Rosemary Tonks was born in 1928 in Gillingham, Kent. The only daughter of Gwendoline and Desmond Tonks, her father was a mechanical engineer who died of blackwater fever in Africa before Rosemary was born. Her father's uncle, Henry Tonks, was a surgeon and painter who worked as an official war artist on the western front in World War One before becoming a professor of fine art at the Slade in the 1920s. Brought up by her widowed mother, Rosemary attended Wentworth College boarding school in Bournemouth and began writing children's stories in her teens, before marrying in London in 1949. Rosemary suffered a number of medical crises during her life. In her childhood, Rosemary had numerous eyesight problems including a squint, lazy eye and astigmatism in both eyes. After her marriage, her husband's work as an engineer saw them living in India and Pakistan where Rosemary contracted first paratyphoid fever in Calcutta, and then polio in Karachi in 1952. The latter left her with a slightly withered right hand, causing her to teach herself to write and paint with her left. Between 1952 and 1953, the couple lived in Paris until they moved to Downshire Hill, Hampstead, becoming near neighbours of Dame Edith Sitwell. During this time, her husband became a financier and Rosemary worked for the BBC and wrote about both these careers in her novels of this period between the early 1960s and 1970s. Rosemary became strongly involved in London's literary scene, being one of the few women poets to be published at the time, and writing reviews for leading journals and newspapers. After her mother's death in 1968, Rosemary suffered a personal crisis, exploring various forms of religion before turning to fundamentalist Christianity. Her marriage collapsed in this period, and in 1977 she underwent an emergency operation for detached retinas in both eyes. Although her sight was eventually saved, Rosemary spent several years in a state of near-blindness. In 1980, Rosemary completely renounced her past life; she moved to Bournemouth and incinerated an unpublished novel and a collection of valuable Oriental treasures. She refused republication of any of her poetry or fiction, further cutting herself off from family and friends. In October 1980, she travelled to Jerusalem and was baptised near the River Jordan. She continued to live in Bournemouth until her death in April 2014, with her disappearance from the literary scene continuing to be a source of mystery until after her death with Neil Astley's publication of her obituary and explanation of her disappearance in The Guardian . Rosemary Tonks published two collections of poetry to great critical acclaim in the 1960s: Notes on Cafes and Bedrooms (1963) and Iliad of Broken Sentences (1967). She also published six novels in the 1960s and early 1970s, and collaborated with the BBC Radiophonic Workshop to create an experimental sound-poem, entitled 'Sono-Montage'. One of her first works, 'Miss Bushman-Caldicott', written while she was still at school, was broadcast on BBC radio in 1946 and her first published work, On Wooden Wings: The Adventures of Webster (1948), was also illustrated by her. Two of Rosemary's poems were included in Philip Larkin's anthology of twentieth-century English verse, and copies of the original volumes of poetry were selling for sums of up to £1500 prior to a collected edition of her work being published after her death. This collection, Bedouin of the London Evening (2014) contains examples of her prose writing in addition to all her published poems. During her active years in the literary scene, Rosemary gave few interviews; in 2009, her disappearance was the subject of a BBC Radio 4 programme, 'The Poet Who Vanished', as part of the Lost Voices series.

Wife of Charles Edward Trevelyan and sister of historian and politician Thomas Babington Macaulay

Mary Katharine Bell was born in Kirkleatham on 12 October 1881, to Sir Thomas Hugh Bell, second baronet and iron master, and his second wife, Lady Florence Eveleen Eleanor Bell (née Olliffe), author and social investigator. She was the youngest of their three children, and was the stepsister of the traveller, writer and political figure Gertrude Bell, and the granddaughter of Sir Isaac Lowthian Bell, first baronet, steel manufacturer and MP. Mary, known as Molly to close friends and family, studied briefly at Queen's College before she began a relationship with Liberal MP Sir Charles Philips Trevelyan, third baronet (1870-1958). After their marriage in January 1904, Mary became a successful political hostess at their home in London, arranging dinners and parties for political friends and associates. Around this time, Mary became president of the Northumberland Women's Liberal Federation (WLF), and became a popular speaker around the country. She favoured women's suffrage, an issue which deeply divided the WLF, but disliked the militancy associated with the movement. Mary actively aided her husband in his work, translating German material on land reform, and campaigning in his favour at each election, including that of 1918 in which he was attacked for his opposition of the First World War.

After Charles inherited the Trevelyan ancestral home of Wallington Hall, Northumberland, in 1928, the pair devoted much of their lives to the estate and the village of Cambo, becoming invested in the welfare of their tenants and establishing a pension plan for local schoolchildren. Mary was active in many local, national and international groups including the Workers' Educational Association and the Federation of Women's Institutes, as well as founding local branches of the Girl Guides, the Women's Institute and the Band of Hope. She served on the national executive of the National Federation of Women's Institutes, played a leading role in the Folk Dance and Northumbrian Pipers societies, and played a key role in the establishment of the Council for the Preservation of Rural England in 1926, becoming a representative and founding committee member. In 1963, she was awarded with an OBE for her years of public service to politics and various good causes. Mary died at St Catherine's Nursing Home in Newcastle Upon Tyne on 8 October 1966, and her ashes were scattered on moorland near Winter's Gibbet on the Wallington estate.

