Review of The Wheeldon Case
In January 2012 the BBC reported on a campaign to clear Alice Wheeldon's name, quoting Dr Nicholas Hiley of the University of Kent who said the case against her was "shaky". Hiley said that during the First World War MI5 had become "very fixated on political opposition to the war" and that the Wheeldons' beliefs, unusual for the time, as Marxists, atheists, vegetarians, supporters of the suffragettes and conscientious objectors, had drawn MI5's attention. The man known as Alex Gordon (in reality William Rickard), said Hiley was an "unbalanced fantasist" who was "spectacularly unreliable": a convicted blackmailer, he had twice been declared criminally insane and was released from the high security psychiatric Broadmoor Hospital only two years before being employed by MI5. Hiley's suggestion is that Rickard's department of MI5 was facing closure at the time of Mrs Wheeldon's arrest and the case against her and her family was fabricated to justify the department's being kept open.
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