History of English Churches in Switzerland – Chateau d’Oex

History of St. Peter’s, Chateau d’Oex

Château d’Oex had a community of Anglicans as early as 1866 when it was placed on the chaplaincy list of the then Colonial and Continental Church Society (CCCS); its first seasonal clergyman was the Revd G. V. Chichester. Land was given to the Anglican community in 1888 by the Hotel Berthod and the foundation stone of the church was laid on June 28, 1899, by Bishop Wilkinson. The church was opened for services on 10 September of the same year — the Morning Post of 15 September 1899 noted that it had opened “within the past fortnight” — and was consecrated on 27 May 1902, when Bishop Wilkinson returned to Château d’Oex for the purpose. The building proved too small for the congregation almost at once, but it was not until 1911 that it was enlarged, with a new chancel and a north aisle; the work ran from June to November and the church re-opened on 15 November 1911. Extensive restoration took place in 2017 and 2018. St Peter’s holds regular services each Sunday at 17h30.

Paid for with tea and English cakes

The church was two years in the raising before a stone was laid, and the village newspapers followed it. In August 1897 the Journal de Château-d’Œx announced “une vente en faveur de la création d’un fonds pour la construction d’une église anglaise”, to be held on 3 and 4 September at the Chalet Bellevue, and hoped the local hoteliers would make a point of attending. In December it advertised the second: a vente-bazar on the 16th and 17th, “au profit de la construction d’une Eglise Anglaise”, with objets d’art, flowers, photographs, a buffet, and “biscuits thé, gateaux anglais”. Donations were received by Mme Scott of the Chalet Bellevue, who appears again in February 1900 handing 161 francs from the English colony to the district’s school soup fund.

When the work was ready to begin, Le Progrès named the man who would do it. On 20 May 1899 it reported that construction would start the following month: “Ce sera un édifice construit d’après la nature de la contrée. Il sera suffisant tout en demeurant simple et modeste. On nous dit que c’est M. Jean Gippa, à Bulle, constructeur de l’Eglise de Montbovon, qui a l’entreprise.” A builder from Bulle, who had already built the church at Montbovon.

The Lausanne paper La Revue carried the news two days later and gave the reason in a single line: “Le nombre des Anglais qui séjournent ici croissant d’année en année, on va construire une église anglaise.” The English were not visiting in greater numbers for their health. They were settling.

By 1904 the dedication was public knowledge. Writing up the opening of the Montbovon–Château-d’Œx railway, the Feuille d’avis de Lausanne described the English colony that wintered in the village, “où ils ont édifié une charmante petite église du culte anglican dédiée au vieux Saint-Pierre”.

The 1911 enlargement has its own paper trail. On 6 May the municipality opened the statutory public enquiry into an application from “MM. Monod & Laverrière, architectes à Lausanne”, acting for the Colonial and Continental Church Society, for “l’agrandissement de la Chapelle anglaise actuelle”; objections were to be lodged at the Greffe municipal by 16 May 1911. The notice ran three times in a fortnight.

What Château-d’Œx actually sold

It is easy to assume that the English came to the Alps for their lungs. At Leysin, an hour away, they did. At Château-d’Œx they did not — but the village tried the idea before it let it go, and both halves of that are worth setting out.

In June 1912 the visitors’ paper of the Vaud Riviera ran a survey of the region’s summer stations, describing four of them on a single page in a single format. Aigle-les-Bains was “recommandé aux anémiques, aux neurasthéniques, aux affaiblis et aux convalescents”. Bex-les-Bains offered “l’influence sédative et calmante de son climat” to “les nerveux et les excitables”. Montbarry-les-Bains was “très efficace contre maladies cutanées et nerveuses, pour rhumatisants, délicats, irritables”.

Château-d’Œx named no condition at all: “station climatérique bien connue: séjour de montagne et centre d’excursions grandes ou petites… Le climat est des plus salubres. Les forêts de sapins dont s’entoure Château-d’Oex en vivifient l’air constamment. La pêche de la truite dans la Sarine attire chaque année de nombreux amateurs de la ligne.” Its neighbours advertised cures. Château-d’Œx advertised air, walks and trout.

The absence holds across the whole archive. The nineteenth-century words for consumptives — phtisie, phtisiques, poitrinaires — never once appear alongside Château-d’Œx in the Vaud press. Where tuberculosis does turn up in the village papers it is one of three things: cattle inspection returns from the communal abattoir, charitable collections for the district’s own sick poor, or admiring references to what was being achieved at Leysin. In April 1913 a lecture in the village praised “les guérisons admirables obtenues par la cure d’air et de soleil à Leysin” and asked whether Château-d’Œx might not create something of the kind itself — for its own children. It had no such institution, and was not pretending to.

