Alison Brimelow
British civil servant

Alison Jane Brimelow CBE (born 1949) is a British civil servant and former chief executive and Comptroller General of the UK Patent Office, now known as the Intellectual Property Office. She was the fifth President of the European Patent Office, a position she held from 1 July 2007 to 30 June 2010.
Early life and education
Born in Havana, Cuba, she is one of the two daughters of Sir Thomas Brimelow, a British diplomat, who was Permanent Under-Secretary in the British Foreign Office in 1973–75 and Member of the European Parliament in 1977–78, and Jean Cull. She holds a degree from the University of East Anglia.
Career
She joined the British Diplomatic Service in 1973. In 1976, she joined the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI). She worked in a variety of Headquarters policy jobs, including private office. She joined the Patent Office in 1991, where she became Head of the Trade Marks Registry.
In 1997 she returned to DTI Headquarters to work on European and International Competition Policy. She was appointed chief executive and Comptroller General of the Patent Office in March 1999.
“Alison Brimelow” enters the record as british civil servant. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Alison, Brimelow and British can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Feb 28, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q4727037. VIAF identifies the subject as 307207087. 2 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1949, 2007, 2010 and 1973.
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This entry incorporates text from “Alison Brimelow” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.