What if you found your father’s whole life was a big lie?
By Christopher Wilson The TV drama Mrs Wilson tells how a woman discovered her spy husband’s secret life as a bigamist. To the horror of CHRISTOPHER WILSON (no relation) the parallels with his family were uncanny
AS I watched the rolling endcredits of the bewitching TV drama Mrs Wilson this week, there were tears in my eyes. Actress Ruth Wilson’s story, of a man who lived with his family for years without once ever telling the truth about himself, is my story, too.
The BBC mini-series is already being hailed as a masterpiece worthy of a Bafta award. But the closing titles which stated that ‘inquiries into Alexander Wilson’s life are ongoing’ sent a chill down my spine. Inquiries are ongoing in my family, too. Ruth’s real-life grandfather, Alexander Wilson — a serial bigamist, author and spy — was born just four years before my father. Her grandfather cheated four ‘wives’ and spawned an extended family which he abandoned.
He lied and defrauded and went to jail, all the while protesting his innocence.
His casual abuse of human relationships was breathtaking in its cruelty. But was my secretive father any better? Like Alexander Wilson, my father served in both world wars. from my earliest memories of him until his death, he would introduce himself as ‘Keith Wilson’. But that was not his real name.
for 30 years I’ve struggled to find out who he really was, and even now — just like the other Wilson family — I don’t have all the answers.
The man I grew up with, in later life a retired civil servant with an impeccable military record and a distinguished sideline in voluntary service, painted a very distinctive family history. The son of a Royal Navy officer, he was born and schooled in Cornwall. His two brothers were killed in World War I in the Battle of Jutland. His sister married a surgeon and moved to South Africa.
We — my brother, my mother and I — grew up in a cold edwardian house in a small town near London secure in that knowledge. But none of it was true. In the drama Mrs Wilson, the shadowy figure of her grandfather Alexander Wilson comes and goes, taking the truth with him as he walks out of the door.
But his constant absences give rise to suspicion as to who he really is. By comparison, my father was always there, a gruff but stable figure, never allowing any doubt to surface in my or my brother Richard’s minds as to who he was.
When he died, in 1981, the church was filled to capacity with friends, colleagues, people who came to pay their respects; he was a muchadmired figure. In my eulogy, I innocently recounted the many untruths that had become family legend, and which now were carried with him to the grave.
He had pulled off a gigantic contrick, just as Alexander Wilson had done.
Only after his death did the reality finally start to surface, although the suspicion that all was not as it appeared had been seeded some years before.
My father was 50 when I was born, but as a result of his war wounds he appeared much older; so that by the time I was ten he seemed more like 70 or 75. It was like living with a cantankerous old grandfather — easy to admire, sometimes less easy to love.
Only when I applied in my teens to go to The Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, with the intention of becoming an Army officer, did I glimpse the first chink in my father’s armour-plated deception.
Included in the application papers returned to me was a copy of my parents’ marriage certificate which Sandhurst had required and which, without explanation, they submitted without me seeing it.
As I glanced at it, I quickly realised why my parents had kept it hidden from me. In the document, my father described himself as ‘ widower’. Never in all my 17 years had anyone ever mentioned he’d been married before.
I asked my mother. Her answer was vague, dismissive — just as Ruth Wilson’s grandmother Alison would have been in the early days with her two boys. I was too busy being a teenager to think any more about it though, and our lives went on.
MY FATHER retired and threw himself with energy into good works, being elected a town councillor and rising high in the masonic world. He was a governor of my public school, and when the Queen visited our town, was offered the position of Mayor — his fellow councillors judging him the most appropriate person to greet her on such an august occasion.
He turned the invitation down flat, and we could never understand why. Only later, as the secrets started to unravel, did I come to realise that he was fearful of being caught out: questions might be asked about his background before he would be allowed to shake Her Majesty’s hand.
My father’s death certificate bore the name Albert Montague Keith Wilson, but when I set out to find a birth certificate matching those names, I searched in vain. No such person had been born in Britain. Then I checked with his school in Redruth, Cornwall. No, they’d never had a pupil of that name. I scoured the records of the midshipmen killed during the 1916 Battle of Jutland for his two brothers lost at sea — they weren’t there.
A search of the shipping registers, to find evidence of his sister’s voyage to her new life in South Africa, left me empty-handed.
I would have looked for the birth and death certificates of his mother, but I realised he had never told me her name.
THE man I’d thought I’d lived with, from my birth to adulthood, did not exist. And yet he did — every Remembrance Sunday he’d taken out his medals, polished them, and gone off on parade with men who clearly knew him as one of them.
Colonel fanning, his commanding officer from their days in the World War I trenches, would occasionally come to tea. Captain Meade, a brother soldier, often paid a call.
