Sydney Morning Herald, April 20, 2013 : It was a bizarre plot to murder the British PM - or was it? Two sisters tell Suzy Freeman-Greene why they want justice for their framed forebears.
In 1986, as he was dying of brain cancer, Sydney physicist Peter Mason sat his daughters down to watch a video. It was a dramatised documentary, set in the dark days of World War I, called The Plot to Murder Lloyd George.
Sisters Chloe and Deirdre Mason did not know what to expect. Why was their dad showing them this? Now? But as he stopped and started the video, to comment and, sometimes, to cry, they quickly realised this was no remote historical account. Three of the key protagonists - jailed in 1917 over an unlikely plan to poison the British PM - were their grandparents and great-grandmother.
"It was stunning. We were devastated," recalls Deirdre of the day she learnt about her relatives' fate. "We were in pain, but it was overshadowed by the fact that we were losing our father. There was this total sense of our family being doomed."
"But the thing I remember also is that they were feisty people," adds Chloe, a quietly determined woman who is campaigning to clear the names of her grandparents, Winnie and Alf, and great-grandmother, Alice. "And we had already shown our colours as being feisty people, too."
The tale of Alice Wheeldon and the infamous "poison plot" is one of secret agents, intercepted mail, men on the run and vials of strychnine and curare. It's a tale of a nation reeling from the carnage of war and an outspoken woman taking huge risks to defend her beliefs and her son. A century later, it's a story that still angers the Mason sisters as they lobby, from Sydney, for belated justice.
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