St. Peter's Anglican Church Château-d'Oex · Serving the English-speaking Community Since 1899

History of English Churches in Switzerland – Glion

On Sunday 17 July 1887 the Free Church congregation of Montreux held its French service in a new chapel at Glion. It was half past nine in the morning, and it was the first service in the building. At eleven the English came for Morning Service and Communion, and at four for Evensong. The Feuille d’avis de Montreux had announced the arrangement three days earlier. Thanks to the Colonial and Continental Church Society, and to the devotion of Mlle Müller, proprietor of the Hôtel Victoria, Glion “possède maintenant une gracieuse petite chapelle”. It now had a pretty little chapel.1

Glion stands on a shelf of the mountainside at about 700 metres, a thousand feet above the eastern end of the Lake of Geneva. From 1883 a funicular climbed to it from Territet, past the east end of St John’s. It was a summer place first. Its hotels looked out over the lake to the Dent du Midi and the Alps of Savoy. At least one of the Montreux doctors who practised by the lake in winter moved up to Glion for the summer. Why the English came to this coast at all is told on our page Wintering on the Swiss Riviera.2

Two hotel rooms

The Colonial and Continental Church Society placed Glion on its list of chaplaincies in 1864, and the Revd J. E. A. Fenwick was chaplain there in 1866. For the next twenty years the English service was held in a room lent by M. Heimberg, proprietor of the Hôtel Righi Vaudois. The French-speaking Protestants of the village were housed in the same way, in the salon of the Hôtel Victoria. Neither had a church of its own, and the villagers had none nearer than Montreux.3

The decision to build came from the English. In March 1887 the Feuille d’avis de Montreux reported that “la colonie anglaise de Montreux se propose d’ériger, cette année, une chapelle à Glion”. The Nouvelliste vaudois repeated the news the next day. With the church then going up at Clarens, it added, there would be no fewer than five English chapels in the parish of Montreux.4

The ground came from Mademoiselle Müller of the Hôtel Victoria. The Graphic published an engraving of the church in June 1888. She had placed “an excellent site” freely at the Society’s disposal two years before, it said, and her “exertions on behalf of the church have been unwearied”. The site was well chosen. It stood above the road to Caux, in the part of the village most likely to grow. It was within five minutes’ walk “of all the hotels where English travellers are found”.5

A chalet church

The Graphic described the building as it stood in its first year. It was “constructed in the chalet style, after plans furnished by M. Maillard of Vevey, and will accommodate about 150 persons”. The engraving and a photograph printed in the Montreux visitors’ paper in 1926 show the same small church. There is a steep gable with a cross at its peak, a group of narrow lancet windows, and deep eaves on shaped timber brackets. An open timber bell-cote carries a slender spire. A side porch opened onto a railed terrace, reached from the road by an outside flight of steps, for the church was built into the slope.6

The architect was Louis Maillard, who kept an office in the rue des Deux-Temples at Vevey and practised in the district for at least twenty-five years. In 1894 the tenders for the new Collège de Montreux were taken at his office. The standard survey of the English churches in Switzerland, published in 1972, does not mention Glion at all, perhaps because the building had gone by then. It gives the architects of the Montreux English churches as unknown. In April 1905 “M. Maillard, architecte, à Vevey” invited tenders for the construction of the English chapel at Caux, a short climb above Glion. It was very probably the same man.7

The chapel was shared from the start, and not only for convenience. The Église libre of the Canton de Vaud contributed to the cost of building it. Its ministers from Montreux held services in it every Sunday in summer and on alternate Sundays in winter. The July notice compared the arrangement to the one already in force at the English chapel at Villars. English service, The Graphic added, was held from the beginning of May to the end of September.8

Schniewind’s history of the Anglican chaplaincies in Switzerland dates the church to 1888–89, but the papers of the time agree on 1887.9

