A specialist in Caribbean art and literature, Anne Walmsley was a British editor, scholar, critic and author. Anne started her career in the late 1950s when she worked as a secretary for Faber and Faber. Following this, she spent three years as a teacher at Westwood High School in Jamaica. When she returned to the UK, she worked for a time with BBC Schools television service.
Her career with Longman began in 1967, where she was employed as their first editor on Caribbean focused writing. In 1968, The Sun's Eye was published which marked her first compilation of Caribbean literature. Anne Walmsley spent ten years in this role, before moving to Nairobi as publishing editor for Longman Kenya. She later returned to the U.K. to undertake a Master's in African Studies at the University of Sussex.
Anne Walmsley participated in the Caribbean Artists Movement (CAM), founded in 1966 by Kamau Braithwaite, John La Rose and Andrew Salkey. In 1985 she was awarded a Leverhulme Fellowship to research CAM and in 1992 she was awarded a Ph.D. from the University of Kent for her thesis on this, which was also published as a book entitled The Caribbean Artists Movement: A Literary and Cultural History, 1966-1971.
Anne Walmsley has contributed to a range of journals, literary magazines, exhibition catalogues and anthologies. The archive at Newcastle University Special Collections holds a range of material including letters and reports from her time at Longman's, her scrapbook from teaching at Westwood, research on CAM, and research on a range of Caribbean artists.

William Law (1836-1901) was a Rochdale mill owner who accumulated an exceptional library of English and Scottish manuscripts and books.

Born in Callander, Scotland, Eleanor Luisa Haverfield wrote fiction for young adults. She is also said to have been a talented artist and wood carver. She took a great interest in village activities during a long residence in Peaslake, Surrey, where she died, age 74.

Peter John Wyllie is a retired petrologist, author and explorer. Born in 1930 in London, Wyllie studied at St Andrews University where he gained a degree in Physics and Geology in 1952. Following this he joined the British North Greenland Expedition as a geologist. The expedition was a pioneering British-led 2 year scientific expedition to the North Greenland Ice Sheet. The expedition sought to conduct research in many areas including geology, seismology, meteorology, gravimetry, physiology and the logistics of operating in a polar climate for prolonged periods.

Following the expedition Wyllie gained a PHD in geology and went on to have a successful academic career in the field. Emigrating to the United States in the late 1950s he was appointed professor of geology at California Institute of Technology in 1983, a position which he held until his retirement in 1999. During his career as an academic Wyllie made notable contributions to research in the field of petrology and authored 2 textbooks in the fields of plate tectonics and magmatism.

Christopher Pilling was a prize-winner in the National Poetry Competition and has published nine collections of his own poetry, as well as translations of poems by Tristan Corbière (a Book of the Year for the Sunday Telegraph and the World Service of the BBC in 1995), Max Jacob and Lucien Becker (a PBS Recommended Translation in 2004). He has also written a number of plays. With William Scammell, he founded a Cumbrian Poets' workshop which has run for thirty years, and has seen two of his plays performed at the Theatre by the Lake in Keswick. In 2006, Christopher Pilling won first prize in the John Dryden Translation Competition, one of the UK's most prestigious translation awards.

Foreign Bodies is an original poetry collection published in 1992. Love at the Full is an English translation of Lucien Becker's Plein Amour , and was published in 2004. Springing From Catullus is an English translation of Catullus' complete works, and was published in 2009.

Richard Brett-Knowles was born in Essex in 1924. Educated at St Catherine's College of Oxford University, with a life-long interest in radio engineering, Brett Knowles worked for the Telecommunications Research Establishment during World Word 2 which developed early radar technology. During the latter years of the war he joined the RAF, learnt to fly aeroplanes, and spent time in occupied Dutch territory learning about German radar technology.

In 1946 he joined the Royal Navy as an Instructor Officer, teaching at Dartmouth College. During this time he participated in the British North Greenland Expedition as an assistant scientist and radio officer from 1952 to 1954. The expedition was a pioneering British-led attempt to conduct research in several areas including polar geology, seismology, meteorology, physiology, gravimetry, radio communications and developing expertise in polar logistics.

Later, Brett-Knowles left the Navy and joined the Admiralty Surface Weapons Establishment where he was involved in several research and development projects. Following early retirement he became a consultant engineer and contributed to the development of products in the commercial aerospace industry. After retirement Brett-Knowles continued his life-long amateur radio hobby up until his death in 2015.