Even the chaplain screened invalids out. Advertising in 1907 for pupils to board in his chalet, the Revd E. Dudley Lampen specified: “Excellent climate. Boys ages 9-14 preferred. None very delicate taken as boarders.“

The winter the village hoped otherwise

That settled position was not the one Château-d’Œx started from. In February 1895 the Journal de Château-d’Œx was reporting the first winter the Hôtel Berthod had ever opened, and it was distinctly hopeful about invalids. There were some among the guests — “les malades, car il y en a dans [un certain] no[m]bre” — taking part in the season’s amusements in moderation and benefiting from “les qualités excellentes de notre air pur et vivifiant”; a few had seen their condition improve “d’une façon su[r]prenante” since arriving in the autumn. Then the paper made a wish:

“Nous ne doutons pas que chaque année un plus grand nombre de malades [ne] vienne à Château-d’Œx pour y chercher et y trouver la guérison, comme à Da[vos] ou à Leysin.”

We do not doubt that each year a greater number of invalids will come to Château-d’Œx to seek and find healing, as at Davos or at Leysin.

That is an aspiration, not a description, and it is the only one of its kind in the archive. Seventeen years later the village was advertising trout. Whatever the Journal hoped for in 1895, it did not happen: no sanatorium was ever built here, no condition was ever named in the advertising, and the words for consumptives never attach to the village at all. Château-d’Œx did not become Leysin. For one winter, it rather wanted to.

The summer the English left

The colony was not always content. In July 1882 the Journal de Château-d’Œx was conducting a public quarrel with its rival, Le Progrès, about why the season had collapsed. Le Progrès blamed the rain. The Journal blamed a prosecution.

Its account is that the Department of the Interior, tipped off “par on ne sait qui”, had ordered the Prefect to establish whether a “M. W.” was practising medicine in the valley. The Prefect’s enquiry, “conduite avec tact et sincérité, donna un résultat négatif” — it found nothing. But a third party, “M. R.”, sent in what the paper calls “un violent réquisitoire contre M. W.”, and the Conseil d’État, “mal inspiré par cette lettre”, ordered a fresh investigation and a prosecution. The matter went before the police court.

The consequence, the Journal said, was “l’abandon de Château-d’Œx par la colonie anglaise”. Mocking its rival’s weather theory, it suggested a day trip: go to Chesières, to Villars, to Les Plans, “il y verra, malgré la pluie, des pensions regorgeant d’Anglais, qui ne se gênent pour dire publiquement la raison pour laquelle ils ont déserté Château-d’Œx cette année” — guesthouses overflowing with English, rain and all, perfectly willing to say why they had left.

The affair had begun two summers earlier. In July 1880 an eleven-year-old boy drowned in the Lac Lioson while boarding at Château-d’Œx-le-Prez “sous la surveillance du médecin anglais, le Dr W.”, who had let the maid and the governess take the children walking without a guide. They lost their way, gave in to the children’s wish to bathe, and the boy went under in thirty feet of very cold water. He was the only son of parents living in the East Indies, who were coming to fetch him that autumn. Six Swiss papers carried the story.

The press named neither man beyond an initial, as was usual where a prosecution was pending, and we have not identified them. What the episode shows is a foreign colony with the power to punish its hosts — and hosts who understood exactly what it had cost them.

The chapel in wartime

When Edward VII died, the village turned out. Le Progrès of 18 May 1910 announced that the funeral service would be held “à 3 h., à la chapelle anglaise, et tout le monde y est cordialement invité”, and urged the population to show “à nos hôtes anglais, que nous savons vibrer avec eux et rendre hommage au roi qu’ils pleurent à bon droit”. The notice was signed not by the chaplain but by the Swiss Reformed pastor, Ern. Chuard.

During the First World War, when Château-d’Œx housed interned British servicemen, the chapel served them. In December 1916 the Journal de Château-d’Œx reported two weddings in one week: two interned soldiers married fiancées they had been due to marry in the autumn of 1914. The civil ceremony took place before the British consul at Lausanne; the religious ceremonies followed the next day, “pour l’un des couples à la chapelle anglaise à Château-d’Œx et pour l’autre à l’église de Rougemont”.

The following summer the chapel gave a concert. On 23 August 1917 there was an organ recital — Chopin, Guilmant, Grieg, Mendelssohn and Massenet, with a violinist and a cellist — postponed from June for unstated reasons. The collection was for the organist: “lance-caporal Lester, qui tient actuellement l’orgue”, an interned soldier who had taken over the instrument.

