History

St. Peter’s was consecrated in 1902, but the story of an English-speaking parish in Château-d’Oex begins decades earlier — in the lounges of Victorian Alpine hotels, where holidaying British families first gathered for Sunday services long before there was a building to gather in.

What follows is a curator’s guide to the parish’s own heritage: its founding, its First World War years, and the documents that survive from both.

The story of St. Peter’s

The fullest account is Janet Daenzer’s Heritage 1866–1919, which traces the parish from its hotel-lounge origins to the consecration of the church on 27 May 1902.

Two original documents from that year survive in the archive. The Consecration Certificate was issued by Thomas Edward Wilkinson, Anglican Bishop of North Europe, formally consecrating the new church. His authority to do so came from a letter of commission from Arthur Foley, Bishop of London, dated 10 May 1902 — which appointed Wilkinson to dedicate the building “by the name of St. Peter.” Both, with the rest of the parish’s founding papers, are gathered on the page of St. Peter’s original documents.

The First World War

In 1916, Château-d’Oex received hundreds of British prisoners of war who had been exchanged from German camps through neutral Switzerland under a diplomatic agreement that May. Wounded and invalid soldiers were brought to the Swiss Alps to recover, and St. Peter’s became a centre of welcome and pastoral care for them. The parish marked the WWI centenary in 2016, and the story remains one of the most remarkable chapters in the church’s history.

The contemporary newspaper reports of those events — the Great War cuttings from the parish’s own press archive — are published in full, and free to read, at the Château-d’Œx press archive.

Anniversaries

St. Peter’s celebrated its 120th anniversary on 2 June 2019, in the presence of the Right Reverend Dr. Robert Innes, Anglican Bishop in Europe.

The wider Anglican story in Switzerland

St. Peter’s was one of many English churches built across Switzerland from the 1840s onwards, to serve British residents, invalids and visitors who wintered and climbed here. The parish keeps the record of that whole phenomenon: English Churches in Switzerland indexes twenty-four churches and chapels across five cantons — Vaud, Bern, Geneva, the Valais and the Grisons — each with the questions its page answers. Behind it sits the wider story of why the English came to the Alps at all, and a deeper account of one of our nearest sister congregations, St. John’s, Montreux, founded amid the Romantic afterglow of Byron, the Shelleys, and the early years of Lake Geneva tourism.

Contributing

The archive is being assembled gradually. If you have photographs, documents, or recollections relating to St. Peter’s or the wider Anglican community in the Pays-d’Enhaut that you would be willing to share, please write to info@stpeters.ch.