From Suffragette to Fascist

The Many Lives of Mary Sophia Allen

Nina Boyd

• Publisher: The History Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780752489179
• eBook ISBN: 9780752492780
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Historical Biographies
• Index: History

Mary Allen, once a window-smashing suffragette, went on to become a pioneer policewoman, helping create Britain's first female police force. Honoured for her work policing munitions factories and bombed towns during the First World War, she was soon infuriating the Establishment, travelling the world in her unauthorised uniform to the acclaim of foreign leaders and the dismay of the British government. Mary's head was next turned after a meeting with Hitler, and she joined Mosley's British Union of Fascists, narrowly escaping internment despite suspicions of spying, secret flights to Germany and Nazi salutes. The liaisons she formed with wealthy heiresses funded an extravagant lifestyle and the formation of a private army of women intended to save the country from Communist aerial attacks, nudity and white slavery. Although adored by her loyal friends, Mary was a stubborn, opinionated woman and today her achievements are overshadowed by the eccentricities of her later years. Citing documents specially released from the Home Office and sources contributed from Mary's own family, Nina Boyd has produced a fascinating account of this extraordinary woman.

1

A BENEVOLENT
DICTATORSHIP

We tend to remember the house we grew up in as being much bigger than it actually was; but Mary Allen’s childhood home was certainly substantial by modern standards. She was part of a household of two parents, ten children, and assorted nannies, governesses and servants, and they were not cramped for space:

As we grew older, boys and girls rode a velocipede around the garden paths, and on rainy days (forbidden joy!) even along the corridors. A velocipede! The name itself was an enchantment. Can any later invention provide a more fascinating suggestion of speed produced by short gyrating legs?¹

Little is known of Mary’s childhood. She was always reticent about the details of her private life, in marked contrast with her partiality to self-advertisement in the public sphere. In her first volume of autobiography, The Pioneer Policewoman, she claims that she was ‘a very delicate child, educated almost entirely at home, and denied all the training in outdoor sports of the robust modern girl. Increased mental activity may possibly have been the result of this intolerable physical restraint.’² Yet it was a busy, active childhood, fondly remembered fifty years later in A Woman at the Cross Roads, when Victorian values and the virtues of discipline and hard work had been replaced by what Mary perceived as dangerous libertarianism. ‘We invented games, made things, carpentered, jig-sawed, dug in the garden.’ (p.15) There were outings to a pantomime at Christmas, and three or four visits a year to the theatre, ‘either as a birthday treat or as a reward for good conduct’. (p.30) She describes a series of governesses, of varying quality and ability, but all respected and obeyed by their charges.

We might expect a childhood as apparently happy as Mary Allen’s to be recounted in more detail by a woman who wrote three autobiographies; but in none of them does she even tell us the first names of her brothers and sisters, or recall anecdotes from her earliest years. All she tells us is that her large family was not unusual, and that nannies were important figures, more present in the children’s lives than their parents:

From the age of two, or even earlier, we recognised a benevolent dictatorship – a discipline firm but not harsh (in spite of novels that make the exceptional seem the usual state of affairs). It was a brave child who would dare defy Nannie! … In looking back, it seems to me that we were very rarely punished. Not to be permitted to go down-stairs to join our parents in the real dining-room, to say good night, was a bitter humiliation. (pp.15–16)

Although Mary was educated mostly at home by governesses, she attended Princess Helena College, Ealing, when her father’s work took the family to London. The Princess Helena College was established in 1820 as one of England’s first academic schools for girls, founded for the daughters of officers who had served in the Napoleonic Wars, and the daughters of Anglican clergy. Mary gained a good education there judging by her literary output. Although her style is sometimes florid, she writes well, and displays a thorough knowledge of history. Mary is remembered in the annals of the college:

Another well-known figure in public life, Miss Mary Allen, the thrice-gaoled suffragette, returned to the College and talked to the girls about the Women’s Police, which she and a friend had launched. Sixty years later, in 1983, Marjory Lucas [a pupil in 1923] had still not forgotten the extraordinary visitor who ‘appeared large and important’ in uniform, hatted, ‘and sort of marched about’. But Miss Allen had yet to espouse the Fascist cause.³

Mary Sophia Allen was born on 12 March 1878 at 2 Marlborough Terrace in Roath, a suburb of Cardiff, not far from the divisional office of the Great Western Railway in St Mary Street, where her father was Railway Superintendent. Three years later, the family moved to a larger terraced house on four floors in nearby Oakfield Street.

