Claude John Eyre Auchinleck was born into a military family in 1884. He attended the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst and passed with marks just high enough for a career in the Indian Army. In 1904, he joined the 62nd Punjabis. Auchinleck was renowned for his rapport with Indian soldiers and showed an aptitude for learning Indian languages which made him very popular among ordinary Indian soldiers. During the First World War, Auchinleck served as a captain in Egypt, defending the Suez Canal, before being stationed in Mesopotamia, where he was subsequently promoted to the rank of Brigade Major. After the end of the war, his career stalled. He attended the Imperial Defence College in 1927, and was an instructor at the Staff College in Quetta from 1930 to 1932. In 1933, he became Commander of the Peshawar Brigade, and in 1936 Deputy Chief of the General Staff in India.

Auchinleck was heavily involved in the modernization of the Indian Army and very much in favour of Indianisation, replacing British Officers with Indian officers. He was sent to England in 1940 to help with the preparation of the 4th corps, which was poasted to France, before moving to Norway. Here his fraught relationship with Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty, emerged, with Auchinleck insisting on more supplies, artillery and air cover. Auchinleck’s insistence was correct as the under-equipment and mismanagement of the campaign led to the defeat of Norway. On his return, Auchinleck was instructed with the formation of the 5th corps for the defence of the south of England in case of a German invasion. In July 1940, he was promoted to the rank of general officer. His antagonistic relationship with Montgomery, who served under him then, dates back to his time at southern command. In November 1940, Auchinleck was promoted to the rank of General and appointed Commander in Chief of the Indian Army as India’s strategic importance in the war effort increased. Churchill later decided to appoint Auchinleck as Commander in Chief of the Middle East to relieve Wavell, swapping their roles in June 1941 after the failure of Operation ‘Battleaxe’. Churchill was impatient for a successful campaign in North Africa, however Auchinleck forewarned him that the inadequate equipment and training of the soldiers would make the success of such an operation doubtful. Auchinleck’s perseverance led to the successful operation at Tobruk in November 1941. However, a series of misjudgments on his part resulted in a crushing defeat in June 1942, with the British Army being pushed back to El Alamein. This led to Churchill’s decision to remove him from his post, replacing him with Montgomery.

Auchinleck returned to the post of Commander in Chief of the Indian Army on Wavell’s appointment as Viceroy of India in June 1943. Auchinleck organized the expansion of the Indian Army as well as the provision of bases, troops and supplies for the campaign in Burma to counter the Japanese attacks. In 1946, Auchinleck was promoted to Field Marshall. Auchinleck remained in India until 1947 and was in charge of preparing the Indian army for the handover of power. Auchinleck was committed to the idea of a united India and had hoped that the Indian Army would remain undivided; however, he quickly became aware that partition and the division of the army were inevitable. Auchinleck needed to ensure that the command structures remained intact once all British officers returned to the UK after independence. His efforts were hampered by Mountbatten’s decision to bring the date of independence and partition forward from 1 June 1948 to August 1947. The division of the Indian Army as well as religious conflict within the army itself rendered it ineffectual to counter the partition violence and to restore law and order. Auchinleck stayed on as Supreme Commander of the Indian and Pakistan forces after independence. As his relationship with Mountbatten grew increasingly hostile, he was asked to resign in September 1947. He left India in December 1947. In 1968, he retired to Marrakesh where he died in 1981.

Born in 1891, Bhupinder Singh was put on the throne of Patiala State in 1901, a year after his father died. Patiala State was a Sikh Princely State in the Punjab. Bhupinder Singh was educated at Aitchison Chief's College in Lahore and was a talented polo and cricket player. In 1911, the Maharaja of Patiala captained the India XI that toured England. He played for various teams in India and as a member of the Marylebone Cricket Club for the season 1926/7. He contributed generously to the Indian Gymkhana Club in London which catered for Indian students and which with his donation was able to move to Osterley Park. He also founded the Sikh Dharamsala in Putney in 1911 (which later moved to Shepherd's Bush).

