Janie Allan

Jane "Janie" Allan (28 March 1868 – 29 April 1968) was a Scottish activist and fundraiser for the suffragette movement of the early 20th century.

Janie Allan was born to Jane Smith and Alexander Allan (who married in 1854), members of a wealthy Glaswegian family that owned the Allan Line shipping company. Her grandfather, Alexander Allan, founded the firm in 1819, and by the time that her father – the youngest of Alexander Allan's five sons – took over the running of the company's Glasgow operations, the line had many vessels, additional offices in Liverpool and Montreal, and had wrested the Royal Mail's North American contract away from the Cunard line. Janie's brother, Robert S. Allan, was later a partner of the Allan Line.

In common with many of her family, Allan held socialist political views and helped the city's poor. She was an early member of the Independent Labour Party (ILP), and she edited a column covering women's suffrage issues for the socialist newspaper Forward.

In May 1902, Allan was instrumental in re-founding the Glasgow branch of the National Society for Women's Suffrage as the Glasgow and West of Scotland Association for Women's Suffrage (GWSAWS), and was a member of its executive committee. She was a significant financial supporter, and as one of the GWSAWS vice-presidents she took up a position on the National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies (NUWSS) committee in 1903, in order to represent the association following their affiliation.

In 1906, Allan was among the audience when Teresa Billington (who had been arrested and jailed following a protest in London earlier in the year) toured Scotland, although the GWSAWS themselves refused to invite Billington to speak. In December of that year she attended a lecture by Helen Fraser as she expounded the militant principles of the newly formed Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU). In 1907, concerned that the non-violent GWSAWS was not being as effective as it should have been, Allan resigned from their executive committee and joined the WSPU, although she maintained her subscription to GWSAWS until 1909.

Over the following few years, Allan provided at least £350 (approximately equivalent to £45,100 in 2023) in funds to the WSPU, as well as donating some funding for the Women's Freedom League (WFL) following their split from the WSPU. In addition to her monetary contributions, Allan was an active participant in the WSPU's militant activism.

In early March 1912, along with over 100 others Allan participated in a window smashing protest in central London. The women secreted large stones and hammers under their skirts and, once in position, in a coordinated action they destroyed shop windows in Regent Street, Oxford Street, and the vicinity. Following this, the women patiently and calmly waited for the police to arrive. While police attention was diverted elsewhere by the protests, Emmeline Pankhurst and three others managed to get close enough to 10 Downing Street to throw stones through four of its windows. In the aftermath, along with many of her associates Allan was arrested, tried, and sentenced to four months in Holloway Prison.

Her imprisonment was widely publicised, and around 10,500 people from Glasgow signed a petition to protest for her freedom. Her fellow suffragette, Margaret McPhun – who was herself imprisoned in Holloway for two months in 1912 after breaking a government office window – composed a poem entitled "To A Fellow Prisoner (Miss Janie Allan)", that was included in the anthology Holloway Jingles published by the Glasgow branch of the WSPU later that year.