Celebrating Hampshire Historians

Varley, Telford

20 March 1866 – 7 May 1938

Telford Varley was, from 1897 to 1926, the first headmaster of Peter Symonds School, Winchester.  During his tenure he wrote and contributed to two popular local histories – and was ordained as a priest (1908).

Varley was born in Islington to Samuel and Emily Varley, the fourth of their seven children.  Samuel Varley was a telegraphic engineer, who had laid cables in the Crimea and worked on railway communication before managing the family-owned telegraph factory in London.

Telford Varley was schooled in London before going up to St Johns College, Cambridge in 1884 to read mathematics.  He received his BSc in 1887 and MA in 1891 and on three occasions won the Cambridge Seatonian Prize, awarded for a poem with a sacred subject.

His teaching career took him to Queen Elizabeth’s Grammar School, Mansfield, where he married Anne Parsons, daughter of the Town Clerk. They subsequently had five children. Varley then taught in Guildford (1891 – 1897) before moving to Winchester, where he was in post for 29 years. His retirement years were spent in Brighton, but he is buried in Winchester.

Varley’s time at Peter Symonds School is well-recorded in the school archives and his ‘fearsome outbursts of temper’ and ‘strange punishments’ kept the boys in check.  The punishments may not have been as harsh as the temper – one boy found climbing through a classroom window was made to repeat the exercise 50 times after school, whilst slovenly pupils were kept in after hours in order to march smartly round and round ‘in the attitude of a gentleman’.

Varley’s name is remembered on the current Peter Symonds site in the Varley building, which houses an eponymous theatre, and café.

Varley’s books, describing Hampshire and Winchester, and – in more guide-book style – the Isle of Wight, were aimed at the general reader.  He quotes his sources, ranging from ‘the pages of Bede’ to the ‘Records of the Hampshire Field Club’ but much of their appeal was in the numerous colour plates, a collection of water colours from the brushes of Wilfred Ball.  Such ‘serenely pastoral and picturesque views of England’ were exactly what ‘people wanted to hang on their walls’.

Sources

• Ancestry UK

• Wikipedia

• Varley’s works

• eter Symonds College.

Portrait

Contribution to county’s history

Varley’s purpose was to produce popular accounts of Hampshire and Winchester, using a range of sources and illustrating the books with attractive water colours by Wilfred Ball. The numerous editions and many original copies available on the second market, show how popular they were! Varley was on a somewhat less well trodden path with his work on Birinus and Early Christianity.

Relevant published works

• Varley T and Ball W (1909) Hampshire - published in the A&C Black ‘twenty-shilling series’ and Cambridge County Geography Series.

• Varley T and Ball W (1914) Winchester

• Varley T (1934) St Birinus and Wessex: Odin to Christ.

Critical Comments

General works – but extremely popular with his readership.

Other Comments

Contributor

Dave Allen, October 2023

Key Words

Winchester, Wilfred Ball water colours - a link to a 'Path in the New Forest'.

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