Obituary: The Rev Chad Varah | Society | The Guardian The Rev Chad Varah Liberal cleric who founded of the Samaritans, his life was dedicated to 'listening therapy' Simon Armson Share on Messenger Close The Rev Dr Chad Varah, who has died aged 95, dedicated his long life to providing care and emotional support to people contemplating suicide, and teaching others how to provide that support. To this end, in 1953 he founded the Samaritans - "to befriend the suicidal and despairing". The movement is now a household name, with more than 200 branches in the UK and Ireland and some 17,000 trained volunteers providing confidential, non-judgmental, emotional support around the clock. In 2004, 4.7m telephone calls were made to the organisation. Last year, the number of contacts exceeded 5m. Varah also promoted the same principle internationally through Befrienders Worldwide, as its founder/chairman from 1974 to 1983, and president from then until 1986.

Befrienders Worldwide now operates in more than 40 countries, including some where there is no easy access to phones or computers, and where people will walk for hours to get emotional support. An inveterate traveller, Varah visited most, if not all of them, continuing these journeys into his 90s. Although he stepped down from day-to-day involvement with the Samaritans in later life, for more than four decades he continued to be immensely proud of the organisation. It was only as the Samaritans' 50th anniversary approached in 2003 that he felt it necessary to voice his disapproval and disappointment at some of the ways the Samaritans and Befrienders Worldwide were being directed. However, in the summer of 2005, a rapprochement was reached. He was delighted when, in 2006, his eldest son, Michael, who died earlier this year, was elected to the organisation's newly created board of trustees. Varah was a man of immense intellectual and linguistic skills, of eclectic interests, originality and practicality.

He was born the eldest of nine children in the village of Barton-on-Humber, Lincolnshire, where his father - the local vicar and a canon - named him after St Chad, founder of the parish. In his autobiography, Before I Die Again, published in 1992 - the title referred to his belief in reincarnation - Varah described his father as "a very strong character, a man of principle with firm beliefs and convictions, someone with the moral courage to speak what he believed, whether it would make him popular or unpopular". The son inherited those qualities. The extent to which Chad spoke what he believed often earned him respect, but not infrequently led him into conflict - not that this ever weakened his resolve. From his schooling at Worksop college, Nottinghamshire, he gained an exhibition in natural sciences to Keble College, Oxford, but switched subjects and, in 1933, obtained a degree in philosophy, politics and economics. A keen linguist and with a great love of music, he was active in the university Russian and Slavonic clubs (he would go on to publish two volumes of Russian Orthodox church music).

He also founded the student Scandinavian club - "not least because of the access it gave me to long-legged, blue-eyed blondes", he reflected candidly in later life. Despite an initial reluctance to follow in his father's footsteps, Varah was persuaded by his godfather, Archbishop Hine, to study at Lincoln Theological College. Ordained in 1936, he was curate at St Giles, Lincoln (1935-38), St Mary's, Putney (1938-40), Barrow-in-Furness (1940-42), and vicar of Holy Trinity, Blackburn (1942-49) and St Paul, Clapham junction (1949-53). In 1940, he married Susan Whanslaw, who became a key figure in the Church of England as world president of the Mothers' Union during the 1970s, steering through important changes in the organisation's statutes. They had one daughter, triplet sons (born at home in the Blackburn vicarage in wartime Britain), and then a fourth son.

This growing family and the scale of his parish work were often the cause of Varah's pleas to the Almighty about the pressures on his time. At Clapham Junction in the early 1950s, the house visits, youth clubs, teaching, and (as chaplain of St John's hospital, Battersea) "bawling prayers at geriatric patients" meant that his stipend covered only his secretary's wages. So, from 1950 until 1961, he built a second career, working into the night as a scriptwriter and visualiser for the children's comics Eagle, Girl, Robin and Swift, applying his scientific knowledge - notably as one of the brains behind the strip cartoon spaceman Dan Dare - and dramatising the lives of famous religious figures for young readers on the back covers of these publications. These titles belonged to the stable published by fellow clergyman Marcus Morris, another believer that good, popular writing could improve people's lives. (Morris, who would go on to head the National Magazine Company, once described Varah as "the wild card of the Church of England").

This was the impetus, too, behind Varah's consultancy work for the sex education magazine Forum for 20 years until 1987. In that year, the HIV/Aids charity the Terrence Higgins Trust made him its patron, a role he held until 1999. The origins of the Samaritans went back to 1935, the year in which Varah conducted his first funeral, as an assistant curate in Lincoln. The subject was a 13-year-old girl who had taken her own life, fearful that she had venereal disease and would die a slow, painful and shameful death. In fact, she had simply started to menstruate. Varah vowed at her graveside to devote himself to helping other people overcome the sort of isolation and ignorance that had caused the girl to kill herself. He would do it through a combination of education, and by providing access to emotional support in times of need. As one of the earlier proponents of sex education, particularly to poorly educated young people, he earned the label, as he wryly observed later, of "a dirty old man by the time I was 25".

His teaching swelled attendances at his youth clubs and attracted young couples preparing for marriage as well as married couples who had started to drift apart. "It was marriage guidance before it was invented," he said. Varah also gave an early warning of the approach of the permissive society, usually associated with the 1960s, with an article in Picture Post magazine in 1952. Far more important to him than the outraged responses of conservative Christians were the 235 people who wrote in afterwards to bare their souls, 14 of whom showed signs of considering suicide. In the early 1950s, three suicides a day were officially recorded in Greater London. Varah felt that there was a great need that was not being met by doctors and social workers. Some desperate people clearly preferred to turn to someone of his liberal views. Varah pondered that if it was so easy to save lives, why not make this his full-time work? But then, how would he support himself and his young family, and what could be the equivalent of a 999 emergency number for the suicidal to make contact? Such challenges initially deterred him.

