Southampton. He stayed with Gladys for only 18 months. After a falling out over finances with Gladys' Aunt Ruth, Alec moved back to London in 1935 to live with Dorothy and Michael. He told Gladys that he would find a place for them all to live. Instead, he and Dorothy lived in Little Venice. Michael later suspected that his father had been involved in intelligence activities as an agent in the 1920s and 1930s. He remembered seeing his father meet Joachim von Ribbentrop at the German Embassy in Carlton House Terrace in London in the spring of 1938, and recalled other meetings with men with whom his father spoke fluent German. A letter written by Dorothy in 1936 mentions that Alec intended to travel to Spain during that country's civil war. Bankruptcy forced Alec to move with Dorothy and Michael to Yorkshire in 1940. In 1941 Alec finally left Dorothy, departing in uniform on a train after kissing his son Michael goodbye for the last time. By 1940 Wilson was working as a translator for Secret Intelligence Service (then MI6) in Section X, which conducted communications surveillance of embassies. There he met Alison Mary McKelvie (1920 – 2005), a secretary for the Service. When her apartment became uninhabitable during a German bombing raid on London, she moved in with him. In 1941 Wilson married Alison, who became his third wife. Although he had shown her a divorce certificate, it was later found to have been falsified. Wilson was almost 30 years older than Alison. They had two sons: Gordon Wilson (b. 1942) and Nigel Wilson (b. 1944). In 1942 a maternal uncle told Dorothy's son, Michael, aged nine, that Alec had been killed in the Battle of El Alamein. But Wilson was living with Alison in London at the time. While a Lieutenant Colonel Wilson, who had served with the Punjab Regiment, is listed as killed at El Alamein by artillery fire, his photograph and personal history is not that of Alec Wilson. Foreign Office files released to The National Archives at Kew in May 2013 confirmed that a translator of Hindustani, Persian and Arabic had joined the SIS in October 1939 and had been forced to resign in October 1942. Although the translator's name is redacted, it is likely to be Alexander Wilson, since the details disclosed match those included in the first part of a memoir, written by