In addition to estate work she was a JP and was active with numerous local, national, and international organizations, such as the Workers' Educational Association and the Association of Country Women of the World. She founded branches of the Girl Guides and the Women's Institute in Cambo, and served on the national executive of the National Federation of Women's Institutes for many years. In keeping with her temperance principles she also founded in Cambo a Band of Hope, which local children were pledged to join at a young age. She also played a leading role in the Folk Dance and Northumbrian Pipers societies, and made music an important feature of her family's life. Singing songs, accompanied by Molly on the piano, was a regular part of their domestic routine, and she and Charles also delighted their children, among them George Lowthian Trevelyan, by regularly reading to them from a diverse selection of classic literature. Such activities took the place of attending church on Sundays, for while Molly was Unitarian, Charles was agnostic. In appearance her clothes, hairstyle, and pince-nez gave her a Victorian air, and one contemporary described her as attractive in a 'no nonsense' sort of way. Her decades of public service, to politics and various other good causes, were recognized with an OBE in 1963, shortly before her death at St Catherine's Nursing Home, Newcastle upon Tyne, on 8 October 1966. Her ashes were scattered on moorland near Winter's Gibbet on the Wallington estate.

Sir George Otto Trevelyan 20 July 1838 – 17 August 1928 was educated at Harrow and Trinity College Cambridge. He spent some years in India in the 1860s, including working as private secretary for his father Sir Charles Edward Trevelyan, and publishing books on British India.
He served as a Liberal Member of Parliament for a number of constituencies – Tynemouth and North Shields (1865-1868), Hawick Burghs (1868-1886) and Glasgow Bridgeton (1887-1897). He also held a number of political offices; Civil Lord of the Admiralty (1868-1870), Parliamentary Secretary to the Admiralty (1880-1882), Chief Secretary for Ireland (1882-1884), Chancellor for the Duchy of Lancaster (1884-1885) and twice serving as Secretary for Scotland (1886, and 1892-1895).
Trevelyan was a radical liberal, supporting expanded suffrage, Irish Home Rule and reform or abolition of the House of Lords, twice resigning his political position in protest at passing bills.
After resigning from public office 1897 he continued working as an author, and his Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay was followed a history of Charles James Fox and a three volume history of the American Revolution.
George married Caroline Philips in 1869, and they had three sons, Charles Philips Trevelyan, Robert Calverley Trevelyan and George Macaulay Trevelyan. George Otto became Baronet of Wallington in 1868, and spent time here and at Welcombe Hall, which was owned by his wife.

Brian Randell was born in Cardiff (16 April 1936) and educated at Imperial College London. From 1957 until 1964 he was employed in the Atomic Power Division of the English Electric Company Ltd, Whetstone, Leicester, including working on compilers for the ALGOL 60 language (see BR/1). From 1964 to 1969 he worked for IBM at the T.J. Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights, New York, and later in California, specialising in computer architectures, operating systems and system design methodology (see BR/2). In 1969 he was appointed Professor of Computing Science at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne (later Newcastle University) (see BR/3), becoming Emeritus Professor following his retirement.

His main research interests are in the field of system dependability and fault-tolerant computing. Professor Randell also carried out research into the history of computing and computers (see BR/3/20 and BR/3/21), including pioneering research into the work carried out at Bletchley Park during World War two (see BR/3/20/3).

Professor Randell was involved in commercial exploitation of the software and techniques developed at the University, being instrumental in the founding of the Microelectronics Applications Research Institute (MARI), of which he was a director (see BR/14) and the Northern Informatics Applications Agency (see BR/18).

In addition to his employment, Professor Randell served on a number of UK, French and European bodies, including panels of the Science and Engineering Research Council (SERC) (see BR/5), the Health and Safety Commission Advisory Committee on the Safety of Nuclear Installations (ACSNI) (see BR/6), the Council of the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) (see BR/10) and the Scientific Committees of the CNRS Institutes at the universities of Toulouse and Rennes (see BR/11 and BR/12). He was also an active member of many organisations concerned with Computer Science, notably the British Computer Society (BCS) (see BR/21) and the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP) (see BR/20); he was a founder member of IFIP's Working Groups on Programming Methodology and Dependability and Fault Tolerance.

Priscila Uppal is a Canadian poet and fiction writer of South Asian descent. Born in Ottawa in 1974, she lives in Toronto. She has a PhD in English Literature and is a professor of Humanities and English at York University in Toronto. Her first UK poetry selection Successful Tragedies: Poems 1998-2010 (Bloodaxe Books, 2010) draws on six collections of poetry published in Canada: How to Draw Blood From a Stone (1998), Confessions of a Fertility Expert (1999), Pretending to Die (2001), Live Coverage (2003), Holocaust Dream (with photographs by Daniel Ehrenworth, 2005), Ontological Necessities (2006) and Traumatology (2009). Her other books include the novels The Divine Economy of Salvation (2002) and To Whom It May Concern (2009), and the critical study We Are What We Mourn: The Contemporary English-Canadian Elegy (2009). She also edited the multilingual Exile Book of Poetry in Translation: 20 Canadian Poets Take On the World (2009). Her works have been translated into Croatian, Dutch, Greek, Korean, Latvian, and Italian, and Ontological Necessities was shortlisted for the prestigious $50,000 Griffin Prize for Excellence in Poetry.