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.)
What both 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)
Further Reading