SECRETS & SPIES
LUTHER STAR RUTH WILSON DIGS INTO HER FAMILY’S SHOCKING PAST
Ruth Wilson’s shock family find
Patting her 1960s-style 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 recreate. She always looked immaculate.”
Ruth knows a great yarn when she sees one. Having played Alice Morgan in three seasons of Idris Elba’s edge-of-your-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 fellow Brit Dominic West’s father-offour 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 bringing this extraordinary tale to the screen in a BBC drama that is playing in the UK and will hopefully reach our screens.
When Ruth was 15, her grandmother Alison revealed a secret she’d kept hidden for decades, even from her children. She showed them a memoir she’d written about her life that revealed her late husband, Alexander Wilson, had been a spy, an actor, a novelist and a bigamist. She’d found out about another wife and three more children while going through his papers after his death from a heart attack in 1963. He had never divorced.
But even that was only half the story, as Ruth (36) and her family found out when Alison died seven years after giving her children 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. 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’d written 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 we meet on the show’s London set, 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 says, laughing. “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, we meet Ruth again after a small preview screening of the first episode. Her uncle and father were in the audience and were filled with emotion.
“They were both incredibly moved. 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.”
It wasn’t easy for Ruth, either. “To go through what she went through has messed with my head. A week in, 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, called 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 (57), 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 to whom she was married 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 woman and an English soldier father and grew up moving from base to base. He trained as a pilot, but a knee injury stopped him from fighting in World War I. In 1916, he married his first wife Gladys and a year later, their first child, Adrian, was born.
After the war, Alec joined the merchant navy but was prosecuted for theft. After six months of hard labour, he and Gladys started a theatre company and had two more children, Dennis and Daphne.
He was a fierce patriot and the family have found letters from him to the secret services asking to be of 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.
“The academic who appointed him had connections with the intelligence world,” says Tim Crook. “The British needed to combat the threat of Communistbacked insurgents on India’s north-west frontier.”
It was while in India, having left his first family at home, that he married his second wife, an actress named Dorothy, 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 only legal wife in Southampton.
“My father had been this glamorous figure who would turn up in a flash hired car with loads of presents before leaving again,” his son Dennis (97) later recalled. “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 all to live.
“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 from Spooks) and Michael, who died in 2010 and who had strong memories of his father.
“He was kind, generous and loving,” Michael once recalled. “We’d go on wonderful trips. Once we went to Southampton to have tea with the captain on board RMS Queen Mary.”
Michael also remembered accompanying his father to a meeting with Hitler’s foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop just before World War II.
In 1940 Alec joined MI6, eavesdropping on conversations held by foreign embassies. He 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 to live with Alison.
Michael was seven and saw his father go off to war on the train in uniform. Shortly after, he was told his father had died an honourable death at the Battle of El Alamein.
But Alec was still very much alive and living in London with
‘Half the family think he was a bit of a conman; the other half think he was a hero’
Alison, whom he’d married, making her his third wife, and their infant son, Gordon.
Alison recalled Alec as a charming older man known as “Buddha” at MI6 because of his experience in India and fluency in eight languages. He told her he was related to the noble Marlborough family and to Churchill, neither of which were 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 for sure was that the family were plunged into poverty.
In 1944, while Alison was pregnant with their second son, Nigel (Ruth’s father), he was arrested for wearing a fake colonel’s uniform and medals. He told Alison this was a contrivance to enable 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, staying just one step ahead of their creditors. All the while, he insisted to an increasingly sceptical Alison that it was part of the MI6 plan.
Astonishingly, in 1955 he married yet again after meeting a nurse called Elizabeth (26). He was 62. For two years, he 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 so many times through a misplaced sense of duty.
“He never just got a girl pregnant and ran off. He felt he had to keep marrying them.”
Alison only discovered Alec was a bigamist after he died aged 69. “She had to ring his first wife Gladys and tell her that her husband had died and he had another family,” Ruth says.
Following Alec’s death, Alison turned her back on men.
“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 number two, and Douglas, the son of wife number four, got in touch thanks to
Tim Crook’s investigation.
The family were forced to come to terms with the idea
Alec was a serial bigamist. The shock was immense, though by then none of the wives were still alive to understand the extent of their husband’s duplicity.
In 2007, a gathering was organised where nearly 30 of Alec’s relations met for the first time. Despite the difficulty of the circumstances, they were pleased to have found each other. “It was like we’d known each other all our lives,”
Dennis later recalled.
They remain close, but there is disagreement 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 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 says. “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.”