Who built the Montreux Riviera?

On the first Saturday of January 1900, a weekly paper published at Montreux printed its usual page of practical information for the foreigners wintering on the shore of Lake Geneva. Under Renseignements et adresses diverses a reader could find two Anglican chaplaincies and a resident Presbyterian minister; a physician who was a Fellow of the Royal Society and emeritus professor at Manchester, consulting on the Avenue du Kursaal; a second English doctor advertising his hours in English; an English pharmacy; two English lending libraries; three tailors touting for English custom, one of them in “English styles”; an English hairdresser; a shoe shop announcing “English spoken”; a nurse who spoke English and Dutch; and two teachers of the English language.

The place is the north-eastern corner of Lake Geneva, where the lake turns and the mountains come down almost to the water — Vevey, Clarens, Montreux, Territet, and the villages on the shelves above them. Switzerland’s own tourist trade christened it the Swiss Riviera, and the name stuck. Today it is best known for a jazz festival. A century and a quarter ago it was known for something else entirely, and the directory above is the evidence.

Two things about it are worth pausing on. The first is the date. This was January, and Montreux’s season was in full flow — which is not what one expects of a lake. The second is who published the list. At the head of its front page the Journal et liste des étrangers — the register of the foreigners who had come — described itself as “organe officiel et propriété de la Société des hoteliers”: the official organ and the property of the hoteliers’ society. The English were the guests. The list of them belonged to the Swiss.

A visitor walking the lakefront at Territet in 1905, past the English chemist and the English library and the Anglican church, might reasonably have concluded that the British had made the place. They had not. But neither were they simply the people who turned up. To see why, it helps to know what had sent them there in the first place — because for a great many of them, it was not a holiday.

The disease that moved people

Consumption was tuberculosis of the lungs. The older name is the more descriptive one: it comes from the Latin for eating up or devouring, and it describes what onlookers saw, which was a person being consumed — wasting, coughing, running a low fever, and eventually coughing blood.

It is difficult now to convey how ordinary this was. By the early nineteenth century, roughly one in four deaths in England were caused by tuberculosis. It was not a rare misfortune; it was the single likeliest way for an adult to die. It fell hardest on the crowded industrial poor, but it was no respecter of income — the poet John Keats, who had trained as a surgeon and knew exactly what he was looking at, saw blood on his pillow and told a friend: “that drop of blood is my death-warrant; – I must die.”

There was no treatment that worked. Antibiotics were the better part of a century away. Nobody even knew what caused the disease until 24 March 1882, when Robert Koch told the Physiological Society of Berlin that he had isolated the bacterium responsible — a discovery that changed how the illness was understood, from an inherited weakness of constitution to something one person could catch from another. That was a mixed blessing for the sufferer. As the Science Museum puts it, people with tuberculosis “became people to keep away from.”

What a doctor could offer, before and after Koch, was air. If the disease was in the lungs, then the lungs should be given the best air obtainable, and as much of it as possible. That single idea — that climate was medicine — is the reason a comfortable English family might spend six months of the year in a foreign hotel. The prescription was not a suggestion to travel. It was the treatment.

Before Switzerland, the warm south

For the first half of the nineteenth century the answer was obvious: go somewhere warm.

The doctrine’s most influential exponent was the Scottish physician Sir James Clark, who travelled through the Mediterranean with a consumptive patient, settled in Rome, and in 1829 published The Influence of Climate in the Prevention and Cure of Chronic Diseases. A whole genre of guidebook grew up for the invalid traveller — one of the earliest was The Invalid’s Guide to Madeira of 1840 — and a string of southern resorts filled up each winter with British people who had been told to leave England.

Madeira was among the first. So were Hyères, Nice and Cannes. But the place that became most closely identified with consumption was Menton, on the French coast near the Italian border, and it happened because of one man’s own illness. J. Henry Bennet (1816–1891) was an English doctor who, after twenty-five years in practice, contracted tuberculosis himself. In 1859 he went to Menton — by his own account, to die “in a quiet corner, like a wounded denizen of the forest”. He did not die. He recovered, wintered there for years afterwards, and wrote the book that sent everybody else: Winter and Spring on the Shores of the Mediterranean, first published in 1861 and reissued in edition after edition. By 1862 some three hundred families were wintering at Menton. The town had fewer than five thousand inhabitants in 1866; by 1911 it had eighteen thousand.