They knew who he was, but I didn’t.
And how much did my mother know of her husband’s life and lies?
Was she complicit in the deceit, as Ruth Wilson’s grandmother Alison was, shielding the truth from her two sons? Or did she live in complete ignorance?
Like many a son, I was proud of my father’s glittering medals and wanted to discover more about what he’d done in both wars — but when I approached the Admiralty for his Royal Navy war record, they denied all knowledge of him.
yet there he sat in a silver frame on the mantelpiece — surely he couldn’t be an impostor wearing a uniform to which he wasn’t entitled?
It was then that my researches started in earnest.
This was long before the internet, family history groups such as Ancestry.com and the TV family roots series Who Do you Think you Are?, and the search would necessarily be a long and often troubling one. With only an alias to go on, how do you even start to find a real person’s name?
Luckily, the gifted genealogist John Hitchcock helped me, and he worked hard to unlock my father’s secrets — but with so little information, progress was slow and easily thwarted.
There were times when I began to feel mistrustful of a man who was my own flesh and blood, doubting his integrity, wondering what he — like Alexander Wilson — had to hide. I’d hero-worshipped him at times, but now too many doubts were setting in for me to dwell comfortably on his memory, and on the extravagant things I’d said in my funeral oration. At times I felt betrayed. And then, John Hitchcock made a breakthrough. By constantly refining his researches, he’d discovered that
my father had been born not in Cornwall but in Portsea Island, the part of Portsmouth where, coincidentally, TV’s Alexander Wilson is buried. My father’s name at birth was not Albert Montague Keith Wilson but Percy Albert Montague King. His mother, Elizabeth, widowed once and now married to an ‘assurance agent’ Pierce King, had given birth to him at the age of 34.
Hers was a life of grinding poverty. Her parents, refugees from the Irish Potato Famine, had arrived in England in the mid-19th century to circumstances which were hardly better, and she was put into domestic service.
At 24, she married a man 25 years her senior, probably to escape her drudgery, but he died two years later and she returned to house-maiding.
Whether she married my father’s father, Pierce King, is open to doubt. But, in any case, Pierce did not linger on the scene, and by the time my father was in short trousers, Elizabeth was ‘married’ to James Wilson, a gardener. All three — James, Elizabeth, my father — lived in a single room in a house occupied by four other families, in a street described as a ‘slum’ by local officials.
Little surprise, then, that shortly after his 15th birthday, my father ran away — and so began his transformation.
He joined the Army in 1912, lying about his age, and by the time he was 17 he was in the first wave of British Expeditionary Force troops to land in France, in August 1914. He served throughout, fighting battles at Mons, Le Cateau, the Marne and others, before being wounded at Gallipoli.
He stayed on in the Army after the war, using it as a high school and university, becoming an expert in armaments. The marriage to his first wife remains a mystery because there’s no evidence of her death. But already he’d learned to dissemble, lying about his father in his official declarations, making up an entirely fictitious character.
He’d also changed his name several times, ditching Percy in favour of Sidney, before acquiring Keith.
HIS surname, though he used Wilson by then, was still officially King — which is why I couldn’t find his Navy record: with that crucial point resolved, it turned out he had, once again, served with distinction.
He had spent years running away from a tragic childhood — a lonely boy living in slum conditions, trying to erase the pain and deprivation he’d suffered; the ‘family’ he’d invented were simply his comfort blanket. But finally, at the age of 43, peace and lifelong contentment arrived in the shape of my mother.
Mary Juanita Richards came from an entirely different class — moneyed civil engineers who built Liverpool and Edinburgh Docks as well as the Godrevy Lighthouse made famous by Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse.
But she, too, came from a fractured family and together they started married life with a common pledge: to bury the past. My father became a gentleman. My mother gloried in her marriage and her children and, unlike Alice Wilson, lived the rest of her life with a man whose only wish was to honour her.
Did she know about his lies? Did she assist in the cover-up?
To this day, I can’t make up my mind, the evidence still seeming to point both ways. As I watched the three-part series Mrs Wilson unfold, I found myself taken aback by the number of coincidences between the story of Alexander Wilson and my father Keith Wilson.
Both had Irish mothers and English fathers. Both were wounded in World War I, both changed their names several times, both faked where they had been to school.
Both had been married before — though I’m convinced, but cannot prove, that unlike Alexander, my father was not a bigamist.
Why did my father not confess to his past in later life, when he was secure in his new position in society? Watching Mrs Wilson, I came to understand that just like Alexander Wilson, he had become a prisoner of his own lie.
And never in his long life could Keith Wilson find an escape route back to the truth.