Edgar Johnson Allen (1866–1942)

Abstract

The late Dr E. J. Allen was the son of the Rev. Richard Allen, a Wesleyan minister and as such liable to change the sphere of his work every few years. For this reason E. J. Allen passed his childhood in Cornwall, went to school in Exeter, and lived during his late boyhood in the Worth Valley, going into Leeds to attend the Yorkshire College (now University of Leeds); his education was continued by the University of Berlin, an interval of teaching in Antigua, and University College, London, followed by a Royal Society research studentship at the Plymouth Laboratory. Excepting Antigua, every one of these epochs claimed in him its own loyalties: a few years ago he seriously considered going west to Cornwall to end his life where he first remembered it; he much admired Franz Eilhard Schulze, who taught him at Berlin, and W. F. R. Weldon, his Professor of Zoology at University College, yet kept a lively gratitude for what he had learned from Professor Miall at Leeds.To this very varying environment during the first third of his life we may attribute through the next half-century much of his universal power of sympathy and contact with all sorts and conditions of men. Unselfish by nature, he had the example of a singularly wide-minded father; then bred as a boy in Cornwall, Devon, and West Riding, as a man among London University students and Berlin University students, with the West Indian interlude— there was no class or nation who could not feel an understanding with Allen.