History of English Churches in Switzerland – Clarens

History of Christ Church, Clarens

Clarens was long the hardest of these churches to write about, and the reason is itself a piece of history. Its own records are gone; it published nothing; and the magazine that carried news from every other English chaplaincy on the lake — edited two miles away at Territet — never printed a word from it. But a church that keeps no archive still leaves tracks in other people’s paper. The Montreux newspapers printed its services and its chaplains every week, and the Vaud annual directories listed it among the canton’s Anglican parishes; between them they return a good deal of what the parish itself failed to write down.

A congregation before it was a church

Clarens was placed on the chaplaincy list of the Colonial and Continental Church Society in 1875, and the Revd W. C. Ormsby was its first chaplain. But the congregation is older than its building, and that single fact dissolves a conflict that has stood in this account for years.

On 31 October 1875 the Feuille d’avis de Montreux carried the English service among its Sunday listings, and gave the address: “Culte de l’Eglise anglaise (chez Mlle Gaberel, villa Perret, Clarens) A 11 heures du matin et à 4 heures de l’après-midi.” The English of Clarens were worshipping in a private house. By January 1876 they were still there, now with a named chaplain, the Revd John Bennett.

Four years later they had outgrown it. On 27 September 1879 the same paper announced, in English: “Church of England Service. CLARENS. Supplied by the Colonial and Continental Church Society. The Services will be resumed on Sunday, the 21st of September in the SALLES DE RÉUNIONS” — rented meeting rooms, with Mervyn A. Clare as chaplain. That notice also settles a second long-standing question: the society named is the CCCS, plainly and in its own words.

The building came later still. In March 1886 Le Semeur vaudois, surveying the English churches of the lake, noted that the principal one at Territet was undergoing its third enlargement and that “une entre Vernex et Clarens est en construction” — one between Vernex and Clarens is under construction. And on 5 April 1888 the Feuille d’avis de Montreux announced that it was finished.

So the dates that once looked irreconcilable were never in conflict. 1875 is the chaplaincy, meeting in a villa. The building was going up in 1886 and was occupied in 1888. Schniewind’s “1888” is right about the church; the present owners’ “1875” is right about the congregation; and “before 1882” is right about neither, being a bracket he drew from a property transfer rather than from the building itself.

Palm Sunday, 1888

The Feuille d’avis de Montreux of 5 April 1888 is the fullest account of this church that survives anywhere, and it is worth quoting at length:

“L’église anglaise de Clarens a pris possession le Dimanche 25 Mars, jour des Rameaux, de son nouveau temple entre Clarens et Vernex… le premier culte y sera célébré par le révérend pasteur Ormsby… Bâtie comme l’église allemande, sur une terrasse dominant la grande route, cette nouvelle église, Christ church, est un petit joyau gothique.”

The congregation took possession on Palm Sunday, 25 March 1888, and the first service was taken by Ormsby — the same man who had been its first chaplain thirteen years before. The paper called it a little Gothic jewel, built like the German church on a terrace above the main road.

It also recorded who had made it happen. Christ Church was, the writer noted, the third English church in the district — the fourth counting the Scottish chapel — and Clarens had been the last of the congregations to get a building of its own: “seule la congrégation de Clarens ne possédait pas d’église.” Fifteen years earlier there had been none at all, and “les cultes en langue anglaise se tenaient dans les salons et dans les galeries des hôtels” — English services were held in hotel drawing rooms and galleries.

The church was built on the initiative of one member of the congregation, Major de St-Hubert d’Entragues, who began raising money in 1880 with the approval and blessing of the Bishop of London and found more than 30,000 francs himself. The total cost, excluding the land, was put at 125,000 francs.

The silence

Schniewind’s paragraph on Clarens contains one of the most telling sentences in his book: records on Clarens could not be traced, and the column News from the Chaplaincies in The Anglican Church Magazine, “for years edited in nearby Territet, has no contributions from Clarens”.

That is not a gap in the archive. It is evidence about the chaplaincy. Every other church on this shore reported its confirmations, its collections and its visiting bishops to that magazine. Clarens, next door, sent nothing.