But, as he related in his autobiography: "Then I said to God, be reasonable! Don't look at me ... I'm possibly the busiest person in the Church of England ... It'd need to be a priest with one of those city churches with no parishioners." At this point, he set off for a holiday at the English church at Knokke, Flanders, where he received an unexpected telegram from the Grocers' Livery Company in London, inviting him to apply for the living of St Stephen Walbrook, of which the company was patron - just such a City of London parish. Once installed as rector of the Wren masterpiece and Lord Mayor's parish church, Varah was soon inundated with demands for help from the suicidal and despairing, and enlisted some of the laity of his tiny parish to help - not as trained counsellors, but as ordinary volunteers offering a listening ear and emotional support. At that time suicide was illegal in Britain. Varah founded the Samaritans in the church vestry on November 2 1953 and continued to run the organisation from the crypt, where the first volunteers were based.

In February 1954, he decided the group should become a freestanding organisation. "I called our little band together and suggested that the whole project should be handed over to them, the volunteers, because I should never again pick up the emergency telephone, nor be the person to say 'come in' when someone tapped timidly on the door." In spite of this declaration, he continued to befriend the most desperate and despairing, working alongside the volunteers, for many years. Though Varah held Samaritans' posts thereafter for decades - including director of the London branch from 1953 to 1974, and its president from 1974 to 1986 - and wrote the movement's handbook, Samaritans: Befriending the Suicidal (1984 and 1988), he ensured from the outset that its voluntary principle could flourish without him. The novelist Monica Dickens became one of those the London Samaritans recruited, and inspired by Varah went on to set up the first American branch.

In her autobiography, An Open Book, published in 1978, she wrote: "The recruiting slogan is 'Are you ordinary enough to be a Samaritan?" Varah, paradoxically, was not ordinary at all. How could an ordinary person, Dickens suggests, have set up a method of befriending so simple, so direct, and so purely human that it can work anywhere in the world. In 1972, BBC television screened Varah's play Nobody Understands Miranda as part of a six-episode series called The Befrienders, loosely based on the Samaritans' casework. Varah's battle for sex education continued into his 80s. In 1992 he founded, and from 1999 was secretary of, Magmog (Men Against Genital Mutilation of Girls), going into the homes of immigrants from east Africa to convince them of the cruelty of the practice. Only in 2003, at the age of 92, did he finally retire as rector of St Stephen Walbrook and prebendary of St Paul's Cathedral (at this stage, he preferred to drop the Rev and Prebendary from his title).

At the evensong held in November 2003 to celebrate his retirement, the Bishop of London, Richard Chartres, presented him with the Cross of St Erconwald to mark his long service and achievements. He was, at the time, the oldest incumbent in the Church of England. The desire to speak his mind and take on contentious issues never left Varah. Some would say that it was what had kept him going. He would not easily drop an issue in which he believed. More than once did Samaritans (the name was changed from his original the Samaritans in 2002) remind him that it was literally impossible for him to resign as founder. But despite any disagreements he may have had with those to whom he handed over the organisation, it was his inspiration and determination that created and developed it. He never lost sight of his early ideal of making suicide "unimportant as a cause of death" all over the world.

Though Samaritans has kept up to date with the changing needs of society and developments in technology - support service is now available by text as well as email, face to face, by letter and telephone - it has always remained faithful to the founding philosophy of "active listening therapy", as Varah called it. Among many awards, Varah was made a Companion of Honour in the millennium year honours list. His wife died in 1993, and he is survived by one daughter, three sons, 12 grandchildren and five great-grandchildren. · Edward Chad Varah, clergyman and founder of the Samaritans, born November 12 1911; died November 8 2007 BBC NEWS | UK | Obituary: The Reverend Chad Varah Obituary: The Reverend Chad Varah Chad Varah: Offered a listening ear to the desperate The Reverend Chad Varah founded Samaritans with one telephone line and saw it grow into a world-wide organisation helping thousands of people to avoid the ultimate act of desperation. He was never a conventional clergyman. His chief concern from the start was to help individuals rather than spreading the gospel.

Born in Barton-upon-Humber, where his father was the vicar at St Chad's, the local Anglican church, Chad Varah was educated at Oxford before, he said, being "press-ganged" into the life of a priest. Promise His first task as an assistant curate in Lincoln in 1935 determined the path he would follow. Standing in at the funeral of a 14-year-old girl, he asked the undertaker why the girl was being buried in unconsecrated ground, and was told she had killed herself because she had mistaken menstruation for a serious disease. Chad Varah wanted volunteers with humility Dr Varah recalled his reaction: "I stood at the end of the grave and I said, little girl, I never knew you, but I promise you that you have changed my life and I shall teach children about sex." Dr Varah kept his promise, although the explicit nature of his advice to children and young couples scandalised many people in the Church. The need for advice on sexual taboos was reinforced by the response to an article he wrote in Picture Post on the joys of sex, with 250 people writing the next day, asking for help.

Samaritans' rapid growth As vicar of St Paul's, at Clapham in south London, he realised that a significant number of people coming to see him were talking of suicide. He thought a special telephone line might help people in distress, but there were many demands on his time. He was a father of five, including triplet sons, he wrote strip-cartoons for Eagle and Girl comics and was the scientific consultant for the Eagle hero, Dan Dare. I would not have anyone prudish or preachy because the prudish want to sit in judgement Chad Varah But the idea of a help line became a reality when he became rector of St Stephen Walbrook, a church in the City of London whose only parishioner was the Lord Mayor. Samaritans grew rapidly, complemented by a dramatic fall in the suicide rate, and its many branches in Britain and around the world now handle millions of calls every year. Chad Varah always insisted that it should not be a religious organisation.