The same thing was happening along the coast in Italy, and you can read it in the hotel names. At San Remo the Hôtel de Londres opened in 1861, the Hôtel d’Angleterre in 1863, the Hôtel Victoria in 1864. Nobody names a hotel after London unless Londoners are coming.

So why did anybody go to Switzerland — colder, higher, harder to reach, and by every intuition exactly wrong for a diseased lung?

Partly because of results. At Davos, high in the Grisons, a German-born country doctor named Alexander Spengler had noticed something odd about the local people: they did not seem to get consumption. He had arrived there in 1853, concluded that the altitude protected them, and treated patients with mountain air, long walks, cold water and up to three litres of milk a day. Enough of them improved that Davos changed character around him. By 1875 — and this is the fact that matters most for what follows — winter guests at Davos outnumbered summer guests for the first time.

And partly because the science turned. In 1877 Arthur Downes and Thomas Blunt demonstrated that light had a bactericidal effect. In 1882 Koch proved a bacterium caused tuberculosis. In 1890 Koch showed that sunlight killed that bacterium. Cold, dry, brilliantly-lit high air now had a rationale behind it rather than merely a run of good outcomes, and Swiss physicians pushed the logic hard. In 1903, at Leysin — a Vaud village an hour or so from Montreux — Auguste Rollier opened his Institute of Heliotherapy, and went on to build the world’s most celebrated practice in the treatment of tuberculosis by controlled exposure to sunlight.

It would be tidy to say that doctors changed their minds and the invalids moved from the Riviera to the Alps. They did not, and the medical histories are firm about it. The two schools competed for the same patients for decades, and the better physicians matched the climate to the individual rather than to a fashion. What Switzerland did was take a growing share of a growing trade — and Montreux, mild and low and on a lake, sat in an interesting position between the two doctrines. It was not the high Alps. It was the warm south’s climate, at a Swiss address.

Who actually came

It is tempting to assume that railways and Thomas Cook democratised all this, and that the Alpine resorts filled up with the ordinary middle classes. In absolute numbers, travel certainly broadened. But Susan Barton’s study of the British at Davos, St Moritz, Arosa, Leysin and Grindelwald builds its picture of these visitors largely out of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography — which is to say out of the lives of people notable enough to be in it. What it describes is a decidedly upper-class clientele. This was not a mass market. It was a narrow and wealthy one that grew.

The cost is part of the explanation. A six-week Thomas Cook family tour of Germany, Switzerland and France came to around £85 — and a tour was the cheap version of this. The people in the January directory were not touring; they were resident. Robert Louis Stevenson, sent to Davos for his lungs, was there from November 1880 to the following April, and again from October 1881 to April 1882. The critic John Addington Symonds went for eight months in 1877, then moved his family out and made Davos his home for the last sixteen years of his life. Whole households decamped — servants, governesses, children — for a season or for good.

And they were not only British. In 1902, according to the Encyclopædia Britannica of 1911, 31,473 foreigners visited Montreux, and 39,493 the following year — this in a town whose own population was just over fourteen thousand. Of the 1902 figure, 7,634 were German, 7,327 English and 5,651 French. That is worth reading twice. On the coast where the English had two chaplaincies, an English pharmacy and two English lending libraries, the Germans were, by a small margin, the larger group. The English were the most visible colony, and the most thoroughly catered for. They were never the only one.

The Swiss made the plant

So a market existed, and it was large, wealthy and returned every winter. Who built the buildings it filled?

Almost every hotel, funicular and railway on this coast that can be traced to a named promoter traces to a Swiss one, and to a remarkably small circle of them. The Dictionnaire historique de la Suisse is unambiguous about who stood at the centre of it. Its article on Ami Chessex (1840–1917), born at Territet and died at Montreux, ends: “C. est, avec son beau-frère Alexandre Emery, l’artisan du développement de la Riviera” — Chessex, with his brother-in-law Alexandre Emery, is the maker of the Riviera’s development.

What that meant in practice was a career of building things. In 1887 Chessex enlarged the family hotel into the Grand-Hôtel de Territet. He helped found, and then administered, the Territet–Glion railway of 1881, the Glion–Naye and the Aigle–Leysin of 1892 — the last of which served the village where Rollier would later set up his sun clinics, because Chessex had also had a hand in creating the climatic station at Leysin in 1890. In 1903 he founded an electricity company and ran it until his death. He sat on the boards of a Vevey hotel, a chocolate firm, an engineering works and the local bank, and he was a municipal councillor at Montreux for fifty years.

