John Cornelius Blair Serjeant was a consultant general surgeon and urologist at Shotley Bridge General Hospital, County Durham. He was born at Masham, Yorkshire, on 17 January 1917, the son of Robert Serjeant, a surveyor of HM Customs and Excise, and Agnes, his wife, formerly Blair, who was a teache

Norman Logie was born in Glasgow on 1 January 1904, the son of a general practitioner who was a Glasgow Honours graduate; his mother had been a nurse at Belvidere Fever Hospital, Glasgow. He was educated at Glasgow High School, but his University was Aberdeen, the family having moved north to Rothes