Why is there an English church in Zermatt?

Because of mountaineering. Zermatt was placed on the chaplaincy list of the Colonial and Continental Church Society in 1857, and services were held in hotel lounges before the congregation outgrew them. The church grew directly out of what the Walliser Bote called the pioneering days of the golden age of alpinism: the English stood at the cradle of the sport, and in the Victorian era a permanent place of worship followed the climbers.

Who is buried in the English church at Zermatt?

The Revd Charles Hudson, who died in the descent from the first ascent of the Matterhorn on 14 July 1865. Paul Schniewind records that he was Zermatt's first chaplain, appointed in 1864, and that his body was later moved from the village cemetery to a place beneath the Holy Table as a special honour. The church also holds his Bible and the prayer book he used as an army chaplain in the Crimean War.

When was St Peter's Church, Zermatt built?

The foundation stone was laid on 29 June 1869, the Feast of St Peter and St Paul — which is how the church got its name. The first service was held the following year, and the church was dedicated on 6 August 1871 by the Suffragan Bishop of Dover, the Rt Revd Edward Parry. It cost £1,575 in all.

Why is St Peter's Zermatt called the parish church of the Alpine Club?

It became known by that name throughout climbing circles, and Schniewind records it as the only church in the Swiss Alps able to claim the title. The connection was practical as well as sentimental: the Alpine Club of Great Britain paid for a new roof in 1925, and the church holds memorial tablets to many who were bound up with Zermatt and its mountains.

Who paid for the English church at Zermatt?

The subscription list was opened in 1865 and headed by the hotel pioneers Alexander Seiler and Joseph Clemenz — both of them, as the Walliser Bote noted, Roman Catholics. Large sums came from the Marquess of Queensberry, head of Lord Francis Douglas's family, and from the relatives of Douglas Hadow. Douglas and Hadow had both died alongside Hudson on the Matterhorn.

History of St. Peter's English Church, Zermatt - Anglican Churches in Switzerland

History of St. Peter’s English Church, Zermatt

No other English church in Switzerland is bound so tightly to a single event. St Peter’s, Zermatt, was conceived in the months before the first ascent of the Matterhorn, paid for in part by the families of men who died coming down from it, and it holds beneath its altar the body of its own first chaplain, who died with them.

Before the church

By the middle of the 1850s the Swiss Alps had become fashionable, and Zermatt in particular drew English mountaineers into the Valais. Cicely Williams, the church’s principal chronicler, caught the expectation they brought with them: the Victorian gentleman travelling in Europe “liked to have his accustomed comforts around him, more especially when his family was present”, and among the requirements he thought necessary was divine worship in the form of full matins and evensong — “the latter shortened if the mountains were in good condition”.

Zermatt was placed on the chaplaincy list of the Colonial and Continental Church Society in 1857, as a summer chaplaincy. Services followed in hotel lounges, and by the early 1860s the crowds had made them uncomfortable. (Schniewind dates the hotel services from 1858, in the Hotel Monte Rosa and the Hotel des Alpes; the Walliser Bote dates them from 1862, in the Hotel Monte Rosa and the Hotel Mont Cervin. The two accounts differ on the year and on the second hotel, and we have not been able to settle it.) In July 1864 Dr Miller of the CCCS came out from London to discuss building a church, and the first plans were drawn in May 1865.

The Matterhorn, 14 July 1865

Two months later, Edward Whymper’s party of British mountaineers and Zermatt guides completed the first ascent of the Matterhorn. A few hours afterwards, on the descent, a rope broke. Four of the seven fell to their deaths.

One of them was the Revd Charles Hudson, whom Schniewind records as Zermatt’s first chaplain, appointed the year before. Hudson was no tourist on the mountain. Ten years earlier he had climbed the Klein Matterhorn and the Breithorn without a guide, he was regarded as the outstanding amateur mountaineer of his generation, and in 1862 he had spent his honeymoon at Zermatt.

The subscription list for the church had been opened that same year. The first two names on it were the hotel pioneers Alexander Seiler and Joseph Clemenz — “although both were Catholic”, as the Walliser Bote observed. Large sums came from the Marquess of Queensberry, head of the family of Lord Francis Douglas, and from the relatives of Douglas Hadow. Douglas and Hadow had died on the rope with Hudson.

The church is built

On 29 June 1869, the Feast of St Peter and St Paul — which gave the church its dedication — the foundation stone was laid. The first service in the new building followed a year later. (Schniewind says it was held exactly one year after the stone, on 29 June 1870; the Walliser Bote gives 6 June 1870. Both place it in 1870, and the church’s 140th anniversary in 2010 is consistent with that, but the day is not settled.)

