The Many Wives of Vincent Carron Wellington - Catherine Brown

One man. Eight wives. Multiple identities. The astonishing reconstructed true story of The Many Wives of Vincent Carron Wellington.

In the early twentieth century, a man from a small Welsh mining town disappeared - and in his place emerged someone entirely new.

Born David Hugh Williams in Blaenau Ffestiniog in 1889, he repeatedly re-invented himself under a succession of new identities. Vincent Carron Wellington, Dean Stuart-Wynne, Captain Peter Ward and others besides. Charming, persuasive and endlessly resourceful, he moved effortlessly through different circles, building new lives wherever opportunity arose.

But every new beginning came at a cost.

Behind him he left abandoned wives, broken promises and children who would grow up barely knowing the truth about their father.

At a widely publicised trail at the Old Bailey in 1926, he was found guilty of bigamy and sentenced to prison. Yet even this did not deter him.

He simply began again.

For decades his story remained hidden within whispered family memories, scattered official records and fragments of forgotten history.

Gradually, piece by piece, the extraordinary truth has emerged.

Drawing on years of meticulous research through genealogy records, military archives, newspaper reports, family documents and personal correspondence, this book uncovers the remarkable and often troubling life of a man determined to escape the destiny he had been born into - no matter the cost.

The Many Wives of Vincent Carron Wellington is a gripping true story of bigamy, deception and reinvention in twentieth-century Britain - and the consequences one man's choices left behind.

Who was the real Vincent Carron Wellington? A brilliant opportunist? A romantic adventurer? Or simply a man running from the life he was born into?   

The reader must decide.