How old is the English congregation at Vevey?

It goes back to 1823. The chaplain, the Revd Barry O'Meara Dean, wrote in an 1845 report that "a congregation of the English Church has existed at Vevey since 1823", and Professor Michel Jéquier of Lausanne records that English services were held in the church of La Tour-de-Peilz in 1823. What happened between 1823 and 1844, when Anglican services began or recommenced in Vevey itself, is not known.

Who designed All Saints Church, Vevey?

George Edmund Street, the London architect of the Law Courts in Fleet Street. He had drawn up initial plans by 1880, and they were passed to the Swiss master builder and architect Henri Lavanchy for final implementation. Street had already built the English church in Lausanne in 1878 and the English church at Mürren the same year. All Saints was regarded by his peers as his masterwork; Bishop Wilkinson, visiting in 1886, called it in his journal "our pretty little church, built by Mr Street".

When was All Saints Vevey consecrated, and who consecrated it?

On Tuesday 22 August 1882 at 11 o'clock, by the Bishop of Pennsylvania, the Rt Revd Stevens, assisted by the chaplain, the Revd William Phelps Prior. Neither Schniewind nor the chaplaincy's own history can explain why an American bishop was chosen, beyond the presence of an influential group of American Episcopalians in the parish; a report thirty years later noted the church had "always been well attended and well supported by the American community in Vevey".

What did All Saints Vevey cost to build?

CHF 103,000 in total, or about £4,120 at the exchange rate of the day — CHF 14,000 for the land and CHF 89,000 for the foundations and the building. The money came entirely from subscription; the English church had no state or cantonal aid, and in July 1879 the chaplain wrote to the Vevey Executive Council to say that without outside help the building could not be finished. The council refused, and the walls stood unfinished for years.

Why are British war graves at Vevey?

In 1922 the bodies of 76 British soldiers who had died during internment in Switzerland between 1916 and 1918 were brought together in the cemetery of St Martin at Vevey — the same internment scheme that brought wounded British prisoners of war to Château-d'Œx and Mürren. Airmen who crashed in Switzerland during the Second World War were buried there too, and in 1947 or 1948 a wooden triptych bearing their names was dedicated in the north transept of All Saints. From the 1960s the Royal British Legion took over the Remembrance service at the memorial.

History of All Saints, Vevey - Anglican Churches in Switzerland

Q: Which other churches were served from Vevey?

Château-d'Œx and Villars. Schniewind records that an assistant chaplain was employed at All Saints because of the distances to the two chaplaincies served from Vevey, the Revd Mark Hunt, replaced in early 1991 by the Revd Brian Crook. Aiglon College's own history records that All Saints has at times of need taken Villars and its congregation under its wing, "as it has St. Peter's Château d'Oex". St Peter's and All Saints share a chaplain today.

History of All Saints, Vevey

Of all the English churches on the Lake of Geneva, All Saints at Vevey is the one this parish knows from the inside: St Peter’s Château-d’Œx and All Saints Vevey share a chaplain, and for long stretches of the twentieth century Château-d’Œx was served from Vevey. It is also the most substantial of these buildings — a church by George Edmund Street that his peers thought his masterwork, put up by a congregation that had already been worshipping in other people’s churches for fifty-nine years, and paid for franc by franc by people who very nearly failed.

A congregation before a church

The beginnings go back to 1823. The chaplain, the Revd Barry O’Meara Dean, noted in an 1845 report that “a congregation of the English Church has existed at Vevey since 1823”, and Professor Michel Jéquier of Lausanne records English services held that same year in the church of La Tour-de-Peilz. What happened over the next two decades is simply not known. Anglican services began — or began again — in Vevey itself in 1844, in the Hotel Monnet, now the Hotel des Trois-Couronnes.

Before that, some of the English visitors were in the habit of travelling to Geneva from Saturday to Monday for the privilege of a Sunday service. Why they went to Geneva rather than to Lausanne, which was nearer and had held regular Sunday services since 1822, nobody has explained.

The hotel’s owner, M. Monnet, asked the Vevey council whether the Anglicans might worship in the town’s parish churches. The council agreed, approaches were made to Pastors Etienne Chavannes and François Grenier, and from July 1844 Anglican services were held in St Martin and St Claire by turns — St Claire, as it worked out, more often, until the congregation finally had a building of its own in 1882. It would return there in 2001 when that building was being rebuilt around it.

