Seeking Mea Allan

The definitive and long-overdue biography of pioneering journalist and LGBTQ+ figure Mea Allan

‘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?