Maud Perceval Allen

She was born in 1872, the daughter of Josiah Allen, a doctor and Ripley’s Medical Officer of Health for many years. He was also on the Local Board for many years, and a prominent freemason and official of the Jubilee Club.

He was a devout Anglican, and organist and choirmaster of All Saints Church; Maud must have grown up in a family where music played an important role.

She was the youngest of nine children, six boys and three girls. At least three of the boys had medical careers as doctors or dentists. Another son, Charles, was drowned in Butterley reservoir in 1893, a traumatic event for the family.

She was educated at Miss Topham’s school on the High Street, and later received vocal training from a well-known London music teacher called William Shakespeare. Her choice of career was, it seems, not approved of by her family, which might explain why she was in her twenties at the time of her first major public performances.

Though born Charlotte Maud, she adopted her mother’s maiden name Perceval as part of her stage name, possibly to avoid confusion with the Canadian dancer Maud Allen, who in 1906 had become notorious for dancing the Dance of the Seven Veils in a revealing costume.

Ripley’s Miss Allen seems to have begun performing as a student: there is a record of a concert in the Queen’s Hall in London where the main soloist was William Shakespeare, and Maud is also a soloist. By 1901 she is performing in Ipswich, for example, and Derby (in Mr J. Harold Henry’s Grand Orchestral Concert) and in 1903 even back in Ripley in a concert in aid of the Derbyshire County Nursing Association. By the time of her father’s death in 1905, she is described in his obituary as “the vocalist of world-wide renown.”

 Later she performed all over the world: in 1910 she sang the role of Brunhilde in Wagner’s Gotterdammerung under Sir Thomas Beecham; in the late 1910s she appears to have been very popular in Australia. In her later career she avoided stage performances in opera and concentrated on concert singing, completing a successful world tour in 1913/14. She also made a lot of recordings, some of which can even still be heard on Youtube.

She seems to have given up performing by the 1920s, but settled in Bognor Regis with her widowed brother James and lived until 1955.