Dean’s return of 1845

In 1845 the Revd G. E. Biber sent a questionnaire to every English church on the Continent. Dean, appointed the year before, replied in detail, and the result is an unusually exact photograph of an Alpine chaplaincy at work.

The Church of St Martin was used in summer, a room at the hotel in winter. Services were at 11 in the morning, with a second at 7 in the evening through the summer; Holy Communion once a month and at Christmas, Easter and Whitsun. Dean took four pupils, aged between seven and fourteen. The hotel room held sixty; St Martin, he noted drily, “is much larger than the congregation requires”, and no charge was made for sittings at either place.

The resident English population was “variable, about 40, chiefly of the upper class”, against some 5,000 visitors between June and the end of September. The congregation averaged seventy in summer and thirty in winter, with thirty to forty communicants in summer and ten to twelve in winter. The church was supported entirely by voluntary subscription among residents and visitors, and the appointment of the minister rested with the resident heads of families and was considered permanent. There were, Dean recorded, “no English poor settled”.

Vevey was taken onto the list of the Colonial and Continental Church Society in 1855, and from 1862 the Swiss Protestant Church allowed the English their Sunday service at 11 o’clock in St Claire. The stretch of shore between Vevey and Villeneuve was by then a favourite of British artists; the painter Edward Lear, arriving in 1861, was moved to declare that “Vevey is Paradise, and I don’t see how the people can have the impudence to suppose that they can go to Heaven after death.”

The vineyard called En Puey

On 11 February 1878 the Vevey council approved the sale of a vineyard of 1,756 square metres, then called En Puey, to William Grimley, president of the English congregation. The price was CHF 14,000 — about £560, at a time when a housemaid in England was paid three or four pounds a year and her board. The intention was unmistakable.

The original plan was for two churches on the plot, the Russian Orthodox and the new Anglican one side by side. It did not happen, because Count Peter Andreivich Shuvalov provided the funds to build the Orthodox church in the Rue des Communaux instead, where it still stands under its golden dome. Shuvalov — born 1827 into an old Russian family, a Guards officer, Governor General of the Baltic Provinces from 1864, then head of the political police, and finally Russian ambassador in London — owed his connection with Vevey to that last posting.

Street’s design, and the walls that stood unfinished

By 1880 the London architect George Edmund Street had drawn up initial plans. Street was the architect of the Victorian Gothic Law Courts in Fleet Street; he had already built the English church at Lausanne in 1878, and the English church at Mürren in the same year. His drawings for Vevey were passed to the Swiss master builder and architect Henri Lavanchy to carry out. The chaplain who drove the whole project, raising the first funds and keeping it alive, was the Revd William Phelps Prior, chaplain from 1861 to 1884.

The money ran out almost at once. The English church had no state or cantonal aid towards construction, and in July 1879 Prior wrote to the Vevey Executive Council setting out the position and asking whether some ex gratia funding might exceptionally be found; he went so far as to say that without external help the building could not be completed. The council was sympathetic and said no — its own means were already stretched by urgent repairs to St Martin, and it could not create a precedent by paying for an Anglican church outside its jurisdiction.

So the walls stood. In October 1880 the Greater Britain Messenger printed an account by the Revd J. N. Woodroffe, sent out by the society as assistant chaplain for the month of June. Asking to see the English church, he was shown a site just below where he stood: “there on a nice piece of ground, stood the unfinished walls of what should long ago have been completed and consecrated as the English church at Vevey.”

They were finished franc by franc. One of the collectors was Caroline Lillian Taylor, who died on 30 October 1882, only weeks after the consecration; the baptismal font, carved by the Vevey marble sculptor David Dore, is in her memory. A letter from Captain Taylor, quoted in the chaplaincy’s history, is the best sentence anyone has written about this building: “Lil worked hard collecting money to build the church, which remained only a few feet high for a long time, until inch by inch they raised enough funds to complete it.”

The final account, in the chaplaincy’s own record, was CHF 14,000 for the land and CHF 89,000 for foundations and building — CHF 103,000, about £4,120.

22 August 1882

On Tuesday 22 August 1882, at 11 o’clock precisely, the Bishop of Pennsylvania, the Rt Revd Stevens, assisted by Prior, consecrated the church as All Saints. Why an American bishop performed the ceremony is a genuine puzzle: both accounts note an influential group of American Episcopalians in the parish, and neither can find any indication of how the choice was made. A report thirty years later observed that the church “has always been well attended and well supported by the American community in Vevey.”

