The Pioneer Policewoman by Mary S. Allen first edition 1925
ALLEN, Mary S.; Julie Helen MEYNEMAN [Ed.]
London: Chatto & Windus, 1925
8vo., pale blue cloth embossed with police badge to upper cover; backstrip lettered in blue; together in the dustwrapper, priced 10s. 6d. net to spine, featuring a black and white photograph by Reville; pp. [vi], vii-xi, [iii]; 3-288; with frontis portrait matching wrapper, and a further 11 black and white photographic plates throughout; a lovely copy, lightly bumped and rubbed at spine tips and corners; upper edge a trifle dusty; the about very good dustwrapper with some overall shelf darkening, particularly to folds and spine; some light scratches and creases; nicked, chipped and torn at spine and folds tips, with strip of abrasion to spine affecting lettering, and a 3.5cm chip to lower panel causing some additional loss to publisher’s ads.
First edition.
Mary Sophia Allen was born in Cardiff in 1878. The daughter of Thomas Isaac Allen, Chief Superintendent of the Great Western Railway, she was one of ten children, and left home at the age of thirty after rebelling against her father and swiftly joining the suffragette movement. There, under the leadership of Emmeline Pankhurst, she was imprisoned three times for her involvement in the smashing of windows, and while in Holloway Gaol was forcibly fed after going on hunger strike. She never reconciled with her father, and returned home only in 1911, after he had passed away.
Upon the outbreak of the First World War Allen joined the Women Police Volunteers, rising to second-in-command the following year when the group became the Women Police Service (WPS). She was responsible for policing wartime munitions factories and helped to set up a maternity home for mothers and babies. For her wartime work, she was awarded an OBE in February 1918. After the war, despite being ordered to disband the WPS, she continued to wear her police uniform in public - an eccentricity which was to last the rest of her life. She developed a close and personal relationship with Commandant Margaret Damer Dawson, and the pair lived together between 1914 and 1920, both cropping their hair short, and often seen together in public in their uniforms. When Dawson died suddenly in 1920, her will left everything to Allen, who continued to live in the same house for the next ten years. She also took over her title as head of the WPS.
During the 1920s, Allen learned to fly and travelled throughout Europe, where she continued to advise on women’s policing, despite no longer having an active title. She attracted a great deal of controversy during the Second World War when she joined the Women’s Voluntary Service and publicly praised Hitler and Mussolini, leading to suspicions that she was in fact a German spy (a suggestion that was never proved). The Pioneer Policewoman was her first autobiography, and follows her life from her initiation into the WPS, through to the end of the war and the role of women in the police force going forward. It was followed by A Woman at the Cross Roads in 1934 and Lady in Blue in 1936. Mostly remembered today for her controversial views, Allen is nonetheless an incredibly important figure in the history of women’s policing. This volume, like her others, is dedicated to ‘the chief’.
A rare copy of the true first edition with the scarce wrapper.