Ian Wilson (author)

Ian William Wilson (30 March 1941- ) is an English-born, Oxford-educated author specialising in historical and religious mysteries. Best known for his writings on the ever-controversial Turin Shroud, he began his writing career in 1978 with the international best-seller ''The Shroud of Turin'' and has since explored subjects as diverse as Biblical history, medieval history, the historical Shakespeare, prehistoric rock paintings of Australia’s Kimberley region, and several paranormal topics, the latter mostly critically. His most recent publication is the ''Book of Geoffroi de Charny'', an uncompromisingly academic study of a lengthy poem by the medieval knight of that name. A practising artist in any spare time, since 1995 he and his wife Judith have lived in south-east Queensland, Australia.

Early Life

Wilson was born on 30 March 1941 in Clapham, south London, to William and Doris Wilson. His father was personal secretary to the supervising director of a major construction company, his mother a school secretary. Unlike many London children, he was not evacuated during the blitz, his earliest memories being of war planes overhead, air raid wardens, and nearby buildings rendered ‘bomb sites’.

From the age of eleven his education was at Emanuel School, Battersea, south London, an independent school for boys founded in 1594, and nominally Anglican. With eerie prophecy his first-ever school prize, as the ‘Divinity’ class’s most attentive though highly agnostic pupil was Lloyd C. Douglas’s The Robe, a historical novel about the adventures of Jesus’ seamless robe in the aftermath of the crucifixion. Despite art not being included in his syllabus his recreational pastime was making pencil drawings from black and white photographs of classical sculptures and old master drawings, colour photographs in art books still being a rarity. Hence when in 1955 he first came across a photograph of the Turin Shroud - in an article by Group Captain Leonard Cheshire V.C. in the popular weekly Picture Post - it was his hands-on experience working with light and shade which aroused his strong doubts that the cloth’s ‘imprints’ could be the work of an artist, conflicting with his still entrenched agnosticism.

In 1960 he won a scholarship to study history at Magdalen College, Oxford where his tutors included the medievalist Bruce McFarlane, the playwright and author Alan Bennett (already of Beyond the Fringe fame), and formidable historian of the Second World War Alan (A.J.P.) Taylor. Having also qualified for art school, Wilson part-time attended Oxford’s Ruskin School of Art in pursuit of what would become a life-long recreational hobby of life drawing and life painting.

Graduating in 1963, and with no inclination for an academic career, Wilson joined the advertising department of a London-based retail multiple, where he quickly became its manager, amongst his employees hiring psychology graduate Judith Dyett, later to become his wife. In 1966 he switched to publicity manager for Oxfam, soon to resign due to differences over the charity’s management policy. The only time in his life when he would be between jobs, for three months he made daily visits to the British Library (then in the British Museum’s Round Room), furthering his interest in the Turin Shroud, in particular pursuing a burgeoning theory concerning its early history. Shortly after his taking up a new management post in Southampton he and Judith married - in the December of 1967 – and because of her Catholicism he dutifully accompanied her to Mass, finding the gospels in the plain English of the Church’s then new Jerusalem Bible translation altogether more meaningful than the King James version of his schooldays. Following the birth of their first son Adrian, in 1969 the Wilsons moved to Bristol where he started up a publicity and promotions department for West Country newspaper group the Bristol Evening Post, an appointment which gave him a long-sought opportunity to work closely with journalists.

During any spare time, however, Wilson continued to pursue his interest in the Shroud’s history, closely collaborating in this with Guildford-based general practitioner, Dr David Willis, a convert to Catholicism, also with the inspirational Benedictine monk Dom Maurus Green. In family camping vacations driving around Europe Wilson would steer towards key locations associated with the Shroud. Likewise, during a business trip to the United States in 1971 he met up with Fr Peter Rinaldi, Italian-born parish priest at Port Chester, New York state, who had been an altar boy in Turin when the Shroud had been last publicly shown back in 1933. His agnosticism inexorably on the wane, Wilson was received as a very liberal-minded member of the Catholic faith in 1972.