The Feuille d’Avis de Vevey carried it the next day. Around Bishop Stevens were ten English and American clergy, with several pastors from Vevey and the neighbouring communes, and a congregation drawn from the foreign colony, the inhabitants of Vevey and others from around the canton. The service began exactly on time — hymns, prayers, readings by several of the clergy present, and a brief sermon from Stevens — and ended at half past twelve. At one o’clock the clergy who had taken part and several members of the executive committee sat down to luncheon at the vicarage in the Hotel Monnet, where speeches followed from Stevens, from clergy of Vevey, Neuchâtel and Nice, and from a committee member, the banker M. Glas. Kind words, the paper reported, were addressed to the town and particularly to the National Church in Vevey, whose churches had been used for Anglican services for so many years.

Writing to the same Greater Britain Messenger in January 1883, Prior put the relief plainly: “The day to which we have been looking forward to for more than 15 years, has at last arrived.”

The title of the church was transferred to the society in London at the beginning of the 1880s. Bishop Wilkinson, who came for visitation and confirmation on his first visit to Switzerland in 1886, wrote of “our pretty little church, built by Mr Street.”

Fabric and furnishing

The principal structure is sandstone rather than the more robust Portland stone, and it has cost the congregation steadily over the years as eroded pieces come away.

The Revd George Akehurst, chaplain from 1886 to 1901, set out to clear the building debts and started a fund for future costs; among his expedients was selling the original church organ for £100. In 1909 a new organ was commissioned from Goll of Lucerne at £550, and central heating was installed the same year. The present instrument, by E. Dumas et Fils of Romont, is the third, replacing one by Kuhn of Männedorf which had replaced the Goll.

The windows repay a look. A small rose window carries the royal coat of arms, and the one facing it the blue and yellow escutcheon of Vevey. The principal window, of 1896, was the gift of the Revd Onslow Mangles on the occasion of Akehurst’s second marriage. The Victorian brass lectern, surmounted by an eagle, was Akehurst’s own gift in 1887 — and has an identical twin at Holy Trinity, Cannes.

A surviving account of the 1920s shows the pattern of a congregation always slightly behind its ambitions: £160 of organ debt repaid to the society; a Church Repair and Improvement Fund started in 1922 with roof repairs and kneelers bought for the pews; new pews throughout in 1923; the whole church redecorated in 1924 at CHF 4,000; oak wainscotting in 1925, a gift of £200 from Miss Fleming, along with a marble pulpit in memory of Madame Susan Grand d’Hauteville (1849–1928). In 1926 Admiral Horsley paid for the church garden to be reordered and a new vestry built. In 1935 land to the south-east was bought from M. Jean Louis Ormond, of the local cigar-manufacturing family, for CHF 5,642, which allowed a carriage way through to the garden. In 1964 the church was redecorated again, relit and reroofed, the whole expense borne by a legacy from Madame Grand d’Hauteville.

The war graves at St Martin

In 1922 the bodies of 76 British soldiers who had died during internment in Switzerland between 1916 and 1918 were transferred to the cemetery of St Martin at Vevey. This is the Vevey chapter of our own story: the internment scheme that gathered wounded British prisoners of war into Swiss mountain villages is the same one that brought them to Château-d’Œx and to Mürren, and Vevey is where those who did not survive it were finally laid together.

The service was largely attended. The chaplain, Mr Legg, was accompanied by the Presbyterian minister of Montreux and by the priest of the Roman Catholic church. Remembrance services were held in All Saints every year afterwards, with wreaths laid at the memorial in St Martin’s cemetery. During the Second World War airmen who crashed in Switzerland were buried there too, and in 1947 or 1948 a wooden triptych bearing the names of the soldiers and airmen was dedicated in the north transept of All Saints. From the 1960s the Royal British Legion took over the Remembrance service at the memorial, and on 11 November itself the British ambassador attends the wreath-laying.

1949, and the closing of the chapels

In 1949 the British Chancellor of the Exchequer, Sir Stafford Cripps, devalued the pound. For the English churches of Switzerland the consequence was immediate and severe: parishioners whose income came in sterling could no longer afford to live in Switzerland and went home, and church funding collapsed with them. At Vevey the financial position made it necessary to ask the chaplain, the Revd F. E. Keay, to leave, and to close many of the surrounding chapels or hand them over to the Swiss authorities.

