He was educated at King Edward VII School (photo) in Sheffield, where he was Head Prefect in 1938/1940, Captain of cricket for two years and 1st XI footballer for four.
He began a degree at Oxford at the start of World War II, but was soon enlisted as a bombardier.
In September 1949 they sailed First Class from Liverpool on the Cunard Line’s Ascania to Quebec, en route to the Twin Cities, where Wheatley was a Commonwealth Fellow at the University of Minnesota for a year.
Biochemist Richard E. Dickerson recalls that “in 1957, Peter J. Wheatley despaired of supporting a wife and two children on his Leeds professorial salary of £900 per annum (then $2,500), resigned from the university, and prepared to move to Zurich to head up a new crystallographic unit for Monsanto.”[4] After nine years in Switzerland, during which time he published several papers,[5] Wheatley spent a year (1966-67) as visiting professor at the Department of Chemistry, University of Arizona, where he published a paper with John P. Schaefer on the structure of anisomycin.
He also served as British Co-editor of Acta Crystallographica from 1969 to 1980, processing a phenomenal number of papers with care, knowledge and not a little tact!”[3] Wheatley was made a Life Fellow of Queens' when he retired in 1988.