After a short, and miserable, few days at Rosyth Wheatley was sent to Southampton where he recorded the work of the Salvage Service.

He produced over 40 paintings there including a large canvas for the proposed, but never built, national Hall of Remembrance.

[1] He held a joint show with Muirhead Bone at the Grosvenor Gallery in 1922 and taught at the Slade for five years from 1920 until 1925 when he, and his wife the artist Edith Grace Wheatley, née Wolfe, moved to South Africa.

[1] The couple remained there until 1937, during which time John Wheatley was the Michaelis Professor of Fine Art at the University of Cape Town and Director of the National Gallery of South Africa.

[9] Two paintings by John Wheatley were burned by demonstrators during the Rhodes Must Fall upheaval at the University of Cape Town in February 2016: a portrait of Edward, Prince of Wales and one of Alexander Brown.