John R. Allan

[2] Among his writings he is best remembered for Farmer's Boy, described by Allan Massie as "the most evocative memoir of rural Aberdeenshire"[3] and for the North-East Lowlands of Scotland (1952) in Robert Hale's County Books series, described by Massie as the "indispensable introduction" to the area[3] and by Allan's son as his "definitive work".

[5] In England Without End (1940), The Times identified a tension between the down-trodden workers and greedy land-owners that Allan described and his natural appreciation of the landscape and buildings in which they existed.

After the end of the war he stood for the Labour Party in the general election of 1945 in the Aberdeen and Kincardine East constituency, losing to the Unionist Bob Boothby.

[4] In 1991, his son Charlie described the various impediments that prevented Allan from leaving a greater literary legacy, such as the effects of the Second World War (according to Mrs Allan), well-paid BBC radio jobs that took priority and left no legacy in print, and pneumonia in 1954 combined with cirrhosis of the liver that almost killed him and left him permanently weakened and struggling to complete serious literary work.

[12] One, Green Heritage, was written in the late 1930s and published in 1991 by Ardo Publishing, edited by Charlie Allan and with a foreword by Charles Calder of the University of Edinburgh in which he compares the themes of the book to those of Allan's semi autobiographical Farmer's Boy of 1935 in describing the "robustness and spiritual independence" of the north-east tenant farmer struggling to make a living in the face of the elements, greedy land-owners and rapacious bankers.