This Is Your Life: Edward Chad Varah

The Reverend Edward Chad VARAH (1911-2007)

THIS IS YOUR LIFE - Edward Chad Varah, Anglican priest and social activist, was surprised by Eamonn Andrews in the audience at the BBC Television Theatre, having been led to believe he was there to watch a film, Meeting Point, about his work.

Edward, who was born in Barton-on-Humber, was educated at Keble College, Oxford. After training for the priesthood at Lincoln Theological College, he worked as a curate in Lincoln, London, and Barrow-in-Furness before being appointed Vicar of Holy Trinity Church, Blackburn, in 1942. In 1949, he became Vicar of St Paul's Church, Clapham Junction, in London. In addition to his Church duties, he contributed an advice column to the Eagle and Girl comics.

In 1953, having been appointed Rector of the Church of St Stephen, Walbrook, in the City of London, the parish church of the Lord Mayor of London, he founded the world's first crisis hotline organisation, The Samaritans, which offered telephone support to help the despairing and those contemplating suicide.

programme details...

Edition No: 152
Subject No: 152
Broadcast live: Mon 20 Feb 1961
Broadcast time: 7.30-8.00pm
Venue: BBC Television Theatre
Series: 6
Edition: 23

on the guest list...

Barry Williamson
'Mary'
Rev Eric Reid
Reginald Rozee
Bastiaan Mahieu
Susan - wife
Pamela Webber
Roger Martyn
'Julian Graham'
Mary Bruce
Rev John Eldrid
'Robert'
Vivan Prosser
Rev John Elphinstone-Fyffe
Felicity - daughter
Michael - son
Andrew - son
David - son

production team...

Researcher: Ronald Vivian
Writer: Ronald Vivian
Director: Michael Goodwin
Producer: T Leslie Jackson

names above in bold indicate subjects of This Is Your Life

related pages...

A Charitable Life

the unsung heroes

Life's Vocation

celebrating the 'men of God'

Photographs of Edward Chad Varah This Is Your Life

Edward Chad Varah recalls his experience of This Is Your Life in his autobiography, Before I Die Again...

When you live to be eighty, the majority of the people you used to know have either died or grown away from you.

The other day, I was rearranging books in the library - my eight-roomed semidetached house has one room lined with shelves which I call the library, even though only about 3,000 of my books are in it - and I found the record of my 1961 appearance on Eamonn Andrews' This Is Your Life programme.

Looking at the photographs of the people who were so important to me at that time, I realise that only my wife and the four children I then had are still part of my life, and Eamonn Andrews himself is dead. If I were to be done again, the people around me in the group photograph would be different; and if I had been done twenty years before, they would have been different again.

Series 6 subjects