As more light is shed on the events of the time, the story of Alice Wheeldon and her family is being retold and a clearer picture is emerging

Popular memory of Alice and reactions to the trial had survived in Derby families. From the late 1970s, professional historians started to gain privileged access to closed private and public records, and their work informed dramatisations of her life in the 1980s and 1990s.

Sheila Rowbotham’s play Friends of Alice Wheeldon, published in 1986, was the first book by a social historian to reassess the trial in the social and political context of the times, after the trial transcript and some related documents were made public.

A fuller picture of Alice’s life and the injustice she suffered was beginning to reach wider audiences.

Derby community connects with Alice’s descendants in Australia

Incredulity about the case grew further when Angela Truby’s new play, Alice, was staged in 2011. The Derby People’s History Group (DPHG) then launched a campaign to clear Alice’s name, connecting local people and inviting Chloë and Deirdre Mason, Alice’s descendants in Australia, to participate.

At a Derby forum in 2012 with historian Nicholas Hiley and Betty Keeling (a local family friend of the Wheeldons), Deirdre Mason explained that their parents had maintained a cone of silence about the criminal convictions. This was only broken by their father, Peter Mason, when he sat them both down, shortly before his death, to watch The Plot to Kill Lloyd George, a video of the 1983 BBC drama documentary.

Peter Mason had kept a box of family papers given to him by his mother Winnie, including a report on the trial by Hettie Wheeldon and Hettie’s leaflet ‘Victims of Alex Gordon: The Agent-provocateur’ about the use of undercover agents. There were also letters, diaries and other documents that historian Nicholas Hiley would eventually decipher and which would turn out to be crucial in revealing the true identity of ‘Alex Gordon’.

First World War Centenary offers opportunities for new perspectives

The centenary of the First World War accelerated interest in the Wheeldon family and the case. DPHG hosted talks by professional historians at grassroots history and arts festivals.

As well as creating media attention and new social histories, the story also attracted artists who took inspiration from Alice’s life, finding in her conscientious objection to war and conscription an alternative perspective on the conflict and its commemoration.