The many and varied interests of Selsey author Edward Heron-Allen – including predicting his own daughter's death using palmistry

Edward was the fourth child of George Allen, head of Allen & Son, Solicitors, London, and his wife Catherine Herring (or Heron). Edward became senior partner of the firm in 1889.

Edward Heron-Allen attended Harrow from 1876. It was here that he developed his interests in classics, science and music, particularly the violin. Heron-Allen became a casual apprentice of Georges Chanot, eminent violin maker and it was under Chanot’s guidance that Edward made two violins.

In 1884, he published Violin-Making As It Was And Is, a book which has been in continuous publication for over a century. It was this same year that Edward was admitted as a solicitor.

As well as music, Edward also had a keen interest in chiromancy (or palmistry) and became very successful in the art, publishing A Manual of Cheirosophy in 1885 and The Science of the Hand in 1886.

He was subsequently asked to undertake a three-year lecture tour in the United States focusing on Cheirosophy, which was highly successful and financially lucrative.

Whilst on tour, he also published three short novels or stories of an early science fiction type genre under several pennames. These have since become collectors’ pieces.

Upon his return to the UK, Heron-Allen returned to his legal work in London. Alongside this, he also found time to develop his interest in the Persian language, particularly translation. In 1898 he published the literal translation of the Rubaiyat or Omar Khayyam from a copy in the Bodleian Library.

Heron-Allen married twice. His first wife, Marianna Lehmann, whom he had married on July 1, 1891, sadly died in 1902. In November the following year, Heron-Allen married Edith Pepler. The pair had two daughters – Ianthe Theodora born in 1905 and Armorel Daphne born in 1909.

In 1930, two weeks after graduating with a first in Zoology at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, Armorel tragically died in a car accident. Heron-Allen himself had predicted the crash and had recorded it in writing several years prior, having read Armorel’s palms.

At the age of 50, after the death of his father in 1911, Heron-Allen retired from his law practice and moved to a house called Large Acres in Selsey, which he had had built a few years prior in 1904. It was here that he produced a large volume on the history of Selsey Bill, as well as other publications on the history of the parish and wider local history of the area.

It was whilst in Selsey that he devoted himself to the intensive study of the foraminifera (a single-celled planktonic animal) of the local coast, publishing more than 70 studies of a proto-zoological nature, often alongside Arthur Earland, a British oceanographer and expert in foraminifera.

His large collection of the two most important ‘type slide’ collections of recent foraminifera to exist in England were developed over these latter years of his life. His foraminiferal collections and associated library were gifted to the Natural History Museum and form the backbone to the museum’s foraminiferal collections. Heron-Allen was elected a fellow of the Royal Society in 1919 in recognition of his work in the field.

Heron-Allen produced many unpublished manuscripts over the course of his lifetime, one of which journaled his experiences during the First World War. It highlighted the impact of the war on the lives of himself, his family and friends, both in Selsey and London, detailing the increasingly strict conditions imposed on wartime Britain.

He describes the effects that conscription, spy scares and Zepplin raids have on the country, as well as his own personal experiences of military training with the Sussex Volunteer Regiment. According to his journal, this was a somewhat ‘Dads Army’ affair.

He also speaks of his officer training in Tunbridge Wells, and details of his experiences in intelligence, where he played a significant role in the production of propaganda, on account of his linguistic skills. As part of this work, he visited the Western Front and saw first-hand the incomprehensible destruction. His wartime journal was published by the Sussex Record Society in 2002.

Heron-Allen’s post war literary writings were somewhat more controversial, including The Cheetah Girl, written under the pseudonym of Christopher Blayre. It was supposedly suppressed in the 1920s for dealing with various sexual taboos. Only 20 copies were printed.

Heron-Allen died on March 28, 1943, at Large Acres, Selsey, and was buried at Church Norton, Selsey. Heron-Allen was a long-standing supporter of the church and in 1912 donated an organ to Selsey church in his father’s name.

The Novium Museum now holds a selection of items which once formed part of Edward Heron-Allen’s personal collections. These items include around 115 fossils, seven watercolours, various archaeological objects collected from the Selsey area, as well as two 19th century humane mousetraps made by Colin and Charles Pullenger of Selsey.

In addition, the West Sussex Record Office holds a large collection of documentary material relating to Edward Heron-Allen, including correspondence and holiday journals recording Heron-Allen’s trips to Europe and Egypt, but possibly most interesting to the area, he also produced several volumes recording the contemporary history of Selsey, including six volumes of Selseyana, a series of scrapbooks dating from around 1901-1937.The Heron-Allen Society was formed in 2000 and seeks to ‘study and record all aspects of the life and interests of Edward Heron-Allen, 1861-1943, and to promote his work’.