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William Edward Maxwell, born in 1846, was the son of Sir Peter Benson Maxwell, the Chief Justice of the Straits Settlements. Maxwell followed in his father's footsteps, training in the legal profession and working within colonial administration. In 1883, Maxwell was appointed Commissioner of Land Titles in the Straits Settlements, and, therefore, Member of the Executive and Legislative Councils of those Settlements. In 1889, he was appointed the Resident of Selangor. He became the Colonial Secretary of the Straits Settlements in 1892, and was acting governor from 30 August 1893 to 1 February 1894. During this time Maxwell was actively involved with the Singapore Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, serving as President, Vice-President, and Editor of the Journal, to which he contributed a number of articles. He was avidly interested in the Malay language.

In 1895, he was transferred to be Governor of the Gold Coast (Ghana). Maxwell died at sea, from malaria, near the Canary Isles, in 1897, and was buried at sea. He requested that all his private papers and diaries were burnt. Fortunately, this did not include the many manuscripts which he had collected. These were bequeathed to the Royal Asiatic Society.

Sir William Foster CIE was a British historiographer and civil servant who was Registrar and Superintendent of Records in the India Office. He was a member of the Hakluyt Society and an authority on the detailed history of early British relations with India and other countries in Asia.

William Harold Ingrams, OBE CMG, was a British colonial administrator who served in Zanzibar, Mauritius, the Aden Protectorate, the British Zone in post-WW2 Germany, and the Gold Coast. He is best known for his posting in Mukalla, together with his wife Doreen, where he oversaw the Hadhramaut region and brokered a truce between feuding tribes known as "Ingrams' Peace".

William James Adair Nelson, the elder son of H. Adair Nelson who was the original manager of His Majesty's Theatre, Aberdeen, was educated at Aberdeen Grammar School (1914-24). On leaving school he was apprenticed to chartered accountants Williamson & Dunn, qualifying with distinction in 1930 when he took up a series of appointments with London accounting firms, followed by five years in Colombo working for Ford, Rhodes & Thornton. He served in the Royal Artillery in the Middle East during WWII. In 1946 he was appointed Finance Inspector to the Ministry of Food in Colwyn Bay, later becoming Finance Officer to the National Coal Board. In 1948 he was appointed Treasurer and Assistant Secretary at Aberdeen University where he remained until his retirement in 1975.

During his five years in Sri Lanka he developed an interest in castles and artillery fortifications and after his retirement he wrote Dutch Forts of Sri Lanka published in 1984. He then went on to study Fort Jesus at Mombasa and his book of the same name was published posthumously in 1994. Nelson was an active member of the Fortress Study Group for which he wrote many articles.

William Manning was the Rector of Diss & Weeting.

William Roff (mainly known as Bill) was born in Bearsden, in East Dunbartonshire, Scotland. He joined the merchant navy in the late 1940s and worked for the British and Burmese Steam Navigation Company in Asia.. He settled in New Zealand, working as a journalist, and in 1952, he took up New Zealand's offer for anyone over 21 to enrol in tertiary education and studied part-time for a history degree and Masters at Victoria University, Wellington. He went to the Australian National University for his PhD, much of which was researched when living with a family in Kampung Jawa, near Kuala Lumpur. His thesis was subsequently published as The Origins of Malay Nationalism .

He taught at the University of Malaya from 1965-1969 before moving to the University of Colombia where he remained until his retirement. On retiring, he moved with his wife, Sue, to the East Neuk of Fife, Scotland, in the early 1990s, and was an honorary professorial fellow in Edinburgh University's Islamic and Middle Eastern department. Throughout his "retirement" he continued to supervise PhD candidates. He died in 2013, aged 84.