Rod Allen

Sep 20 2007 by David Charters, Liverpool Daily Post

IT’S a tricky business. Some people write great tomes and die almost forgotten. Others offer a few words and achieve a kind of immortality.

It all depends on the words. The bespectacled man with the noble brow sitting in the white suit and boater beneath a plume of pungent cigar smoke had understood that since first he practised his gift, writing love letters for soldiers pining for sweethearts back home.

In later life, he would be remembered for slogans which lurked in the brain like the two-times table.

Think of the wonder of Woolies, the listening bank, the pint that thinks it’s a quart, milk has gotta lotta bottle, triangular honey from triangular bees, this is the age of the train, and perhaps most famously, the secret lemonade drinker.

They might well irritate you, but you couldn’t get them out of your head and they were a gift to the headline writers on newspapers.

Anyway, they made Roderick (Rod) Howard Allen the jingle king.

He was born in Consett, County Durham, starting his career as a 17-year-old copywriter in Newcastle, before he was whisked off for a spell with the Royal Signal Corps in Salonika, Greece, where he would pen letters for soldiers in return for them cleaning his kit.

On his return to England, Allen joined the Osborne Peacock Agency. There he met Peter Marsh with whom he would later form Allen Brady and Marsh, one of Britain’s most successful advertising agencies.

Despite the miseries outside, the 1970s was a time of flamboyant dress and manners. Wine and good food stirred the creative juices, a fact well-known to Allen, who had a white piano parked in his office, so that he could compose when the muse tickled him.

His 50th birthday was celebrated with the brass band of the Royal Artillery in full dress uniform, who appeared outside the company’s London office to play his most celebrated jingles.

Behind his image, Allen was a quieter and more studious figure, who loved history and heritage and campaigned against the plans of vandal-politicians to demolish fine buildings.

Humour bubbled in him, and he was fond of telling his partner Marsh: “I’ll come to your funeral, if you come to mine”.

Allen, who had four children, retired to Suffolk with his second wife, Hilary Wisdom.

Rod Allen, jingle king; born May 16, 1929, died August 22, 2007.