First Watson Gordon chair of fine art at Edinburgh University (first chair of fine arts in the British Isles) 1880-1930; early monuments preservationist. Brown's father was a minister, James Baldwin Brown (1820-1884) and his mother, Elizabeth Leifchild (Brown). His uncle was the sculptor Henry Leifchild (1823-1884). After attending Uppingham School, he earned a scholarship to Oriel College, Oxford, in 1869. He graduated with a degrees in classics in 1871 and literae humaniores (humanities) in 1873.

Iconographer, archaeologist and preservationist. Didron initially studied for the church at the seminaries at Meaux and Rheims. In 1826 he moved to Paris in order to study Greek and Latin, working as a teacher. In Paris he met Victor Hugo (1805-1885) in 1831 who encouraged him to study the medieval buildings of Normandy. Didron became fascinated with archaeological method for the middle ages, a discipline developing in France since the establishment of the Société Royale des Antiquaires de France in 1814.

Architectural Historian and preservationist; diarist. Lees-Milne was eldest son of George Crompton Lees-Milne (1880-1949), a Lancashire mill-owner, and Helen Christina Bailey (Lees-Milne) (1884-1962). He attended Lockers Park boarding school (Hempstead Hertfordshire), Eton College, 1921-1926, and Grenoble University, 1927-1928, before entering Magdalen College, Oxford. He graduated in modern history in 1931. A chance discovery of a brutish renter desecrating a William Kent building in north of Oxford purportedly led Lees-Milne to vow to preserve the country houses of England.

Scholar of classical Greek and Roman art; specialist in preservation and restoration of ceramic artwork. Züchner studied archaeology beginning in 1925 at the universities in Berlin and Dresden and ultimately writing his dissertation at Christian-Albrecht-Universität, Kiel, completed in 1934. His dissertation was on Greek mirrors. That year he was hired as Scientific Assistant at the Staatlichen Museum in Berlin. There he issued a book on the Berlin Maned krater in 1938. In 1939 he moved to the Archaeological Institute in Leipzig.