The famous ‘Patiala Necklace’, one of the most expensive pieces of jewellery ever made, was created for him by the house of Cartier in 1928. Besides his passions for beautiful women (he married ten times and had eighty-eight children) and sparkling gems, the Maharaja’s addiction to the prestigious Rolls-Royce Motor car practically kept the firm in business. In his garage at Moti Bagh, Patiala, the Maharaja had forty-four Rolls-Royces, all especially built for him.

Bhupinder Singh was extremely loyal to the British empire. In October 1914, he left Patiala with his Imperial Service Troops and headed for the Western Front to command his troops there for the British. However, on the journey over he was beset by ill-health and had to return to India. He did though donate his troops to the First World War and spearheaded a large recruitment drive for volunteers. Patiala State sent more than 28,000 men to fight in the war and their involvement encouraged other Sikhs in the Punjab to volunteer; nearly 89,000 Sikhs were involved in the war. The total financial contribution of Patiala to the war in terms of material and cash was Rs 1,17,16,822/6/2. Singh was a member of the Imperial War Council in 1918. After the Armistice, he was appointed Honorary Colonel of 1/140th Patiala Infantry, and had already been appointed Honorary Colonel of the 15th Sikhs. Singh was given Freedom of the City of Cardiff in 1918 and Freedom of Edinburgh in 1935. He was given the keys to Brighton in 1921 and unveiled the Southern Gateway of the Royal Pavilion there in October 1921, a gift from Indian princes for the kindness of Brighton to their wounded soldiers during the war.

Singh was awarded the GCIE in 1911, the GBE in 1918, the GCSI in 1921 and the GCVO in 1922. He also served as a representative of India at the League of Nations assembly in 1925. In 1919, during the 'Amritsar Massacre', the Maharaja gave aid to the British. Sir Michael O'Dwyer, Governor of the Punjab, remembers this assistance in his autobiography and his obituary of the Maharaja for The Times. His eldest son, Yadavindra Singh, succeeded him to the throne when he died in March 1938 in Patiala.

Frederick Duleep Singh was the son of the deposed and exiled Maharaja Duleep Singh of the Punjab. Born in Kensington and bought up at the family home in Elveden, Suffolk, Frederick (or Freddy) was educated at Eton School and then studied history at Magdalene College, Cambridge. Like his father, he enjoyed shooting and country estates. In 1906, he rented Blo Norton Hall in Norfolk, and lived there for the rest of his life (twenty years). In the summer of 1906, Virginia Woolf had stayed at Blo Norton Hall and it provided the setting for her short story, 'The Journal of Miss Joan Martyn'. Frederick Duleep Singh became an amateur archaeologist and historian, specializing in East Anglia and its gentry. He contributed to a number of local periodicals and built up a collection of English artefacts in his home. In 1921, he bought Ancient House in Thetford and gave it to the town as a museum. His collections were donated to Thetford Museum, the Museum of Inverness and Norfolk Record Office.

Frederick joined the Suffolk yeomanry as Second Leutenant in 1893 and was promoted through the ranks. In 1901, he was transferred to the Norfolk yeomanry as Major. In 1909, he resigned from the yeomanry, but at the outbreak of war in 1914 he rejoined. He served in France with training units from 1917 to 1919, but saw no action.

Frederick Duleep Singh did not visit India and was a conservative, Christian loyalist. He was a member of a number of societies, including the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings, the Norfolk and Norwich Archaeological Society (President in 1925–6), the Norfolk Archaeological Trust, the London Society of East Anglians (President), the Royal Norfolk Agricultural Association,  and the Diss Choral Society, and belonged to White's and the Carlton Club in London.

William Rothenstein was a renowned artist and art administrator, who was interested in various forms and origins of art.