Little more than a year later Rinaldi phoned Wilson with a proposition that would prove life-changing. He told him that the Shroud was just about to be brought out for a showing on Italian television and if he could obtain a press pass and get himself to Turin there was a good chance of him being able to view it directly, Armed with a suitable letter from the Bristol Evening Post’s editor Wilson flew to Turin where much to his amazement, over a three-day period he was enabled to study the cloth at the closest hand for no less than eight hours.

The Turin Shroud

Following this most unusually privileged firsthand examination of the cloth, which confirmed for him that no artist could have created the cloth’s shadowy body imprints, Wilson felt confident enough to write with some authority on the subject. He began contributing the very occasional article to Britain’s Catholic weekly the ''Catholic Herald'' – his only active journalism - and contacted several British publishers with the proposal for a book. All of them turned him down flat on the grounds that the world was no longer interested in religious relics, a reaction that he accepted uncomplainingly, being happily settled in Bristol where his second son Noel had been born, and similarly happy working within the fast-moving world of Bristol’s two daily newspapers.

However, in 1976 the release of fresh scientific findings on the Shroud prompted him to write another article for Britain’s ''Catholic Herald'', one that happened to attract the interest of Bob Heller, religion editor for the major New York publishers Doubleday. To Wilson’s astonishment Heller wrote out of the blue from the States inviting him to write a full book on the subject, Wilson duly accepted, and in 1978 ''The Shroud of Turin'' in the U.S., and ''The Turin Shroud'' in the U.K. became best-sellers on both sides of the Atlantic. There followed foreign language editions in French, German, Dutch, Portuguese, Finnish, Polish, Japanese, Greek and Arabic.

During this same late 1970s period Wilson’s researches had attracted the attention of independent documentary film maker David Rolfe. A pilot script written by Wilson and professionally adapted by Rolfe and a scriptwriter became ''The Silent Witness'', a highly acclaimed 50-minute documentary on the Shroud screened at prime time on Britain's BBC1 Channel at Easter 1979. It won the Robert Flaherty BAFTA award for that year as best documentary and was also subsequently screened on French TV's TF1 Channel, in Italy, in the USA and numerous other countries around the world.

Career as a freelance author

Encouraged by his publishers on both sides of the Atlantic, in 1979 Ian Wilson made a much-agonised-over decision to leave the Bristol Evening Post group and try his luck at becoming a full-time author. Intent on not becoming too wrapped in the Shroud, he decided to investigate the then topical phenomenon of people being hypnotically ‘regressed’ to purported ‘ past lives’ to as far back in time as Roman Britain and ancient Egypt, a topic earlier popularised by American hypnotist Morey Bernstein’s best-selling '' The Search for Bridey Murphy''. Intrigued by the strong emotion and rich historical detail evident in some examples, Wilson set out to determine whether those experiencing them were somehow seeing flashbacks from the real-life historical past, only to find to the contrary. Gradually it emerged that although the hypnotists and their subjects were honest enough, when the latter were asked to go back to times before they were born they would comply by ’reliving’ and creatively dramatising episodes from historical novels that had particularly excited them. In some instances Wilson was able to prove this by tracing the relevant historical novel. Published in 1981 in the U.K as ''Mind out of Time? Reincarnation Investigated'' and in the U.S. as ''All in the Mind'' Wilson’s book inevitably disappointed those who believed hypnotic regressions to be evidence for reincarnation, but it firmly shut the lid on the Bridey Murphy phenomenon having any validity.

Jesus: The Evidence

During the early 1980s Wilson’s film producer associate David Rolfe gained the backing from the UK’s TV channel Channel 4 for a three-part fact-finding documentary series entitled '' Jesus: The Evidence''. Invited to write the book to accompany the series, Wilson accepted the assignment, though found himself increasingly at variance with the production TV team on how certain elements were handled. In the event, although the TV series became widely slammed for sensationalist gimmicks such as exploding statues, Wilson’s deliberately more even-handed and respectful treatment of the literary and archaeological evidence was well received, even ''The Jewish Gazette'' describing it as 'a very good book, dispassionate, terse and compelling'. Again published on both sides of the Atlantic, it would stay in print as a paperback for much of the rest of the century.

