David Allen, who has died aged 72, was by turns scholar, educator, music critic, entrepreneur and smallholder.
Born in Bexleyheath, south-east London, Dave was the only child of Colin Allen, who worked for the local electricity board, and his wife, Betty (nee Picket), who came from a local family of timber merchants. He was educated at St Dunstan’s college, Catford, and in 1972 went to St Catherine’s College, Oxford, then the university’s newest college, to study music (where I first met him, as a fellow undergraduate); he was the first in his family to be university educated. As St Catherine’s, opened only a decade earlier, had no music fellow, he was tutored at Magdalen by David Wulstan, founder of the early music ensemble the Clerkes of Oxenford.
