BIGAMIST NOVELIST CROOK SPY ...my grandad’s story
Ruth Wilson, star of Luther and The Affair, on the barely believable exploits of her enigmatic ancestor — and why she had to bring the story to the TV screen
Patting her 1960sstyle bouffant, Ruth Wilson grins. ‘I remember my grandma always having this big, glamorous hair,’ she says. ‘She used to put so much hairspray on it, my mother would get annoyed that the spray would be all over the bathroom mirror. It was one of the things about her I wanted to re-create. She always looked immaculate.’
Ruth knows a great yarn when she sees one. Having played Alice Morgan in three series of Idris Elba’s edge-of-the-seat crime drama Luther (which she’ll be returning to later this year), she also won a Best Actress Golden Globe for her role as a married waitress caught up in an explosive tryst with Dominic West’s fatherof-four in steamy drama The Affair. But her own grandfather’s story — taking in bigamy, espionage, incarceration and bankruptcy – stretches the bounds of credibility to the limit. No wonder then that she’s now bringing this extraordinary tale to the screen in a new BBC drama also starring Iain Glen and Keeley Hawes.
When Ruth was 15 her grandmother Alison revealed a secret she’d kept hidden for decades, even from her sons. She showed them a memoir she’d written about her life, which revealed her husband Alexander Wilson was a spy, an actor, a novelist and… a bigamist. She’d found out about his other wife, and three more children, when going through his papers after his death of a heart attack in 1963. He had never divorced.
But even that was only half the story, as Ruth, now 36, and her family found out when Alison died seven years after giving her sons the memoir. Separately, an actor called Michael Wilson had asked a family friend, author Tim Crook, to investigate what had happened to the father he’d waved off at the age of seven with his mother in 1941 and believed had died at the Battle of El Alamein.
He’d learned that in fact the same Alexander Wilson had travelled only as far as London, where he got married for the third time, to Ruth’s grandmother Alison. And, astonishingly, while married to Alison, Alexander entered into a fourth marriage and had another child. Four wives who knew nothing of each other at the time, with seven children between them.
Yet there was still more. Alexander — known by all his families as Alec — had also been an MI6 agent who wrote popular spy novels, including The Devil’s Cocktail and Chronicles Of The Secret Service. He was imprisoned twice, boasted that he was related to Winston Churchill, and died bankrupt.
But even his fall from grace may — or may not — have been a ruse on behalf of the secret services who employed him. ‘We still don’t quite know who he was,’ says Ruth. ‘Half the family think he was a bit of a conman, the other half think he was a hero. It’s complicated.’ When
HE WAS JAILED TWICE, BOASTED HE WAS RELATED TO CHURCHILL & DIED BANKRUPT
we meet on the set of the drama in London, Ruth — who also produced the series — talks about the extraordinary tale.
‘When I first heard the story I thought, “What a legend!” and I wondered how he’d got away with it,’ she laughs. ‘I was amazed that something like that had happened in my very ordinary family. But now, playing my grandmother, I think I hate him. I have very mixed feelings.’
Five months later I meet Ruth again after a small preview screening of the first episode. Her uncle and father were in the audience. ‘They were both incredibly moved,’ she says. ‘My uncle said he’d never quite understood it from his mother’s point of view before. He hadn’t realised how she had to maintain everything while her life was falling apart.
‘To go through what she went through has messed with my head. A week into my performance I was wishing someone else was playing her, but also I knew I wanted to play her in all her complexity. In a way she was complicit in how she protected Alec. It’s been one of the hardest things I’ve done. There was some weirdness, like the scene giving birth to my father.’
The three-part series, Mrs Wilson, is set in London during the 1940s and 1960s and India in the 1930s, where it’s believed Alec, played by Iain Glen, first became a spy. ‘The story is a deep analysis of whether you can protect people by lying to them.’ In the memoir she showed her children before her death, Alison wrote that the only thing she really believed of the man she was married to for 22 years was that he was full of lies, describing him as ‘one vast lie’. So who exactly was he? A few genuine facts are known about Alexander Wilson. He was born in Kent in 1893 to an Irish mother and an English soldier father and grew up moving from base to base. He trained as a pilot but a knee injury stopped him fighting in World War I. In 1916 he married his first wife, Gladys. Their first child, Adrian, was born a year later. After the war Alec joined the merchant navy but was prosecuted for theft. After six months’ hard labour, he and Gladys started a theatre company and had two more children, Dennis and Daphne.
Fiercely patriotic, the family have found letters from him to the British secret services asking to be of some use.
In 1925, out of the blue, he was made professor of English literature at the University of Punjab. This seems to have been the start of his life as an intelligence agent.
Tim Crook says: ‘The British needed to combat the threat of Communist-backed insurgents on India’s northwest frontier.’
It was while in India, having left his first family at home, that he married his second wife Dorothy, an actress, and they had a son Michael. ‘We’re discovering new things all the time,’ says Ruth. ‘We thought he met Dorothy in India but my dad just found out that he and Dorothy were actually on the same boat going to India, so they might have gone there together, or met on the ship.’