Later Career

As a professional author Wilson continued to diversify in the topics that he chose to tackle. Entranced by the superb Minoan wall-paintings uncovered from beneath the ash of the Santorini volcanic eruption of circa 1500 BCE Wilson decided to investigate whether widespread climatic effects from this eruption – in particular tsunamis – could have been behind the Biblical stories of the plagues, the parting of the sea, and the Israelites’ strife-filled exodus from Egypt. Following discussions with relevant archaeologists and field trips to Crete and Santorini, in ''The Exodus Enigma'' (1985) he concluded that whilst it would be quite wrong to regard the Biblical Exodus story as wholly historical, it could not be ruled out that it embodies a genuine folk memory of a Semitic people’s drama-filled flight from Egypt amidst the climatic disruptions caused by the eruption.

The After Death Experience

Two years later Wilson addressed the topic of life after death, partly prompted by the Spiritualist medium Doris Stokes then being at the height of her fame relaying messages from deceased loved ones. Deciding to investigate a show of hers Wilson, Rolfe and two hired TV researchers booked gallery seats for a London Palladium performance from which vantage-point they noted that those for whom Stokes produced messages were all seated in the audience’s first three rows. In the interval, whilst Wilson and Rolfe questioned the Palladium manager - learning from him that Stokes regularly reserved the first three rows for her own invitees - the two hired researchers sought out those for whom Stokes had produced messages. From these they learned that all had contacted Stokes beforehand to tell her of their loss, following which she had most kindly sent them free tickets for her show. All too obviously Stokes’ seances were a set-up, Wilson’s quickest and easiest research finding except that Stokes had an unexpected trick up her sleeve. With so many earlier mediums having proven charlatans, Wilson’s whole purpose in selecting her had been because she was still living. However mere days after his publisher’s lawyers had cleared his ‘Stokes’ chapter for publication came news that she had died from a brain tumour. In Wilson’s eyes, she had cheated both in life and death. His ''The After Death Experience'' published in 1987, ranged well beyond cases such as Stokes and was well received. As summed up by the New York Times reviewer: 'a reasoned, reality-based guide to an eternally enthralling subject.’

Shakespeare: The Evidence

Sam Wanamaker’s project to recreate Shakespeare’s Globe theatre then being much in vogue, Wilson turned his attention to the controversies surrounding how a humbly-born Stratford-on-Avon actor could have written what are arguably the greatest works in the English language. Firmly rejecting theories of alternative authorship Wilson explored the background of the first patron of Shakespeare’s company of actors, the little known Ferdinando Stanley, Lord Strange. A powerful northern noble under the darkest suspicion of Catholic sympathies Wilson opined that it was Strange who nurtured the young Shakespeare to write plays subtly conveying his family’s loyalty to the Tudor dynasty, in particular the ambitious Henry VI/Richard III tetralogy in which Strange’s ancestor Thomas Stanley crowns Queen Elizabeth’s grandfather Henry Tudor on the Bosworth battlefield. In 1594 Strange suffered death by arsenic poisoning, almost certainly at the hands of Queen Elizabeth’s ultra-Protestant secret service, and arguably it was observing such machinations by people in high places which gave Shakespeare his later edge.

In tune with the Jesuit literary scholar Professor Peter Milward, Wilson detected many signs in Shakespeare’s oeuvre of his crypto-Catholic sympathies, though always necessarily covert due to Elizabethan government represssion. The resultant book ''Shakespeare: The Evidence: Unlocking the Mysteries of the Man and his Work'', is not only Wilson’s longest, he regards as his best, borne out by some commensurately warm critical reviews. Leading Oxford scholar A.L. Rowse reviewed as ‘Conscientious ndfull of good sense. The reader will not go wrong with it.’ Likewise American literary scholar Park Homan ‘A splendid, fresh, significant work on Shakespeare. ilson’sprose is a wonderful reward in itself.’ As usual published on both sides of the Atlantic, the book led to an unexpected invitation from Australia to speak at the 1994 Sydney Writers' Festival. It was Wilson and his wife Judith’s first experience of the country, and they became so attracted by its lifestyle they decided to emigrate, moving to Brisbane, Queensland in 1995, and becoming full Australian citizens three years later.

