Clifford Allen was part of a group of left-leaning conscientious objectors and pacifists who chose prison rather than conscription during World War I. His prison experience left him with the tuberculosis that cost him a political career and periodically immobilized him. It killed him in 1939. Allen was an organizer, publisher, executive secretary, fund-raiser, treasurer, speechifier, newspaper op-ed and letter writer and later broadcast debater. His greatest political influence came in the early 1920s when the first Labour Prime Minister, Ramsay MacDonald, assumed government. MacDonald later engineered the peerage that placed Allen, an avowed Socialist, in the House of Lords.