After the war

Our detailed record has long stopped in 1919. It need not. The reason the later decades looked empty is that the newspapers changed their vocabulary: after the war the building is no longer the chapelle anglaise but the Temple anglais or the église anglicane, and searches made with the old words find nothing.

In June 1929 some sixty people gathered in the garden of the pension des Hirondelles, “presque toutes faisant partie de la colonie anglaise permanente de Pays-d’Enhaut”, to say goodbye to the chaplain, the Revd F. Hamilton, who was returning to England after twelve years’ ministry — which places his arrival around 1917. A member of the church council, a Mr Wilson, spoke; Hamilton talked about the English and Swiss he had come to care for; and the writer remembered meeting him botanising in the pastures. That the colony was described as permanent is itself worth noting: this was no longer a seasonal congregation.

Twenty years on, the cantonal directory for 1948, 1949 and 1950 lists the chaplaincy in English: “Chaplain: Rev. Maurice Kenneth, Château-d’Oex… Sunday, 8.00 Holy communion; 10.30 Matins and Holy communion; 17.30 Evensong.” In those three editions he is the only Anglican chaplain listed in the whole canton, resident here — a complete reversal of 1861, when the canton’s single Anglican entry was Ouchy. Between Hamilton’s departure in 1929 and Kenneth’s appearance in 1948 we have no chaplain’s name at all.

The church also served the village, and not only the English. Funeral notices in the Lausanne papers record services at “la chapelle anglaise” for Swiss families: Olga Devaux-Joerin, wife of a Château-d’Œx photographer, on Christmas Eve 1944; and Maurice Devaux in October 1959, whose notice added that, at his own wish, the family would not go into mourning. In May 1952 the British colony buried Miss Alice Bacon, who died on Ascension Day in her eighty-second year.

And on 2 August 1983 the church was briefly the most photographed building in the village. The actor David Niven had died the previous Friday, aged seventy-four, at his chalet above the town, and his funeral was held “à 14 h 30 à l’église anglicane du village”. Reporting it, the Tribune de Lausanne used the church’s English name — “EGLISE St Peter’s Church de Château-d’Œx” — the only time the dedication surfaces in the French-language press in this whole period.

Ordinary life continued around it. The weekly listings in the local paper carry “ENGLISH CHURCH — Evening Service” through 1978 and 1984. When the Catholic parish reopened its renovated church in August 1984, “les représentants de l’Eglise anglicane” were among the invited guests alongside the Reformed pastor. And in December 1986 the paper advertised, in English, a Christmas Sale in the church, with “spécialités anglaises” for sale.

One clergyman of this period was not ours. The obituary in January 1920 of a M. Sutherland, who founded the first English soldiers’ club and library in the village with a Mrs Eves, ran the internees’ orchestra, and held Sunday services on the balconies of the Hôtel Berthod and the Soldanelle for those too ill to come down, describes him as “chapelain presbytérien des soldats internés”. He belongs to the story of the internment, not to St Peter’s.

Date of first Chaplaincy: 1866

Church dates: 1899 to present

Patron: Intercontinental Church Society (ICS)

Affiliated Hotel: Berthod

Current Status: Used all year round.

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Sources

Anglicans in Switzerland Past and Present, Paul Schniewind

Journal de Château-d’Oex, 28 August and 11 December 1897; 24 January 1898; 6 and 13 May 1911; 2 December 1916; 17 January 1920; 28 June 1929; 27 May 1952

Le Progrès de Château-d’Oex, 31 July 1880; 20 May 1899; 3 February 1900; 15 October 1904; 18 May 1910; 10 May 1911; 18 August 1917

Journal de Château-d’Œx (feuille d’avis), 29 July 1882, for the 1882 dispute

La Revue (Lausanne), 22 May 1899 · Feuille d’avis de Lausanne, 19 August 1904, 23 December 1944, 22 October 1959

Journal et liste des étrangers de Montreux, de Vevey, 24 October 1896; 2 November 1907; 7 August 1909; 22 June 1912

Annuaire et indicateur vaudois réunis, editions of 1948, 1949 and 1950

24 Heures and Tribune de Lausanne, August 1983, for the funeral of David Niven

Digitised newspapers consulted at Scriptorium, Bibliothèque cantonale et universitaire de Lausanne (scriptorium.ch)

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Further Reading
Hotel Berthod, Château d’Oex
St Peter’s Web Site

Documents of Interest
Petition from Continental and Colonial Church Society (1901)
Consecration of St. Peter’s by Bishop of London (1902)
Commission of St. Peter’s by Bishop of London (1902)