History of English Churches in Switzerland – Chandolin
History of the English Chapel, Chandolin
Chandolin sits at about 2,000 metres above the Val d’Anniviers, and its English chapel exists for a single reason: a hotel was built there, and the hotel filled with English visitors who expected somewhere to worship.
The hotel first
The Swiss mountain guide and hotelier Pierre Pont (1831–1912) began building the Grand Hôtel de Chandolin in 1893, to a design by the Vevey architect Louis Henry Maillard. The hotel’s own history records up to fifty workmen on the site, supported by forty mules bringing the materials up from the valley. It took four years, and the hotel opened in 1897.
The chapel followed the guests. Paul Schniewind records Chandolin on the chaplaincy list of the Colonial and Continental Church Society in 1896, and a gift of land for a chapel in March 1897 — the same seasons in which the hotel was being finished. The Val d’Anniviers tourism office dates the chapel itself to 1896–97 and describes it as built for hotel guests who were almost exclusively English and Anglican.
Eighty-five years later the Journal de Sierre put it more vividly. The chapel, it wrote in September 1982, “was built in the great days of English tourism, when ladies and gentlemen came up from the valley on muleback, and consecrated for Anglican worship”. The mules appear in both accounts, arrived at independently — the hotel’s builders bringing materials up the same tracks its congregation would climb.
Schniewind records one further Anglican fact and then falls silent: in 1923 the CCCS claimed the right of appointment to the chaplaincy.
The chapel changes hands
At some point the English stopped coming in the numbers that had justified a chapel of their own, and the Church of England let it go. Here the two sources we hold diverge, and neither can settle the other.
Schniewind states simply that in 1975 the Swiss Reformed Church bought the chapel. The Journal de Sierre, writing in 1982 and much closer to the events, describes something else: the Church of England had long had no use for the building, and so handed it over — to the Eglise réformée évangélique du Valais — on condition that the Reformed Church restore it, work carried out in stages. The renovated chapel, the paper records, was rededicated in 1976, to serve Protestant visitors to the region in summer and winter alike.
Those stages are worth naming, because the building had been left to decay. The chapel “fell sadly into decrepitude”, the paper wrote. In 1950, on the initiative of Pastor Pasche, the roof was renewed. Then in 1974 and 1975 the labour came from youth camps — young volunteers who supplied, in the paper’s phrase, the manpower and the enthusiasm needed to put the house of God back in order.
A chapel that outlived its name
By 1982 the name had become an anachronism, and the parish said so plainly. There was no longer any reason to go on calling it the chapelle anglaise, the Journal de Sierre observed, since more French, Dutch and German was now spoken there than English. At its autumn gathering on Sunday 5 September 1982, the reformed parish of Sierre and district — which covers the whole Val d’Anniviers — gave the building a new name: the chapelle des Daillettes. After the eleven-fifteen service, the terrace of the Grand Hôtel was to host a verre de l’amitié offered by the commune of Chandolin, followed by a picnic and a barbecue.
It went off as planned. Reporting two days later, the Journal de Sierre confirmed that the chapel “will henceforth bear the very local name of chapelle des Daillettes”, and that over the aperitif after the service the church authorities had praised the collaboration of the commune under its president, Ulysse Zufferey. The paper photographed three men outside: Jean Aeberhard, president of the Protestant parish of Sierre; the pastor, M. de Haller; and Zufferey himself — standing in front of a panel carved in arolla pine by André Pont.
It is worth noting what this means for everything written since. Every modern source that calls the building the chapelle des Daillettes — the tourism office, the heritage archives, the walkers’ guides — is using a name it has held only since 1982. For the eighty-odd years that matter to this history, it was simply the English chapel.
Since then
The chapel still stands below the village at Les Daillettes, beside the hotel that called it into being, and is still in use: Protestant worship several times a year, private ceremonies, and services arranged around whichever groups are staying at the Grand Hôtel. A contributor to the Swiss heritage archive notreHistoire.ch, photographing it in 2013, admired the roof — “a magnificent wooden ceiling, like an upturned boat”.
It appears in neither volume of the commune of Anniviers’ built-heritage inventory, whose Chandolin entries record the church of Sainte-Barbe and the old chapel that is now the Espace Ella Maillart, but not this one.
Date of first Chaplaincy: 1896 (Colonial and Continental Church Society)
Church dates: Built 1896–97; rededicated 1976; renamed 1982
Patron: Colonial and Continental Church Society, which claimed the right of appointment in 1923
Hotel: Grand Hôtel de Chandolin (begun 1893, opened 1897)
Current Status: Standing and in use as the chapelle des Daillettes, Reformed Church
Sources
“La chapelle des Daillettes, vous connaissez?”, Journal de Sierre, vol. 68 no. 70, 3 September 1982
“La chapelle anglaise devient officiellement: chapelle des Daillettes”, Journal de Sierre, 7 September 1982
Paul Schniewind, Anglicans in Switzerland, Past and Present (p. 109)
Le Grand Hôtel Chandolin — history
Commune d’Anniviers, Inventaire du patrimoine bâti — consulted; the chapel is not listed
Further Reading