Alfred Charles William Harmsworth, Viscount Northcliffe, was born on July 15, 1865, at Sunnybank, Chapelizod, near Dublin, Ireland.

He was a British journalist and newspaper and publishing magnate. He was educated at Henley House School, Hampstead (1878), where he published the school magazine. By 1880, he was an occasional reporter on the Hampstead and Highgate Express. He also contributed articles to The Cyclist and Wheeling, The Globe, the Morning Post, and the St. James's Gazette. A bout of pneumonia brought on by cycling from Bristol in the rain and with insufficient food resulted in his doctor's ordering him in 1885 to leave London. He moved to Coventry, where he worked for Iliffe & Sons and wrote two books, "One Thousand Ways to Earn a Living" and "All about Railways." Harmsworth was an early developer of popular journalism. He bought several failing newspapers and made them into an enormously profitable newsgroup, appealing to the general public. He began with The Evening News in 1894 and then merged two Edinburgh papers to form the Edinburgh Daily Record. In 1896, he began publishing the Daily Mail in London and, in 1903, he founded the Daily Mirror, relaunched in 1904 as the Illustrated Daily Mirror. He rescued the financially failing Observer (1905), The Times (1908) and acquired The Sunday Times (1908). Northcliffe had a powerful role during the First World War, especially by criticizing the government regarding the Shell Crisis of 1915. In 1918, he became a Director of Propaganda in Enemy Countries, a role that used his journalistic skills. In 1905, Harmsworth was raised to the peerage as Baron Northcliffe, and, in 1918, he was created Viscount Northcliffe, of St. Peter's in the County of Kent, for his service as the director of the British war mission in the United States. The subsidiary of the Amalgamated Press, the Educational Book Company, published "The Harmsworth Self-Educator," "The Children's Encyclopedia," and "Harmsworth's Universal Encyclopaedia."

In 1888, he married Mary Elizabeth Milner (1868–1963), and they had no children together. He had an illegitimate son with Louisa Jane Smith (1864-1931) and another three children with Kathleen Wrohan (1873-1923). He died on August 14, 1922, in London, England.

Elizabeth Jane (Rusty) North was born on December 10, 1921, in Buffalo, New York.

She was an American poet, painter, and printer. She married a photographer John Livingston North ( -1974). Despite the loss of her right hand in a printing press accident, Rusty’s determination and courage enabled her to learn to write and paint with her left hand and to raise her five children. She was a dedicated pacifist who actively engaged together with her husband in antiwar and civil rights demonstrations during the 1950s and early 1970s. In 1970, they settled in Port Townsend, Washington, where they joined the Port Townsend Worship Group. In 1983, she joined University Friends Meeting and in 2002, she became a founding member of the new Port Townsend Friends Meeting. Rusty served on several Meeting committees, including the Committee for Peace and Social Concerns. Under the name "Sagittarius Press" Rusty also published her own poetry and that of others in small chapbooks on a hand-operated letter-set press. She returned to school and received a graduate degree in psychology from Antioch University when she was 60. She published books of poems "Port Townsend poems" (1976), "Christmas Past (1977), "Little Old Lady in Tennis Shoes" (1990) and "Fog" (1992).

She died on September 12, 2010, in Port Townsend, Washington.

Ernest Dressel North was a prominent antiquarian bookseller, born in New York in 1858. He opened his shop in 1902 and retired in 1944. He potentially had the world's largest collection on Charles Lamb and had prominent clients, including Henry C. Folger. In March 1920 he had the winning bid on the original manuscript for Shelley’s “Julian and Maddalo, a Conversation”, paying over $16,000.

The North West Company was a fur-trading organization formed over the course of the first decades following the British conquest of Canada. It was not a chartered company like the Hudson's Bay Company, but a syndicate of a number of individual fur-trading firms. Later, however, it came to be dominated by the Montréal partnership of McTavish, Frobisher and Co. (later McTavish, McGillivrays and Co.). Although there are references to a North West Company as early as 1776, the first documented union of interests was a 16-share concern formed in 1779. However, a new agreement drafted in 1783 is commonly considered to have inaugurated the Company. The expansion of the North West Company's trade was rapid: in the person of Alexander Mackenzie, it reached to the Arctic Ocean in 1789 and to the Pacific in 1793. After 1812, the Company faced intense competition from the Earl of Selkirk, who had acquired a controlling interest in the Hudson's Bay Company. Although the North West Company defeated Selkirk in the courts, its financial position had deteriorated by 1820, and in 1821 it was absorbed by the Hudson's Bay Company.