Secret lives
Death exposes a spy’s hobby in Mrs Wilson: 24 novels, four wives and seven children.
Mrs Wilson Season 1 Sundays (from 24 March) BBC First (*119) 20:00
Real-life history and mystery combine in the three-episode drama miniseries Mrs Wilson (2018). Alison Wilson (Ruth Wilson, Alison in The Affair, 2014-2018) discovers a shocking truth after the death of her former spy husband Alexander “Alec” Wilson (Iain Glen, Jorah in Game Of Thrones, 2011- current): she isn’t the only Mrs Wilson. Alison learns from going through his papers that she was in actual fact the second Mrs Wilson. Little did she know that she was really the third… and there was a fourth, with seven children between them and no divorces. What happens next unfolds like the plot from one of Alec’s 24 spy novels. Alec was a man with many secrets, some of them government protected. But was he also a cruel bigamist and abandoner? In the series, that’s what Alison, who was Alec’s former MI6 secretary during the 1940s, wants to find out.
THE SECRET KEEPER
There is plenty to dig up. “There is a long book about him and all the MI6 intrigue,” reveals Ruth. But even Tim Crook’s 2010 biography The Secret Lives Of A Secret Agent: The Mysterious Life & Times Of Alexander Wilson couldn’t get to the bottom of Alec’s secrets. His research eventually brought all Alec’s secret families together for a party in 2007. Tim notes that “we came up against brick walls all the time. There were leads in the USA, Canada, Egypt, Pakistan, Palestine, Australia, Hong Kong, France, Ireland and all parts of the United Kingdom to follow. The fourth bigamous relationship and onion skin of deception was in truth very difficult to absorb.”
A WORK OF FICTION
In May 2013, three years after the book has been published, the Foreign & Commonwealth Office made public some archives in which traces of Alexander’s three-year stint as an intelligence officer for SIS (Secret Intelligence Service) came to light. It revealed that he had been fired from the service in October 1942 following a fake burglary at his flat. He told Alison that the firing was a cover story for his return to the field as an agent. But letters later revealed in the UK’s National Archives paint a different picture as chief of the SIS Sir Stewart Menzies wrote, “I do not think it at all likely that we shall again have the bad luck to strike a man who combines a blameless record, first-rate linguistic abilities, remarkable gifts as a writer of fiction and no sense of responsibility in using them!” It seemed that Alec had been caught faking details in the Egyptian Embassy phonecalls that he was supposed to be translating!
DID HE DO IT?
“Even though his name is redacted, there is no doubt that this was about Alexander Wilson. It explains his fall from grace but also raises many more questions than it answers,” points out Tim. “It seems more likely that Alexander Wilson had faked the burglary to cover up the fact he sold Alison’s jewellery in order to pay for expensive new antibiotics that actually saved her life.” As for those faked translations, Tim suggests, “It’s also possible that the KGB traitor Anthony Blunt at MI5 wanted to discredit the MI6 telephone bugging operation so he could take it over.” Tim and the Wilson families’ research continues, with a second volume of his biography published in November 2018…
IT’S ALL RELATIVE
Ruth calls the process of playing her own grandmother on screen daunting. But she has found that telling their story as a drama rather than as a documentary has given her some wiggle room. “I have never judged them and neither has the rest of the family. I find them both curious and complex. It would actually be more exposing to make a documentary because it would be me, Ruth, and you would have to give answers. This is fiction and isn’t really me or even my real grandmother.” In fact, the entire search for the truth is a bit of dramatic license. “I’m not sure my granny wanted to search for the truth. She heard enough, early on. So that is a character change that we have put in place in order to serve the whole story,” notes the actress.