That sentence explains a great deal of what happened to the smaller chapels in these pages. The network of Alpine chaplaincies did not so much fade as lose its currency.

What kept All Saints open was, of all things, a jumble sale. Introduced in the early 1950s, the annual Church Sale grew into a substantial institution: Schniewind records takings of SFr 38,000 in 1991, a fifth of it allocated to the church’s missionary committee. The chaplaincy’s own history credits Mrs Sandra Darra, MBE, and an army of volunteers with driving it in later years to sums of CHF 30,000 to 40,000, of which ten to fifteen per cent went to causes chosen by the missionary committee and the rest kept the doors open and the chaplain paid. In May 2010 it became the Taste of Spring Fair. The first sales had done something quieter and more lasting: they provided the deposit on a parsonage at Blonay.

Growth

The later twentieth century was, unusually for these churches, a story of expansion. In the ministry of the Revd Leslie Wright, in the early 1970s, the only boys’ choir in Switzerland was established. Under the Revd Richard Thomson the church lounge came into being in the crypt, and the congregation grew enough to need an assistant to look after the young: Linette Hunter stayed twelve years before returning to England.

Because of the distances to the two chaplaincies served from Vevey — Château-d’Œx and Villars — an assistant chaplain was employed, the Revd Mark Hunt, replaced in early 1991 by the Revd Brian Crook. Aiglon College’s own history describes the arrangement from the other end: All Saints has at times of need taken Villars and its congregation under its wing, “as it has St. Peter’s Château d’Oex”.

The centenary was marked during the chaplaincy of the Revd Timothy Barlow, with the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Lord Coggan, coming to Vevey for it — but the two accounts do not agree on when. Schniewind places it at an evening confirmation service on 19 September 1982; the chaplaincy’s own pamphlet describes Coggan and his wife as guests for the weekend of 18–20 August 1982, with about a hundred people at dinner on the Saturday night in the newly converted church hall. We cannot settle from these sources whether there were two occasions or one date misremembered. The Feuille d’Avis de Vevey marked the anniversary with a long article on the church’s history and an old photograph of it.

That hall was the work of the local architect Georges Dufour, who in 1977 proposed turning the vaulted cellars of the vigneron whose land the church stood on into a modern church hall — the congregation having been refused permission to build out into the car park or towards the avenue de Blonay. It was superseded within a generation. Between 1996 and 2001 a series of legacies came in: CHF 513,000 from Felix Jacobs, whose frugal apartment gave no hint of his means, CHF 33,000 from Betty Junod and CHF 155,000 from Ruth Taylor. With further donations from the congregation, from friends of the church, from Nestlé and from trust funds including the Société Vaudoise d’aide sociale, a total of CHF 1,213,918 had been raised by 2001. The council built a new church hall, renovated the organ, the north wall window and the tower — and moved the congregation back to St Claire while the work went on, 119 years after leaving it.

The Warden Emeritus, John Edward de Bruin, closed his notes on the church’s history with an assessment that has aged well: “All Saints’ is still prospering and we have by majority many young families from Nestlé and another company… I have had the privilege of seeing the congregation grow from year to year. A very live congregation.”

This account rests on sources published up to 2011. For the church’s present-day life, see All Saints Church Vevey.

Date of first Chaplaincy: Congregation from 1823; first resident chaplain 1844; on the Colonial and Continental Church Society list from 1855

Church dates: Land bought 11 February 1878; plans by George Edmund Street from 1880; consecrated 22 August 1882

Patron: All Saints

Hotel: Hotel Monnet, now the Hotel des Trois-Couronnes

Current Status: In use as All Saints Church Vevey, an Anglican chaplaincy of the Diocese in Europe, sharing a chaplain with St Peter’s Château-d’Œx

Sources

Graeme Livingstone-Wallace, All Saints’ Vevey (Vevey: All Saints’ Anglican Chaplaincy, 2011) — drawing on notes by Albert Wailes, an earlier manuscript believed to date from 1919, and corrections by Ambassador Charles Bruggmann and Derek Thompson

Paul Schniewind, Anglicans in Switzerland, Past and Present (pp. 52–56)

Feuille d’Avis de Vevey, 23 August 1882, as translated in the chaplaincy history

Greater Britain Messenger, October 1880 and January 1883, as reprinted in the chaplaincy history