his aircraft. In 1915 he was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the Royal Army Service Corps, escorting motor transports and supplies to France. He sustained disabling injuries to his knee and shrapnel wounds to the left side of his body which led to his being invalided out of the Army in 1917, and for which he was awarded the Silver War Badge. In March 1916 Alec married his first wife, Gladys Ellen Kellaway (1896 – 1981), in Lyndhurst, Hampshire. He tried to reenlist in 1917, but due to his medical record was unsuccessful. He joined the merchant navy in 1919, serving as a purser – first on a Scottish shipping line, then on a requisitioned German liner, SS Prinzessin, which sailed from London to Vancouver via South Africa, China and Japan. While working on the Prinzessin, he was arrested and prosecuted in Vancouver in September 1919, a day after his father's death. He received a six-month sentence of hard labour at Oakalla Prison near Burnaby, British Columbia. From 1920 to 1925 Alec and Gladys managed a touring repertory theatre company and lived in Thame, eastern Oxfordshire. In his romantic comic novel The Magnificent Hobo (1935), a touring theatrical company moves from town to town. Second marriage and academic appointment In 1925 Wilson answered an advertisement in The Times for a position as Professor of English Literature at Islamia College at the University of Punjab in Lahore (now part of Pakistan). Wilson was interviewed and appointed by the college's principal, Abdullah Yusuf Ali, an author and educator who translated the Quran. Biographer Tim Crook discovered that Wilson had fabricated the credentials which led to his appointment. Wilson provided a portrait of Abdullah in his second novel, The Devil's Cocktail (1928), as principal of the fictional Sheranwalla College in Lahore. Leaving behind Gladys and his children, Adrian Wilson (b. 1917), Dennis B. Wilson (b. 1921), and Daphne Wilson (b. 1922), Wilson left for British India in October 1925. En route to British India, Wilson met actress Dorothy Phyllis Wick (1893 – 1965) on the SS City of Nagpur, bound from Liverpool to Karachi. Wick was on a tour in the place of Dame Sybil Thorndike. Wilson married Dorothy in Lahore some time in 1928, while he was still married to Gladys, his first wife. Although a public wedding ceremony apparently took place at the Cathedral in Lahore, no certificate has been