War on Lies: The Alice Wheeldon Campaign premiered at the Derby Museum and Art Gallery on 27 January 2024, 108 years after Alice’s birth.
Created by young filmmaker Elizabeth McGlynn, the documentary traces the Wheeldon campaign – and why it still matters – through the lens of the people and experts who each in their own way contributed to changing the public’s opinion of Alice and her family, and to getting her story more widely known. Piece by piece, over many decades, each element of the puzzle is uncovered and finds its place, until today Alice is remembered for who she truly was, a strong, feisty woman who fought for what she believed in.
“It is important to realise that campaigns like this can win,” says Keith Venables, Convenor, Derby People’s History Group. “It requires all sorts of layers and levers for that to happen, and if we can do that once, we can do it more often.”
Watch the film
About the filmmaker
Elizabeth McGlynn, 23 years old from Essex, recently completed an MA in Film and Television at the University of Birmingham with distinction. War on Lies: The Alice Wheeldon Campaign is the film she submitted for her dissertation. Required to independently create a documentary on any topic of her choosing, she was hooked as soon as she came across Alice’s story.
She writes:
When I first sat down to research topic ideas for my Masters dissertation, my intention was to find a story that was largely unknown. What seemed to be a difficult, potentially tedious task, took me 10 minutes of scanning through a Birmingham forum to come across an image of Alice Wheeldon. Labelled as a suffragette, with a name I had never heard of, I was interested to find out more about her story and why she was imprisoned.
What I soon discovered was an unbelievable story about a miscarriage of justice, whereby Alice Wheeldon and her family had been falsely convicted of plotting to kill the Prime Minister in 1917. In recent years, Alice's descendants have worked tirelessly to change the Wheeldon narrative, and have their innocence recognised, inspiring interest, campaigns and passionate retellings from those who heard about the story.
I never would have expected how emotionally invested I would become in this project, and connected to all the people who have been involved over the years. It is such a fascinating, incredible story, and a project I have worked on passionately and tirelessly nine months; I would love for more people to know about it, and the truth that was concealed for so many years.