Herbert Henry Asquith, 1st Earl of Oxford and Asquith, was born on September 12, 1852, in Morley, England.

He was a British politician. He graduated from Oxford University and began to work as a barrister in 1876. In 1886, his interest in politics saw him successfully stand for election as a Member of Parliament for East Fife. He was promoted to Home Secretary in 1892, Chancellor of the Exchequer in 1905, and Prime Minister in 1908. Asquith's government was responsible for constitutional changes within British politics, including Lloyd George's People's Budget in 1909 and the Parliament Act 1911, which limited the powers of the House of Lords in passing legislation. Before the outbreak of World War I, Asquith introduced the Government of Ireland Act 1914, but later proved ineffectual as a war-time leader and resigned in 1916. Following the loss of his seat in the 1918 general election, Asquith remained the leader of the Liberal Party, was elected to represent Paisley in 1920 and became Earl of Oxford and Asquith in 1925. He resigned from the leadership of the Liberal party in 1926.

In 1877, he married Helen Kensall Melland (1854–1891), and in 1894, he remarried Emma Alice Margaret Tennant (1864–1945). He died on February 15, 1928, in Sutton Courtenay, Berkshire, England.

Lady Nancy Witcher Langhorne Astor, known as Viscountess Astor, was born on May 19, 1879, in Danville, Virginia.

She was an American-born British politician who was the first woman seated as a Member of Parliament (MP), serving from 1919 to 1945. Raised in Albemarle County, Virginia, by a Confederate veteran father who made his fortune in the railroad boom, she was a noted beauty in her time. She and her four sisters were collectively called the "Gibson Girls" from images created by her older sister Irene's husband, painter Charles Dana Gibson. She attended a finishing school in New York City, where she met her first husband, the socialite Robert Gould Shaw II (1872-1930). Moving to England in the early 1900s following a broken marriage, she quickly became a much-desired member of high society. After meeting Waldorf Astor (1879-1952), a child of the legendary Astor family, she married him in 1906 and established herself as mistress of Cliveden, the couple's Buckinghamshire estate. Playing hostess to a wide circle of upper-crust friends, she was also liked by the general populace because of her charitable activities which included setting up a World War I hospital for Canadian soldiers on her property, where she personally helped care for the wounded troops. When her husband succeeded to his father's title and seat in the House of Lords in 1919, Lady Astor stood as the Conservative candidate for Plymouth. Her effort was handicapped by her prohibitionism, lack of political experience, and knack for saying outrageous things, but was helped by her good looks and nature, willingness to moderate her views, and genuine devotion to her constituents. During most of her 25 years in Parliament, she proved popular and energetic, though with time her anti-Catholic and anti-Semitic views caused comment and the term "Cliveden Set" became, probably unjustly, a synonym for "Nazi." During World War II, she again established a hospital on her estate, but she was showing early signs of mental decline and reluctantly retired from Parliament in 1945. Thoroughly established in her adopted land, Nancy never lost her identity as an American and more especially as a Virginian, visiting frequently over the years, donating both money and artifact collections to the University of Virginia during the 1930s, and contributing materially to the 1929 restoration of Stratford Hall, Robert E. Lee's Westmoreland County birthplace and ancestral home.

Gradually isolated as her health deteriorated, she became a virtual recluse prior to her death on May 2, 1964, at her daughter's home in Grimsthorpe, England.

Waldorf Astor was born on May 19, 1879, in New York City, New York, the eldest son of William Waldorf Astor, 1st Viscount Astor (1848-1919).

He was an American-born English politician and newspaper proprietor, a member of the legendary Astor family. He spent much of his life travelling and living in Europe before his family settled in England in 1889. Waldorf attended Eton College and New College, Oxford, where he excelled as a sportsman, earning accolades for both fencing and polo. In 1905, while a passenger on an Atlantic voyage returning to Britain, Astor met Nancy Langhorne Shaw (1879-1964), a divorced woman with a young son (Robert Gould Shaw III). Coincidentally, both he and Mrs. Shaw shared the same birthdate, May 19, 1879, and both were American. After a rapid courtship, the two married in May 1906 and settled at the Astor family estate in Cliveden. Nancy encouraged her husband to launch a career in politics. He entered Parliament in 1910, acting as secretary to Prime Minister David Lloyd George in 1917. He retired from public office in 1919, his seat being taken by his wife, Nancy Witcher, Viscountess Astor, the first woman to sit in the British House of Commons. Astor was proprietor of The Observer, a London Sunday newspaper formerly owned by his father (to whose title he succeeded in 1919), from 1919 to 1945, when he turned it over to a trust. Astor became governor of the Peabody Trust and Guy's Hospital. His interest in international relations fuelled his involvement with the Royal Institute of International Affairs, and he served as its chairman from 1935 to 1949. He was also a considerable benefactor to the city of Plymouth and served as its Lord Mayor from 1939 to 1944. Astor was appointed Honorary Colonel of the Devonport, Plymouth-based Devonshire Heavy Brigade, Royal Artillery of the Territorial Army in 1929. An authority on agricultural problems, Astor became chairman in 1936 of a committee that was the progenitor of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations.

He died on September 30, 1952, in Cliveden, Buckinghamshire, England.