Emery (1850–1931) arrived at Montreux in 1877 as his brother-in-law’s secretary and became a hotelier six years later. The dictionary calls him “très influent dans tout ce qui concourt au développement de la Riviera vaudoise: hôtellerie, chemin de fer Montreux-Oberland bernois, banque, presse” — very influential in everything contributing to the Riviera’s development: hotels, the railway over the mountain, banking, the press — and names him promoter of the Montreux-Palace. He was a local mayor, then a member of the Swiss parliament, and from 1893 to 1925 he presided over the Swiss hoteliers’ association and its Montreux section. It was his association that owned the visitors’ list we started with.

The same names recur around these two. The Dufour brothers held the Grand Hôtel at Les Avants. Albert Cuénod administered the company, constituted in 1899, that built the Caux Palace. The vehicles were Vaudois, and so were the men who sat on them.

What that circle earned is a matter of record. For the 1908 financial year the Territet–Glion funicular paid a dividend of 14 per cent, and the rack railway above it 7.5 per cent, on top of substantial transfers to reserves. A funicular built to carry foreign visitors up a hillside was returning fourteen per cent to Swiss shareholders. That single figure carries more weight than any general statement about where hotel capital came from, and it points one way.

One piece of evidence cuts against the neatness of this. Writing of the Swiss railway law of 1852, Murray’s handbook — quoted by Diccon Bewes in Slow Train to Switzerland — records “many of the lines being executed by English engineers and with English capital”, and notes that the Swiss called in English engineers, Robert Stephenson among them. That is real and should not be waved away. But it concerns the Swiss trunk network of the 1850s, a generation before the Riviera’s funiculars and palace hotels. On this coast, in this period, the money and the initiative were local.

The season ran the wrong way round

The intuitive picture of Lake Geneva is a summer one: a mild shore, a lake, visitors from June to September. That is what the record shows at the beginning. In 1845 the Anglican chaplain at Vevey reported a congregation of about forty residents, “chiefly of the upper class”, with some five thousand visitors passing through “from June to end of September”, and an average congregation of seventy in summer against thirty in winter.

By the end of the century it had inverted, exactly as Davos had inverted a quarter of a century earlier. Paul Schniewind’s history of the Anglican chaplaincies records that “the flow of tourists, especially in the winter season, to the mild region of Lake Geneva, called the Swiss Riviera, continued to increase”, and that by the end of the 1870s there were at least fifty hotels and pensions between Vevey and Villeneuve. In September 1900 Der Bund reported from Montreux that the town had begun its autumn season; the hotels were gradually filling; “viele kommen zur Traubenkur” — many come for the grape cure — while others used Montreux as a staging post on the way south, and many, finally, chose it as their “Herbst- und Winteraufenthaltsort”, their autumn and winter residence. It counted sixty hotels and pensions, including those at Glion.

The clearest proof is in the doctors, because you can watch them migrate. In the January 1900 directory, Dr Nolda practised at Montreux in winter and spent his summers at St-Moritz-Bad; Dr Isler summered at Vulpera-Tarasp in the Engadine; Dr Leeson moved up to Glion for the summer. Five years later the same pattern held. The medical trade came down to the lake for the winter and went up to the mountains for the summer — the exact opposite of the modern habit.

By 1913 a physician simply printed it. Tucker Wise, MD, MRCS, LRCP, late resident medical officer at St Mary’s Hospital London and visiting physician to the Infirmary for Consumption in Margaret Street, gave his address at the Villa Champod, Bon-Port — and his season: “(October to May.)”

So the Riviera did not extend a summer season into the winter. It was a winter station whose visitors went up the mountain in the season we would expect them to come down it.

The cure economy

The visitors’ paper said what it was selling on its own masthead: it served the “stations climatériques romandes”, the climatic stations of French-speaking Switzerland. Not the beaches. The climates.

The physician on the Avenue du Kursaal in 1900 was Arthur Gamgee (1841–1909), FRCP and FRS, the first Brackenbury professor of physiology at Owens College, Manchester, and physician to the Manchester consumption hospital — a scientist of real standing, running a winter practice in a lakeside resort. The Dictionary of National Biography records that he left England to live abroad, settling first at Lausanne and later at Montreux. By 1905 the directory gave him in full, at the Villa Miguel, Territet, consulting daily except Sundays and Tuesdays — and “Tuesdays at Caux”. The physician followed his patients up to the terrace.