Thomas Isaac Allen, Mary’s father, had entered the railway service when he was 15 years old, as a junior clerk. It was a boom time for ambitious young men, and he worked his way up to the position of Chief Superintendent of the Great Western Railway. He was much respected by his peers as a talented engineer, responsible for instituting a number of improvements in the GWR, including restaurant cars, better conditions for third-class passengers, steam heating of trains, and accelerated express services. His status within the GWR hierarchy is indicated by the fact that he represented the company on royal occasions. At the funeral of Queen Victoria in 1901, he accompanied the royal train from Paddington and, as one of the organisers of the event, he received a commemorative medal. The following year, he was photographed wearing a uniform specially designed for him for the Coronation of Edward VII. Thomas was then a fine-looking man in his early sixties, sporting a full white beard and luxuriant moustache.

In the notice of his retirement in the Great Western Railway Magazine, Thomas Allen is said to have filled the position of superintendent of the line ‘with great advantage to the company and much credit to himself … Mr Allen has always been keenly alive to the interests of the company, and also ever mindful of the welfare of the staff, with whom he is deservedly popular.’⁴

Thomas Allen’s position gave his family privileged access to railway travel, at home and abroad. His daughters travelled a great deal, and went to finishing school in Switzerland, and took music lessons in Germany.⁵ ‘When they travelled in England they had a special coach hitched on to the train they were travelling by. In Switzerland and France they were always met by railway officials who smoothed their paths.’⁶ Thomas died aged 72 years old in Brighton on 20 December 1911, having made a will three weeks earlier leaving everything to his wife. The net value of his estate was £1,987 18s 11d; the equivalent in 2012 of approximately £164,000.

Mary’s mother, Margaret Sophia Carlyle, came from a distinguished family, the Carlyles of Dumfries. She brought money and social cachet to the marriage. Her father was the Reverend Benjamin Fearnley Carlyle, vicar of Cam in Gloucestershire, who compiled a number of books of hymns and psalms. Margaret had two younger sisters, Anne and Dorothy, and an older brother, James, who was the father of another Benjamin Fearnley Carlyle, an eccentric charismatic character, who became known as Dom Aelred.

Margaret, Mary’s mother, went regularly and in secret to London to visit Mary after she was banished from the family home. She made her home in London after Thomas died. One of her granddaughters remembered:

We used to go from Edinburgh to London to Putney where she had a flat, to stay with her for holidays. I remember once we decided on the spur of the moment to go to Brussels to see Auntie Elsie who lived there and we gave grandmother ten minutes to get ready. When we were on the steamer we noticed that she had one black shoe on and one brown one and when we told her she said ‘That’s allright, nobody looks at an old lady like me’ and was quite unconcerned.⁷

Margaret Allen died in London in 1933.

Dom Aelred exerted considerable influence on his female cousins, one of whom, as we shall see, became a nun. Aelred began his professional life as a medical student at St Bartholomew’s Hospital, London, but he gave up medicine in order to become an Anglican Benedictine oblate. He took the name Aelred and founded the Benedictine community which, in 1906, settled on Caldey Island off the south-west coast of Wales:

Benjamin (Aelred) Carlyle, who had been fascinated by the monastic life since the age of fifteen, when he had founded a secret religious brotherhood at his public school … was a man of dynamic personality, hypnotic eyes, and extraordinary imagination. In 1906 his community made its permanent home on Caldey Island, off the coast of south Wales (outside Anglican diocesan jurisdiction), where, largely on borrowed money, he built a splendidly furnished monastery in a fanciful style of architecture. The life of this enclosed Benedictine community centred upon an ornate chapel where the thirty or so tonsured and cowled monks sang the monastic offices and celebrated Mass in Latin according to the Roman rite. As there was nothing like it anywhere else in the Church of England the island abbey inevitably became a resort for ecclesiastical sightseers, and many young men were drawn to join the community out of personal affection for Carlyle. The self-styled Lord Abbot of Caldey introduced practices into the life of his monastery which many outsiders, accustomed to the austere atmosphere of the existing Anglican men’s communities, found disconcerting … during the summer months they regularly went sea-bathing in the nude. Nor did Carlyle make any secret of his liking for charming young men.⁸

