page_title: Alexander Wilson (British writer)
section_title: Uncovering Wilson's parallel lives
hierarchical_section_title: Alexander Wilson (British writer) / Uncovering Wilson's parallel lives
caption_attribution_description: English: Ruth Wilson speaking at the 2019 San Diego Comic-Con International in San Diego, California.
context_page_description: Alexander "Alec" Joseph Patrick Wilson was an English writer, spy and MI6 officer. He wrote under the names Alexander Wilson, Geoffrey Spencer, Gregory Wilson, and Michael Chesney. After his death his family discovered that he had been a serial polygamist who had lied to many people. As of 2018, documents that could shed light on his activities remain classified as "sensitive" by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, under section 3 of the Public Records Act 1958. The effect of his deceptions on his wives and descendants were dramatised in the 2018 BBC miniseries Mrs Wilson, in which his granddaughter, actress Ruth Wilson, portrayed her grandmother, Wilson's third wife, Alison.
context_section_description: Wilson never divorced any of his wives, "instead keeping the women ignorant of each other’s existence as he juggled his many separate lives and parallel families." One way in which he avoided detection was "by changing his middle name on marriage certificates".
  The multiple marital aspects of her husband's life came to Alison Wilson's notice only after Alec's death in 1963, when she discovered from his papers that his first wife was Gladys. Alison telephoned Gladys to inform her of Alec's death and of his other family. Dennis Wilson said that they thought the call had come from Alec's landlady. Alison asked Gladys to pretend to be Alec's relative at his funeral, so as not to upset Alison's sons, Gordon and Nigel. As a result, neither Gordon, Nigel, nor Daphne knew about one another or about their father's bigamy. Alison never found out that her husband had also been married to Dorothy and Elizabeth.
  Alison Wilson wrote a two-part memoir in an attempt to make sense of her husband's deceptions, lamenting that "he had not only died, he had evaporated into nothing." Her grandchildren were only allowed to read her memoir shortly before her death.
  All his wives kept Alec's secrets, maintaining the image of him as a heroic figure for the sake of his children.
  In 2005 Wilson and Dorothy's son, Michael (then aged 73), asked his son's friend, the journalist and academic Tim Crook, to investigate his father's life. An actor and poet, Michael had changed his name by deed poll to "Mike Shannon". Crook spent six years on the project, publishing the results in a 2010 book entitled The Secret Lives of a Secret Agent: the Mysterious Life and Times of Alexander Wilson. 
  Crook uncovered Wilson's marriage to Gladys, whose son Dennis told him about the funeral arrangements, and so revealed the marriage to Alison. Alison's sons told him that they had been contacted by Elizabeth's son, Douglas Ansdell, and so they had discovered Alec's fourth wife.
  Crook concludes that Wilson’s spy novels reveal details of intelligence work so precise as to indicate first-hand experience. Wilson may have been encouraged to write them by the intelligence services to portray themselves as all-powerful, Crook says. And the lack of evidence about Wilson's life may be due to an intelligence operation meant to expunge all traces of him from public records, Crook told a reporter. 
  All of Alec Wilson's surviving offspring with their families, 28 persons in all, met for the first time in December 2007 in Hampshire. Each of Alec's children wore a badge indicating who their parents were. Since that first meeting the extended family has tried to meet regularly.
  The actress Ruth Wilson, daughter of Nigel, is one of Alec's grandchildren, and discovered that the children of Mike Shannon were also professionals working in playwriting, filmmaking and drama education. Ruth's brother, Sam Wilson, a senior BBC journalist, wrote an article in The Times in 2010 that explored the impact of Alexander Wilson's complicated private life on his various families.
caption: Actress Ruth Wilson, granddaughter of Alec and Alison Wilson, in 2019.
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