Hello I'm Krestey Young and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive.

For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.

The program was originally broadcast in 1992,

and the presenter was Sue Lolly. My castaway this week is a priest. Ordained in 1935, he found himself appalled at the ignorance of many young people about sexual matters and began counseling sessions in the parishes where he worked. His concern for the young

also took him into journalism, on the one hand writing about sex for the popular

press, on the other becoming one of the founder writers of the Eagle comic. But it was in the Church of St Stephen

Walbrook in the city of London that his life's work really began. It was there in

1953 that he opened a telephone helpline for people in despair.

He's the founder of the Samaritans, Chad Varra.

Did you have any concept, Chad, when you establish that first emergency telephone line nearly 40 years ago now,

of the response and the repercussions that it would have, or were you just doing it and seeing

what happened? I was doing it and seeing what happened.

I was doing it wrongly at the beginning.

I was offering my counseling because I didn't know any better.

There wasn't anything else except either counseling or psychiatry or psychotherapy.

And I wasn't competent to do anything except the counseling.

But three months later I had discovered that

something that wasn't in the textbook that was being done by the volunteers who'd

gathered around me with no qualifications but

wonderful human qualities was even better than my counseling.

It's a listening therapy which I named befriending and this is now accepted by other

organizations besides us who say that so and so needs to be befriended.

...