The oddest moment in the remarkable life of Lieutenant-Colonel Eric Wilson came when he discovered that he was officially dead, and thus joined the distinguished band of people prematurely consigned to the hereafter.

Colonel Wilson died last week at the age of 97, but his first “death” took place 68 years earlier, in the desert sands of East Africa.

On August 11, 1940, Colonel Wilson, then a captain commanding the Somaliland Camel Corps machinegun company, was involved in a ferocious firefight with Italian troops near Tug Argan Gap. On the first day he was wounded in the shoulder and eye and his spectacles smashed. Within four days, two of his frontline guns had been destroyed and his Somali sergeant killed, but he manned his machinegun as the enemy closed in.

He was formally listed among the war dead, his family was informed of his passing and he was posthumously awarded the Victoria Cross “for most conspicuous gallantry”.

Captain Wilson, however, was very much alive, held in an Italian prison-er-of-war camp in Eritrea. Badly wounded and suffering from malaria, he had stumbled from the battlefield into an Italian unit who forgot to inform the Red Cross of his capture.

While a prisoner, he met a newly captured RAF officer who informed him that he had been declared dead and awarded a posthumous VC.

“He flatly refused to believe it,” Hamish Wilson, his son, said yesterday. “He said that his Somali soldiers deserved at least equal credit and he had just done what he was supposed to do.” Captain Wilson’s “death” was announced in The Times in November 1940 - and his obituary appears in the newspaper today.

He is not the first person to receive a double death notice. In July 1900 George Morrison, the Peking correspondent of The Times, read of his own death in his own newspaper after he was believed to have perished during the Boxer Rebellion. His obituary described him as devoted and fearless. A friend remarked: “The only decent thing they can do now is double your salary.” They didn’t.

Mark Twain was twice prematurely reported to be dead. On the first occasion, he remarked: “The report of my death is an exaggeration.” A few years later, The New York Times claimed that he had been lost at sea, prompting Twain to write an article proving that he was still alive.

When Sean Connery was reported by various Japanese and African newspapers to be dead from throat cancer in 1993, he immediately went on the David Letterman chat show to demonstrate his rude good health. When three quarters of Abba were reported dead in a plane crash in 1976, the group appeared on German television - the first of numerous barely credible resurrections for the group.

That remedy was not available to earlier victims of a mistaken obituary, who simply had to put up with their own deaths, sometimes at a cost to their careers. Samuel Taylor Coleridge once came across a man in a hotel reading the poet’s obituary aloud from a newspaper. The man remarked that “it was very extraordinary that Coleridge the poet should have hanged himself just after the success of his play; but he was always a strange, mad fellow”. Coleridge is said to have replied: “Indeed, sir, it is a most extraordinary thing that he should have hanged himself, be the subject of an inquest, and yet that he should at this moment be speaking to you.”

The premature death announcement can be a shock, occasionally fatal. Marcus Garvey, the black nationalist leader, suffered a stroke in 1940, and soon after read a most unflattering obituary in the Chicago Defender describing him as having died “broke, alone and unpopular”. He then had another stroke, and died.

However, sometimes the shock may be salutary: when the brother of Arthur Nobel died, a French newspaper is said to have run a premature obituary of the Swedish gunpowder magnate, describing him as a “merchant of death”. He subsequently founded the peace prize to ensure that posterity had a better opinion of him than the obituary writer.

Ernest Hemingway, it seems, enjoyed the experience of being thought to be dead, after he was reported killed in an African plane crash in 1954. According to one biographer he would start the morning by happily reading a scrapbook of his own death notices, accompanied by a glass of champagne.

Returning from the dead can have unexpected consequences. St Oran of Iona is said to have risen from his grave after being accidentally buried alive. When he claimed to have seen angels he was denounced as a heretic and reburied, this time permanently.

The concept of returning from the dead is deeply embedded in our culture, from The Return of Martin Guerre, to Reggie Perrin, to the scene in Twain’s Tom Sawyer when Tom is moved by witnessing his own funeral.

As Colonel Wilson’s story shows, it was easy to disappear in the chaos and fog of war. And it was not so easy to reappear. His survival was not discovered until April 1941, when the Italian PoW camp was captured and he was liberated (midway through the construction of an elaborate escape tunnel).

Even then, some preferred to believe the earlier account of his gallant death. “The idea that he was dead was so firmly embedded that some people later accused him of being an imposter,” Hamish Wilson said.

Explore UK News

• Crime News

• Education News

• Health News

• Scotland News

Times Recommends

• A vicar’s wife: ‘There is no one to fight for us’
• Every little helps at the supermarket
• Ugg or Fitflop? The battle of the boots