Chad Varah

Chad Varah was the eldest of nine children of a Lincolnshire vicar. His first duty as a newly ordained curate in 1935 was to bury a girl of fourteen who had killed herself because she had started to menstruate and thought she had caught a shameful disease. Standing at her grave he resolved to spend his life giving people the plain information about sex and the human body that nobody had given her.

For years that meant counselling in his parishes and writing frank articles that scandalised some of his superiors. He also wrote scripts for the Eagle comic, including Dan Dare, to pay the bills. In 1953 he read that there were three suicides a day in London, and that many people in crisis simply had nobody to speak to. He had just been given the living of St Stephen Walbrook in the City, a church with a crypt and, crucially, a telephone. He announced a number, MANsion House 9000, and invited anyone contemplating suicide to ring it.

The calls came at once, more than one man could handle. Volunteers who had come to help with the tea began sitting with callers while they waited, and Varah noticed that many people did not need his counselling afterwards; they had needed someone to listen. That became the Samaritans' method, which he called befriending.

The organisation spread across Britain and then the world, as Befrienders International. Varah remained forthright and often awkward, resigning from the charity's council in his eighties. He died in 2007, aged 95.