At odds with management In his autobiography, Before I Die Again - he believes in reincarnation - he says: "Church people were all too often narrow-minded, censorious, judgmental, intolerant, conventional." Retiring from Samaritans in 1986, Chad Varah's work has received widespread recognition - he was made a Companion of Honour in 2000. A Samaritan at work His wife, Susan, who died in 1993, also distinguished herself as a president of the Mothers' Union. Sadly, Chad Varah had been at odds with Samaritans' management council for several years because he felt it had betrayed its original principles. He felt the job of volunteers was to listen, without talking about themselves. "This is a rare quality," he said. "They are in fact people who cannot bring themselves to pass by on the other side when somebody's needing them." Obituary: Rev Dr Chad Varah | Society | The Guardian Rev Dr Chad Varah Samaritans founder Rev Dr Chad Varah, who has died aged 95.

Photograph: Samaritans/PA Thursday 8 November 2007 07.59 EST First published on Thursday 8 November 2007 07.59 EST Share on Messenger Close The Rev Dr Chad Varah, who has died aged 95, dedicated his long life to providing emotional support, caring for people, and teaching others how to do so. To that end, he founded The Samaritans in 1953 "to befriend the suicidal and despairing". The movement now has 202 branches in UK and Ireland, and some 15,500 volunteers providing confidential, non-judgmental emotional support, at all hours. Varah promoted the same principle internationally through Befrienders International (Samaritans Worldwide) as its founder/chairman (1974-83), and then president (1983-86). Befrienders International now operates in more than 40 countries, including some where there is no easy access to phones or emails, and where people will walk for hours to receive emotional support.

An inveterate traveller, Varah visited most, if not all of them, continuing these journeys into his nineties. Although he stepped down from day-to-day involvement with The Samaritans in later life, for more than four decades Varah continued to be immensely proud of the organisation. It was only as The Samaritans' 50th anniversary in 2003 approached that he felt it necessary to express his disapproval of, and disappointment with, some of the ways both The Samaritans and Befrienders International were being directed. However, in the summer of 2005 a rapprochement was reached when he enjoyed a particularly happy meeting with the new chief executive and the then chairman of The Samaritans, listening enthusiastically to news about all those people who continue his original enlightened and essential work. Varah was delighted when, in 2006, his eldest son, the late Michael Varah, was appointed to sit on the organisation's newly created board of trustees. Varah was a man of immense intellect and linguistic skills, of eclectic interests, originality and practicality. He was the eldest of nine children of the vicar of the village of Barton-on-Humber, Lincolnshire.

His father named him after St Chad, founder of the parish. In his autobiography, Before I Die Again (1992 - the title referred to his belief in reincarnation), Varah described his father as "a very strong character, a man of principle with firm beliefs and convictions, and a man with the moral courage to speak what he believed, whether it would make him popular or unpopular". His first-born son inherited those qualities: the extent to which Chad spoke what he believed often earned him respect, but often led him into conflict - not that this ever weakened his resolve. From his schooling at Worksop college, Nottinghamshire, he gained an exhibition in natural sciences to Keble College, Oxford, but switched subjects and in 1933 obtained a degree in politics, philosophy and economics. A keen linguist with a great love of music, he was active in Oxford's Russian and Slavonic Clubs (he would go on to publish two volumes of Russian Orthodox church music). He also founded the university's Scandinavian Club: "not least because of the access it gave me to long-legged, blue-eyed blondes," he reflected candidly in later life.

Despite an initial reluctance to follow in his father's footsteps, Varah was persuaded by his godfather, Archbishop Hine, to study at Lincoln Theological College. Ordained in 1936, he was curate at St Giles, Lincoln (1935-38), St Mary's, Putney (1938-40), Barrow-in-Furness (1940-42), and vicar of Holy Trinity, Blackburn (1942-49) and St Paul, Clapham Junction (1949-53). In 1940, he married Susan Whanslaw, who later became a key figure in the Church of England as world president of the Mothers' Union during the 1970s, steering through important changes in the organisation's statutes. They had one daughter, triplet sons (born at home in the Blackburn vicarage in wartime Britain), and then a fourth son.

At Clapham Junction in the early 1950s, the house visits, "open" youth clubs, teaching, and - as chaplain of St John's hospital, Battersea, "bawling prayers at geriatric patients" - meant that his stipend covered only what he had to pay his secretary. So, from 1950 until 1961, he built a second career, working into the night as children's comic scriptwriter and visualiser for Girl and Eagle, Robin and Swift, bringing his scientific knowledge to life in comicbook space stories - notably as one of the brains behind strip cartoon spaceman Dan Dare - and dramatising the lives of famous religious figures for young readers on the back covers of these publications. These titles belonged to the stable published by fellow clergyman Marcus Morris, another believer that good, popular writing could improve people's lives. (Morris, who would go on to head the National Magazine Company, once described Varah as "the wild card of the Church of England").

This was the impetus, too, behind Varah's consultancy work for the sex education magazine Forum for 20 years till 1987 - in that year, in recognition of this efforts, the aids charity The Terrence Higgins Trust made him its patron, a role he held till 1999. In 1935, Varah had conducted his first funeral, as an assistant curate in Lincoln, for a 13-year-old girl who had taken her own life, fearing she had venereal disease and would die a slow, painful and shameful death. In fact, the girl had started to menstruate. Varah vowed at her graveside to devote himself to helping other people overcome the sort of isolation and ignorance that had caused the girl to kill herself. He would do it through a combination of education, and by providing access to emotional support in times of need. As one of the earlier proponents of sex education, particularly to poorly educated young people, he earned the label, as he wryly observed later, of "a 'dirty old man' by the time I was 25".

