to be taught by somebody.

That advertisement contains most of this page. English schooling in Vaud began not with institutions but with clergymen taking boys into their houses, and it ended, a lifetime later, with English public schools occupying Belle Époque hotels. This page follows that line, from the local press.

The chaplain as schoolmaster

The pattern is older than the Riviera’s fame. In 1845 the Revd G. E. Biber sent a questionnaire to every English church on the Continent, and the chaplain at Vevey, the Revd Barry O’Meara Dean, replied in enough detail that we know how his chaplaincy worked. Services were in the church of St Martin in summer and a room at the Hôtel des Trois-Couronnes in winter — and, in the same breath, that the minister “receives 4 pupils, between 7 and 14 years of age”.

Four pupils, aged seven to fourteen. Sixty-two years later Lampen advertised for two, aged nine to fourteen. The chaplaincy and the schoolroom were not separate careers; they were one household.

Between those two comes the most quotable claim in the material, and the one that needs the most care. At the end of December 1899 the Vaud papers began carrying a recollection, prompted by the South African war then filling the news. La Revue of Lausanne and the Tribune de Lausanne both printed it on 28 December, as did the Feuille d’avis de Vevey; the Aigle district paper followed on 3 January and the Montreux visitors’ paper on 6 January, where it runs:

“on nous rappelle que le général Kitchener qui vient de détruire les derviches au Soudan était, en 1865, l’élève de M. Bennett, pasteur anglais à Montreux et qui tenait un pensionnat au château de Rennaz, près Villeneuve.”

Lord Kitchener, at twelve or thirteen, a pupil of the English chaplain of Montreux, at the clergyman’s boarding school in the château de Rennaz. Drawing was taught him by a painter named Renkewitz, who by then was still teaching in Montreux.

Taken alone, that would not be worth much. The phrase on nous rappelle — “we are reminded” — is the paper telling you it is repeating something rather than reporting it, and five printings inside ten days across one region are one item circulating, not five witnesses. Two of the five say plainly that they are quoting the Feuille d’avis de Montreux.

But it does not stand alone. Two and a half years later, in July 1902 — the week Kitchener came home from South Africa to an ovation at Paddington, as the same page’s telegrams report — the Feuille d’avis de Montreux ran a long local history of a country house at Rennaz, written by L. Poirier-Delay from the private archives of the notary Léon Perret, who owned it. The house is the Château de Grand-Clos, “situé à l’extrémité du petit village de Rennaz, sur la route de Villeneuve à Aigle”. Its occupants are listed in order: the pretender Naundorff in 1837–38, a proscribed French republican family in 1854–58, and then:

“De 1864 à 1875, il fut occupé par le pensionnat du Révérend Bennet, pasteur anglican, qui compta au nombre de ses élèves celui qui est aujourd’hui Lord Kitchener, commandant en chef des troupes anglaises dans l’Afrique du Sud.”

That is a different kind of source: an estate history drawn from a notary’s papers, not a paragraph passed between newspapers. It gives the school a name for its building, an eleven-year run from 1864 to 1875, and it is the only source we have found that calls its proprietor not merely an English pastor but “pasteur anglican” — an Anglican clergyman.

One caution survives. The clergyman’s name is spelled both ways in the archive: Bennett in four of the five press printings, and Bennet in the Aigle paper and in the 1902 estate history. We have not found a source that settles it, and we have not traced any record of Kitchener’s Swiss schooling independent of Vaud.

What the trade actually was

It is tempting to picture the Belle Époque Riviera as a coast of British schools. The directories say otherwise, and they say it precisely.

In September 1905 the Journal et liste des étrangers de Montreux, de Vevey printed its page of “Renseignements et adresses diverses” — the district’s standing directory of doctors, chaplains, pharmacies and everything else a foreign resident might need. Private education appears there under three separate headings.

Under Écoles particulières: Mlle Cardinaux at Clarens, the Marlburia English Boys’ School, and Mlle Mattei. Under Institutions de demoiselles et externats: Mme Dupraz at Clarens, “Des Essarts, Territet (Pens. demois.)”, Mme Hélène Guenther, La Printanière, Mme Rollier, Mlle A. Supplitt at Territet, and Mlles Vincent. Under Pensionnats: Mme Peytrequin, Mlle Guenther and Mlle E. Drapel.

Thirteen establishments in one district in one year — and exactly one of them is named as English. The rest are Swiss, and the largest single category is institutions de demoiselles: boarding schools for young ladies. The pre-war business of the Montreux Riviera was not British schooling transplanted to Switzerland. It was Swiss schools selling French, music and accomplishments to foreign girls, of whom the British were a part of the clientele rather than the proprietors.

