Alexander Joseph Patrick Wilson (24 October 18934 April 1963) 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(4) 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, Alison (Wilson's third wife). Early life Wilson was born in Dover, the eldest son and second of four children of Alexander Wilson (1864-1919), from Winchester, Hampshire, and Annie Marie (née O'Toole; 1865–1936), from Carlow, County Carlow, Leinster, who were married in 1886. Wilson's paternal grandfather, Hugh Wilson (1839–1870), was born in Winchester, Hampshire, where he married Elizabeth Bracken (b. 1842) in 1863. Hugh helped found the Army Hospital Corps and participated in the Second Opium War (1860) in China, consequently receiving the China War Medal. Hugh died at the age of 30–31 in 1870, and was buried in the grounds of Netley Hospital, Hampshire. The couple had only one child, Alexander Wilson, Alec's father. Wilson's father had a 40-year career in the British Army, progressing from a 15-year-old bugler to a Lieutenant Colonel Quartermaster in the Royal Army Medical Corps by the time he died in 1919. The elder Wilson served throughout the Boer War, consequently receiving the Queen's South Africa and King's South Africa medals. He was mentioned in dispatches for managing and supplying hospital ships and trains from the Western Front during World War I. In 1918 he was responsible for all medical supplies to the British Army in Europe. He was buried on the Isle of Sheppey, Kent. In his childhood Alec Wilson's family followed his father to Mauritius, Singapore, Hong Kong and Ceylon. Alec was educated at St. Joseph's College, Hong Kong, a prestigious public school, and St Boniface's Catholic College in Plymouth, where he played amateur football. First marriage and World War I Wilson enlisted in the Royal Naval Air Service in 1914, at the start of World War I, according to a reference in a War Office document which also indicated that he had crashed