His teaching swelled attendances at his youth clubs, and attracted young couples preparing for marriage - and married couples who had started drifting apart. "It was marriage guidance before it was invented," he said. Varah also gave an early warning of the approach of the permissive society, usually associated with the 1960s, with an article in Picture Post in 1952. Far more important to him than the outraged responses of conservative Christians were the 235 people who wrote in to bare their souls, 14 of whom showed signs of considering suicide as an option. In the early 1950s, three suicides a day were officially recorded in Greater London. Varah felt that there was a great need that was not being met by doctors and social workers. Some desperate people clearly preferred to turn to someone of his liberal views: Varah pondered that if it was so easy to save lives, why didn't he make this his full-time work? But then, how would he support himself and his young family, and what could be the equivalent of a 999 emergency contact number for the suicidal to make contact? Such challenges initially deterred him.

But, as he related in his autobiography: "Then I said to God, be reasonable! Don't look at me ... I'm possibly the busiest person in the Church of England ... It'd need to be a priest with one of those city churches with no parishioners." At this point, he set off for a holiday at the English church at Knokke, Flanders, where he received a quite unexpected telegram from the Grocers' Livery Company in London offering him the living of St Stephen Walbrook - just such a City of London parish. Once instituted as rector there, Varah was soon inundated with demands for help from the suicidal and despairing, and enlisted some of the laity of his tiny parish to help - not as trained counsellors, but as volunteers. Varah founded the Samaritans in the church vestry on November 2 1953 and continued to run the organisation from the crypt, where the first volunteers were based. In February 1954, he decided the group should become a freestanding organisation.

"I called our little band together and suggested that the whole project should be handed over to them, the volunteers, because I should never again pick up the emergency telephone, nor be the person to say 'come in' when someone tapped timidly on the door." In spite of this declaration, he continued to befriend the most desperate and despairing for many years. Though Varah held Samaritans posts thereafter for decades - including director of the London branch from 1953 to 1974, and its president from 1974 to 1986 - and wrote the movement's handbook, Samaritans: Befriending The Suicidal (1984 and 1988), he ensured from the outset that its voluntary principle could flourish without him. The novelist Monica Dickens, inspired by Varah, set up the first American branch of The Samaritans. In her autobiography An Open Book, first published in 1978, she wrote: "The recruiting slogan is 'Are you ordinary enough to be a Samaritan?'" Varah, paradoxically, was not ordinary at all.

How else, Dickens suggests, could he have set up a method of befriending which is so simple, so direct, and so purely human that it can work anywhere in the world. In 1972, BBC television screened Varah's play Nobody Understands Miranda as part of a six-episode series called The Befrienders, loosely based on The Samaritans casework. Varah's battle for well-informed sex education continued into his eighties: in 1992 he founded, and from 1999 was secretary of, MAGMOG (Men against Genital Mutilation of Girls), going into the homes of immigrants from East Africa to convince them of the pointless cruelty of the practice. Only in 2003, at the age of 92 and 50 years after he had founded the Samaritans in its crypt, did he finally retire as rector of his beloved church, St Stephen Walbrook, and prebendary of St Paul's Cathedral. He was, at the time, the oldest incumbent in the Church of England. The desire to speak his mind and take on contentious issues never left him: some would say that it was what had kept him going.

He would not easily drop an issue in which he believed. More than once did Samaritans (the name was changed from his original The Samaritans in 2002) remind him that it was literally impossible for him to resign as founder. But despite any disagreements he may have had with those to whom he handed over the organisation, it was his inspiration and determination that created and developed it. He never lost sight of his early ideal of making suicide "unimportant as a cause of death" all over the world. Though Samaritans has kept up to date with the changing needs of society and developments in technology - support service is now available by text as well as email, face to face, by letter and telephone - it has always remained faithful to the founding philosophy of "active listening therapy", as Varah called it. Among many awards, Varah was made a Companion of Honour in the Millennium Year honours list. His wife died in 1993, and he is survived by four of his children. · Edward Chad Varah, clergyman and founder of The Samaritans, born November 12 1911; died November 8 2007 The Rev.

Chad Varah, 95; founded Samaritans movement - The Boston Globe The Rev. Chad Varah, 95; founded Samaritans movement The Rev. Chad Varah started the Samaritans suicide prevention group in 1953. (samaritans via reuters/file) Email | Print | Single Page | Text size – + By Adam Bernstein Washington Post / November 15, 2007 WASHINGTON - The Rev. Chad Varah - an Anglican priest and sex therapist who started the Samaritans movement, an early telephone help line credited with making significant contributions to suicide prevention - died Nov. 8 at the Basingstoke hospital near London. He was 95. Father Varah started the Samaritans in 1953 with a newspaper advertisement pleading for volunteers who would come to his historic London church and use "active listening therapy" to help the hundreds of people who contemplated suicide every day.

He once said he thought of his Samaritans as fire-spotters who "keep watch for the conflagrations that break out in human lives." The organization became a massive volunteer force with 202 branches in the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland and includes a system of drop-in centers and home-visit services. It operates in more than 40 countries as the Befrienders Worldwide. Father Varah was widely recognized as having pioneered the phone help line for those threatening suicide, and he received honors from the American Association of Suicidology as well as from Queen Elizabeth II. But the volunteer group was also criticized at times for being too passive with callers in the name of nonjudgment. One of the movement's principles was that a caller "does not lose the freedom to make his own decision, including the decision to take his own life." Father Varah considered the Samaritans a "spiritual alternative" to the police emergency line, especially in its early years, when attempting suicide was criminalized. Volunteers, armed with sympathy and the basics of psychotherapy, fielded anonymous calls from across the psychological spectrum. As Father Varah explained, some people called after midnight to complain they were unloved.

