William Edward David Allen

William Edward David Allen OBE (6 January 1901 – 18 September 1973) was a British scholar, Foreign Service officer, politician and businessman, best known as a historian of the South Caucasus—notably Georgia. Career Born into, on his father's side, an Ulster-Scots family in London and brought up in Hertfordshire, he was educated at Eton College (1914–1918), where he began to learn Russian and Turkish. He published his first book, The Turks in Europe, when he was eighteen. He was a special correspondent for The Morning Post during the Greco-Turkish War (1919–1922) and the Rif War (1925). In the pre-Second World War years, he travelled a lot and conducted extensive research on the history of the peoples of the Caucasus and Anatolia. In 1930, along with Sir Oliver Wardrop, he founded the Georgian Historical Society; the Society published its own journal, Georgica, dedicated to Kartvelian studies. His mother financed his personal enterprises until around 1935, and also provided a home at Commonwood House, Chipperfield, Hertfordshire, where he and his brothers could bring their guests at weekends: in Allen's case, he wrote later, these would include "bizarre intellectuals, Caucasian philologists and exiled national leaders from the remoter parts of Central Asia".