William Alexander Duncan Drummond was born in Cape Town on 16 September 1901 where his father was then working for the Anglo-American Tobacco Company. The family later returned to England. Having initially studied engineering and lost two fingers of his left hand in an accident at the Liverpool ship

Benjamin William Rycroft was born in a small village in Yorkshire in 1902. In his youth he learned to play the organ well enough to do so in his parish church and thus was mildly attracted to the ministry as a profession. Instead, he studied medicine in St Andrew's University (1919-1924) and after q