Others expressed suicidal thoughts or violent urges against their unfaithful spouses. Like the callers, volunteer staffers - doctors, stockbrokers, and secretaries - are also anonymous, a step meant to underscore the mission over individual personality. Diana Churchill, daughter of former prime minister Winston Churchill, was a volunteer, and Father Varah revealed that only after she took her own life in 1963. Edward Chad Varah was born in Barton-on-Humber, Lincolnshire, where his father, a Church of England minister, was vicar. He graduated from Oxford University's Keble College, and studied at a Lincolnshire theological college. He was ordained in 1936. A year earlier, while working as a church assistant, he had presided over the funeral of a 13-year-old who killed herself because she mistook menstruation for a symptom of venereal disease. As he repeated often, the funeral proved a pivotal experience. He constantly denounced ignorance and isolation that resulted from poor sex education and a repressive society. In subsequent parish work, he emphasized sex counseling and remained current on developments in psychology. More controversially, he talked openly about the pleasures of masturbation and what he considered the usefulness of pornography to help impotent men.

He also contributed articles titled "Let Them Be Gay," "The Right to Abortion," and "Is Marriage Still Valid?" to a British pornographic magazine. The gusto with which he enjoyed breaking stigmas landed him in trouble with his church, but he always seemed to prevail. Father Varah spoke of a vital need for the church to address sexual problems, because his parish experience showed many were driven to contemplate suicide as a result. He had the opportunity when, in 1953, he began his 50-year posting as rector of St. Stephen Walbrook in London. Father Varah found himself overwhelmed by cries for help, and he enlisted parishioners to aid him with calls. After formalizing the organization, he became a public spokesman for the movement in interviews and by writing a Samaritans guidebook. He said he considered it a myth that those who speak about committing suicide never do; two of his early clients did indeed kill themselves. After stepping down from the Samaritans in 1986, he campaigned against genital mutilation among East African immigrants. Father Varah wrote a memoir, "Before I Die Again" (1992), a title that referred to his belief in reincarnation.

His wife, D. Susan Whanslaw Varah, whom he married in 1940, died in 1993. A son, one of triplets, died in April. He leaves four children, 12 grandchildren, and five great-grandchildren. © Copyright 2008 Globe Newspaper Company. more stories like this Edward Chad Varah Life's Vocation Celebrating the 'men of God' THIS IS YOUR LIFE - The Reverend Edward Chad Varah, CH CBE, Anglican priest, was surprised by Eamonn Andrews at the BBC Television Theatre . He is best remembered as the founder of The Samaritans, established in 1953 as the world's first crisis hotline organisation, offering non-religious telephone support to those contemplating suicide. He was ordained as a deacon in the Church of England in 1935 and as a priest in 1936. After several postings, he became rector of St Stephen Walbrook, in the City of London, where, in the crypt of the church he founded charity hotline which received its first call on 2 November 1953. Edward Chad Varah with Eamonn Andrews on This Is Your Life programme details...

Broadcast live: Mon 20 Feb 1961 Broadcast time: 7.30-8.00pm The Reverend Prebendary Chad Varah - Telegraph The Reverend Prebendary Chad Varah The Reverend Prebendary Chad Varah 12:01AM GMT 09 Nov 2007 The Reverend Prebendary Chad Varah, who died aged 95, was one of the most remarkable, and most highly honoured, Church of England priests of modern times. Single-handedly, Chad Varah founded the telephone help service for people contemplating suicide which became known as The Samaritans and which, after a period of rapid growth in Britain, provided a model for similar organisations in most other parts of the world. From 1974 to 1986 Varah was founder-chairman, then president, of Befrienders International (Samaritans Worldwide), and in his ninetieth year his great contribution to human welfare was recognised by appointment as a Companion of Honour. A dynamic, combative priest of generous disposition and immense compassion, especially for those with sexual problems, he was quite unshockable.

But he was perfectly capable of shocking the more conventional elements in his Church, and far beyond it; and while the suggestion that he was responsible for inaugurating the “permissive society” of the 1950s and 1960s was untrue it was not entirely incredible. Related Articles Bernard Mayes, priest 03 Mar 2015 A controversial article outlining what he believed to be an enlightened Christian philosophy of sex appeared in a widely read magazine, Picture Post, in 1953, and for some 20 years he was a consultant to the magazine Forum, which specialised in the frank discussion of heterosexual and homosexual problems and aspirations. One of his many books, published in 1976, was entitled Telephone Masturbators. The early years of The Samaritans movement were financed, in part, by Varah’s use of his gift as a visualiser, inherited from his mother. This took him on to the staff of the then highly popular Eagle and Girl children’s comics, and eventually he was in constant demand for newspaper articles and broadcasts on the subject of suicide.

Edward Chad Varah, the eldest of nine children, was born on November 12 1911 at Barton-on-Humber, where his father, Canon William Edward Varah, was the vicar (he named his son after the founder of the parish, St Chad). From Worksop College he went on an exhibition to Keble College, Oxford, to read Natural Sciences, but he changed horses midstream and achieved only modest success in PPE. He was, however, secretary of the university’s Russian and Slavonic clubs, thus beginning a lifelong interest in the Eastern Orthodox Churches, and was also founder-president of the Scandinavian Club. Varah prepared for ordination at Lincoln Theological College, where he was taught by Michael Ramsey, the future Archbishop of Canterbury; and although he confessed to having had “unspecified sexual relations with an unspecified number of girls” he became a curate of St Giles’, Lincoln, in 1935. In this new housing-estate parish he soon made a name for himself with his marriage preparation classes, which included explicit sex instruction, attracting young couples from all parts of the city.

After further curacies at Putney and Barrow-in-Furness, he became vicar of Holy Trinity, Blackburn, in 1942. There, he and a group of young men removed from the church the large, unused galleries and, as part of a general enlivening of parish life, he instituted an Industrial Harvest Festival in which representatives of all aspects of local industry and commerce brought to the church examples of their work. He also edited the diocesan magazine, The Crosier. In 1949 Varah moved to London to become vicar of St Paul’s, Clapham Junction, and chaplain of St John’s Hospital, Battersea. Church life was at a low ebb, and the congregation was tiny, but soon there were signs of revival. Besides his greatly valued pastoral work in the hospital he began to work for the newly-launched children’s comics. It was becoming increasingly clear, though, that his chief interest and skill lay in the field of personal counselling, which had been claiming an ever increasing amount of his time since his days as a curate in Lincoln. In 1935 Varah had conducted his first funeral.

