Welsh activist and social reformer Mary Sophia Allen was BOTD in 1878. Born in Cardiff to a middle-class family, she was educated at a private girls’ school in England. She became a suffragette, joining the Women’s Social and Political Union alongside Emmeline Pankhurst, and was imprisoned three times for civil disobedience. Force-fed during her final prison term, she was awarded a Hunger Strike Medal by the movement. At the outbreak of World War One, she joined the Women Police Volunteers, a pseudo-military organisation who oversaw women’s safety in munitions factories, establishing care homes for nursing mothers and “rescuing” women from prostitution and white slavery. Known as “Robert” by her friends and called “Sir” by her fellow officers, Allen cropped her hair short and adopted military dress for the remainder of her life. In 1920, she assumed the leadership of the WPV. The following year, the London Metropolitan Police prosecuted the group for impersonating the police force, requiring them to modify their uniform and rename themselves the Women’s Auxiliary Service. In 1922, Allen unsuccessfully stood for Parliament, and worked for the Organisation for the Maintenance of Supplies during the 1926 General Strike. An enthusiastic aviatrix, she travelled through Europe in the 1930s, attending the League of Nations conference in 1936 and often posing as a representative of the British government. Convinced that Fascism was an effective solution to the threat of Communism, she met Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, Eoin O’Duffy and Francisco Franco, and became a prominent member of Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists. During World War Two, she worked for the Women’s Voluntary Service, though her support of Fascist causes raised government concerns that she was a security risk. In 1940, she was placed under home detention, restricted to her Cornwall home and banned from using telephones and the wireless. Little is known about her life after World War Two, though she continued her association with Mosley and other Fascist movements. She is thought to have had relationships with her MVP colleague Margaret Damer Dawson and militant suffragette Norah Elam. She converted to Roman Catholicism in 1953 and died in a nursing home in 1964, aged 86.