Above all the Papworth Village Settlement was the brain-child of Pendrill Charles Varrier-Jones (1883-1941), a research worker for the Cambridge pathologist German Sims Woodhead who virtually stumbled into his métier as founder of this industrial settlement, as an accidental consequence of what was intended to be a temporary appointment as County Tuberculosis Officer. Whilst others supported him well and he was able to lean effectively on their connections, the inspiration and guiding light for the Settlement were always his.
Varrier-Jones ran the Village Settlement with energy and charm as a benevolent dictatorship. So successful was he that the governing bodies of other faltering kindred institutions resorted to him for advice and ended up appointing him director. Hence the archive includes papers of Preston Hall British Legion Village, of the Enham Village Centre for Disabled Ex-servicemen and of the Peamount Sanatorium in Newcastle, County Dublin.
Varrier-Jones died suddenly in 1941, with the Papworth Village Settlement fully developed, at the very point when tuberculosis was abating under the twin developments of better hygiene, housing and diet on the one hand and effective medical intervention – both surgical and (more significantly ) antibiotics on the other. It was not an auspicious moment for the preservation of the great man’s papers. War-time and reorganisation of the Settlement to more shared management and then to address changes in priorities for rehabilitation, led inevitably to a turnover in staff.
It was Peter Fraser, husband of Varrier-Jones’ niece and Managing Director of the Settlement, who took on the task of ensuring the work of Varrier-Jones would not be forgotten, publishing with others’ assistance an epitome of his thinking in Papers of a Pioneer and planning a biography. For these purposes he salvaged Varrier-Jones’ extensive papers upon his own departure from Papworth in 1946, intending both to organise them and use them as a source. Regrettably the task defeated him and the papers were eventually returned to Cambridgeshire by his widow in 1996 and deposited in the County Record Office.
The archive includes:
- Drafts and copies of papers for research and publicity publications, lectures and speeches, etc. by Varrier-Jones and others, 1915-41; news-cuttings books of the tuberculosis research 1901-10.
- Correspondence, papers, etc., as medical director of Papworth Village Settlement, and of the kindred establishments at Preston Hall, Enham and Peamount, including those systematically copied to him by officers of those establishments1915-41.
- Private papers of Varrier-Jones.
- News-cutting books for Papworth, Enham and Peamount 1927-1936 compiled by the Organising Secretary, J. Reynell Wreford, Organising (i.e. publicity) Secretary at the joint London office of the Settlements, with Wreford’s correspondence with Varrier-Jones as Secretary of the Enham Village Centre.
Please follow the link in the right hand column to open our online catalogue for this collection.