Life

Radio review: Belfast man Bill Allen's extraordinary life

Nuala McCann

Nuala McCann

Nuala McCann is an Irish News columnist and writes a weekly radio review.

Nuala McCann
Nuala McCann Nuala McCann

The Allen Identity: Mosley, MI6 and the Ulster MP Radio Ulster

He was a unionist MP from west Belfast who lived half a dozen lives.

Bill Allen – a turn of the last century man – was a writer, a businessman, a soldier, an adventurer, a politician and, many believe, a spy.

He rubbed shoulders with Adolf Hitler, Cold War double agent Kim Philby and Oswald Mosley.

You couldn’t have made it up.

The stories fell thick and fast in this documentary on the life of Allen.

His family harked from Randalstown: he ventured far to the fields of Abyssinia.

He spoke Russian and Turkish, he married high society – he would have featured on the front cover of Hello, had they had

Hello back then.

BBC politics reporter Stephen Walker took us on a whistle-stop tour of an exciting life.

He had four wives in all. He was attracted to fascism and hooked up with Mosley but they fell out over £10,000 given by Allen to Mosley’s party. It was a fortune in those days.

It was a loan, insisted Allen: it was a donation insisted Mosley.

This was a rollercoaster of a ride through history, made all the more enjoyable with the perfect music from the time that set the scene for the events that unfolded.

So we had a little French song from Charles Trenet - Boum - as we heard about Allen setting himself up in a hotel on the Riviera – to be deliberately caught en flagrant délit, no doubt by a man bursting through the door with an old-fashioned flash camera as he relaxed on the bed with woman unknown.

That was how they did it back in the day. His wife got her divorce and on they went.

He married again, he moved in circles with the Mitfords, Cecil Beaton and Evelyn Waugh.

When Diana Mitford married Mosley, he ended up at the wedding with Adolf Hitler and Goebbels.

He met all the leading figures in the Nazi regime.

His third wife, Natasha, was the daughter of a Russian colonel.

They decamped to a big house in Waterford ... Kim Philby was a guest there for a few months.

Mystery, intrigue, wealth, secrets, espionage: it was all there, stylishly produced by Catherine Smyth.

There’s surely a book in it too.