But the silence is only in the church’s own voice. The Montreux papers printed the English churches’ services every week, with the chaplain’s name, his degree, his former English parish and often his address in the village; and the Almanach de Lausanne listed the canton’s Anglican chaplaincies year by year. Out of those two sources a succession emerges for a church supposed to have left no record:

• 1875 — the Revd W. C. Ormsby, first chaplain
• January 1876 — the Revd John Bennett, at the villa Perret
• September 1879 — Mervyn A. Clare, at the Salles de Réunions
• March 1888 — Ormsby again, taking the first service in the new church
• 1893–1901 — the Revd J. G. Bullock, M.A., “Late Rector of St-Nicholas with St Runwald, Colchester. Licensed Chaplain for Clarens and Vernex, 5, villas Dubochet, Clarens”
• 1900–1901 — the Revd E. D. Lampen, listed in the visitors’ paper as “Chaplain at Clarens”, with Mrs Lampen
• February 1901 — A. Vandeleur Garden, M.A., of the Maison Rousseau, Clarens
• 1936 — the Revd Charles P. Heywood, appointed Rural Dean in Switzerland
• 1950–1962 — the Revd A. Douglas Adams, in joint chaplaincy with Vevey
• to 1968 — the Revd Sidney J. Baggott

The names around the turn of the century overlap, and the sources do not say how. Bullock appears in the Almanach from 1893 to 1901; Lampen is described as chaplain at Clarens through the spring of 1900; and in February 1901 it is Vandeleur Garden whose name stands under Christ Church in the Montreux services column. Incumbent, assistant and locum are not distinguished in these listings, and an annual directory can lag a year behind the reality it records. The overlap is set down here as it stands rather than resolved by choosing one.

One of these men connects two churches in these pages. E. D. Lampen — the Revd E. Dudley Lampen, M.A. Cantab. — was chaplain here in 1900, and by 1907 was advertising himself at Château-d’Œx as “Chaplain for Winter”, taking pupils into his chalet. He is on record there as chaplain from 1913. The English churches of the Vaud were a small world, and their clergy moved between them.

Beyond the names, what can be reconstructed comes from the relationships. Clarens was regularly visited by the bishops, who as a rule would hold a confirmation service one day at Christ Church, Clarens, and the next day at St John’s, Territet — two English churches within a short walk of each other, each with its own congregation, both worth a bishop’s day. The chaplain at Clarens was responsible for several schools in the region, among them the Châtelard School at Les Avants, founded in 1927. In 1936 the chaplain, the Revd Charles P. Heywood, was appointed Rural Dean in Switzerland.

One occasion at Christ Church is recorded in detail, and it is the one you would expect. Queen Victoria died on 22 January 1901, and on the morning of her funeral the Feuille d’avis de Montreux told the English colony where to go: “Un service solennel sera célébré samedi matin à 10 h. 30 à l’Eglise anglicane (Christ Church), à l’occasion des funérailles de la reine Victoria. On chantera et l’orgue jouera la grande marche funèbre de Saül, par Hændel.” There was to be singing, and the organ would play Handel’s Dead March from Saul. The same column directed mourners to a second service that afternoon at St John’s, Territet, and reported that one had already been held in the English chapel of the Grand Hôtel at Caux. Three English churches on one shore, marking the same death in one day.

Held together with Vevey, then closed

From 1950 to 1962 Clarens was a joint chaplaincy with Vevey, under the Revd A. Douglas Adams. Adams is a thread running through this whole stretch of shore: the Vevey chaplaincy’s own history records him taking over the English church at Clarens after the Second World War, continuing to serve Château-d’Œx from there, and later holding the Vevey chaplaincy as well — one man covering, in succession, three of the churches in these pages.

He was followed by the Revd Sidney J. Baggott, styled “Chaplain of Leysin with Christ Church Montreux”, who was appointed Rural Dean in 1966 and took the Berne chaplaincy in 1968.