The chaplains

Glion never had a settled incumbent in the way St John’s did. The chaplaincy was filled a few weeks at a time, mostly by English and Irish parish clergy who came out for part of the season. Their names survive because the Montreux visitors’ paper, the Journal et liste des étrangers, printed arriving hotel guests with their occupations. In 1904 the Society’s own list, printed in the Irish Times, gave “English Church, Glion, Switzerland, July 3-31, Rev. A. E. Crotty, M.A., Rector of Moyliscar, Mullingar”. In the spring of 1906 the visitors’ paper listed “Rev. B. W. Isaac, chaplain for Glion during April, Ipswich”. In 1907 there were two chaplains in a single season. At least twenty-five of them can be named between 1866 and 1929.10

Short as their stays were, they served a real congregation. In May 1892 the visitors’ paper printed the full Sunday round at the English Church, Glion. There was Holy Communion at eight and at noon, Morning Prayer and sermon at eleven, and Evening Prayer and sermon at five. There was also “Choir practice each saturday 5 p.m.”, under the name of the chaplain, Fred. E. Toyne.11

Over the years the season lengthened. In December 1908 the Feuille d’avis de Montreux noted that the English service would be held at the chapel “durant tout l’hiver, comme d’habitude”, all winter as usual. From 1911 the guest lists describe each chaplain as “residing” at Glion. In August 1914, the month the war began, the residing chaplain was the Revd Ch. Geeson of West Hartlepool.12

By then the chapel had a caretaker. In April 1911 a property company, the Société Immobilière de l’Etraz-Sous-Crin, advertised “la place de concierge de la Chapelle Anglaise de Glion”. Applications were to go to its president, Louis Du Pasquier, an engineer at Veytaux, who would explain the duties and the pay. How the company came to hold the chapel, which had begun as the property of the Colonial and Continental Church Society, is not known.13

Between the wars

The war did not close the chapel. A residing chaplain, the Revd F. Merveyn of Dublin, was at Glion in August 1915. In the summers of 1920 and 1921 the guest lists again name English chaplains, the Revd Howard de Caux and Canon Mervyn. The village’s Reformed parishioners, who had worshipped in the English chapel for years, moved into their own temple when it was inaugurated in 1916.14

The English stayed. In June 1926 the visitors’ paper printed a photograph of the chapel, captioned simply “La Chapelle anglaise de Glion”. In August 1928 the Tiverton Gazette reported the marriage “at the English Church at Glion, Switzerland” of Major Arthur Butterworth, O.B.E., and Miss Eleanor Grant. The next summer an English visitor wrote home to the Eastbourne Chronicle that at Glion he had found “a delightful chaplain, the Rev. G. H. Schofield-Frobisher”. That November Marcel Cuénod, who signed as vice-consul, published the accounts of the district’s Poppy Day. The collection at the English Church, Glion, had raised 115 francs.15

The chapel also belonged to the village. Mademoiselle Marie Jordan, a former needlework teacher, died on 19 January 1935. Two days later her family asked mourners to a service “à la Chapelle anglaise de Glion à 15 h. 15”, before her cremation at Lausanne. Above the notice they printed a line from Psalm 121: “J’élève mes yeux vers les montagnes d’où me viendra le secours.” In July 1937 the Journal de Montreux remembered that fifty years had passed since the chapel’s inauguration, and reprinted the notice of 1887.16

The last years

When the chapel came down, a Lausanne paper wrote that after the First World War it had been almost unused and had slowly fallen into ruin. The wedding, the chaplains and the funeral of the interwar years suggest that the decline came later, in the 1940s and 1950s. In December 1959 a member of the Montreux-Planches council asked that “l’ancienne chapelle anglaise de Glion qui est désaffectée”, the old disused English chapel, be kept locked. A member of the municipality replied that, by agreement with the Hôtel Victoria, it would be demolished the following spring and a pavement laid in its place.17

A year later the chapel was still standing. On 1 December 1960 the Journal de Montreux listed it among the “Démolitions en vue”, together with a derelict house at Territet: “Ainsi disparaîtront deux témoins d’une autre époque.” Thus two witnesses of another age will disappear. On 14 December the Feuille d’avis de Lausanne reported that the English church of Glion, “construite en 1887”, would go to the demolishers in the next few days. After that the Montreux and Lausanne papers do not mention it again, and no report of the demolition itself has been found. It came down in the last weeks of 1960 or in 1961, some seventy-three years after it opened.18

So far as we know, nothing marks the place now. The chapel stood above the road from Glion to Caux, up a short path. The ground had been given by the Hôtel Victoria in 1886, and the hotel agreed to clear it in 1959. Two pictures of it survive: the engraving The Graphic published in 1888, looking down the lake past the little church to the mountains of Savoy, and the photograph of 1926.

