Visits to Prisoners | St. Peter's

The Times, 6 September 1916. One of St Peter’s First World War documents, from the years when British prisoners of war were interned at Château-d’Œx, 1916–17. Transcribed in full from a cutting made available by The Times Archive.

In this report: the Duke of Portland’s cheque for £100 towards the wives’ journeys, with £200 from Mr. Charles Elgar of New Zealand for the Kentish men and £100 from Lord Londonderry for County Down.

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Headline as printed: VISITS TO PRISONERS.

Handwritten annotation

The Times - 6/9/1916

DUKE OF PORTLAND’S GIFT.

There are still many applications coming in from wives and mothers of British returned prisoners who are interned in Switzerland, asking to be included in the party which it is hoped to dispatch shortly to Mürren and Château d’Oex. It is not thought that the first party will be able to leave for a week or two, but in the meantime the money is coming in steadily, and every day brings further assurance that all the wives and mothers will be able to get to Switzerland.

The Duke of Portland, in enclosing a cheque for £100, writes:—“I have read with much interest the account of Lord Northcliffe’s visit to the interned prisoners at Château d’Oex and Mürren, and I am in much sympathy with the scheme he wishes to set on foot to enable their wives to visit them.” The cheque has been forwarded to the British Red Cross Fund to be allocated for the specific purpose which the Duke of Portland desires.

The Hon. Arthur Stanley, Chairman of the British Red Cross, has received from Mr. Charles Elgar, of New Zealand, a sum of £200 to be used in defraying the expenses of the wives and mothers of the Kentish men who are interned. Lord Londonderry has sent £100 in a similar way for the people in County Down.

Facsimile of the original cutting: Visits to Prisoners, The Times, 6 September 1916 — **Facsimile** — *The Times*, 6 September 1916, page 5. Scanned by the News UK Archive & Record Office and supplied to St Peter's in April 2016. Reproduced with acknowledgement to Times Newspapers Limited. Open the full-size scan.

End of the transcribed document

Notes by St Peter's — not part of the document above

St Peter’s and the 1916 internment

The Château-d’Œx chaplaincy was placed on the Colonial and Continental Church Society’s list in 1866, and for the thirty-three years before St Peter’s was built the English congregation had no building of its own. Served by seasonal chaplains, it met in the village’s Protestant church — the Temple, up on the hill — and, when the climb or the snow made that impractical, in the lounge of the Hôtel Berthod, the Pension Morier and the Salle des Catéchumènes. The season was a summer one — June to September, before winter sports drew visitors to the valley. The church was built in 1899, on land given by the Berthod brothers and with a loan from the Society; it was consecrated on 27 May 1902 by Thomas Edward Wilkinson, Anglican Bishop of North Europe, and enlarged in 1911, by which time the chaplain could no longer seat everyone who came.

From 1916 neutral Switzerland took in wounded and invalid prisoners of war from both sides — French, Belgian, German and British — released from enemy camps under agreements between their governments. Château-d’Œx received the British. The first train reached Montreux on 30 May 1916 carrying 304 men, including 32 officers. The chaplain, the Revd E. Dudley Lampen — the parish’s first permanent chaplain, in post since 1908, and assisted during the war by the Revd Isaac Hutchinson — later described the whole episode as “the sojourn of 750 British soldiers in this valley”.

St Peter’s was their parish church. They filled it for services, and one of the internees, a professional organist in England before the war, played the church’s American harmonium. In August 1916 Lampen wrote to The Times asking readers to fund a proper organ — “a permanent memorial of the historic sojourn of our British officers and men in this valley”. The fund’s treasurer was Colonel E. Vansittart of the Royal West Kent Regiment, himself one of the officers who had arrived on that first train. The organ was dedicated on 8 March 1917: a Goll of 1916, opus 462, and the organ still played in the church today.

These First World War reports were traced for the centenary of the internment, which Château-d’Œx marked on Sunday 29 and Monday 30 May 2016 — a hundred years to the day after the first train. The complete archive → · The fuller account of 1916 →

About this transcription

Source: The Times, 6 September 1916
Archive item: The Times (1916.9.6 p5) (1 image)
Transcription: Machine-transcribed in two independent passes.
Status: Verified before publication — two independent transcriptions were compared, and any reading still in doubt is left unresolved and noted below rather than settled.
⚠️ The archive filename’s date is wrong for this item. The date above is taken from the cutting’s own annotation or masthead, which is the authority.

Transcribed verbatim, preserving the spelling, punctuation and capitalisation of the original. Square brackets mark a reading that is uncertain or a passage cut off by the edge of the scan. Where the text of a figure or a name could not be established, it is shown as unresolved rather than guessed.

Editorial notes

Signature and date as printed

(none)

Dating evidence

The archive filename reads The-Times-1916-6-09, and the cutting is annotated by hand “The Times - 6/9/1916”. Neither settles the order of the day and the month, and both have been read as 9 June. The date is 6 September 1916:

The News UK Archive supplied this page under its own label, The Times (1916.9.6 p5), and the masthead of page 9 of the same issue prints “WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 6, 1916”.
The report follows Lord Northcliffe’s appeal, printed in The Times of 31 August 1916, and precedes the departure of the first party of wives, reported on 7 October 1916. St Peter’s holds both.

Uncertain readings

“British returned prisoners” — printed exactly so. The phrasing is the paper’s, not a transcription slip.
“Mürren” — printed here with the umlaut. The leading article on page 9 of the same issue prints “Murren” without it. Each is left as its own page prints it.

Editorial method

No wording, spelling or punctuation is altered. The headline and sub-headline are set in capitals in the original and are kept that way.