Aelred’s biographer, a former member of the Caldey Island community, remarked that spiritual friendships were ‘not discouraged’.⁹ In 1913 Aelred and a number of his monks renounced the Anglican Church and were received into the Roman Catholic Church. He spent some years working in the Canadian mission fields, but returned to his community and moved to Prinknash near Gloucester, where he is honoured as the founder of the present Benedictine community. He died in 1955, and is buried at Prinknash Abbey.¹⁰

Mary’s parents, Thomas and Margaret, had ten children, five girls and five boys, all but the youngest born in Cardiff. Bunty Martin, the daughter of their youngest daughter, Christine, said perhaps unfairly that ‘the girls of that family were the “go getters”. The brothers were very dull.’¹¹

Thomas Fearnley Allen, Mary’s eldest brother, who bore a strong resemblance to his father, became an engineer, and settled in Argentina, where in 1885 he was appointed by the directors of the Buenos Aires and Rosario Railway as their Locomotive and Carriage Engineer and placed in charge of the shops at Campana. He married Ann Irving Lawrie, a descendant of one of the first Scottish settlers to arrive in the Argentine. They had three sons and a daughter. Some members of this branch of the family are still living in Argentina.

The second of Mary’s siblings, Henry Bevill, died when he was 11 months old. Her third brother, Arthur Denys Allen, known as Denys, ‘invented things’, according to his niece. ‘I met him once and he took us for a ride in his Model T Ford.’¹² Another brother, Herbert, who became a master mariner, was killed in the First World War. Edward, the youngest of the Allen children, was born when the family had moved to Ealing.

The five Allen girls were energetic and outgoing. The eldest, Margaret Annie, was always known as Dolly. She is the person Mary refers to in The Pioneer Policewoman and Lady in Blue as ‘my sister, Mrs Hampton’. Dolly was involved with Mary in the setting up of the Women Police Volunteers (later renamed the Women Police Service), and was the only member of that service eventually employed by the Metropolitan Police, working at Richmond as an Inspector and probation officer. She had a daughter, Marjorie, and a son, called Wilfred after his father. Wilfred was a Polar explorer and pilot. He and his companions on a Greenland expedition were the first explorers ever to be awarded Polar Medals with both Arctic and Antarctic silver bars. Dolly was, like her sisters, attracted to religion, and she became a Christian Science practitioner.

Mary Sophia was the second daughter, and she was followed by Elsie, who married Herbert Joseph Cotton, a captain in the Indian Army. In 1911, Elsie and her daughter were living with her parents in Wraysbury, outside London, but her husband was absent, serving overseas. He died in Baghdad on 22 May 1916, having been taken prisoner by the Turks after the siege of Kut-al-Amara. Major Cotton was seriously ill with enteric fever when Kut surrendered at the end of April. Along with other sick officers, he was put on a steamer and sent up the river to Baghdad, a journey which took ten days. He died a few days after their arrival in Baghdad, and was buried in the Christian cemetery there. The cemetery has recently been destroyed in conflict. His possessions, apart from a few personal items kept back for his wife, were sold b...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• Prologue
• 1 A Benevolent Dictatorship
• 2 This Suffragette Nonsense
• 3 Suffering in the Cause of Womankind
• 4 Nursed Back to Health
• 5 ‘Pollies!’
• 6 On Actual Police Duty
• 7 A Rude Disillusionment
• 8 Demands from Abroad
• 9 A Good Deal of Feminine Spite
• 10 White Slaves
• 11 An Accomplished Writer
• 12 Women Will Have To Be Used
• 13 A Hitler of the Spirit
• 14 Yellow and White Flowers
• 15 Helen’s Loss Has Taken Away All Joy In Life
• Appendix I: Mary Allen’s ‘call to women’ issued in November 1933
• Appendix II: Report on the search on 10 July 1940 of Mary’s home
• References and Notes
• Plate Section
• Copyright