Most of us have read the short history on the inside cover of this magazine, and know at least part of the story of Mrs Castleman and her adopted daughter, Ursula Postlethwaite, whose cure led to the gift of enough money to enable the construction of our church building. But why should there be an Anglican church in Berne at all, and why in Kirchenfeld? We keep hearing of people who have lived in or near Berne for years and who haven't realised we exist, or of people who pass through and do not realise we are here. How do we explain this?
The British have an enthusiasm for travel, and the coming of the railways and the initiative of people like Thomas Cook in the mid-19th century gave birth to large-scale tourism. Before this there had been small clusters of English people in Switzerland, particularly religious exiles at the Reformation, who established colleges in Basle, Zurich and Geneva, among other places, where they had more freedom, but none of these felt the need to build churches.
Switzerland already had a reputation as a good place to visit, and when continental Europe became accessible and peaceful in the 1840's, Swiss hotel keepers were keen to attract British guests. But where would they go to church? Missing a week or two in Victorian times was not an option. And going to the local church had two disadvantages - firstly, the services were in a tongue which they (and perhaps God too) did not speak, and secondly, the Swiss were not Anglicans - they were Roman Catholics, or else they were some kind of Congregationalists - neither of which were socially acceptable.
In 1841, the owner of the Gasthof Bellevue in Thun asked permission to open a chapel to provide English church services for the needs of his guests. The same happened all over Switzerland. Innkeepers built chapels and paid chaplains from England to come over and conduct services. In this canton, chapels were built in Adelboden, Grindelwald, Wengen, Meiringen, Thun and Zweisimmen, and chaplains were employed in such places as Gurnigelbad, Oberhofen, Gunten and Spiez.
But what of Berne itself? In 1845 a group of innkeepers got together to pay a chaplain to conduct services in the chapel of the Bürgerspital. Ten years later, the Canton offered a site in Hirschengraben to build a church. Plans were drawn up, over Fr 8000 was raised, but it was not enough (alas??). For the next fifty years, services were held in a variety of places - the Petrus- und Pauluskirche (where the congregation were somewhat lost) and the hall of the Lerberschule (now the Freies Gymnasium, then in Nageligasse) among others.
The city had offered us the Antonierkirche, which they were using as a fire depot, in 1889, but there was no money. So there was not a lot of hope when the English-Berne Land Company offered us a site in 1904. It was a good site, at a key point in their development in Kirchenfeld. It had been used as an enormous open-air theatre for the city's 700th jubilee celebrations in 1891, and was called Jubiläumsplatz.
The rest you can read inside the front cover. By chance, or providence, the chaplain then was Gilbert Sissons. His mother fell ill, and was operated on at the same clinic as the young Ursula Postlethwaite. Both made remarkable recoveries, and as a result, the church was built. It was completed early in 1906, and consecrated on 20 September. May its witness continue well beyond our centenary three years hence!
HD