Beachy Head: "Soon we will not be here to conserve lives"

But alternatively of celebrating the royal accolade this weekend, the chaplains are dealing with a crisis of their own. The funds has run out.

The four skilled chaplains employed to perform with a team of 14 qualified volunteers have just been told they are to be produced redundant. If no much more cash comes in by the end of the month, their last wages will be paid by promoting off the team’s Land Rover patrol vehicles, sophisticated thermal imaging cameras and other kit. That will mean the finish.

“If you get the products away, then the volunteers will have nothing at all to work with. We will have to finish,” says Mr Pybus, a 57-yr-outdated former financial product sales adviser who is now director. That is why he is speaking to the Telegraph, breaking a code of silence that has been in place because the crew was founded ten years ago. The chaplains have often refused all interviews and publicity, right up until now. “I do think that far more lives will be saved if we talk about this and get the monetary help we want to carry on.”

This hefty, assured guy strides in excess of the downlands in his red fleece and substantial-visibility jacket, both of which recognize him as a chaplain. He shouts a warning to a young lad who has acquired as well near to the edge. There are faded warning signs and a negligible fence created from a single wire, but only at the highest point. “We cannot stop individuals currently being stupid but we can make them conscious of the threat they are taking,” says Mr Pybus. “The drop is 500ft and the edge is not steady.”

The lad realises his mistake, turns pale with fright and hastens inland. So the chaplain will take up his binoculars yet again to watch as his colleague – who needs to be identified only as T, for the sake of his privacy – reaches the agitated guy on the subsequent headland.

“We normally inquire an innocuous query about the climate or the see. The response will tell us a lot about the situation of that man or woman.”

For a although, the two figures are silhouetted against a shimmering sea. These initial conversations can go on for hrs, even in intense weather. Some men and women refuse to react at all. But if they are at some point prepared to engage in conversation, the chances are that they will also come away and accept support.

“I’m advised by folks who know better than me that feeling suicidal is not a long lasting state of mind,” says the crew director. “Therefore, we will do what we can to assist folks to not take their lives at that point of crisis, which is not going to final permanently.”

The Samaritans agree. Their telephone number is advertised at Beachy Head, but their help is available to any person who calls from anyplace, at any time. Chantel Scherer-Reid of the Samaritans says: “When a individual reaches a stage exactly where they really feel suicidal, they usually shed sight of currently being able to operate by means of their difficulties. Talking can really assist a man or woman to see a way by means of this, and we would encourage any person who is struggling to cope to reach out for aid,” she says. “People can come to us knowing that we supply a secure area for them to speak and to be themselves.”

This is not a competitors for souls. The chaplains would rather individuals located assist from the Samaritans or any other source prior to they ever felt the need to go to Beachy Head. “If you are troubled at all, please try out and locate somebody to talk to about it,” says Mr Pybus. “That is the ideal point to do.”

If men and women do come to what he calls the Head, even though, he wants to be there to assist them. He also needs them to know the truth about jumping. “People say this is a specific way to die, but that is not real.” Some hit ledges on the way down and have to be rescued by the Coastguards, who threat their own lives to do so. Some survive the fall but are quite severely and permanently disabled. “I think it is some thing like 85 per cent of individuals who survive say they wish they had not jumped.”

The chaplaincy crew was commenced 10 years ago after a pastor in the local town of Eastbourne had a vision he believed to be from God. To this day, you have to be a committed Christian to train as a chaplain, which upsets some people who are not. Mr Pybus is adamant. “We pray ahead of each and every single session, to be in the proper place in the appropriate time with the correct words. We think you require to be Christian to do that.”

The hardest point to cope with is when a chaplain is talking to somebody and they leap anyway. That occurred four times final year. “They are going to want TLC, tender loving care. The best place for that is within a little group in a regional church.”

What about taking donations from unbelievers? “I have no difficulty taking donations from non-Christians. I may possibly even be cheeky and say God owns it all, he can make it come from wherever he needs.”

Regardless of all this, he insists it is “most unlikely that Christianity or the Bible will come into conversation at the cliff edge. We have to demonstrate real humility. We have to present them that we care and that we are fully non-judgmental and that they can tell us factors they can’t tell other individuals.” Often details does have to be passed on to the authorities, however. “We had a lady tell us she was at the edge because she had taken a hammer to her husband and left him at home. There was no way we could hold that to ourselves.”

