Reginald Ernest Moreau was a distinguished ornithologist, but with no official or academic post. He was born in Kingston upon Thames and entered the Civil Service (Army Audit Office) from Kingston Grammar School in 1914, serving in Britain and Egypt. He was later, 1928-1946, in the Colonial Service Agricultural Research Unit in Amani, Tanganyika, pursuing his ornithological studies in his spare time. On his retirement from the Civil Service in 1946, he returned to England and devoted his time wholly to ornithology, editing Ibis, 1947-1960, and working at the Edward Grey Institute, Oxford, 1947-1966.

Beryl Patricia (Pat) Hall (née Woodhouse) was born in Epsom, Surrey. Her ambition had been to study mathematics at Cambridge, but was unable to due to the opposition of her parents. In 1939 Pat joined the Women's League and taught ambulance drivers in local Air Raid Precautions. During the Second World War she became engaged to Lieutenant John Hall, who was posted to the Middle East, and she joined the Mechanical Transport Corp, serving in South Africa and Egypt. She and John married in 1941, though the marriage had failed by the end of the war. An interest in birds that had begun during holidays to Cornwall was developed while she was in Africa, and in 1947 she took up a role at the Natural History Museum in London, joining collecting expeditions to Africa. Her work yielded numerous papers, including and An Atlas of Speciation in African Passerine Birds (with R. E. Moreau, 1970). Pat was a member of the Committee of the British Ornithologists’ Club from 1955 to 1964 and an Assistant Editor of Ibis from 1971 to 1973. She received the Gill Memorial Medal and the Stamford Raffles Award in 1971 as well as a British Ornithologists' Union medal in 1973.