Then it ended, and here too the sources disagree. Schniewind writes that “after years of careful considerations the bishop closed Clarens in 1968”, and in his account of St John’s, Territet, he gives the month: “in October 1968 Clarens, which had been served in the last years from Vevey, was closed by the Bishop as a place of worship.” The New Apostolic Church’s account says Christ Church “a fermé ses portes en 1965” — closed its doors in 1965. We cannot settle it; the likeliest explanation is that the two dates mark different things, a last service and a formal closure, but no source we have read says so.

One further detail from the Territet side explains why the closure took so long to come. Amalgamating the two Montreux chaplaincies, St John’s and Christ Church, had been considered and described as “ultimately possible” — but, Schniewind records, “each church wished to maintain its own tradition.” St John’s was Anglo-Catholic; Christ Church, Clarens, like All Saints’ Vevey, was Evangelical. The two English churches of Montreux stood a short walk apart for ninety years because they were not interchangeable.

The cause is not mysterious, whichever year is right. The devaluation of the pound in 1949 had already emptied the English colonies of the Vaud Riviera — at Vevey it forced the chaplain out and closed chapels all round the lake — and Clarens, a church with no records, no magazine contributions and a congregation drawn from the same sterling incomes, was among the casualties.

A second life

At the end of 1975 the church was sold to the Swiss Église néo-apostolique. The purchasers put a date on it: Apostle Hermann Hänni signed the purchase contract on 22 December 1975 — which is exactly what “the end of 1975” means, and one of the few points where our two sources corroborate each other precisely.

Patriarch-Apostle Hans Urwyler consecrated the reordered church on 13 May 1979. The Montreux and Vevey congregations merged in 2011, and after three years of building work the Montreux congregation moved back into the renovated church on 8 March 2015.

So the church on the shore at Clarens is in better repair than it has been in a century. It simply belongs to someone else. Its own archive is still lost — but a congregation that wrote nothing down for itself turns out to have been written about a great deal by other people, week after week, in the ordinary columns of the local press. The silence was never quite as complete as it looked.

This account rests on Schniewind (1992), on the Vevey chaplaincy’s history (2011), on the New Apostolic Church’s own account of the building (2020), and on the contemporary Vaud press — the Feuille d’avis de Montreux, the Journal et liste des étrangers de Montreux, de Vevey, and Le Semeur vaudois — together with the Almanach de Lausanne, consulted in the digitised collections of the Bibliothèque cantonale et universitaire de Lausanne. It does not describe the building’s present-day life, which is that of another denomination.

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Date of first Chaplaincy: 1875 (Colonial and Continental Church Society); first chaplain the Revd W. C. Ormsby

Church dates: Congregation meeting in a private villa from 1875 and in rented rooms from 1879; church built between 1886 and 1888 on the initiative of Major de St-Hubert d’Entragues, occupied Palm Sunday 25 March 1888, cost 125,000 fr excluding land, architect unknown; property transferred to the CCCS in 1882; closed 1965 or 1968 (sources differ); sold 22 December 1975

Patron: Christ Church

Hotel: None recorded — Clarens was a resident colony, not a hotel chaplaincy

Current Status: Owned by the Église néo-apostolique since 1975; reconsecrated 13 May 1979, renovated and reoccupied 8 March 2015

Sources

Paul Schniewind, Anglicans in Switzerland, Past and Present (pp. 103–104)

Oliver Rütten, “Montreux : des alpinistes, des touristes, des fidèles”, nac.today (New Apostolic Church), 8 October 2020

Graeme Livingstone-Wallace, All Saints’ Vevey (Vevey: All Saints’ Anglican Chaplaincy, 2011)

Feuille d’avis de Montreux, 30 October 1875, 8 January 1876, 27 September 1879, 5 April 1888 and 1 February 1901

Le Semeur vaudois, 5 March 1886

Journal et liste des étrangers de Montreux, de Vevey, 18 November 1893 and 28 April 1900

Almanach de Lausanne, editions of 1893, 1896, 1899 and 1901 (“Culte anglican”)

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