Woods owned a full set of Wisden, and loved all games and sports, having played cricket, soccer, rugby and tennis as a young man.Woods’s expertise as a folklorist produced some memorable discs from outstanding singers like the Clutha, Gordeanna McCulloch, Cyril Tawney, Shirley Collins, Tom Paley, the late Peter Bellamy and the late Ewan MacColl. However, like so many clever boys of his generation, he left school at 18.After National Service in a Highland Regiment he held a variety of jobs, becoming Secretary of the Performing Rights Society, and after years of patient part-time toil published A Bibliography of the Works of Sir Winston Churchill (1963, fourth edition 1979), the standard bibliography.By 1970 he was managing director of Argo Records, a branch of Decca specialising in the spoken word and in folk music. He was good at telling jokes, and despite what might have appeared a certain dry reserve, was excellent company He was outstandingly well-read. His first two marriages were dissolved and he had no children of his own.
He went to Emanuel School, Wandsworth, where he received a traditional grammar-school education which left him with a fondness for Latin puns.

Retaining his Christian faith, Fred Woods sang in the local church choir almost to the end, accompanied by his third wife Monica Tew, and her grown-up daughters Sharon and Claire. He was also an expert folklorist under the by-line Fred Woods. Woods was born in Swindon in 1932, the only child of the Rev Bertram Woods, the distinguished Methodist minister and musician who wrote the tune of “O Jesus, I have promised” in the Methodist hymnbook His mother was a headmistress. Frederick Woods was a versatile writer and administrator, whose 30 published books ranged from historical scholarship to raunchy thrillers (under the transparent pseudonym of Fredric Woods). Miles Professor of English, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University 1974-75; married 1944 Peggy Joy (two sons, two daughters); died London 28 February 1995.. He and Louis MacNeice vied for the literary rights in John Hampson’s marriage of convenience to Thrse Ghiese, the Berlin cabaret artist whose friend Erika Mann had been similarly rescued by Auden, who was now in charge of this ceremony: summary cannot do justice to the comedy of Walter Allen’s account of such things as the mutual inability to speak the language and Auden’s being prevented from playing piano in the pub afterwards because a corpse was laid out on the billiard table.Two further novels followed and, if they did not match the earlier ones, they do not demean a life in which concern for the written word was paramount but never to the exclusion of the subject matter itself.Christopher HawtreeWalter Ernest Allen, writer, literary journalist: born Birmingham 23 February 1911; Assistant Literary Editor, New Statesman 1959-60, Literary Editor 1960-61; Visiting Professor of English, Vassar College, New York 1963-64, University of Kansas 1967, University of Washington 1967; Professor of English, New University of Ulster 1967-73; Berg Professor of English, New York University 1970-71; Visiting Professor of English, Dalhousie University 1973-74; C.P. A source-book for innumerable biographers, it is a spirited series of reminiscences, its eye as sharply amusing as he was in conversation, bringing to life the great and those who simply milled around the fringes.

Whether it was this struggle with the past or pressure of other work, Allen stopped the writing of fiction that he thought a man’s most important task. The man of letters continued non-stop, and it was a terrible blow in the mid-Seventies to be laid low by a stroke which ever after confined him to his Islington home in the care of his devoted wife, Peggy, whom he had married within three weeks of their meeting in 1944.Under her care he was able to resume writing: a history of the short story and some “Memories of a Writing Life” modestly and perhaps romantically titled As I Walked Down New Grub Street (1981). Not only was there The English Novel but unceasing journalism, teaching, broadcasting and – most importantly – his best novel, All in a Lifetime (1959), which explores something of his father’s character. The bombing of Paternoster Row destroyed most copies of Blind Man’s Ditch, a sort of thriller which owes much to Graham Greene, and Dead Man Over All (1950) has yet to be appreciated as one of the most convincing attempts to come to grips with industrial life.Allen’s workload in the Fifties was tremendous. His fiction, however, drew on the past in a way that did not prevent experiment and development within a traditional structure.