It was for a 14-year-old girl who had committed suicide fearing that she was suffering from venereal disease, whereas in fact she had merely started to menstruate. And the turning point for Varah came in 1953, when he read in a newspaper that there were three suicides every day in the Greater London area. This coincided with an invitation from the Grocers’ Company, patrons of the living, to become rector of St Stephen Walbrook, alongside the Mansion House in the City of London. This beautiful Wren church, sensitively rebuilt after wartime bombing, had no regular congregation, and Varah accepted the appointment on the understanding that he would use the crypt as the base for a new kind of ministry to desperate people. He made it known that, with effect from November 2 1953, anyone contemplating suicide could telephone him at Mansion House 9000. Calls soon began to come in, and doubled each year from 100 in 1954 to 1,600 in 1959. Eventually, they would grow to 100 a day.

Initially Varah used his church stipend to pay a secretary and lived off his Fleet Street earnings, but as the number of clients increased he recruited and trained volunteer helpers. In 1956 he secured a grant to enable him to engage paid staff, including a professional psychiatrist. During the early part of 1954, however, the original concept of a counselling service had been abandoned in favour of a less demanding befriending service. This enabled a wider range of unqualified volunteers to be used. These were carefully selected, and in their training taught to recognise symptoms that required professional help. Religious tests and attempts to indoctrinate were strictly forbidden. Later the movement advertised its availability to the despairing as well as to the suicidal. Varah stood at the head of these developments, providing inspiration and expertise, and was more than content for others to deal with the increasing administrative demands. This left him free to remain actively involved in the work of the London base, and to help found branches in other parts of Britain. Within a decade few parts of the country were without a branch and the number of active helpers had risen to 17,000.

A national association was formed in 1963 and the expansion of the work overseas led later to the formation of an international body. Varah revelled in the extensive travel which this involved. He soon became familiar with the major, and many of the minor, airports of the world, seized an opportunity to fly from Bahrain to London on Concorde, and wherever he went gave classes on dealing with sexual problems. Language problems did not hinder him — he was fluent in French and knew some Russian, and was ready to use interpreters in China and Chile. On reaching the age of 75 in 1986 he retired from his various Samaritan offices, except that of Founder, but continued to travel the world, offering encouragement and advice. He did not, though, retire from his position as rector of St Stephen Walbrook. From the outset he had employed a professional quartet to sing 16th and 17th-century Masses at the Sunday morning Prayer Book Eucharist. The congregations were never large, but he became a much-loved figure in the City and his growing fame attracted to the church visitors from overseas.

As chaplain to the Lord Mayor, he always enjoyed his place in the coach at the annual Lord Mayor’s Procession, and he was a Liveryman of the Carmen and Grocers’ Companies. But disaster struck in 1978, when it was discovered that the erection of high-rise buildings had lowered the water table of the neighbourhood and dried out the foundations of the church, causing its walls and dome to become unstable. Immediate closure of the building was required, and nine years were to pass before it was ready for re-opening. During this time Varah shared in the worship at St Paul’s, of which he had become a Prebendary in 1975, and in partnership with his friend Peter (later Lord) Palumbo raised the money needed for the underpinning of the church’s foundations and the securing of its walls. When the work was nearing completion Varah, aided by Palumbo, commissioned Henry Moore to sculpt an altar to stand under the dome. Great controversy followed the refusal of the Chancellor of London diocese to grant permission for the altar on the ground that it was solid stone and not a table.

Undeterred, Varah appealed to the Court of Ecclesiastical Causes Reserved and, at what proved to be only the second time the Court had been convened in its long history, the Chancellor’s decision was overturned. A few eyebrows were raised when Varah, in his autobiography Before I Die Again (1992), announced: “When I say the Creed I assert my belief in Reincarnation”; but no one was surprised when, aged 81, he founded Men Against Genital Mutilation of Girls. Its membership was never large. He was patron of the Terence Higgins Trust, the HIV and Aids charity, from 1987 to 1999. Chad Varah finally retired as rector of St Stephen Walbrook in 2003, when, at 92, he was the oldest incumbent in the Church of England. He was appointed OBE in 1969 and advanced to CBE in 1995. An honorary fellow of Keble College, Oxford, he received honorary doctorates from six British universities.

Among numerous international awards were the Albert Schweitzer Gold Medal and the Romanian Patriarchal Cross, awarded for his work as secretary of the Orthodox Churches Aid fund. His wife, Susan, who was a notable Central President of the Mothers’ Union from 1970 to 1976, died in 1993. She and Chad Varah had four sons (three of them triplets) and a daughter. One of their sons died in April this year. BBC News Online | Obituary: The Reverend Chad Varah Obituary: The Reverend Chad Varah 8 November 07 20:40 GMT The Reverend Chad Varah founded Samaritans with one telephone line and saw it grow into a world-wide organisation helping thousands of people to avoid the ultimate act of desperation. He was never a conventional clergyman. His chief concern from the start was to help individuals rather than spreading the gospel. Born in Barton-upon-Humber, where his father was the vicar at St Chad's, the local Anglican church, Chad Varah was educated at Oxford before, he said, being "press-ganged" into the life of a priest.

