Allen Synge

Allen John Millington Synge, born in Buckinghamshire and schooled at Millfield in Somerset, came from the same Anglo-Irish family as the playwright John M. Synge, his full name marking family pride in the connection. Before Millfield, he experienced an apparently hilarious wartime interlude of evacuation in Arizona to his American great-aunt, Eufrasia Tucker. After it, and national service, he went to Trinity College, Dublin, like his distinguished relative. There, he studied history, and met and later married Olive Weir, a strikingly beautiful Ulster girl; they had a daughter and two sons.

Himself a writer, editor, publisher and original person, Allen was one of that talented tribe of advertising men moonlighting as novelists, and poets moonlighting as advertising men. Allen started out with a series of quirky, parodic thrillers and war stories under the pseudonym Christopher Leopold: Blood and Guts is Going Nuts (1976); another, Looneyheim. Allen, a lifelong addict of cricket and a life member of the MCC, produced Strangers Gallery (1974), Keep Mum (1975), and a parody-homage to John Le Carré, Bowler, Batsman, Spy (1985). Allen went on to produce a series of short memoirs called A Time Remembered - among the memoirists Benny Green and Frank Norman.

Source: The Guardian