He set about establishing a self-supporting colony where TB sufferers could learn to live with their disease under medical supervision and do a level of work that did not worsen their condition, and be paid for doing so.
Patients whose health was improving were assigned paid work under medical supervision and the goods manufactured were sold at commercial rates on the open market.
In an appeal on the wireless in 1932, Stanley Baldwin said of Varrier-Jones: "For years he has struggled on, entirely without endowments, harassed by the conflicting claims of finance and humanity.
"[8] On 17 December 1935 at the royal premiere at the Leicester Square Theatre, London of René Clair's The Ghost Goes West before Queen Mary, the whole of the proceeds was devoted to the provision of a nurses' home at Papworth.
[11] After a visit in 1947, the British Medical Association reported that Papworth then had hospital and sanatorium accommodation for 350 men and women TB patients and that the Industries, manned and managed by ex-patients, turned over £340,0000 per annum, with some 410 people employed daily.
[12] On 5 July 1948, the hospitals and surgical units at Papworth were brought under state control as part of the newly founded National Health Service.
The father wound up the London operation and the three sons spent the rest of their working lives at Papworth, each in turn running the trunk-making business.
[19] A reputation far and wide was soon established and the buyer from Saks Fifth Avenue is recorded as coming in person to select items for the prestigious New York store.
A brand new factory was completed a month before the outbreak of the Second World War and was well placed to switch production to meeting wartime needs, ranging from attaché cases for the Admiralty to canvas covers for Spitfire, Halifax and Stirling aircraft.
[20] In the early 1950s, the ballerina Margot Fonteyn was one of the first customers to buy a set of luggage with aluminium and plywood frame hidden from view beneath the full-grain hide exterior and the moiré silk lining.
[21] The coach-building workshop was established in 1962 and won contracts to build the yellow Post Office vans and the Green Goddess fire engines.