The Château-d'Œx Press Archive: Primary Sources

St Peter’s holds a press-cutting archive of 32 documents — 66 scanned pages — covering the chaplaincy from 1885 to 1999. Its largest group reports the arrival and internment of British wounded prisoners of war at Château-d’Œx in 1916–17. The collection was not handed down: it was assembled by the parish’s own research for the centenary of the internment, marked here on 29 and 30 May 2016.

These documents are published here as full transcribed text, not as summaries. The Times archive is paywalled, so the contemporary reports of these events are otherwise largely unavailable to read freely. Where our own history pages state a figure or a name, this is where it comes from — and where it can be checked.

Each document is transcribed verbatim from the original cutting. Nothing is paraphrased, and nothing is silently completed: a figure that cannot be read is marked as unresolved rather than guessed.

The documents

Captives from Germany

The Times, 31 May 1916

Our Wounded in Switzerland

The Times, 13 June 1916

British Sick and Wounded in Switzerland

The Greater Britain Messenger, No. CCI, July 1916

Soldiers at Château d’Oex

The Times, 17 August 1916

Our Soldiers in Switzerland

The Times, 23 August 1916

Wives of Prisoners in Switzerland

The Times, 31 August 1916

The Claim of the Prisoners

The Times, 6 September 1916

Visits to Prisoners

The Times, 6 September 1916

Prisoners’ Wives’ Visits to Switzerland

The Times, 4 October 1916

Tears and Smiles at Château d’Œx

The Times, 7 October 1916

Cheerful Wives at Château d’Œx

The Times, 10 October 1916 (dateline “CHATEAU D’ŒX, Oct. 9”)

Farewells at Château d’Oex

The Times, 20 October 1916

With the British Wounded in Switzerland

The Greater Britain Messenger — date not established (late 1916)

Chateau d’Oex (from Greater Britain Messenger, page 60)

The Greater Britain Messenger — date not established (issue undated)

Interned British Soldiers at Chateau d’Oex. the Third Contingent and How They Spent Christmas

The Greater Britain Messenger — date not established

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About this archive

The documents came from several places, and each page says which. Roughly a third are The Times, made available by The Times Archives; others were photographed from the bound volumes of the Greater Britain Messenger, or come from the local French-language Swiss press. Only the rest are St Peter’s own, kept by the parish all along — the chaplain’s annual reports, the parish magazine, and the 1902 certificate of consecration.

Only the transcribed text is published here. The scan images are held back: they are a third party’s digitisation, and permission covering them has not been recorded in writing. The underlying 1916 text is long out of copyright.

The First World War group. The largest group of cuttings covers the internment of British wounded prisoners of war at Château-d’Œx in 1916–17. That conflict is called the First World War here; it is also known as the Great War, and written WWI or WW1. Any of those will find this archive in the site search.

On dates. Several archive filenames encode a misreading of the handwritten date on the cutting — the annotator wrote day-first, and a date such as 7/10/1916 was filed as 10 July instead of 7 October. Every date on these pages is taken from the cutting’s own annotation or printed masthead, never from a filename, and where a filename disagrees the page says so.

If you are researching an ancestor who was interned at Château-d’Œx, the officer lists in the arrival reports name individual men and their regiments. We would be glad to hear from you — contact us.