History of English Churches in Switzerland – Villars

History of the English Church, Villars

The English church at Villars-sur-Ollon stands next to the Palace Hotel, which is the whole explanation for its being there. It is now the chapel of Aiglon College, and it holds the memory of two generations of British sportsmen who did not come home.

Beginnings, and a disagreement about them

Villars was first mentioned on the chaplaincy list of the Colonial and Continental Church Society in 1867. What happened next is told two different ways by the two accounts we hold, and we cannot reconcile them.

Schniewind records that the proprietor of the Hotel Grand Muveran, Monsieur A. Petter-Gueuillard, built a church in 1880 beside his hotel and gave it to the Society; that this chapel was later demolished; and that a new English church was erected in 1954, sometimes used by local Protestants as well.

Aiglon College, which has owned the building since 1996, states instead that the English Church was established in Villars in 1883 and inaugurated on 27 July of that year, and that it remained the property of the Commonwealth and Continental Church Society — later the Intercontinental Church Society — “for well over a century” before the college bought it. That is a continuous history where Schniewind has a demolition and a replacement. (The two accounts differ and we have not been able to settle it.)

The contemporary press does not settle the difference — both dates fall before its earliest notice — but it does establish that a chapel was standing and busy by the summer of 1886, and it adds something neither account mentions: from the beginning the building was shared.

In September 1886 the Vaud church paper Évangile et liberté reported that the Union vaudoise évangélique had arranged, “de concert avec une Société anglaise”, regular Sunday worship at Villars for the many foreigners staying there, and that through July and August “un culte régulier a été célébré par des pasteurs de notre Eglise dans la chapelle construite à Villars sur l’initiative de la Société anglaise” — in the chapel built at Villars on the initiative of the English society. The Union was now seeking a contract guaranteeing it continued joint use.

It got one. In June 1887 the same paper reported: “Nous avons obtenu la co-jouissance de la Chapelle anglaise de Villars sur Ollon; cinq de nos pasteurs y ont célébré l’été dernier des cultes réguliers, réunissant jusqu’à deux cents auditeurs.” Five pastors, congregations of up to two hundred, in an English chapel on a Swiss mountainside.

By the end of the century the building was suffering for it. In July 1898 the visitors’ paper of the Riviera described the state of the chapel where “le culte anglican et le culte protestant français se célèbrent” with some relish: “le toit incline d’une façon peu orthodoxe, la cloche grince, l’orgue gémit à faire pleurer, la porte elle-même refuse de tourner sur des gonds désalignés” — the roof leaning in a distinctly unorthodox manner, the bell grating, the organ groaning fit to make you weep, and the door refusing to turn on its misaligned hinges. Guests staying at Villars were sufficiently moved to organise a musical and literary evening on 2 August, the whole proceeds going to the chapel’s restoration.

What both accounts agree on is why it was there at all. The pioneers of the Swiss tourist trade came principally from Britain, and the plateau above Ollon became one of the early centres for winter sports favoured by that clientele. How much the church mattered to the trade can be read off a hotel letterhead: a letter from the Hotel Grand Muveran to the Society dated 12 February 1887 advertises, among the amenities at the disposal of guests, “cultes anglais, français et catholique” — English, French and Catholic worship, listed alongside the rooms.

What the building holds

A visitor sees the history in the fabric. The chapel adjoins the Palace Hotel, the building that made Villars a resort. In the porch hangs a panorama showing how isolated the chapel stood in its early days.

On the right-hand side of the aisle are two plaques. The first commemorates the British curlers who gave their lives in the First World War. The second commemorates thirty-one British skiers who died in the cause of freedom in the Second. How closely each of those commemorated was tied to the church is, as the college’s own history admits, difficult to establish — but one name connects the plaque to the valley’s schools: Paul Chaning-Pearce, son of Melville Chaning-Pearce, who founded Alpine College at Arveyes in 1925.

A third plaque, on the opposite wall, remembers Thomas Amos Davies (1880–1941) and his wife Sophie Henrietta (1882–1961), “through whose loving care over long years this church was maintained and beautified to the glory of God”. Their daughter Joan Hudson took over the Marie Louise hotel from her mother — now the Hôtel du Golf — and was, like her parents, a pillar of the English church.

The schools take it on

Alpine College at Arveyes, founded in 1925, drew English-speaking boys to the plateau. One of them was John Corlette, sent there in the late 1920s for his health. He came back as a schoolmaster in 1947 and in January 1949 founded his own school, Aiglon College, in the Chalet Chantecler at Chesières. The college has used the chapel for Sunday worship ever since.

Others used it too. The Eglise Réformée du Canton de Vaud held services there before it built its own church in Villars, and a group of Dutch Protestants of the Léman region has continued to do so.

As Aiglon grew through the 1960s and 1970s the chapel became too small for the whole school, and services moved to the Reformed and occasionally the Roman Catholic churches. In the 1980s, as the college’s religious make-up grew more varied, a core of believers began attending voluntary services in the chapel instead of the compulsory school ones. The instigator was the Revd Timothy Barlow, chaplain of All Saints Vevey and at that time a visiting preacher and Religious Knowledge teacher at the college. Bill and Bette Linton and Dolly Johnson became the mainstay of the Villars English Church as a regular place of worship — Bill preaching, Dolly at the piano — and the Lintons’ generosity helped pay for repairs to a fabric that badly needed them, the rest coming as a large loan from All Saints Vevey.

Aiglon College bought the chapel from the Intercontinental Church Society in 1996 and rededicated it on Friday 17 May that year.

The Vevey connection

Villars belongs to the same small network of chaplaincies as this parish. Until 1968 the chaplain from Leysin came over occasionally. In 1980 the Revd Timothy Barlow reopened services at Easter from Vevey, and Villars has been served from Vevey since; in the off-season, services are held at Aiglon College.

Aiglon’s own history puts the relationship plainly. The Villars English Church is not a daughter church of All Saints Vevey, but All Saints “has nevertheless at times of need taken Villars and its groupe de fidèles under its wing — as it has St. Peter’s Château d’Oex”. One Aiglon alumnus, the Revd David Ritchie, returned to the Romandie as an ordained minister of the Church of England, served as chaplain of All Saints, and during those years occasionally took services back in the chapel he had attended as a schoolboy.

This account rests on the sources described below and does not describe the chapel’s present-day life. For that, see Aiglon College.

---

Date of first Chaplaincy: 1867 (Colonial and Continental Church Society)

Church dates: 1883 per Aiglon College; 1880, demolished, and rebuilt 1954 per Schniewind — the accounts differ

Patron: Colonial and Continental Church Society, later the Intercontinental Church Society; sold to Aiglon College in 1996

Hotel: Hotel Grand Muveran, and latterly the adjoining Palace Hotel

Current Status: The chapel of Aiglon College, rededicated 17 May 1996

Sources

History of the English Church Villars (since 1996, the Aiglon College Chapel) — Aiglon College

Paul Schniewind, Anglicans in Switzerland, Past and Present (p. 81)

Évangile et liberté, 17 September 1886 and 10 June 1887

Journal et liste des étrangers de Montreux, de Vevey, 30 July 1898

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

Further Reading

Aiglon College