Mary Sophia Allen was born on the 12th of March, 1878.
Allen was born in Cardiff to Margaret Sophia Carlyle and Thomas Isaac Allen, Chief Superintendent of the GWR, and had 9 siblings, including close sisters. Educated at home, in Bristol, and at Princess Helena College, and leaving home at 30, Allen joined Emmeline Pankhurst and the WSPU in 1909. As organiser in the South West and later Edinburgh, Allen was imprisoned 3 times, going on hunger strike twice, resulting in force-feeding during her last imprisonment.
Like Emmeline Pankhurst, Allen was a militant suffragette who ceased suffrage campaigning during the First World War in favour of British patriotism. Allen joined the Women’s Police Volunteers, then Women’s Police Service, and was second in command, Sub-commandant, to “her lover” Margaret Damer Dawson (they lived together and Dawson left her house and most of her money to Allen), receiving an OBE for services during the war. Allen became commandant of the Women’s Auxiliary Service in 1920, when Dawson died.
‘Mary had a lifelong obsession with uniforms and masculine authority,’ writes Nina Boyd, Allen’s biographer, who also discusses how women loved Allen, women who even funded her. Called ‘Robert’ by friends, and addressed as ‘Sir,’ Allen was certainly an LGBT figure, but was drawn to dictatorship, was proud to have met Hitler and Mussolini and certainly became a fascist, who is now mainly known for involvement with the British Union of Fascists.
“Mary Sophia Allen was a military-minded woman who was probably attracted to the WSPU because it was the most regimented and militant of all the suffrage societies,” writes Helena Wojtczak. It shouldn’t necessarily be seen as a shocking change of direction for Allen, from suffragette to fascist, but these probably went hand in hand for Allen.
Allen was a ‘Pioneering Policewoman,’ according to Allen in her 1925 book. ‘A Woman at the Cross Roads’ was published in 1934, after meeting Hitler when teaching police women in Germany (then becoming a Nazi sympathiser), and then ‘Lady in Blue,’ and she was also a contributor to Policewoman’s Review, 1927-37.
However, Allen was too fascist even for the police service, wanting more power than they would give her. Travelling the world, still in uniform, the Home Office watched closely and even suspected her of being a Nazi spy. These travels were restricted eventually, to a 5 mile radius of her Cornwall home. Allen continued to be associated with fascists following the Second World War, as well as Catholicism and animal activism, but certainly had less influence in later life.
Mary Sophia Allen died in 1964 in Croydon.
Further Reading & Sources:
Nina Boyd, From Suffragette to Fascist: The Many Lives of Mary Sophia Allen.
https://www.thehistorypress.co.uk/articles/mary-sophia-allen-suffragette-to-fascist/
Oxford DNB https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/39176
Image: Mary Sophia Allen, centre, via National Portrait Gallery.
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