He was not alone, and the apparatus around him grew quickly. In 1900 the directory lists a handful of doctors and no sanatorium at all. By 1905 there is a Kurhaus at Territet and the Sanatorium L’Abri. By January 1913 there are four sanatoria — L’Abri, La Colline, Beauregard and Val-Mont — one advertising the specific treatment of tuberculosis, another offering, alongside dietary cures and baths of air and sun, “psychothérapie (hypnose psychanalyse)”. English and Anglo-American pharmacies went from one in 1900 to four in 1913. At Vevey, in the same 1913 issue, Golaz advertised “The English Pharmacy, opposite the Hotel 3 Couronnes (Founded in 1850)” — organised English commercial presence on this coast two decades before the visitors’ paper itself began.

Even the grape cure, which sounds like a joke, was a real prescription: patients ate as much as two pounds of grapes a day, on a theory that grape juice was a kind of vegetable milk. It was practised at fashionable resorts across Germany, France and Italy, and Der Bund says plainly that many came to Montreux for it.

The terraces were built to sell winter sport

If the lake sold the cure, the shelves above it — Glion at 700 metres, Caux at 1,100, Les Avants at 1,000 — sold snow. The visitors’ paper treated them not as outlying villages but as constituent stations of the Montreux group, listed on the masthead alongside Clarens and Territet.

Caux is the clearest case of deliberate construction. A Grand Hôtel already stood there in January 1900. The company that built the Palace was constituted in February 1899, the name “Caux Palace” appears in the Montreux press from November 1899, and a period account of the finished building gives its construction as “trois années” — three lines converging on a start in 1899. Der Bund announced in advance that the inauguration would take place on 5 July 1902. A fortnight later another Swiss paper, in its Vaud column, described what had gone up: one of those immense modern hotels that rise as if by enchantment in the sites where it seems most difficult to build, with its own boulevard several hundred metres long, cut into the rock at a thousand metres, and an exterior with “l’aspect d’un château-fort du moyen-âge, avec donjons, tourelles et machicoulis” — the look of a mediaeval fortress, with keeps, turrets and machicolations. A castle, built from nothing, at altitude, for people who had come for their health.

Les Avants shows the same families running the sport as well as the hotels. In February 1911 the entries for a figure-skating competition there — imposed figures, free figures and a waltz, with cups and objets d’art for prizes — were taken by M. Louis Dufour. That November, when the skating clubs of French-speaking Switzerland met at Lausanne to form an association, Les Avants took two of the five committee seats: the vice-presidency, held by the comte de Martimprey, and a deputy’s place held by L. Dufour. The family that built the Grand Hôtel, and the chapel beside it, was by then running the competition calendar too. And in the same association, over the mountain, sat the club of Château-d’Œx.

The church was part of the plant

To a modern reader the most surprising thing about that January 1900 directory is where the churches sit in it. The two Anglican chaplaincies are listed in the same columns as the English tailor, the English library and the English pharmacy — not as a slight, but because that is how the trade press classified them. An English church was an amenity a resort was expected to provide.

Period voices say so directly. A chaplain’s memorandum of 1903, quoted by Schniewind, argued that “Caux is becoming such an establishment for English and American visitors, that the absence of an English church is a conspicuous want of the life here”, adding that in other parts of Switzerland “we have to come to expect such churches”; the temporary chapel held barely a hundred people, and the proposal was for two hundred seats at 25,000 francs. In 1887 a Neuchâtel paper put the mechanism still more baldly, from the losing side: because the English service there stopped at the end of September, the town not only deprived its English residents but “éloignait de notre ville beaucoup de familles qui s’y seraient établies” — drove away many families who would have settled there, had they found the same resources as in other centres of French-speaking Switzerland, “comme Genève, Lausanne, Vevey, Montreux et Clarens”. A town without a year-round English service lost English residents to towns that had one. The chapel was competitive infrastructure.

Sometimes the hotel supplied it. The Anglican chapel at Les Avants was built by the Dufour brothers, proprietors of the Grand Hôtel, and answered first of all — in the words of a Swiss church-press account — the spiritual needs of the many English tourists then staying there. Schniewind dates its building to 1872, with the chaplaincy entering the Colonial and Continental Church Society’s list the following year; a recent Swiss church-press account gives 1876 instead, and the two have not been reconciled. Jim Ring, in How the English Made the Alps, notes that some of the wealthier Alpine innkeepers arranged for local clergymen to perform Sunday services for their English guests.

