History of English Churches in Switzerland – Zermatt

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 the 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. Clergy were no difficulty — parsons were plentiful among the mountaineers, and some of the finest climbers of the day came from their ranks — but accommodation for those who wished to attend was. From 1858 regular services were held in the lounges of the Hotel Monte Rosa and the Hotel des Alpes; from 1862 salons were set aside at the Monte Rosa and the Mont Cervin and used for worship by turns. (This progression, which Cicely Williams sets out in her history of the church, reconciles what had looked like a disagreement in the records: Schniewind dates the hotel services from 1858, in the Monte Rosa and the Hotel des Alpes, while the Walliser Bote dates them from 1862, in the Monte Rosa and the Mont Cervin — the two are describing successive arrangements, not contradicting one another.) By now an Anglican church had become a necessity. In July 1864 Dr Miller of the CCCS came out from London to discuss building one, and the first plans were drawn in May 1865; as a first step the Society bought a site, west of the Mont Cervin, from Joseph Clemenz and Alexander Seiler.

The Matterhorn, 14 July 1865

Two months later, on 14 July 1865, Edward Whymper’s party completed the first ascent of the Matterhorn, reaching the summit soon after midday and finding they had beaten an Italian party to it. With Whymper were the Revd Charles Hudson, Lord Francis Douglas and Douglas Hadow, and the guides Michel Croz of Chamonix and Peter Taugwalder, father and son, of Zermatt. Early in the descent, on the steep ground above the shoulder, one of the party slipped and the rope broke. Hudson, Hadow, Douglas and Croz fell to their deaths down the north face; Whymper and the two Taugwalders were left on the ridge.

Word reached the village that afternoon: a boy ran into the Monte Rosa at three o’clock crying that an avalanche had come off the Matterhorn, and Seiler — who had told his guests only hours before that the party had been seen on the summit — rebuked him for spreading alarm. The next day Whymper came down alone to the hotel; when Seiler asked what had happened, he answered only, “The Taugwalders and I have returned.” On 19 July twenty-one men of Zermatt brought down the bodies. There was as yet no English burial ground, and the graves of Croz, Hudson and Hadow lie in the village churchyard; Lord Francis Douglas’s body was never found. The disaster resounded across Europe — the press denounced mountaineering as reckless, and Queen Victoria is said to have asked whether such a pastime could not be stopped by law.

One of the dead, Hudson, was Zermatt’s first chaplain, appointed the year before. He 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.

Far from killing the project, the tragedy quickened it. The contributions book had been opened only weeks before, headed by the two hotel pioneers Alexander Seiler and Joseph Clemenz — “although both were Catholic”, as the Walliser Bote observed — and its first page advertised “an eligible site … nearly west of the Hotel Mont Cervin”, with subscriptions to be received by Seiler, by Clemenz, or by the CCCS at its offices in Fleet Street. That two such men lent their names mattered: Clemenz was President of the Grand Council of the Valais and sat in the Federal Assembly, and Seiler held a captain’s commission in the Federal Army — and where they led, the people of Zermatt were content to follow. Ten days after the accident a handful of climbers and tourists sent the first gifts; on 28 July the Marquess of Queensberry, head of Lord Francis Douglas’s family, sent £50, and on 21 August the parents of Douglas Hadow followed. Zermatt saw a lean season or two afterwards — Baedeker’s guide of 1868 dismissed the Matterhorn tersely, “has been climbed once — no tariff” — but by 1869 the mountain and the village were fully back in favour.

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, before a large crowd of British and American visitors. Building began at once, and at a pace a later age would find hard to credit: work went on through the autumn until the November snows stopped it, resumed in April, and on 29 June 1870 — St Peter’s Day again — the church was opened for its first service. (The exact day is not quite settled: Schniewind and Cicely Williams both give 29 June 1870, a year to the day after the stone, while the Walliser Bote gives 6 June 1870. All three place it in 1870, and the 140th anniversary kept in 2010 is consistent with either.)

The dedication itself had to wait until 6 August 1871, when the Suffragan Bishop of Dover, the Rt Revd Edward Parry, came up to Zermatt. The evening before, a notice went round the tables at the Monte Rosa and the Mont Cervin inviting the English and American visitors to fireworks and illuminations — in the village and up at the Riffelberg, three thousand feet above it. Sunday dawned cloudless. At eleven o’clock the Bishop, attended by four clergy and four laymen who stood for the English and American visitors, walked in procession up the little hill to the church, where the petition for its dedication and the commission granted by the Bishop of London — under whose jurisdiction the Continental chaplaincies then lay — were read at the door before clergy and people went up the nave reciting Psalm 24. Parry took his text from Psalm 75, “Unto thee, O God, do we give thanks”, and reminded the visitors of their duty to clear the debt still resting on the building; the Swiss Times carried an almost verbatim account. The whole cost — land, architect, furniture and fabric — came to £1,575, a considerable sum at the time, and the title of the church 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 visitors of those decades were a remarkable company. Among the climbers who gathered under the roof of the Monte Rosa and worshipped at St Peter’s were W. A. B. Coolidge, Sir Martin Conway, Sir Leslie Stephen and Lucy Walker, the first woman to climb the Matterhorn; in 1894 the young Winston Churchill came too and — by the account of L. S. Amery, who knew him — insisted on climbing Monte Rosa on the ground that it was the highest summit in Switzerland. Their tablets, and those of climbers who died in the mountains, gradually filled the little building; the epitaph most often remarked on, over the grave of the Alpine Club member Edward Broome, borrows Shakespeare — “Night’s candles are burnt out, and jocund day stands tiptoe on the misty mountain tops.”

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 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 — though the church itself was not opened in winter until December 1953, after which, with electric heating installed in 1959, it kept a winter chaplaincy every year.

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

The church’s own hundred years were bracketed by two other centenaries. In 1957 the Alpine Club marked its own, and chose Zermatt for the gathering: Sir John Hunt, fresh from Everest and the Club’s president in its centenary year, read a lesson at a crowded service where an ice-axe and rope lay before the Holy Table. In 1965 the centenary of the first ascent brought the descendants of the first-ascent party back to Zermatt; at an evening service in St Peter’s, filled to the doors, Sir John Hunt laid a wreath on the Holy Table beneath which Charles Hudson lies — the man who, a hundred years before, had died on the mountain the church was built partly to remember.

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 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)

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, from which much of the detail above is drawn