How many wives travelled in the second party to Château-d’Œx?

The Times of 4 October 1916 reported that the second party of wives and relatives of interned British prisoners of war, taken to Switzerland by British Red Cross officials, would leave London the following Saturday. “The party will number 19, and the arrangements for their journey, and their fortnight’s stay in Switzerland, will be similar to those made for the first party.”

Who organised the wives’ journeys?

British Red Cross officials took the parties out to Switzerland, on the same arrangements each time — a fortnight’s stay, with the journey organised for them from London.

Prisoners' Wives' Visits to Switzerland

The Times, 4 October 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 second party of wives, 19 in number, leaving London for a fortnight in Switzerland on the same arrangements as the first.

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Headline as printed: PRISONERS’ WIVES’ VISITS TO SWITZERLAND.

Handwritten annotation

The Times - 4/10/1916

Date resolved as 4 October 1916. The annotator writes DD/MM/YYYY (a companion cutting is annotated “31/5/1916”, and there is no 31st month), so the archive filename 1916-04-10_ encodes an MM/DD misreading. Two independent checks agree: this cutting says the second party leaves “next Saturday”, and the 7 October cutting (Tears and Smiles at Château d’Œx) says it leaves “to-day” — 7 October 1916 was a Saturday.

SECOND PARTY ARRANGED.

The second party of wives and relatives of interned British prisoners of war, who are being taken to Switzerland by the British Red Cross officials, will leave London next Saturday to visit the wounded men at Château d’Œx.

The party will number 19, and the arrangements for their journey, and their fortnight’s stay in Switzerland, will be similar to those made for the first party, which left during the last week-end.

Also on this cutting (unrelated)

The clipping continues below a rule with a separate, unrelated item, reproduced here only so the scan is fully accounted for. It has no bearing on Château d’Œx.

HULL FREE FROM PLAGUE.

The Hull Corporation Health Commitee [sic] yesterday received a report from the Medical Officer of Health that, after 10 days from the outbreak of bubonic plague, the port and city was declared free from this disease.

The Local Government Board wrote asking that the number of rats examined should be considerably increased and results of examinations shown in weekly returns.

Facsimile of the original cutting: Prisoners' Wives' Visits to Switzerland, The Times, 4 October 1916 — **Facsimile** — *The Times*, 4 October 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, 4 October 1916
Archive item: prisoners-wives-visits-switzerland (1 image)
Transcription: Machine-transcribed in two independent passes, with a further check on disputed readings.
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 — unsigned news item, no dateline.

Uncertain readings

🔴 “The party will number 19” — adjudicated. Pass 1 read 18 and reported zero uncertain readings; pass 2 read 19 from a 4× crop; adjudication on a 5× upscaled crop (2026-07-28) confirms 19 — the second digit has a single closed upper loop and a descending tail, where an 8 would show two closed loops. A worked example of the rule that a low doubt-count is not evidence of accuracy.
“Commitee” in the Hull item is printed that way in the source — a period typesetting error, retained sic.
No personal names appear anywhere on this cutting.

Prisoners' Wives' Visits to Switzerland — The Times, 4 October 1916

Handwritten annotation

SECOND PARTY ARRANGED.

Also on this cutting (unrelated)

Questions answered