Lieutenant-Colonel F. Stuart Wilder
Royal Regiment of Canada

I consider this an extremely bad case, and there appears to be good ground for thinking a prosecution for perjury might be successful … I consider Mr. Wilder to be a clever, calculating and consummate liar. He has deliberately lied in as brazen a manner as I have ever come across.

—Sir Reginald Sharpe, Divorce Court Commissioner

(Evening Standard, 25 May 1955, 10)

Born on 23 May 1910 in Kingston, Ontario, Franklin Stuart Wilder was a Queen’s University graduate, science teacher, and chemist. In 1940, he was appointed to head gas warfare training on the general staff of National Defence Headquarters. Overseas Wilder commanded No. 6 Wing, Canadian Training School until appointed to succeed Lieutenant-Colonel F.L. Nicholls of the Royal Regiment of Canada in August 1943.

He had relinquished command by January 1944 to Major A.M. Young on orders to return to Canada. He ended the war as Director of Education and Deputy Director of Training for the Canadian Army Overseas. In 1946, he retired from the army to live in England.

Despite his bookish appearance, Wilder was evidently involved in several love triangles during the war and after. After they met at a dance in 1942, he had an affair with Naomi Blanche Thoburn, a woman married to a British lieutenant in the Far East. By 1947, they had each divorced their spouses. However, Wilder refused to marry Naomi that is until she later became pregnant. They wed in September 1948 and she gave birth to a daughter.

The situation became more complicated when Naomi started an affair with Major George Molesworth Salvin Bowlby, husband of her niece, who was having her own affair with one of his colleagues at the Foreign Office. The Bowlbys divorced and Naomi Wilder left her husband in 1953. Colonel Wilder then carried on an affair with a Doris Stanley. The allegations and counter allegations emerged from the 1955 Wilder divorce court case, in which Naomi sued her estranged husband for this misconduct and cruelty. He countered sued, naming Major Bowlby for damages.

On the witness stand, Wilder denied his own affair until a signed hotel bill confirmed he had shared a room with Doris. The revelation caused the court commissioner to denounce the former colonel as a brazen liar even as this official said that Wilder’s former wife “has a most deplorable sense of moral values in the matters of sex.” Because British law prohibited Naomi from marrying Bowlby due to his former marriage to her niece, they went to France to wed shortly after the court case.

For lying in divorce court about his own relationship with another woman, Wilder was charged with perjury. He admitted to deceiving the court but argued he had only done so to retain custody of his daughter. In the end he was fined £100 plus legal costs. The judge opted against a punishment of imprisonment, stating, “I am prepared to take into your favour the fact that this conduct of yours was really brought about by your desperate anxiety for the future of your child.”

Wilder married Doris (who changed her first name to Deverie) in December 1955 (Thank you to the below reader comment for this information).

Wilder died in Maidenhead, Berkshire, England on 23 January 1984.