Promise His first task as an assistant curate in Lincoln in 1935 determined the path he would follow. Standing in at the funeral of a 14-year-old girl, he asked the undertaker why the girl was being buried in unconsecrated ground, and was told she had killed herself because she had mistaken menstruation for a serious disease. Dr Varah recalled his reaction: "I stood at the end of the grave and I said, little girl, I never knew you, but I promise you that you have changed my life and I shall teach children about sex." Dr Varah kept his promise, although the explicit nature of his advice to children and young couples scandalised many people in the Church. The need for advice on sexual taboos was reinforced by the response to an article he wrote in Picture Post on the joys of sex, with 250 people writing the next day, asking for help. Samaritans' rapid growth As vicar of St Paul's, at Clapham in south London, he realised that a significant number of people coming to see him were talking of suicide. He thought a special telephone line might help people in distress, but there were many demands on his time.

He was a father of five, including triplet sons, he wrote strip-cartoons for Eagle and Girl comics and was the scientific consultant for the Eagle hero, Dan Dare. But the idea of a help line became a reality when he became rector of St Stephen Walbrook, a church in the City of London whose only parishioner was the Lord Mayor. Samaritans grew rapidly, complemented by a dramatic fall in the suicide rate, and its many branches in Britain and around the world now handle millions of calls every year. Chad Varah always insisted that it should not be a religious organisation. At odds with management In his autobiography, Before I Die Again - he believes in reincarnation - he says: "Church people were all too often narrow-minded, censorious, judgmental, intolerant, conventional." Retiring from Samaritans in 1986, Chad Varah's work has received widespread recognition - he was made a Companion of Honour in 2000. His wife, Susan, who died in 1993, also distinguished herself as a president of the Mothers' Union.

Sadly, Chad Varah had been at odds with Samaritans' management council for several years because he felt it had betrayed its original principles. He felt the job of volunteers was to listen, without talking about themselves. "This is a rare quality," he said.

"They are in fact people who cannot bring themselves to pass by on the other side when somebody's needing them." The Rev Chad Varah | The Independent The Rev Chad Varah Founder of the Samaritans telephone helpline charity Saturday 10 November 2007 00:00 BST Click to follow The Independent Online Edward Chad Varah, priest: born Barton-upon-Humber, Lincolnshire 12 November 1911; ordained deacon 1935, priest 1936; Vicar, Holy Trinity, Blackburn 1942-49; Vicar, St Paul, Clapham Junction 1949-53; Rector, St Stephen Walbrook 1953-2003; Founder, The Samaritans 1953, Director 1953-74, President, London Branch 1974-86; OBE 1969, CBE 1995; Prebendary, St Paul's Cathedral 1975-97, Senior Prebendary 1997-2003; Founder Chairman, Befrienders International

 (Samaritans Worldwide) 1974-83, President 1983-86; CH 2000; married 1940 Susan Whanslaw (died 1993; three sons, one daughter, and one son deceased); died Basingstoke, Hampshire 8 November 2007.

Chad Varah was one of those people inspired by a sudden brainwave from which developed an international organisation of almost breathtaking simplicity. In 1953 he read that in Greater London three people killed themselves every day, and it occurred to him that what people who were feeling suicidal or in despair most needed was an emergency telephone line akin to 999. This he set up in the crypt of St Stephen Walbrook, a magnificent Wren church in the City of London, and so were born the Samaritans. During the greatest period of expansion, from about 1964 until 1973, on average a new Samaritan branch was established in the United Kingdom every eight weeks. Today there are about 200 centres throughout the British Isles, manned 24 hours a day, and the work of the Samaritans is conducted in around 40 countries overseas. Edward Chad Varah was born in 1911, at Barton-upon-Humber. He was the eldest of nine children and his father was parish priest of a church in Lincolnshire founded by the seventh-century converter of the Midlands, St Chad, after whom Edward was baptised.

The name Varah is almost certainly Ukrainian in origin, but the family had lived in Yorkshire since at least 1537. Chad Varah was educated at Worksop College in Nottingham, and gained an Exhibition in Natural Sciences to Keble College, Oxford. From there he went on to study for the ministry at Lincoln Theological College, where one of his teachers was the sub-warden Michael Ramsey, who later became Archbishop of Canterbury. He was ordained deacon in 1935 and priest a year later, and after serving three assistant curacies, Varah was inducted, in 1942, to his first living, Holy Trinity, Blackburn, where he remained until 1949. For the next four years he was vicar of the Church of St Paul, Clapham Junction, and it was in 1953, the year he founded the Samaritans, that he was offered St Stephen Walbrook by the Worshipful Company of Grocers. He was also working at the time as a children's comic scriptwriter for Eagle, Robin and Swift, and was one of the creators of the cartoon space hero Dan Dare.

In talking about the reason he set up an emergency telephone service for people tempted to commit suicide, Chad Varah frequently referred to his early-acquired expertise in offering marriage guidance to young couples, and to teaching sex generally to youngsters in his youth clubs. "As a result," he used to say, "I became very knowledgeable and practised", and he even went so far as to claim to have ushered in the "permissive society". In his nineties, he described himself as the "world's oldest sex therapist". He was to a fair degree obsessed by sex (one of his more esoteric writings was a 1976 book called Telephone Masturbators and How to Befriend Them) and it has even been suggested that Varah's initial motive in setting up an emergency telephone service was in order to offer sexual counselling, and that it was from this springboard that the far more broadly based Samaritan movement developed. During the first year of operation, some 100 callers were seen. Volunteers were recruited on an alarmingly ad hoc basis. There was little structured training but a good deal of glamorous dashing about "seeking souls to save".

The earliest "rector and assistants", as Varah's first followers were called, banded together into a Company of Samaritans, holding special services of dedication and admission, and for the first 10 years, only clergy were appointed as local directors. It was small wonder that, with the name "Samaritan" attached as well, the movement was so soon and so strongly identified with religiosity. But today one of the seven principles governing the work of the Samaritans expressly forbids any volunteer to impose their own convictions or to influence callers "in regard to politics, philosophy or religion". The first branch outside London was founded in Edinburgh in 1959, and others soon followed at Liverpool, Glasgow and Aberdeen. By 1961 there were Samaritan centres in Belfast, Bournemouth, Bradford, Hull, Jersey and Portsmouth, and enthusiasm for the Samaritan ideal of "listening acceptance and personal caring" had spread to what was then Salisbury in Rhodesia, to Karachi, Bombay and Hong Kong. In 1963, attempted suicide ceased to be a crime, and that year 21 founding branches were incorporated into a company called the Samaritans, to be run in future by a Council of Management.

