Varah was born in the town of Barton-upon-Humber, Lincolnshire, the eldest of nine children of the vicar at the Anglican church of St Peter.

His father, Canon William Edward Varah, a strict Tractarian, named him after St Chad, who, according to Bede, had founded the 7th-century monastery ad Bearum ("at Barrow"), which may have occupied an Anglo-Saxon enclosure next to Barton Vicarage.

[citation needed] Varah was initially reluctant to follow his father's vocation, but his godfather persuaded him to study at Lincoln Theological College, where he was taught by the Revd Michael Ramsey, later Archbishop of Canterbury.

Great controversy followed the installation of a large circular altar in travertine marble by Henry Moore, commissioned by Varah and his churchwarden Peter Palumbo.

[2] He was a supporter of female priests, but preferred the traditional 17th century Book of Common Prayer (1662) to the more modern liturgical changes authorized in 1966.

He officiated at the marriage of Lady Sarah Armstrong-Jones, only daughter of Princess Margaret, to actor Daniel Chatto in 1994.

Varah began to understand the problems facing the suicidal when he was taking a funeral as an assistant curate in 1935, his first church service, for a fourteen-year-old girl who had taken her own life because she had begun to menstruate and feared that she had a sexually transmitted disease.

To that end, Chad Varah founded the Samaritans in 1953 in the crypt of his church, with the stated aim that it would be an organisation "to befriend the suicidal and despairing."

[citation needed] In line with a long-standing commitment to sex education, he was a member of the board of reference of the British edition of the adult magazine Forum from 1967 to 1987.

[6] He wrote a television play, "Nobody Understands Miranda", which was broadcast by the BBC as part of The Befrienders, an eleven-episode series about the Samaritans in 1972.

[7] He continued his campaigning work into his later life, founding Men Against Genital Mutilation of Girls (MAGMOG) in 1992, and publishing his autobiography, Before I Die Again, referring to his interest in reincarnation, the same year.