The Blood and the Shroud

Back in 1988 Wilson had been seriously unsettled by a purportedly ‘conclusive’ carbon dating test dating the Turin Shroud to the Middle Ages. From the very outset he refused to accept this, insisting that the testing had done nothing to explain how the cloth’s imprints could have been faked by an artist. Ten years later he produced ''The Blood and the Shroud'', arguing strongly that the corner location from which the dating sample was taken had been a very unwise choice due to its prolonged handlings on the many hundreds of historical occasions during which the cloth was held up before large crowds. Accretions of microbiological contamination were inevitable. Aided by fresh public showings of the Shroud during the spring of 1998 the argument received sympathetic media treatment. ''Time'' magazine accorded the subject a front cover, ''Canberra Times'' reviewer Frank O’Shea adjudged Wilson’s book ‘a magnificent study, as remarkable for its readability as for its objectivity and thoroughness’, and Wilson accompanied both American and Australian TV units CBS TV’s Public Eye and Australian Channel 9’s Sixty Minutes respectively to Turin for special programmes. Two years later the Turin ecclesiastical authorities, as the Shroud’s ‘hands-on’ custodians, invited Wilson and some twenty other specialists to participate in 'closed' interdisciplinary discussions at Turin’s Villa Gualino. A major conservation ‘make-over’ of the Shroud followed in 2003, succeeded by Wilson and the other Gualino delegates returning to Turin to inspect the results. The third time in Wilson’s life in which he was enabled to study the cloth's imprints at the closest range, he became only strengthened in his opinion that these were not the work of any artist.

Lost World of the Kimberley

Not long after his taking up residence in Australia Wilson became aware of a very ancient genre of rock paintings, the ‘Bradshaws’ (alternatively labelled ‘Gwion Gwion’), notable for their unusually skilled figurative artistry, and located in the remote Kimberley region of Australia’s northwest. Though little was known of them, the most talented seemed to be at Doonan, a vast cattle station privately owned by the ultra wealthy Myers family of Melbourne. After thoroughy familiarising himself with the whole field of prehistoric rock art Wilson politely asked to be allowed to the examine these on site only to be met with a flat refusal. The Myers seemed to regard the paintings as their private art gallery, for sharing with their own very well-heeled social circle, which included media magnate Rupert Murdoch’s mother Dame Elisabeth Murdoch, whilst keeping the rest of the world firmly at a distance. Refusing to abandon the topic, Wilson sought out the help of Lee Scott Virtue, an archaeologist local to the Kimberley, who arranged a broad-ranging offroad camping expedition, partly by a battered Landcruiser, partly via helicopter forays, which enabled Wilson and his wife to study and photograph a representative range of “Bradshaw” sites located outside Myers territory. Though the Murdoch-owned Australian newspaper accorded Wilson’s Lost World of the Kimberley by far the nastiest review – across two pages - of his entire career, the book nevertheless sold out and went on to reprints, remaining to this day the only readily accessible full book on the topic.

Retirement?

In 2010 Pope Benedict XVI’s decision to approve fresh public showings of the Shroud for that year, coincided with Wilson approaching his seventieth birthday. With his London publisher Sally Gaminara also retiring he quickly wrote ''The Turin Shroud: Fresh Light on the 2000 year old Mystery'', fully intending this to be not only his last word on the subject, but also his last book as a freelance author. He and Judith moved house to the pleasant retirement lifestyle of Australia’s Sunshine Coast, with Wilson fully intending to end his days redeveloping his art interests and enjoying the superb local beaches and countryside.

The Book of Geoffroi de Charny

However Wilson could not resist devoting just a small part of his newfound leisure time to trying to translate a never before translated semi-autobiographical poem written by Geoffroi de Charny, the French knight in whose care the Shroud had mysteriously appeared back in the mid-fourteenth century. Though this ''Livre Charny'' or ‘Book of Charny’ poem seemed to include absolutely no mention of the Shroud (hence its neglect), it did promise some hitherto untapped insights into the personality of this alleged perpetrator behind the Shroud’s purported ‘faking’. Whereupon whilst Wilson was still struggling with the poem’s difficult Middle French, totally unexpectedly he came across a once superbly illuminated original manuscript of it that had not only been overlooked by modern scholarship, behind it lay a remarkable story all of its own. In the course of correspondence airing this Wilson became introduced to UK-based medievalist Nigel Bryant, a specialist in translating medieval literature. There quickly evolved a very amicable trans-global partnership that resulted in Wilson’s first-ever uncompromisingly academic book ''The Book of Geoffroi de Charny'', inclusive of a prose translation by Bryant that most satisfyingly achieved the fully professional standard that Wilson had sought. And what this translation reveals is a disarmingly self-deprecating individual who sought to be the very epitome of Geoffrey Chaucer’s ‘truly perfect, gentle knight’. Rather than Charny being credible as orchestrator of any ‘faking’ of the Shroud, arguably he had tried to live a life worthy of his having it in his care.

