Personal Life
Wilkins married an art student, Ruth, when he was at Berkeley. They had a son. He married his second wife Patricia Ann Chidgey in 1959. They had four children, Sarah, George, Emily and William.
He published his autobiography, The Third Man of the Double Helix, in 2003.
In the years before WWII, he was an active anti-war activist, and a member of the communist party, until the invasion of Poland by the Soviet Army in September 1939. Formerly classified UK security service papers reveal that, Wilkins came under suspicion of leaking atomic secrets. The files, released in August 2010, indicate surveillance of Wilkins ended by 1953. "After the war I wondered what I would do, as I was very disgusted with the dropping of two bombs on civilian centres in Japan," he told Britain's Encounter radio programme in 1999.
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—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
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—Anonymous. “Epitaph on William Jones,” from Eleanor Broughton’s Varia (1925)