The same page shows the other half of the arrangement. Under Professeurs stands “F. A. Hake, professeur d’anglais au collège de Vevey et à l’école supérieure” — the colony’s English teacher of 1900 absorbed, five years later, into the Swiss school system.

Those Swiss houses had long lives, and they changed their names as they went. “Des Essarts” had been advertising in the same paper thirteen years earlier, in October 1892, and its notice gives both its character and its age: “Pensionnat et Externat des Essarts — Institution française de demoiselles. Fondée en 1874. Prospectus et références à disposition. S’adresser à M. des ESSARTS, Campagne de l’Abri, Bon-Port.” A French institution for young ladies, founded in 1874, run by a family rather than housed at an address.

It did not keep the name. When a Montreux paper came to write a teacher’s obituary in May 1961, it placed her career by tracing what the school had turned into: she had taught “au Pensionnat des Essarts, devenu depuis … Fisher, c’est-à-dire l’actuel Monte-Rosa”. Three names for one house across nearly ninety years — worth knowing before accepting any confident account of when a Swiss school was “founded”, or of what it has always been called.

1927, and the English build their own

Something changed after the First World War, and the change is datable. Paul Schniewind’s history of the Anglican chaplaincies records that “in 1927 two English girls’ public schools were founded in the district: St George’s College at Clarens and Châtelard School at Les Avants” — and, in the same sentence, who looked after them: “St George’s had regularly the chaplain of St John’s as its school chaplain and Châtelard the chaplain of Christ Church, Clarens.”

That is the arrangement this page has been building towards. The English schools of the Riviera did not import chaplains. They drew them from the two Anglican churches already standing at Montreux and Clarens. Schniewind adds that the chaplain at Clarens “was responsible for several schools in the region” — the schools were part of the job.

Both schools can be watched opening. On Tuesday 18 January 1927 the Messager de Montreux carried an advertisement in English, two days ahead of the event:

Châtelard-School for Girls. Villa Quisisana, Montreux. Opening: January 20th 1927. The Head Mistress: Miss D. Braginton, M.A. Cambridge, will see parents between 2 and 4.30 on Tuesday & Wednesday January 18th and 19th, or at other times by appointment.

St George’s took a different route to the same place. By the autumn of 1928 the Feuille d’avis de Montreux was reprinting from the Swiss commercial gazette the constitution of the company behind it, and the list is worth reading in full: Lorna-Violet Southwell at Clarens and Osyth-Mary Potts at Purley, as partners of unlimited liability; and as sleeping partners Ethel-Florence Southwell at Glion (fr. 18,750), Constance-Rosamond-Alers Hankey at Buckfastleigh (fr. 25,000), Mary-Venton Gibson in London, Helen-Mary Beale at East Grinstead and Evelyn-Madeline Sellar at Chilworth (fr. 12,500 each) — “toutes de nationalité anglaise”. The firm was “L. V. Southwell, O. M. Potts et Cie, Ecole Saint-Georges”, of the Rue du Torrent, Clarens.

Seven Englishwomen incorporating a girls’ school in a Swiss commune — five of them pledging some eighty-one thousand francs between them, the other two putting up unlimited liability instead. It is as clear a picture of who was doing this, and with whose money, as the archive is ever likely to give.

Châtelard’s later moves were written up nearly forty years afterwards, when the Journal de Montreux gave a full page to the district’s private schools in September 1964. Villa Quisisana proved too small almost at once, and the school moved to Chamby, into the former Hôtel des Narcisses. “Dix ans après sa fondation” it outgrew Chamby too and went up to Les Avants, where the Grand Hôtel was still to be had — “C’était à la veille de la guerre.” From 1939 to 1947 the school was moved to England altogether, returning to Les Avants “quand l’Europe eut retrouvé son équilibre”.

After that it took “de nombreuses volées de 200 à 220 jeunes filles, appartenant en général à la bonne société anglaise, et parmi lesquelles il s’est trouvé plus d’une princesse” — aged nine to eighteen, working towards the General Certificate of Education at O and A Level. The paper is blunt about what kind of place it was: “C’est une école anglaise, où l’enseignement est donné dans la langue de Shakespeare”, which did not stop it taking girls of other nationalities who wanted an initiation into British culture. It ran for no profit, everything earned going back into the teaching and the buildings — a principle the paper attributes to the foundress.