The dedication service took place on 6 August 1871, when the Suffragan Bishop of Dover, the Rt Revd Edward Parry, came up to Zermatt. The night before, the village had invited the English and American visitors to fireworks and illuminations — not only in Zermatt but up at the Riffelberg, three thousand feet above it. The church cost £1,575 in all, a considerable sum at the time, and its title rested with the CCCS.

The parish church of the Alpine Club

Through the 1870s the visitors kept coming, still mostly climbers, and St Peter’s acquired a name it has never lost: throughout climbing circles it became known as the parish church of the Alpine Club — the only church in the Swiss Alps, Schniewind notes, that can record the attribute. Memorial tablets inside it commemorate people closely bound to Zermatt and its mountains. As a special honour, Hudson’s body was moved from the village cemetery to a place beneath the Holy Table, where it remains. The church also keeps his Bible, and the prayer book he had used as an army chaplain in the Crimean War. There is a small churchyard of its own.

The early chaplains’ registers survive at St Peter’s, and they record the world changing. Canon Bardsley wrote in August 1895 that he had been struck by the increased number of clergy and schoolteachers travelling; fewer moneyed people seemed to come, and “the absence of gold on the first three Sundays was in contrast to ‘the old days’” — yet, he added, “the general level of giving was higher than I have known it elsewhere”. By 1898 attendances had grown enough that the church had to be enlarged.

St Peter’s closed during the First World War. Repairs became unavoidable in the 1920s and the Society in London could not fund them, so the church’s friends stepped in: the Alpine Club of Great Britain subscribed for a new roof in 1925, and Charles Hudson’s daughter gave new altar rails in memory of her father. Zermatt opened for its first winter season in 1928, and a new generation of British and American visitors arrived with skis.

After the Second World War the summer ministry of the Rt Revd Ronald Ralph Williams, Bishop of Leicester and himself an Alpine Club member, put St Peter’s at the disposal of French- and German-speaking Swiss Protestants who had nowhere else to worship. By the 1950s three chaplains were holding a shared service at nine o’clock on Sunday evenings, each reading, praying and preaching briefly in his own language, and each congregation choosing a hymn from its own book.

The chaplains’ relations with the overwhelmingly Roman Catholic village were warm. When the Olympic skier Bernard “Berni” Perren was killed at work in the summer of 1961, Bishop Williams walked robed in the funeral procession. When typhoid broke out in March 1963 and the village school was turned into a hospital, many of the cases were British, and the Zermatt priest Father Franz Fux visited and cared for them.

Since then

At the church’s centenary in 1970, Cicely Williams — an enthusiastic climber, secretary of the Ladies’ Alpine Club, and a Zermatt regular since her adolescence — reflected on what the place had come to do. People who were not regular churchgoers at home, she wrote, were “so surprised to find an English church that they decide instantly that they must attend the service”, and judging by the letters that arrived over the years, “not a few who began their church-going at Zermatt have continued it at home”.

The church was renovated again in 1997 and 2000. It is known in the village simply as the Tempel. When St Peter’s kept its 140th anniversary on Sunday 26 June 2010, the celebrations were opened the evening before by David Healey of the Intercontinental Church Society, which provides its clergy — priests who come out from England and take the ministry in turn, a fortnight at a time, taking baptisms and weddings as well as Sunday services.

This account rests on sources published up to 2010 and does not describe the church’s present-day life.

Date of first Chaplaincy: 1857 (Colonial and Continental Church Society, summer chaplaincy)

Church dates: Foundation stone 29 June 1869; first service 1870; dedicated 6 August 1871; enlarged 1898

Patron: Colonial and Continental Church Society; clergy now provided by the Intercontinental Church Society

Hotel: Services held first in the Hotel Monte Rosa and, depending on the account, the Hotel des Alpes or the Hotel Mont Cervin

Current Status: Active Anglican church, served seasonally

Sources

“140 Jahre Englische Kirche Zermatt”, Walliser Bote, vol. 174 no. 158, 12 July 2010

Paul Schniewind, Anglicans in Switzerland, Past and Present (pp. 86–89)

Further Reading

Cicely Williams, A Church in the Alps: a century of Zermatt and the English (Intercontinental Church Society; 6th edition reprinted by St. Peter’s Church, Zermatt, 2006, ISBN 0 9537435 0 0) — the church’s principal chronicle, and the source of the passages Schniewind quotes above