[3]In 1916, Wilson worked with French evacuee children at Samoëns in the Haute-Savoie, moving to Corsica the following year with the Serbian Relief Fund.
She did similar work with her brother Maurice Wilson in North Africa before moving in February 1919 to distribute food and clothing in Niš, Grdelica, and Belgrade.
From 1919 to 1922, Wilson worked with Hilda Clark and Edith Pye for the Quaker Relief Mission in Vienna, acting as an interpreter and organizing food depots.
[4] The white Russian refugee scholar Nikolai Bachtin (1896–1950) became a close friend, and lodgers included the biologist Maurice Wilkins.
Trying to help Czechs with false identity papers to join the French army, she was at one point arrested by Hungarian secret police on the Romanian border and, in May 1940, she returned to England.