The traffic ran both ways. When the chaplain of St John’s, Mr Grier, left in 1936 to be Dean of St Ninian’s Cathedral, Perth, what was remembered of him was “his long experience as a headmaster”, which had “enabled him to do such successful school work in the district”. At Lausanne in 1936 the President of the Association of the Girls’ Schools, Ms D. M. Ruey, wrote to the church setting out what the next chaplain must be: “a definite Churchman”, with “some experience in educational work”, who would “approach the headmistresses and ask for access to the children”. The chaplain there had already begun “a regular series of talks on religion in all the schools of any size”, the first term’s subject being “The Origin of Religion” and the second’s “Problems of Conduct”.

Lausanne by then was a city of schools. A report of an Advent service in December 1926 noted that the town once called “the town of the forty Colonels” had changed: “The Colonels have nearly all gone. It might now be said Lausanne is the town of ‘four times forty schools’.”

And when Bishop Staunton Batty came to Berne in 1926 and tried to explain why the chaplaincy there was so hard to sustain, he reached for exactly this. Berne had “neither English residents (as in Montreux and Château d’Oex), nor schools (as in Lausanne and Geneva), and therefore little out of which to form a core or steady nucleus of a church community”. Schools were one of the two things an Anglican congregation in Switzerland could be built out of. That is why they belong in a church’s history.

The schools the archive turns up

The famous names are not the whole list. Searching the Vaud press for the schools themselves produces institutions that no general account mentions.

On 2 May 1931 the Liste des étrangers de Montreux et environs printed, among the residents of private houses, two entries that are not households at all. The first is headed Chillon College, Villeneuve (Vaud), and runs to seventeen names: Mr Alexander Pym, M.A. Cantab., and Mrs Pym; Miss Simpson, Mlle O. Goldschmith, Mme Ducamp, Miss Hodges; then Messrs Hett, Thresher, Airy, Moss-Blundell, Roberts, Bett, Clark, Markham, Gibson, Riley and Stuart — twelve of them with an Oxford or Cambridge degree printed after the name. An English public school, staff and all, in a Swiss visitors’ list, at Villeneuve — the town the papers of 1899 had used to place the château de Rennaz, where an English clergyman kept his handful of boys sixty-six years earlier.

The second is headed Glion sur Territet, English Preparatory School, with six: Capt. W. E. Mocatta, M.A. (Oxon.) and Mrs Mocatta, Mr K. W. Bramley, Mr J. E. Smith Wright, Mr W. S. Ellaby and Miss M. Westcott. The same school stands in the same paper’s list on 21 April 1923, so it was running at Glion for at least eight years.

Our own valley had one too, and it appears in the ordinary traffic of village life rather than in any directory. In February 1922 Le Progrès de Château-d’Œx reported that the village’s second team had beaten “l’équipe de l’École anglaise” by three goals to two after extra time. In March 1924 the Journal de Château-d’Œx carried a small advertisement: “On demande à acheter une poussette. S’adresser École anglaise Ch.-d’Œx” — the English School wanted to buy a pram. Schniewind records that three English schools and a college for young men were spoken of at Château-d’Œx in the summer of 1932, when about two hundred British residents remained there despite the Depression. No name for any of them has survived in the papers we can search.

The best glimpse of what these schools were like comes from a ski race. In February 1929 Le Progrès described a new competition at Château-d’Œx, run on the Swiss army’s patrol system, “entre les troupes d’éclaireurs anglais en Suisse” — between the English scout troops in Switzerland. The first Château-d’Œx troop won; the patrol of the École anglaise de Glion came second, four-fifths of a second behind; a third team came from Château Riant in Geneva. They were competing for a silver challenge cup presented by Capt. E. Mocatta of Glion — on the balance of the evidence the same Mocatta who heads the English Preparatory School’s staff two years later. The paper hoped the race would become annual, with a jumping and slalom competition added.

English boys in a Swiss mountain village, organised as scouts, racing in military patrol formation for a cup given by their headmaster. The same issue records that the sports train that season had been arranged by the committee of the “Visitor’s Ski-Club” — the sibling of the Château-d’Œx Visitors Curling Club that appears elsewhere on this site in the same winter.

The chapel the school nearly pulled down

The clearest single meeting of these two worlds happened at Les Avants in 1938.

The Grand Hotel there had built an Anglican chapel in its grounds in 1872, for its English guests. When the Châtelard School took over the hotel in 1938, it decided not to take on the chapel — it preferred one of its own inside the building — and the hotel company resolved to pull the old chapel down. It was saved by a group of Swiss well-wishers, who formed the Société de la Chapelle des Avants, called for subscriptions and bought the land. The restoration was paid for by a thé-vente held, of all places, on the terrace of the Châtelard School itself.

After the Second World War the rescued chapel was given a name it had never had: St Peter. The same dedication as the church at Château-d’Œx, and the same as this parish.