If you have memories or photographs of the English chapel at Glion, or know what became of its fittings, please write to us at info(a)stpeters.ch.

For the other English churches of the district, see our page on the English churches in Switzerland.

  1. Feuille d’avis de Montreux, 14 July 1887, p. 4, “Chronique locale” (Scriptorium item 503368), quoted in translation; services column, Feuille d’avis de Montreux, 6 August 1887, p. 4 (item 503381): “New English Church at Glion — Services on Sunday. July 17th. 8 a.m. Holy Communion. 11 a.m. Morning Service and Communion. 4 p.m. Evening Service”, with “Glion, Chapelle, culte à 9 1/2 heures du matin” under the Église évangélique libre. Both read on the page image. ↩

  2. Altitude as printed in the hotel list of the Journal et liste des étrangers, 3 February 1906, p. 1 (item 430058): “GLION (Altit. 700 m.)”; “1,000 feet above the N.E. shore of Geneva” and the view, The Graphic, 9 June 1888 (see note 5); the funicular’s opening in 1883, Dave Lüthi, St John the Evangelist, Territet-Montreux: Historic Study (2003), as cited on the St John’s page; the doctors’ summer moves, Journal et liste des étrangers, 6 January 1900, as cited on our page Wintering on the Swiss Riviera. ↩

  3. Paul W. Schniewind, Anglicans in Switzerland (Berne, 1992), p. 105, for the 1864 listing and Fenwick; The Graphic, 9 June 1888, for the room lent by Heimberg (“for the last eighteen or twenty years”) and the Swiss residents “who have hitherto had no church nearer than Montreux”; Feuille d’avis de Montreux, 14 July 1887, for the French service “qui se célébrait jusqu’ici dans le salon de l’Hôtel Victoria”. ↩

  4. Feuille d’avis de Montreux, 26 March 1887 (item 503281), read on a crop of the page image; Nouvelliste vaudois, 27 March 1887: “il n’y aura pas moins de cinq chapelles anglaises dans la paroisse de Montreux”. ↩

  5. The Graphic, 9 June 1888, “Our Illustrations”, p. 6 (or p. 8 in the other edition) continuing on p. 9, read on the page image (British Newspaper Archive); the engraving, “New English Church, Glion-sur-Montreux, Canton Vaud, Switzerland”, is on p. 13. The site “two years ago” dates the gift to 1886. The position above the Glion–Caux road is confirmed by a court report in the Journal de Montreux, 7 October 1937 (item 445060): “le chemin montant à l’Eglise anglaise de Glion, sur la route de Glion-Caux”. ↩

  6. The Graphic, 9 June 1888; photograph, Liste des étrangers, 30 June 1926, p. 7 (item 429794). The description is taken from the two images themselves. ↩

  7. Feuille d’avis de Vevey, 12 June 1896 (item 251753), read on a crop: “bureau de M. Louis Maillard, architecte, rue des Deux-Temples”; tenders at his office for the Collège de Montreux, 1894 (item 504675); in practice from at least 1871 (item 253585). André Meyer, “Englische Kirchen in der Schweiz”, Zeitschrift für schweizerische Archäologie und Kunstgeschichte 29 (1972). The Caux tender: Feuille d’avis de Montreux, 19 April 1905, p. 1 (item 456198), read on the page image; see the Caux page. The notice gives only “M. Maillard”; that he was Louis Maillard is likely but not proved. ↩

