7 FEBRUARY 1941, Page 5

No one who has ever seen the Papworth Tuberculosis Colony

in Cambridgeshire will quarrel with the judgement that Sir Pendrill Varrier-Jones was in his way u great man. I had known him since we were freshmen of the same year at Cambridge (he was just P. C. V. Jones, without a hyphen, then), I have watched through the years the growth of the remark- able and fruitful experiment he initiated at Papworth, and I have been all over the colony under his enthusiastic guidance. It is true that Varrier-Jones had, at the beginning, the co- operation of older men like Sir Clifford Allbutt and Sir German Sims-Woodhead, but the idea of a village settlement where tuberculous patients could settle down with their families and earn their living at some type of work—cabinet-making, leather-work and the like—which their state of health permitted was, I believe, his own. At any rate the execution was all his own. The products of Papworth were marked by first-class craftsmanship, and the settlement itself has attracted almost world-wide interest. For Varrier-Jones Papworth, and certain purely pathological aspects of tuberculosis, were the whole of life. I once said something to him about getting married. He scouted the idea. He was far too busy, he affirmed decisively.