An English girls’ school displaced an English chapel; Swiss neighbours saved it; and it became St Peter’s. There is no tidier illustration of how tangled the English presence in Vaud actually was.

What became of them

This page stops in the 1970s, and deliberately. Several of the schools named here are still trading today under names that have changed more than once, and their present arrangements are their own business, not a historical claim we can make from the archive.

It is also worth resisting the idea that the Riviera’s later fame as a place of “finishing schools” was an English story. The same 1964 survey visited Le Mesnil at Bon-Port, an institute founded by Mme H. Alardo-Brasseur and described, without embarrassment, as reserved to “une certaine aristocratie du sang, de l’argent ou du grade”, where the directress explained that “notre institut est pour elles la dernière étape de la jeunesse avant leur mariage”. Its eighty-five girls came from Ecuador, the Congo, Rhodesia, Guatemala and Turkey — “sept Suissesses pourtant”. That is an international elite, not a British one. The genuinely English institution on that page was Châtelard, and it taught for British examinations.

What the sources let us say is that the connection lasted as long as the congregations did. The joint carol service of the English schools began in 1927, the year the two girls’ schools were founded; in Advent 1962, Aiglon College from Villars and Châtelard School from Les Avants combined for it and filled St John’s, Montreux, “to overflowing, including the gallery”, with the Presbyterian minister of the Scots Kirk at Lausanne preaching. Christ Church, Clarens closed in 1968 and the services at Les Avants went with it. At Leysin the schools outlasted the church: by the early 1990s there were American schools there with more than a thousand students between them, and no Anglican chaplain had been found since 1980.

Châtelard itself ended on the front page. “Un coup très dur pour Les Avants”, ran L’Est Vaudois on 30 September 1975: “CHÂTELARD SCHOOL FERME SES PORTES”. The president of the village’s own interest society gave the paper his first reaction — “C’est une catastrophe” — and the president of the school’s foundation, Neil H. Green, explained what had happened. There had been 170 pupils in 1973, 150 the following year, and “à peine plus de 100” now. He named three causes: the world recession; “la surévaluation de fait du franc suisse”, which in five years had pushed fees up “de 80 pour cent en livres sterling et de 60 pour cent en dollars”; and the decline of the British economy. The administrators noted, too, that the school’s own statutes were no longer being met: there were now “moins de 50 pour cent d’élèves de nationalité britannique”.

It is worth being exact about this, because it is tempting to reach for the falling pound, and the paper puts the mechanism the other way round. What it describes is the Swiss franc becoming too expensive, and with it the plain arithmetic that finally undid a British school on a Swiss mountain: as Green put it, “la concurrence des écoles anglaises est donc désormais et pour longtemps trop forte.” It had become cheaper to educate an English girl in England.

The chaplain who took four boys into his house at Vevey in 1845 and the school with seventeen Oxbridge men on its staff at Villeneuve in 1931 are the same story at two ends of its life. In both, the English in Vaud stayed long enough to need their children taught — and the church was there because they had.

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Sources

Journal et liste des étrangers de Montreux, de Vevey — 1 October 1892 (the institutions de demoiselles), 9 September 1905 (the district directory), 2 November 1907 (Lampen’s advertisement), 6 January 1900, 21 April 1923 and 2 May 1931 (visitor lists). La Revue, 28 December 1899. Tribune de Lausanne et Estafette, 28 December 1899. Feuille d’avis de Vevey, 28 December 1899. Feuille d’avis du district d’Aigle, 3 January 1900. Feuille d’avis de Montreux, 14 July 1902 (L. Poirier-Delay on the Château de Grand-Clos, from the archives of the notary Léon Perret). Le Progrès de Château-d’Œx, 28 February 1922 and 27 February 1929. Journal de Château-d’Œx, 12 March 1924. Messager de Montreux, 18 January 1927 (Châtelard School’s opening advertisement). Feuille d’avis de Montreux, 29 October 1928 (the constitution of the St George’s company). Journal de Montreux, 12 May 1961 (the Frey obituary) and 5 September 1964 (the survey of the district’s schools, and the account of Châtelard School). L’Est Vaudois, 30 September 1975 (the closure of Châtelard School). Digitised newspapers consulted at Scriptorium, Bibliothèque cantonale et universitaire de Lausanne (scriptorium.ch).

Paul Schniewind, Anglicans in Switzerland, Past and Present (1992), for the chaplaincy record: the Vevey questionnaire of 1845, the foundation of the two schools in 1927 and their chaplains, Bishop Batty at Berne, the Lausanne correspondence of 1936, Château-d’Œx in 1932, and Les Avants.