In 1974 a further milestone was reached when delegates from all over the world met at St Stephen Walbrook to establish Befrienders International, the Samaritans Worldwide, of which Chad Varah became the president. The numbers of Samaritans recruited since 1953 must run into hundreds of thousands; around 17,000 volunteers are on the rota of the United Kingdom branches at any time, with thousands of new recruits needed each year just to keep pace with the drop-out rate. No one knows how many suicides have been prevented, but some five million contacts with the Samaritans (by telephone, email or face-to-face) are dealt with in this country every year alone. The establishment of the Samaritans was a major achievement by any standards, but as Chad Varah grew older and his movement grew larger his inevitable loss of personal control caused him to withdraw into a severe paranoia never far below the surface at the best of times, and in his later years the cause of much grief to those who had admired his basic concepts. He seemed quite incapable of resting on his laurels, and the wildest letters and accusations flew about.

He attended his last annual conference in 1986, and resigned from all official connections later that year. In the Samaritans' 50th anniversary year, Varah, claiming that the organisation had strayed from its original aims, wrote to the Charity Commission asking that its charitable status be removed, but later a rapprochement was achieved. Varah was made an Honorary Prebendary of St Paul's Cathedral in 1975 (and a Senior Prebendary in 1997) and an Honorary Fellow of Keble College in 1981. He was appointed OBE in 1969, advanced to CBE in 1995 and was awarded the Albert Schweitzer Gold Medal in 1972. In 2000, he was made a Companion of Honour. Varah believed in reincarnation and his autobiography, published in 1992, was titled Before I Die Again.

Michael De-la-Noy Samaritans of Exeter, Mid & East Devon | Samaritans Our next information evening for potential volunteers is at 7.30pm on Thursday March 9 2017 Exeter Samaritans - who we are Exeter Samaritans held its first meeting to recruit volunteer listeners in November 1963 - one of the first out-of-London branches, set up some 10 years after the national organisation was founded by the Reverend Chad Varah. Exeter Samaritans’ telephone number ‘went live’ in 1964 and by 1970 there were 1,800 annual ‘contacts’ from people by telephone or face-to-face. By 1975 contacts had increased to 6,865. The local branch increased in geographical size to cover parts of Devon as well as Exeter, larger premises were used and at different times the local branch had a city centre charity shop and its own caravan. In 1992 a Listeners team was created in Exeter Prison where prisoners are trained by Samaritans to support their peers - a vital part of our activities that still thrives today.

In 1999 we moved to our current Richmond Road premises, as the charity began to respond to callers by email and more recently SMS text messages as well as the original telephone and face-to-face. There were a remarkable 42,142 contacts between the public and the Exeter, Mid and East Devon branch during 2015 - 33,661 telephone calls, 3,058 emails plus 4,478 SMS texts. The history of Samaritans | Samaritans You are here Home > About us > Our organisation > The history of Samaritans The history of Samaritans Samaritans began in 1953 in London, founded by a vicar called Chad Varah. Throughout his career Chad had offered counselling to his parishioners, and wanted to do something more specific to help people struggling to cope and possibly contemplating suicide. How Samaritans started The initial idea for Samaritans came from the first funeral Chad conducted early on in his career: a girl aged 14 had started her period, but having no one to talk to believed that she had a sexually transmitted disease and took her own life.

Chad was immensely moved by this senseless loss of life, "I might have dedicated myself to suicide prevention then and there, providing a network of people you could 'ask' about anything, however embarrassing, but I didn't come to that until later". Felicity Varah Harding, Chad's daughter, talks about her father: This interview was filmed by Central London Samaritans . Setting up the Samaritans service When Chad was offered charge of the parish of St Stephen in the summer of 1953 he knew that the time was right for him to launch what he called a "999 for the suicidal". He was, in his own words, "a man willing to listen, with a base and an emergency telephone". The first call to the new service was made on 2nd November 1953 and this date is recognised as Samaritans' official birthday. Publicising Samaritans Chad knew he would need to get word out about the service. Luckily he wrote and illustrated articles for children's comics, so he knew many of the journalists who worked on national newspapers.

The service received lots of press coverage and on December 7th, 1953 the Daily Mirror coined the term "Telephone Good Samaritans" and although Samaritans is not a religious organisation, the name has stuck and become synonymous with the idea of people being there for others struggling to cope. The newspaper coverage worked and Chad received many callers wanting support both on the phone and face to face, as well as people wanting to help as volunteers. Initially the volunteers’ duties were to sit with the callers whilst they waited for their appointment, offering them someone to chat to, but it soon became clear that their role was much more central to the service. Often, the callers would pour out their problems to volunteers and many felt no need to speak to Chad afterwards. The simple act of listening and offering non-judgmental support was enough for most callers, and Chad realised the power of the service was in providing a safe space so people could talk and be listened to, without judgment.

Growing into a nationwide service Publicity for the London-based service created a lot of interest elsewhere in the UK and as a consequence several more Samaritans centres were set up in the following years – the second being Samaritans in Edinburgh which took its first call on 1st June 1959. There are now 201 branches across the UK and Republic of Ireland. In February 1954, Chad officially handed over the task of supporting the callers to the volunteers, and Samaritans as we know it today was born. Samaritans service today still operates on Chad’s guiding principles of confidential, non-judgmental support.

Question: Which organisation was founded by the Reverend Chad Varah?
Answer: SAMARITANS