But not always, and this is where the tidy version of the argument breaks. In March 1887 a paper reported that “la colonie anglaise de Montreux se propose d’ériger, cette année, une chapelle à Glion”, which with the one already under construction at Clarens-Vernex would bring the parish of Montreux to “pas moins de cinq chapelles anglaises” — no fewer than five English chapels. There the colony was building for itself. The honest description is a mixed one: sometimes the hotel supplied the church, sometimes the English erected it.

What is not mixed is the direction of growth. The Anglican establishment went from two chaplains in 1900, to two in 1905, to something quite different by January 1913, when the directory listed a bishop in residence — Herbert Bury, DD, at La Valetta, Territet, with an assistant priest — alongside the chaplain at Clarens and a further minister. Bury was Bishop for Northern and Central Europe, coadjutor to the Bishop of London, from January 1911 to January 1926. In thirteen years a resort chaplaincy had acquired a bishop.

What the British actually built

If the Swiss supplied the buildings, the railways and the capital, what did the British supply beyond their custom? The answer is the machinery that filled the buildings.

The economic historian Laurent Tissot, writing about the English and Switzerland in the nineteenth century, describes exactly this: “L’action des Anglais est à cet égard déterminante. En se servant des nouveaux moyens de transport et de communication, ils mettent au point une véritable technologie touristique qui lie l’utilisation des guides de voyage à l’intervention des agences de voyages.” A tourist technology, binding the guidebook to the travel agency. Murray and Baedeker told people where to go; Cook and Lunn moved them there and sold them the ticket.

Thomas Cook opened a bureau at Montreux in 1892 — after Geneva and Lucerne, in the same wave as Lausanne — and, as Tissot notes, most such offices sat in rented rooms inside a hotel. By 1911 an eight-day circuit to Montreux was on sale at £6 6s.

The decisive evidence, though, is a contract. Tissot records that arrangements with Cook spared Swiss transport companies “la coûteuse tâche de rechercher une clientèle et de promouvoir une action publicitaire à l’étranger” — the costly task of seeking a clientele and advertising abroad — and that the management of the Montreux–Oberland Bernois railway was accordingly assured that the company’s existence would be made known to the travelling public in the countries where Cook had offices, through Cook’s publications. A Swiss company built a railway over the mountains and then outsourced the finding of its passengers to a British agency, expressly to avoid the expense of doing it itself.

Nor did the agency stop at filling the rooms. Tissot records that Cook, on the basis of its clients’ remarks, did not refrain from encouraging hoteliers to improve their services or correct certain of them. The distributor was telling the manufacturer how to make the product.

Henry Lunn, who founded his agency in 1893, built the same machinery through a different network. His market was the professions, senior officials, academics, and the clergy whom he gathered into conferences — and public-school boys, for whom he developed skiing holidays. His son Arnold founded the Alpine Ski Club and wrote the first ski guide to the Alps, and left behind the strong version of the claim this essay has been testing: “partout où les Anglais sont allés, l’organisation des sports a commencé” — wherever the English went, the organisation of sport began. Tissot’s verdict on that is worth keeping beside it: a cultural explanation tinged with anglocentrism, and crude in its schematism. Both halves are right. The claim is overstated, and it is not nothing.

Over the mountain, and why a Château-d’Œx church is telling this story

The Montreux–Oberland Bernois is the point at which this becomes our own history. And the sequence is not the one intuition suggests.

In that same issue of 6 January 1900, under “Échos de nos stations”, the paper reported from Château-d’Œx: “Il y a en ce moment à peu près autant d’étrangers à Château-d’Œx qu’en été. Plusieurs hôtels et pensions de la Frasse, les quartiers et le village, regorgent de monde. Tous les chalets sont occupés par des familles venues dans l’intention de passer l’hiver et de jouir des sports de cette saison.” As many foreigners in winter as in summer; hotels, pensions and village overflowing; every chalet taken by families who had come to spend the winter and enjoy the season’s sports.

