Edgar Johnson Allen 1866-1942

Abstract

The name of E. J. Allen will always be associated with the Marine Biological Association and its Laboratory at Plymouth. It was to this institution that he devoted almost the whole of his working life, and it was under his wise guidance that it grew from small beginnings, through long years of anxiety and disappointment, to the established position it ultimately attained. He was the second son of the Rev. Richard Allen of Liverpool, and he was born at Preston in Lancashire on 6 April 1866. His father had been ordained as a Wesleyan Methodist minister in 1859 and it was while serving at Bideford in Devon that he met and married Emma Johnson, the daughter of a shipbuilder of that town who was descended from a freeman of Exeter, long connected with ships and shipping. There were eight children of this marriage, five sons and three daughters. The sons were all educated at John Wesley’s school, originally founded in 1748 at the village of Kingswood, near Bristol, and transferred in 1851 to a site on Lansdown Hill, overlooking the city of Bath. The eldest son, Dr H. N. Allen, was Professor of Engineering and afterwards Principal of the College of Science at Poona; the third son, C. B. Allen, became Assistant General Manager of the Midland Bank; the fourth, E. L. Allen, was Headmaster of the School of Art at Redditch; and the youngest, Dr H. S. Allen, F.R.S., is Professor of Natural Philosophy in the University of St Andrews. E. J. Allen was at school at the Grove (near Leeds) and at Kingswood (Bath) from 1876 to 1882, and here he came under the influence of T. G. Osborn, who was headmaster of both schools and achieved great success. It is said that ‘he infused a marked enthusiasm into his upper boys; an extraordinary zeal for work took possession of the major part of them’. At Kingswood during his last two years he had as a contemporary Arthur Willey, who also attained distinction in zoological research.