Harold Vernon Ingram was born in Durham on 6 June 1902, the second child and elder son of William Jesse Ingram, a headmaster, university lecturer and bursar of Bede College, and of Eleanor Ingram (née Coates). From school he went to the College of Medicine of Durham University and qualified in 1924.

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