Allan Monkhouse

Allan Noble Monkhouse (7 May 1858 – 10 January 1936) was an English playwright, critic, essayist and novelist.

He worked in the cotton trade, in Manchester, and settled in Disley, Cheshire.

As literary editor, in fact if not in formal title, at the Guardian, Monkhouse helped to launch the career of James Agate by publishing his open letters from France during the First World War.

Agate appears in Monkhouse's play Nothing Like Leather barely disguised as the theatre critic "Topaz".

He began to write drama for the Gaiety Theatre, Manchester, shortly after it was opened by Annie Horniman, along with Stanley Houghton and Harold Brighouse, forming a school of realist dramatists independent of the London stage, who were known as the Manchester School.