The railway had not yet arrived. By the company’s own chronology, the Montreux–Oberland Bernois was established on 26 June 1899, and the first section of its line, Montreux to Les Avants, was commissioned in 1901. So on the January morning when every chalet at Château-d’Œx was taken, the railway company was six months old and had not opened a metre of track. The line was pushed over the mountain across the next few years: a Bernese paper reported the opening celebration for the section from Les Avants to Montbovon on Tuesday 29 September 1903, the rails reached Château-d’Œx in 1904, and the run through to Zweisimmen was complete in 1905. That paper made a joke of its invitation: not an engagement announcement, it wrote, and yet one — a threefold one. The betrothed were the cantons of Vaud, Fribourg and Bern, and the ring was the Montreux–Oberland Bernois.

The winter season in the Pays-d’Enhaut existed before the train did. The line came to serve a demand that was already there — and then, as Tissot’s archive shows, hired a British agency to manufacture more of it. Ring notes that Château-d’Œx, Gstaad and Saanenmöser were all established as skiing centres before 1914, all three deliberately cultivating a principally English clientele, “not least by advertising in the English newspapers”.

That is the local proof of the general argument, and it is why a church at Château-d’Œx has a claim on this subject at all. The visitors who filled our chalets in January 1900 were the same visitors who filled Territet, and they were routed here by the same machinery.

The colony as its neighbours saw it

One caution belongs in the open. Much of the newspaper evidence quoted here comes from an archive that holds no Vaud title at all: these are Bernese, Genevan, Neuchâtelois and Jura papers, so a good deal of what survives is the Riviera as the rest of Switzerland watched it. That is a bias. It is also useful, because outsiders record the friction that local boosters leave out.

In March 1900 the same syndicated item ran in several of them. “La colonie anglaise à Montreux a joyeusement manifesté mercredi en apprenant la capitulation du brave général Cronjé” — the English colony celebrated the surrender of the Boer general, and several ladies paid the distributors of the Feuille d’avis de Montreux supplement as much as five francs a copy. The report continues: at Yverdon, young Englishmen boarding in the town had raised the British flag on hearing of their compatriots’ victory, and the flag had to be taken down shortly afterwards “afin de prévenir une manifestation hostile” — to forestall a hostile demonstration. Swiss opinion during the South African war was largely with the Boers. The colony was visible, collective and, on occasion, resented.

And, as the visitor figures showed, it was not the only one. By January 1913 the directory carried an imperial German consulate holding Montreux hours every Saturday afternoon, and a Verein der Reichsdeutschen meeting twice weekly at a restaurant opposite the Kursaal. A German relief society had been formally constituted in 1900 with Dr Nolda — the Prussian physician who wintered at Montreux — as its president. The British vice-consulate, by contrast, operated out of the banking house of William Cuénod & Cie — a Vaudois bank. Britain’s own representation on this coast was housed by the local commercial class, and a Cuénod also sat on the company that built the Caux Palace. It would be hard to state the argument more compactly.

January 1914

On 18 January 1914 a Geneva paper carried the results from Les Avants. England had beaten Bohemia one goal to nil. Germany had beaten Switzerland nine to one. Switzerland had beaten Belgium four to one, and Germany and Bohemia had drawn. Further matches would decide the final; Monday would bring toboggan races, Tuesday and Wednesday the bobsleighs. The average temperature was minus ten degrees. “Les patinoires sont excellentes; temps idéal pour les sports d’hiver.”

Within seven months most of those countries were at war with one another, and a season that had been built over forty years ended in a single summer.

So: who built the Montreux Riviera? The hotels, the funiculars, the railways, the electricity and the banks were Swiss, and a small circle of Vaudois families took the return on them. But the British did more than arrive. They built the guidebooks and the agencies, the circular tickets and the conducted tours — the system that found the visitors and delivered them — and by the end they were telling the hoteliers how to run the product. The Swiss built the plant. The British built the machinery that filled it.

And underneath all of it was a disease. The palaces at Caux and Territet, the funiculars, the English chemists and the lending libraries and the chaplaincies, were built on the fact that a quarter of the people of England had once died of consumption and the only remedy anyone could offer was somewhere else to breathe. When a cure finally arrived in the middle of the twentieth century, the reason for the whole edifice quietly went away.

What became of it is a shorter story. The chapels emptied first, and their fittings went looking for somewhere to be. A Swiss church-press account records that when the Anglican chapel at Caux was falling into ruin in 1941, its altar and four carved angels were given to the chapel at Les Avants, and that a later agreement brought the altar and two of the angels back, leaving two where they had been sent. The carvings of the English season went back and forth between emptying chapels until somebody decided where they should rest.