  8. The Graphic, 9 June 1888: “The Église Libre of the Canton Vaud have contributed towards the cost of erection, and the Free Church Ministers from Montreux hold services in the church every Sunday in summer, and on alternate Sundays in winter”; Feuille d’avis de Montreux, 14 July 1887, for the convention “pareille à celle qui a rendu l’Union nationale évangélique cojouissante de la chapelle anglaise de Villars-s.-Ollon”. ↩

  9. Schniewind, p. 105 (“built in 1888/89”). Against it: Feuille d’avis de Montreux, 14 July 1887; The Graphic, 9 June 1888 (“built last year … by July, 1887, the building was in a sufficiently forward state to be used for service”); Journal de Montreux, 9 July 1937, p. 4, “Montreux, il y a cinquante ans” (item 445177); Feuille d’avis de Lausanne, 14 December 1960, p. 13 (item 49893). Schniewind also says the chaplain from Vevey served at Glion; the guest lists show that this was at most part of the arrangement. ↩

  10. Journal et liste des étrangers, 31 March 1906 (item 430044); Irish Times, 11 May 1904, p. 5, “Continental Chaplaincies” (OCR “Kector”, “Mollingar” silently corrected); Sheffield Daily Telegraph, 5 August 1907, p. 9. The chaplains who can be named, by year of the source, with the most doubtful readings left out: J. E. A. Fenwick (1866); C. J. Down, rector of Tawstock (1891); Fred. E. Toyne (1892); W. Talbot Hindley (1893); Freeman (1895); W. F. Wright (1898); Waters, from Ireland (1901); S. W. Darwin Fox, vicar of St Mark’s, Manningham (1903); Albert E. Crotty (1904); Walter A. Purton, of Ramsgate (April 1905); B. W. Isaac, of Ipswich (April 1906); Egerton Tapp and Dr Jones (1907); E. Pritchett (1909); Richard Earle (1911); A. Bathurst (1912); W. Reindorp (1912); Collens (1913); A. P. Crowyn (1913); J. Swindell (1914); Lewis (1914); Ch. Geeson (1914); F. Merveyn (1915); Howard de Caux (1920); Canon Mervyn (1921, possibly the Merveyn of 1915); G. H. Schofield-Frobisher (1929). The Colonial and Continental Church Society’s list for August 1913 adds R. H. Consterdine, rector of Lindow (The Record, 1 August 1913, p. 14, read on the page image), and its list for September 1912 names R. A. F. Pratt (The Record, 6 September 1912, p. 9; OCR text only, not yet checked on the page). Three more names, in 1897, 1900 and 1908, cannot be read with confidence. Most were read on crops of the guest lists rather than on the full page. ↩

  11. Journal et liste des étrangers, 28 May 1892, p. 4 (item 397824), read on the page image. ↩

  12. Feuille d’avis de Montreux, 19 December 1908 (item 458059). The residing chaplains before Geeson include the Revd Richard Earle in May 1911, the Revd A. Bathurst of Eastbourne in January 1912, and the Revd J. Swindell, from Malacca, in January 1914: Journal et liste des étrangers, 20 May 1911 (item 429445), 6 January 1912 (item 428899) and 3 January 1914 (item 428985). Geeson: Journal et liste des étrangers, 8 August 1914 (item 428971). All were read on crops of the page image. The Society’s list for July 1914, as printed in the British press, gives the Glion chaplain as “Rev. C. Gesson”, evidently the same man. ↩

  13. Feuille d’avis de Montreux, 29 April 1911, p. 1 (item 453830), read on the page image; the same advertisement ran again in the Feuille d’avis de Montreux of 26 April 1911 (item 453695) and twice in the Messager de Montreux (items 463767 and 463561). ↩

  14. Journal et liste des étrangers, 7 August 1915 (item 429053), 21 August 1920 (item 429540) and 6 August 1921 (item 430088), read on crops; Messager de Montreux, 25 January 1916 (item 463631), for the “nouveau temple national de Glion”. ↩

  15. Liste des étrangers, 30 June 1926, p. 7 (item 429794); Tiverton Gazette, 7 August 1928, p. 4; Eastbourne Chronicle, 27 July 1929, p. 5 (both British Newspaper Archive); “Poppies 1929”, Feuille d’avis de Montreux, 25 November 1929, p. 2 (item 452498), read on the page image: “Collect. English Church Glion 115,—”. The English Church, Glion, appears in the same accounts for 1928 and 1930 (items 461196, 464082). ↩

