Seeking Mea Allan
Fleet Street's Forgotten Pioneer
Will be published approx. on 2. July 2026
Book
Hardback
978-1-80399-552-6 (ISBN)
Description
'I'm in love with May Chalmers and I don't know what to do about it.'
It was a bold, unexpected confession, scribbled in a diary by one of the few female reporters in Fleet Street during the Second World War - and it sent Felicity Goodall on a journey that led to places she could never have imagined.
Mea Allan was a star reporter on Britain's biggest-selling daily paper, the first woman on a Fleet Street news desk and to be permanently accredited to the British Army as a war correspondent, and the only woman to report from newly liberated Bergen-Belsen concentration camp and cover the subsequent trials. She was once so famous that her name was used to advertise Horlicks - and yet she has all but disappeared from history.
Seeking Mea Allan interweaves past and present as we travel from London to Glasgow, from Paris to Hamburg and beyond, to answer the questions that still linger: was Mea written out of history because of her sexuality? Or was something more subtle at work?
It was a bold, unexpected confession, scribbled in a diary by one of the few female reporters in Fleet Street during the Second World War - and it sent Felicity Goodall on a journey that led to places she could never have imagined.
Mea Allan was a star reporter on Britain's biggest-selling daily paper, the first woman on a Fleet Street news desk and to be permanently accredited to the British Army as a war correspondent, and the only woman to report from newly liberated Bergen-Belsen concentration camp and cover the subsequent trials. She was once so famous that her name was used to advertise Horlicks - and yet she has all but disappeared from history.
Seeking Mea Allan interweaves past and present as we travel from London to Glasgow, from Paris to Hamburg and beyond, to answer the questions that still linger: was Mea written out of history because of her sexuality? Or was something more subtle at work?
More details
Language
English
Place of publication
Stroud
United Kingdom
Illustrations
20 Illustrations, black and white
Dimensions
Height: 234 mm
Width: 156 mm
ISBN-13
978-1-80399-552-6 (9781803995526)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions
E-Book
approx. 07/2026
The History Press Ltd
€18.49
Not yet available
Person
FELICITY GOODALL is a former journalist and freelance foreign correspondent. She wrote Radio 4 play about Mea Allan Change of Heart (1999), and has written for publications such as The Sunday Times, Business Week, The Listener and The Guardian. She spent 15 years as a producer and presenter for BBC Radio 4 and has written five books of non-fiction. She was researcher and interviewer for a Radio 3 Docudrama about PTSD, Soldiers in the Sun, which was shortlisted in the Mental Health Awards 2008.