Alec became an honorary major in the Indian Army Reserve and travelled across Ceylon, Arabia
and Palestine. He also started writing spy novels, which were a critical success.
Alec and Dorothy returned to Britain in 1933, but while Dorothy lived in London, Alec went back to his first family and his legal wife in Southampton.
His son Dennis, now 97, from that first family, later recalled ‘My father had been this glamorous figure who would turn up in a flash hired car with loads of presents before leaving again. The 18 months he lived with us after he returned from India were the only time we were a family.’ That happy existence ended in 1935 when Alec left for London, saying he was going to look for somewhere for them to live in the capital. ‘I imagined him arriving at Waterloo with his luggage and looking for lodgings,’ said Dennis. ‘But I now know all he did was return to Dorothy.’ Indeed he did move in with Dorothy (played by Keeley Hawes) and Michael, who died in 2010 and who had strong memories of his father.
‘He was kind, generous and loving,’ he recalled in an interview before his death. ‘We’d go on wonderful trips. Once we went to Southampton to have tea with the captain on board RMS Queen Mary.’
In 1940 Alec joined MI6, eavesdropping on conversations held by foreign embassies. He also began a relationship with Alison McKelvie, an MI6 secretary and Ruth’s grandmother. They became lovers when her flat was bombed in the Blitz.
A year later he left Dorothy for Alison. Michael was seven and saw his father go off to war on the train in uniform. Shortly after, he was told he had died an honourable death at the Battle of El Alamein. But Alec was still very much alive and living in London with Alison, whom he’d married, making her his third wife, and their infant son Gordon. Alison recalled Alec as a charming older man who was known as ‘Buddha’ at MI6 because of his experience in India and fluency in eight languages. He also told her he was related to the noble Marlborough family and to Churchill, none of which was true.
In 1942, shortly after Gordon’s birth, Alec was dismissed from the Secret Intelligence Service. He told his wife this was for ‘operational reasons’ and he was now an agent in the field, but all Alison knew was that suddenly the family were plunged into poverty.
In 1944, while Alison was pregnant with their second son, Nigel, Ruth’s father, he was arrested after attending Mass for wearing a fake colonel’s uniform and medals. He told Alison this was a contrivance enabling him to infiltrate subversive groups in prison. Four years later he was arrested again, for embezzling takings at a cinema he was managing. He spent most of the years between 1948 and his death in 1963 working as a hospital porter, and then as a clerk in a wallpaper factory. The family had little money and moved house 17 times in 17 years. All the while, he insisted to an increasingly sceptical Alison it was part of the MI6 plan. Astonishingly, in 1955, he married yet again after meeting a 26-year-old nurse called Elizabeth. He was 62. For two years Alec carried on a double life with Alison and Elizabeth until Elizabeth, who gave birth to their son, Douglas, moved to Scotland. Ruth wonders now if he married bigamously so many times through a misplaced sense of duty. ‘He never just got a girl pregnant and ran off,’ she says. ‘He felt he had to keep marrying them.’ Alison only discovered Alec had married her bigamously when she was going through his papers after he died aged 69. She wrote the details in her memoir. ‘She had to ring his first wife Gladys and tell her that her husband had died and that he had another family.’ Following Alec’s death, Alison turned her back on men to become a strict Catholic. ‘She felt she’d been duped into falling in love and living a shameful life,’ says Ruth.
Shortly after she died, Michael, the son of wife No.2, and Douglas, the son of wife No.4, got in touch thanks to the investigation that author Tim Crook had started. The family were forced to come to terms with the idea Alec was a serial bigamist. The shock was immense, although fortunately by then none of the wives was around to understand the extent of their husband’s duplicity.
In 2007, a gathering was organised where nearly 30 of Alexander Wilson’s relations met for the first time. Despite the difficulty of the circumstances, they were all pleased to have found each other. Dennis later recalled: ‘It was like we’d known each other all our lives.’ They remain close. There is still disagreement, though, about Alec’s motivations. Was he just a philandering conman? Or was he doing it all for his country? The family may never know. MI6 has still refused to hand over his file to his family, saying it is ‘case sensitive’.
For Ruth, learning about her grandfather has allowed her to make sense of her life. ‘When I decided to become an actress, nobody in my family was involved in the arts,’ she recalls. ‘But now there’s this whole new side. Michael was an actor, his son is a writer and his daughter is a director, while Dennis is a poet. And it turns out that my grandfather was not only a novelist of note but probably a spy of note too. He was also the best actor of all of us.’
IT TURNS OUT MY GRANDFATHER WAS ALSO THE BEST ACTOR OF ALL OF US HE NEVER JUST GOT A GIRL PREGNANT AND RAN OFF. HE FELT HE HAD TO KEEP MARRYING
Mrs Wilson starts on BBC1 on Tuesday at 9pm.