  16. Feuille d’avis de Montreux, 21 January 1935, p. 3 (item 507059), death notice, read on the page image, which gives the death as two days earlier; Journal de Montreux, 9 July 1937, p. 4 (item 445177). ↩

  17. Feuille d’avis de Lausanne, 14 December 1960, p. 13 (item 49893): “Après la guerre de 1914-1918, cette église n’était pour ainsi dire plus fréquentée et se mit peu à peu à tomber en ruines.” The same retrospective says that only the Église nationale used the chapel from 1900 to 1916, which the guest lists and the notices of 1908 and 1911 contradict. Journal de Montreux, 2 December 1959, p. 14, “Au Conseil communal de Montreux-Planches” (item 439833), read on the page image: “d’entente avec l’Hôtel Victoria, la chapelle anglaise sera démolie au printemps prochain et qu’on projette en lieu et place l’aménagement d’un trottoir”. ↩

  18. Journal de Montreux, 1 December 1960, p. 7 (item 437735); Feuille d’avis de Lausanne, 14 December 1960, p. 13 (item 49893). Searches of both papers for 1961 to 1966 return nothing about the chapel, and both papers are present in the archive for those years. ↩

Questions answered

When was the English church at Glion built?
The English church at Glion was built in 1886–87. Mademoiselle Müller, proprietor of the Hôtel Victoria, gave the site in 1886, and the chapel opened on Sunday 17 July 1887. The Feuille d'avis de Montreux announced that week that Glion now had "une gracieuse petite chapelle", a pretty little chapel. The Graphic said in June 1888 that it had been built the year before, and in July 1937 the Journal de Montreux marked fifty years since its inauguration. Schniewind's history dates the church to 1888–89, but the papers of the time agree on 1887.
Who designed the English church at Glion?
The English church at Glion was designed by Louis Maillard, an architect with an office in the rue des Deux-Temples at Vevey. The Graphic reported in June 1888 that the church was "constructed in the chalet style, after plans furnished by M. Maillard of Vevey", and that it would hold about 150 people. The standard survey of the English churches in Switzerland, published in 1972, does not mention Glion. In 1905 a Maillard of Vevey, very probably the same man, invited tenders for the English chapel at Caux.
Did Glion have its own Anglican chaplain?
Glion had its own chaplains, but rarely the same one for long. The post was filled a few weeks at a time, mostly by English and Irish parish clergy coming out for part of the season. At least twenty-five of them can be named between 1866 and 1929. In 1892 the chaplain was Fred. E. Toyne, with a full Sunday round and choir practice every Saturday. By 1908 the English service at Glion was held all winter, and from 1911 the guest lists describe each chaplain as "residing" at Glion.
Was the English church at Glion used by anyone else?
Yes, from the first day. The Église libre of the Canton de Vaud helped to pay for the English church at Glion. The Free Church of Montreux held its French service there on the opening Sunday, 17 July 1887. The Swiss villagers had no church nearer than Montreux, and Free Church ministers held services in the chapel every Sunday in summer and on alternate Sundays in winter. Glion's Reformed parishioners worshipped there until their own temple was inaugurated in 1916. In 1935 the family of Marie Jordan, a former needlework teacher, held a service for her there.
When was the English church at Glion demolished?
The English church at Glion came down in the last weeks of 1960 or in 1961. The Montreux-Planches council was told in December 1959 that the disused chapel would be demolished the following spring, but a year later it was still standing. On 14 December 1960 the Feuille d'avis de Lausanne reported that it would go to the demolishers in the next few days. After that the Montreux and Lausanne papers do not mention it again, and no report of the demolition itself has been found.
Where did the English church at Glion stand?
The English church at Glion stood above the road from Glion to Caux, up a short path, on ground given by the Hôtel Victoria in 1886. It was within five minutes' walk of the hotels where English travellers stayed. So far as we know, nothing marks the place now.