Every single volunteer must total forty hrs of education just before going out with a much more knowledgeable companion. “We have security specifications. Chaplains need to be far enough away that if the consumer went to leap they could not grab them. Otherwise there are two individuals falling.”

Don’t folks have a correct to jump if they want to? “Sometime they will tell us in impolite language to go away. We really do not. They may possibly say, ‘I want to jump, you can’t cease me.’ We may possibly say, ‘I’d really like to attempt. I’d like to understand what’s got you here. I’d like to consider and support if I can.’”

As we speak, his radio squawks. T says the man on the edge, who is in his fifties, has agreed to go with him to the chaplaincy hut by the Beachy Head Tavern. “They will have a chat more than a cup of tea and most likely a bit of cake,” says Mr Pybus, whose wife makes the cakes. Later on, the guy agrees to go with police to a neighborhood hospital to be assessed by a psychological overall health nurse.

“Once we have created speak to, we have a duty of care to that man or woman,” says Mr Pybus. “We will not walk away from them right up until we know they are in the hands of an individual who can assist them, whether that is the police, health professionals or their household.”

It performs each approaches. They are the ones who inquire the chaplains to seem out for men and women who may well be coming to Beachy Head. 5 many years in the past, there was a surge in amount, sparked by the publicity surrounding a desperately sad situation in which a couple came right here with the entire body of their deceased son in a rucksack. Despite the surge, the variety of people taking their own lives right here has remained secure, at around 30 a yr. “We have to have been doing some thing proper.”

Nevertheless, the volunteer chaplains at the time could not cope with the extra demand as well as holding down jobs, so four have been employed permanently. “We have continually struggled with the expenses of that,” says Mr Pybus. “We are failing to raise the £10,000 a month necessary to keep going.”

The program now is to lessen the team to a director, administrator and two component-time chaplains as properly as the volunteers, if they can locate the money. 1 of these faced with redundancy is the chaplain recognized as T, a former builder who joined the crew following becoming helped by means of a crisis in his personal existence. “I look at the individuals up here and see a minor bit of the place I employed to be,” he says. “I want to allow them know that they are loved and cared for.”

The first individual he ever aided was a youthful woman in her twenties on crutches. She was sitting proper on the edge on a beautiful summer’s day. Soon after twenty minutes trying to speak to her, he noticed his likelihood. “She began placing her results behind her on the grass. When she passed her telephone back I reached out and grabbed her hand. I apologised for obtaining to do it but I said, ‘I can not allow you go.’ I was in a position to pull her up to a safer area.”

That was dangerous. Wasn’t he breaking the rules and taking a large risk? “I felt on that occasion I was undertaking the proper thing.” She did not resist. “The emergency companies had been presently on their way. She went into their care and I went on with my patrol.”

There is no self-significance in T, no sense that he considers himself a hero. He just feels privileged to be allowed to do this. He is nevertheless on call at midnight when the police ring. A female has told them her boyfriend is suicidal and driving to Beachy Head correct now.

The chaplains have strong spotlights and heat-seeking cameras that will aid them discover him, but the telephone goes once more just before they can be place into use. The boyfriend’s car has been spotted by a number plate recognition camera on 1 of the only two roads top in to Beachy Head and a police patrol has previously managed to intercept him.

“If the police want to take in excess of a predicament we stage back,” says Mark Pybus. “It’s a wonderful connection. We are honoured that they are satisfied to perform with us.”

So the chaplains can stand down, for now. Exhausted as he is soon after a demanding day, the director just hopes they can find a way to stay away from standing down completely. “We are out saving lives 24 hrs a day,” he says. “Unless we can get some significant funds by the finish of the month, this service will have to end and we won’t be here to save lives in the potential.”

* To make a donation to the Beachy Head Chaplaincy Team (bhct.org.united kingdom), pay a visit to the BHCT’s JustGiving page (click right here). Contact Samaritans on 08457 90 90 90

Beachy Head: "Soon we will not be here to conserve lives"