Poonoosamy Ruthnam Pather

Poonoosamy Ruthnam Pather (PR) was born in Mauritius in 1895. His grandfather settled in that country after emigrating from Tanjore in India in the 1840s. PR's father was born in Mauritius and his mother was a Mauritian citizen. His father made his first trip to Natal in 1891 and worked as a jeweller in Durban for a few years before returning to Mauritius. PR along with his parents and brother, PA Pather immigrated to South Africa in 1903.

Vivienne Ncakeni

Vivienne Ncakeni was born in Brakpan, she was educated in the Transvaal and Natal and trained as a teacher. She returned to Brakpan to teach in the late 1930s and became one of the most outspoken members of the Transvaal African Teachers\' Association, serving on the TATA executive and on the action committee that planned the teachers\' campaign for better wages and conditions in the early 1940s.

William Mini

Born in New Brighton, Port Elizabeth, he was aged 37 at the time of the trial. He had a magnificent bass voice, and \'in the Fort his voice rolled above the combined effort of all the others, singing a song he himself had introduced: Iza unyatele Afrika, Strydom shoo…("Strydom, beware, Africa will trample you").\' He was a veteran of the Defiance Campaign, who served three months for breaking railway apartheid regulations, and lost his job as a packer in a battery factory because of his arrest. At the time of the trial he had been taking part in the Sophiatown bus boycott.

Nathaniel James Merriman

Born in Marlborough, England, on the 4th of April 1809, died in Grahamstown on the 16th of August 1882. Educated at Marlborough, at Winchester College and Oxford (where he formed a lifelong friendship with W. E. Gladstone), Merriman was appointed curate of Street (Somersetshire) in 1840. In 3847 he offered his services to Bishop Gray and was appointed the first archdeacon of Grahamstown, with the task of supervising the Anglican Church in the entire eastern region of the Cape Colony.

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