On 4 February 1910, Sir George Birdwood chaired a lecture given by E. B. Havell to the Royal Society of Arts and commented that India had no fine arts. Outraged, Rothenstein, with 12 other signatories (including T. W. Rolleston and George Russell (AE)), wrote a letter to The Times, published on 28 February 1910, to dispute the idea that India had no fine art. Subsequently, Havell and Rothenstein were instrumental in the foundation of the India Society, which was based in London to promote Indian art.

Rothenstein travelled to India in 1910 with Christiana Herringham and met Rabindranath Tagore in Calcutta. When Tagore visited London in 1912, Rothenstein introduced him to literary circles. Tagore was often found at Rothenstein's house in Hampstead, North London. Rothenstein urged the India Society to publish Tagore's Gitanjali in 1912, which won Tagore the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913.

Rothenstein went to the Western Front in 1917 as Official War Artist. With these duties, he was unable to comply with the request from Kedar Nath Das Gupta and Laurence Binyon to decorate the scenery for their production of Sakuntala in 1919. Rothenstein remained an active member of the India Society in his lifetime, Indian art was an influence on his own paintings, and he was a key figure at memorial meetings for Tagore in 1941. He was knighted in 1931 and died in 1945.

Born in 1884, St Nihal Singh was a journalist. He lived and travelled through the USA, Canada and Japan as well as living in Britain with his wife, Cathleyne. He was educated at Punjab University. Saint Nihal Singh was a prolific writer for American, British and Indian publications.

Indra Lal Roy was born in Calcutta to father Piera Lal Roy and mother Lolita. He attended Colet Court Preparatory School, the feeder school for St Paul's, from the age of ten and then went on to St Paul's School, London. Roy played rugby and was captain of swimming. At St Paul's, he was in the school cadet force from September 1914 until March 1917 when he left to join the Royal Flying Corps.

Despite wearing glasses, he was declared fit for military service to fight in the First World War. Roy was appointed to a temporary commission as a second lieutenant in the Royal Flying Corps in July 1917. He was posted to the 56 Squadron in October 1917 in France.

On 6 November 1917, Roy crashed his aircraft and returned to Britain for more training. On 19 June 1918, he returned to France where he joined Captain George McElroy's 40 Squadron. He proved himself an excellent fighter pilot, but on 22 July 1918, when on observation patrol over the trenches, he was shot down over Carvin, France.

In September 1918, Roy was posthumously awarded a Distinguished Flying Cross. He is buried in Estevelles communal cemetary, Pas-de-Calais, France.

Herbert Read was born on 4 December 1893 at Muscoates Grange Farm in Yorkshire. In 1912, he studied law and economics at Leeds University. From 1915, he served in the army and was promoted to captain by the end of the First World War. After the war he became a convinced pacifist.

While on leave in London during the War, he came into contact with key figures of London’s literary and artistic circles such as T. S. Eliot, Edith Sitwell, Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis. After 1918, he continued his career as a poet and literary critic. From 1923 he contributed regularly to T. S. Eliot’s journal Criterion. He published with Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s Hogarth Press and became literary adviser to Heinemann and Routledge and Kegan Paul in 1937.

In the 1930s, Read befriended Mulk Raj Anand and, according to Anand’s Conversations in Bloomsbury (1981), the two of them met with Eric Gill and Stanley Morrison to talk about art. Anand describes Read thus: ‘strikingly tall, with tousled hair, sallow face, mongoloid high cheekbones, and soft shy eyes’ (p.112).

Read also befriended M. J. Tambimuttu, the founder-editor of Poetry London. Read contributed to the first edition of Poetry London (1939), Tambimuttu’s Poetry in Wartime (1942) and to the Festschrift for Marianne Moore’s Seventy-Seventh Birthday (1964), edited by Tambimuttu.

By the 1950s and 60s, Read had established himself as a renowned critic on literature and the arts, his reputation resting on several major works. He died on 12 June 1968.