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Related pages

• Why the English came to the Alps — the change in taste that made Alpine travel thinkable in the first place
• Montreux — St. John’s Anglican Church
• Vevey — All Saints
• Caux — St. Michael and All Angels
• Les Avants — English Chapel
• Glion — English Chapel
• Leysin — English Chapel
• Château-d’Œx — St. Peter’s

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Sources:

Periodicals. Journal et liste des étrangers de Montreux, de Vevey, de la Vallée du Rhône et des Stations climatériques romandes — issues of 5 January 1895, 6 January 1900, 7 January 1905 and 4 January 1913, read from the page images held by Scriptorium (Bibliothèque cantonale et universitaire, Lausanne). Der Bund, 19 September 1900 and 30 June 1902. Le National suisse, 27 March 1887 and 27 June 1909. La Suisse libérale, 7 October 1887. Le Confédéré, 16 July 1902. Geschäftsblatt für den obern Teil des Kantons Bern, 3 October 1903. Journal du Jura, 4 March 1900. La Suisse, 29 November 1911 and 18 January 1914.

Reference. Dictionnaire historique de la Suisse, articles “Ami Chessex” and “Alexandre Emery” (Gilbert Marion). Dictionary of National Biography, supplement of 1912, article “Arthur Gamgee”. Encyclopædia Britannica, 11th edition (1911), article “Montreux”, for the visitor and population figures. The Montreux–Oberland Bernois company’s own published chronology at mob.ch, for the establishment of the company on 26 June 1899 and the commissioning of the Montreux–Les Avants section in 1901.

On tuberculosis and the climate cure. P. Glaziou, K. Floyd and M. Raviglione, “Trends in tuberculosis in the UK”, Thorax 73:8 (2018), 702–703, for the early-nineteenth-century mortality share. R. A. Hobday, “Sunlight Therapy and Solar Architecture”, Medical History 42 (1997), 455–472, for Downes and Blunt, Koch, Bernhard and Rollier. O. R. McCarthy, “The key to the sanatoria”, Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine 94 (2001), 413–417, for Brehmer and the sanatorium regime. Virginia Langum, “‘A Paradise of Invalids’: Medical Tourism and the Climate of Prejudice in Nineteenth-century Madeira”, Nordic Journal of English Studies 21:2 (2022), 52–72, on Madeira as an invalid destination and on the competition the Alpine resorts came to offer the warm south. The Science Museum and the Wellcome Collection, on the social experience of the disease and on the grape cure. The Royal College of Physicians’ biographical records, for Sir James Clark and Sir Hermann Weber. House of Switzerland, on Alexander Spengler and the 1875 inversion of the Davos season.

On the invalid resorts and the travellers. J. Henry Bennet, Winter and Spring on the Shores of the Mediterranean (first edition 1861, many later editions), catalogued by the Wellcome Collection — Bennet’s surname appears as “Bennett” in some reference works, but his own title pages give “Bennet”. William White Cooper, The Invalid’s Guide to Madeira (London: Smith, Elder, 1840). The growth figures for Menton and the British hotel names at San Remo come from regional and local published histories rather than academic monographs, and are offered at that weight. For length of stay: Robert Louis Stevenson’s two Davos winters, 1880–81 and 1881–82, and John Addington Symonds’s removal to Davos in 1877, where he made his home for the rest of his life.

Books and articles. Laurent Tissot, Histoire du tourisme en Suisse au XIXe siècle: Les Anglais à la conquête de la Suisse (Alphil, 2017; first published as Naissance d’une industrie touristique, 2000). Jim Ring, How the English Made the Alps (John Murray, 2000). Diccon Bewes, Slow Train to Switzerland (Nicholas Brealey, 2013). Paul W. Schniewind, Anglicans in Switzerland (Berne: Texte, 1992). Jill Steward’s review of Susan Barton, Healthy Living in the Alps: The Origins of Winter Tourism in Switzerland, 1860–1914 (Manchester University Press, 2008), in Reviews in History, review no. 796, 31 August 2009. Julie Lapointe, “Les sociétés anonymes à vocation hôtelière de l’arc lémanique (1826–1914)”, Études de lettres 4 (2010). Yaffa Claire Draznin, Victorian London’s Middle-Class Housewife (Greenwood Press, 2001), for the cost of a Cook tour. Anne Vallelian, on the chapel at Les Avants, Réformés.ch, 15 June 2026.