Elspeth Grahame née Thomson (1862-1946) was the daughter of Robert William Thomson (1822-1873), an engineer and inventor, and his wife Clara Hertz (1835/6-1888), the daughter of a diamond merchant. Thomson - who invented the pneumatic tyre and floating dock among other things - died in 1873 and in 1875, Clara married John Fletcher Moulton, a barrister and Liberal MP. In 1897, Elspeth met the author Kenneth Grahame (1859-1932) in London and they were married on 22 July 1899 in Fowey, Cornwall. They had one son, Alastair ('Mouse'), born on 12 May 1900. A series of bedtime stories told by Kenneth to Alastair is said to have provided the basis for Wind in the Willows (1908): Elspeth published her own account of the book's origin, First Whisper of the Wind in the Willows in 1944. Alastair, however, struggled at school and university and in 1920, during his second year at Christ Church, Oxford, he was killed by a train at Port Meadow: though it was maintained it was an accident, it was likely to have been a suicide. After Kenneth Grahame's death in 1932, Elspeth was protective of his memory, supervising Patrick Chalmers' biography of Grahame, Kenneth Grahame: life, letters and unpublished work (1933) and donating many of his manuscripts to the Bodleian Library. She died on 19 December 1946.

Mary Margaret ('Margery') Cook was born in April 1895, the daughter of Prebendary Cook of Wells, Somerset. She married Leonard Coleman (d.1943), a vicar, in August 1920. In 1937, she published The Kenneth Grahame Day Book. Coleman died in 1943 and Mary married Rt Rev. Nathaniel William Newnham Davis (1903-1966) in 1948, when he was Bishop of Antigua.

Peter Green (1924-2024) was an English classical scholar, historian and writer. Born in London, he attended Charterhouse and, after serving in the Royal Air Force in the Second World War, Trinity College, Cambridge. He spent his early career as a historical novelist and journalist; he later taught in Athens before moving to the United States in 1971. He taught Classics at the University of Texas at Austin and became Dougherty Centennial Professor of Classics in 1982 (and emeritus professor from 1997); he was later an adjunct professor at the University of Iowa. He died in Iowa City in 2024, aged 99.