Maria Atallah is a Lebanese Canadian composer of contemporary classical music, a pianist, and a teacher, originally from Ottawa, Ontario. In 2015, she graduated from the University of Ottawa (B.A. in Music) under the instruction of John Armstrong and Frédéric Lacroix in composition and Andrew Tunis in piano. Maria was awarded a First Prize (Godfrey Ridout Awards) in the 2017 SOCAN Foundation Awards for Young Composers for Hymn to Inana and reached the semifinals at the 2014 International Sorodha Composition Competition based in Antwerp, Belgium, for her Three Pieces for Unaccompanied Cello. Other awards include the University of Ottawa’s Jean-Marie Beaudet Scholarship for outstanding potential in composition and a City of Ottawa YCPP grant. During the summer of 2016, Maria participated in the Orford Academy’s Creation Workshop, where she had the privilege of studying with composers Ana Sokolovic and Jean Lesage and collaborating with the academy’s contemporary ensemble under the direction of conductor Véronique Lacroix. Maria is currently (2017) pursuing a Master of Music in Composition at the Schulich School of Music with Jean Lesage. She was named Composer-in-Residence with the Schulich Singers, McGill’s premiere chamber choir directed by Jean-Sebastien Vallée. Maria’s research is inspired by the connection between ancient and contemporary music. Her thesis explores melodic and heterophonic writing articulated by electroacoustically inspired techniques. When she is not working on her music, Maria enjoys reading, training in the art of Muay Thai, and listening to hip-hop.

Arthur Turnour Atchison was born on May 16, 1848, in Bath, Somerset County, England.

He was educated in Brighton College and in 1866, he went to Christ’s College, Cambridge. During his residence at Cambridge, he acquired considerable distinction as an oarsman and a gymnast. There he received both his B.A. (1870) and his M.A. (1873) degrees in Civil engineering and became a member of the Association of Civil Engineers. He assisted in superintending the construction of the Alexandra Docks in Wales. After spending some time in the office of Mr. Bailey Denton, a surveyor and civil engineer, he started his own company in London in 1877. His chief work related to the preparation of reports and plans for parliamentary deposit in connection with railways, tramways, and schemes for water supply. He assisted in the construction of the Shanghai Waterworks and in the preparation of a scheme for the water supply of St. Vincent. In 1872, Atchison became a member of the British Association and in 1874, he undertook the duties of Secretary of Section G (Mechanics). He filled the same office again in 1877, and from that time continuously until 1886, accompanying his Section to Montreal in 1884. He contributed articles on mechanical subjects to Nature. He was also a Secretary of the Association at Birmingham, 1886; Manchester, 1887; Bath, 1888, and Newcastle, 1889. In 1875, he visited Ceylon and in 1881, Florida to report on some proposed work.

In 1876, he married Rachel Rogers (1853–1940). He died of consumption on April 21, 1891, in Mentone, Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur, France.

William Henry Atherton was born on November 15, 1867, in Salford, Lancashire, England.

He was a British-born Canadian writer, historian, academic, and scholar. He was educated at Stonyhurst College, a Roman Catholic school. Upon completing his degree in philosophy and theology, he began his career as a teacher in classics at Stonyhurst College and Beaumont College in Berkshire. In 1907, Atherton emigrated to Calgary, Alberta, Canada, to follow his elderly parents. For one year, he taught at a school in Alberta. In 1908, he relocated to Quebec, where he became a faculty member at Loyola College, an anglophone Jesuit college and Collège Notre-Dame du Sacré-Cœur from 1908 until 1918. In 1918, he became a professor of English literature at the Laval University of Quebec - Montreal annex, which became the University of Montreal, where he remained a faculty member until his retirement in 1948. He also taught at the Marguerite Bourgeoys College. For over twenty years, he served on the examining board for Latin and letters for medical students at McGill University, Laval University, and the Université de Montréal. He was an active member of Montreal's literary community, writing fifty books. He wrote the books “Montreal, 1535-1914” (3 vols., 1914), “Old Montreal in the early days of British Canada, 1778-1788” (1925) and “History of the harbour front of Montréal since its discovery by Jacques Cartier in 1535” (1935). He also edited the four-volume work, “The Storied Province of Quebec” (1931-32) and was responsible for writing the volume on Montreal. Atherton was the first in Canada to give broadcast conferences on literature, history, and social reforms, aired on CFCF, a Montreal radio station from 1945. He was a historian of the British Empire Society, the Canadian Catholic Historical Society, and the Catholic Historical Society of Montreal. Rue Atherton was named in his honour by the City of Montreal in 1955. The Williams H. Atherton Award for Excellence in History is presented on an annual basis at Loyola College.

He died unmarried on July 6, 1950, in Montreal, Quebec.

Emily Tweedale, born in 1831, was the oldest surviving daughter of Lancashire woolen manufacturer John Tweedale. She was married in Whitworth in 1855 to George Atkin, a Liverpool businessman, who had inherited his father’s tea company. Later his successful firm, Geo. Atkin & Co., also invested in asphalt byproducts. Her husband, a Liberal, was also a justice of the peace for neighboring Birkenhead, where the family lived. They had nine children of whom only four survived to adulthood, three having died in October, 1870. Of her two surviving sons, one, Hope Tweedale Atkin, married Sir William Dawson’s youngest daughter Eva in 1890 in Montreal; the couple then returned to Birkenhead where their first child was born in 1891.

George Atkin was born on October 23, 1822, in Blackburn, Lancashire, England. He made his fortune firstly as a tea merchant in Blackburn and secondly as a patent asphalt manufacturer in Liverpool (George Atkin & Co.). He also held the office of Justice of the Peace. In 1855, he married Emily Tweedale. Their son Hope Tweedale Atkin married Eva Dawson, George Mercer Dawson’s younger sister. He died on February 2, 1907, in Egerton Park, Cheshire, England.

Hope Tweedale Atkin was born in Tranmere, Cheshire, England in 1857. In 1890, he was in Montreal where he married Eva Dawson, George Mercer Dawson’s younger sister. They moved to England and had three children. Their son George Dawson Hope Atkin was a British Army 2nd Lieutenant. Eva passed away in 1915 in Wales. In 1916, he remarried Florence Cross in England. He died in 1921, in Birkenhead, Cheshire, England.