In the course of his Charny research Wilson gained certainly fresh historical insights concerning the Shroud’s earlier history sufficiently significant for him to consider it to be imperative – even in his mid-eighties - to revise his earlier writings on the subject, with a new book particularly directed to the general reader. ‘Retirement’, it would seem, still remains on indefinite hold…

Publications

*''The Shroud of Turin: The Burial Cloth of Jesus Christ?'', New York, Doubleday, 1978, ; ''The Turin Shroud'', London, Gollancz, 1978,
*''Mind Out of Time?: Reincarnation Claims Investigated'', London, Gollancz, 1981, ;
*''All in the Mind'', New York, Doubleday 1982
*''Reincarnation?: The Claims Investigated'', 1982
*''Jesus: The Evidence'', London, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1984, ; ''Jesus: The Evidence'', San Francisco, Harper Collins, 1985,
*''The Exodus Enigma'', London, Weidenfeld, 1985,
*''The Evidence of the Shroud'', London, Michael O’Mara, 1986,
*''The After Death Experience'', London, Sidgwick & Jackson, 1987 ; ''The After Death Experience, The Physics of the Non-Physical'', New York, Morrow,1987
*''The Bleeding Mind: An Investigation Into the Mysterious Phenomenon of Stigmata'', London, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1988
*''Holy Faces, Secret Places: The Quest for Jesus’ True Likeness'', 1991, London, Doubleday, 1991
*''Shakespeare: The Evidence : Unlocking the Mysteries of the Man and His Work'', London, Headlne, 1993 ; ''Shakespeare: The Evidence : Unlocking the Mysteries of the Man and His Work'', New York, St. Martin’s Press, 1994,
*''Jesus: The Evidence'', 2nd ed. ow illustrated in full colour London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1996. ; ''Jesus: The Evidence'', San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 1997.
*''The Blood and the Shroud: The passionate controversy still enflaming th world’s most famous carbon dating test'', London, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1998, ; ''The Blood and the Shroud: new evidence that the world's most sacred relic is real'', New York, Free Press, 1998
*''Life After Death: The Evidence'', London, Macmillan, 1998
*''The Bible As History'', London, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1999
*''The Turin Shroud: The Illustrated Evidence'' ith Barrie Schwortz London, Michael O’Mara, 2000
*''Before the Flood: Dramatic new Evidence that the Biblical Flood was a real-life event''; London, Orion,
*''Nostradamus the Evidence'', Orion, London, 2003
*''Lost World of the Kimberley: Extraordinary New Glimpses of Australia's Ice Age Ancestors'', 2006 Sydney, Allen & Unwin,
*''Murder at Golgotha: Revisiting the Most Famous Crime Scene in History'', New York, St. Martin’s Press, 2007
*''The Shroud: Fresh Light on the 2000-Year-Old Mystery'', London, Bantam, 2010 )
*''The Book of Geoffroi De Charny with the Livre Charny edited and translated by Nigel Bryant'', Woodbridge, Boydell Press, 2021

Book reviews
"Before the Flood"
''Kirkus Reviews''.
"Mind Out of Time?"
''New Scientist''.
"Nostradamus: The Man Behind the Prophecies"
''Publishers Weekly''.
"Reincarnation Cases"
. ''The Tablet''.
"The After Death Experience"
. ''Kirkus Reviews''.
"The Blood and the Shroud"
''Publishers Weekly''.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Wilson, Ian
1941 births
Living people
21st-century American male writers
21st-century American non-fiction writers
21st-century Roman Catholics
Alumni of Magdalen College, Oxford
British male non-fiction writers
British Roman Catholic writers
Converts to Roman Catholicism from atheism or agnosticism
People from Clapham
Researchers of the Shroud of Turin