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Frank Allen was one of the most striking and memorable personalities in the Society’s history and, depending on whether he was in disputatious or merely convivial mode, he combined the qualities of Doctor Johnson with those of the Ghost of Christmas Present. He had the weight, the panache and the grandiloquent measures to carry it off, as befitted a scion of a theatrical family and a godson of Beerbohm Tree. On our 1978 Swiss Pilgrimage he made a resplendently villainous Count Negretto Sylvius.
Frank was a man of considerable substance, filling the biggest chair in the room, although full of energy and light on his feet. All his life Frank ate what he liked, drank what he liked, smoked (his own and other people’s indifferently) when he felt like it, consistently ignored his doctor colleagues’ advice and outlived all of them.
A druggist by profession, Frank was a keen herbalist and his knowledge of plants – not merely as simples in the physick-garden but as ingredients in cookery – was prodigious. He was a connoisseur of fine ale, and knew his wines too, and during the long years that he was Chief Pharmacist at Whipps Cross Hospital in East London his themed wine-and-cheese parties were legendary.
His love of drugs and poisons (in the criminous sense) matched his professional knowledge. He wrote and talked about them eloquently and with authority and wit. His collecting interests, too, tended to the unusual – old chemists’ jars, Codd mineral-water bottles and Victorian coloured-glass fairy-lights among them. His chief treasures, however, were his walking-stick airguns, of which he had several specimens, one of which he used, as Count Negretto Sylvius, to fire a salute over the grave of Professor Moriarty!
Above all Frank was the most entertaining of companions; he was a big man in every way – full of life and the love of life, of laughter and of understanding – with a warmth of spirit that embraced young and old alike.
This summary is based on the obituary written by Bernard Davies which appeared in the SHJ 23/4 Summer 1998