Diwan Tulsi Das taught Hindustani at the University of Aberdeen. Das arrived in Britain in 1900 as a student in medicine. He eloped with the daughter of Dr Charles Maxwell Muller and settled with her in Aberdeen. He took up a number of professions, including taxi driving, and served in the army during the First World War, before being appointed Lecturer in Hindustani at the University of Aberdeen in the 1920s.

Kamal Athon Chunchie was a Methodist minister and the founder of ‘The Coloured Men’s Institute’ in Tidal Basin Road, Victoria Docks, Canning Town. He was the eldest of nine children born in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) to Muslim parents of Malay origin. His father was one of the leading Muslim figures in Ceylon. He was educated at Kingswood College, Kandy. In 1915 he enlisted in the public schools battalion, 3rd Middlesex regiment, joining around 28,500 other South Asian troops in the trenches. During the First World War, he saw active service on the Western Front, in Italy and Salonika. Chunchie converted to Christianity while convalescing in an Army hospital in Malta. He arrived in London on 6 March 1918. Towards the end of the war, while stationed in Chatham, he met Mable Tappen, who was stationed there as a member of the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps. They married in July 1920 and had one daughter, Muriel.

In December 1921, Chunchie began to work as a missionary for the Wesleyan Methodist Missionary Society among the Asian, Chinese, African and Caribbean sailor community in the Canning Town area of London. He initially took up a position at the Queen Victoria Seamen's Rest in Poplar, which was affiliated with the Wesleyan Methodist Missionary Society. He would visit the local residents and the seamen population in ships, hospitals, and lodging-houses, preaching to them and providing material assistance. His missionary and philanthropic work also extended to the small ethnic minority community resident in the docklands, many married to white partners, and their children, as well as colonial and Indian students. Chunchie spoke out against racism and the plight of the dispossessed in the East End which he saw as incompatible with Britain's Christian values.

In 1923, in a rented hall in Swanscombe Street, Chunchie founded the Docklands' first black Wesleyan Methodist church, and a Sunday school. In his efforts to counter racist discrimination of the black and Asian population he lobbied for the establishment of an organization that catered for London’s East End’s black and Asian community, a plan that came to fruition in 1926 with the establishment of the Coloured Men’s Insitute (CMI) in Tidal Basin Road, Canning Town. It was a religious, social and welfare centre for sailors and local residents with Chunchie as the responsible pastor and warden. From 1926 until the centre's demolition as part of the West Ham Road widening scheme in 1930, Chunchie worked tirelessly as a fund-raiser to keep the centre open, addressing Methodist gatherings all over the UK. He was an accomplished speaker, invoking the Christian ideals of equality and brotherhood to combat racism, unmasking the hypocrisy of Christian England and its attitudes to race. Chunchie was well-respected and well-liked by the black community in East London; however he faced criticism from the East End Branch of the Universal Negro Improvement Association, who accused Chunchie of patronizing black people and fostering segregation. Chunchie was also criticized by the Methodist Mission House over his management of the CMI. After 1930, no plans were drawn up to reopen the CMI elsewhere and Chunchie worked as a missionary deputation in the home church from 1930 to 1932.

Chunchie, however, would continue to work tirelessly to relaunch the CMI as an independent organization. With the support of a multi-racial council that included Dr Harold Moody of the League of Coloured Peoples, Professor R. K. Sorabji, and Lady Lydia Anderson and dedicated volunteers, amongst them his wife, he worked hard to build a new CMI. However, due to a lack of funding this never came to fruition, which meant that Chunchie had to use the limited facilities of the Presbyterian church in Victoria Dock Road as the centre and his own home as a base to continue the numerous pastoral, charitable and religious activities of the CMI.

Chunchie played cricket for Essex, was a member of the Royal Empire Society (from 1935), and was vice-president of the League of Coloured Peoples (1935–7). During the Second World War he was a member of the voluntary firefighting party in Lewisham, South London. In 1943 he also attended meetings of Swaraj House. He died on 28 June 1953 after a heart attack. He is buried in Hither Green cemetery.