The Samaritans, Britain’s first crisis hotline, was founded in 1953 ‘to befriend the despairing and suicidal’. If, like me, you visit the tiny crypt of this church where it all began – St Stephen’s Walbrook in the City of London – you can still see the telephone where the first call was received on 2 November that year, with the number ‘MAN 9000’. The three letters stood for ‘Mansion House’, but they seemed particularly fitting for a service whose purpose was to help people.
Chad Varah, the Anglican priest and social activist who set up the organisation, was moved to action after presiding at the funeral service of a 14-year-old girl who had taken her own life because she had started to menstruate and believed she had a sexually transmitted disease. He vowed to encourage sex education and to help those with nowhere to turn. It is humbling and inspiring to think that the movement that sprang from that tragedy has now has grown to have 201 centres, many thousands of volunteers across the country and a international network.
I myself trained as a Samaritan volunteer back in the 1980s, and remember how it felt drawing alongside others in pain. My strong instinct told me that listening and being in solidarity was a profound thing to do. This week, nearly 40 years later, on 5 June 2025, I have the privilege of presenting my book on trauma at a Samaritans branch that has been running for fifty years in Bury-St-Edmunds, Suffolk. As well as listening, a team from their branch trains and supports Samaritan Listeners at High Point Prison, and they also supporting Bury Drop-In for the homeless. I am full of admiration for those who volunteer, remembering what it was like doing night shifts in my twenties – and then having to go to work afterwards! But mainly I remember that feeling of privilege.
Nowadays we are so familiar with helplines and their importance for society that it’s easy to forget that only 75 years ago we didn’t have them. Of that young victim of suicide, Chad Varah reputedly said “Little girl, I don’t know you, but you have changed the rest of my life for good”. This hopeful story moves me. It strikes me that Chad was a human signpost. Civilisation does bring remarkable changes, but even the best innovations are fragile and only continue with human good will. They need protecting.