Margaret Gascoigne was born about 1877, in Nottinghamshire, England.

She was educated in England where she attended Lady Margaret Hall in Oxford. In 1913, she moved to Montreal, Quebec. She was an educator and in 1915, she founded a small school for six students in the study of her home - the modest but aspiring beginning of what would become known as The Study, a Canadian private education all-girls school. She became its first headmistress. The school's innovative mindset comes from her passionate belief in the education of young women and instilling in them curiosity, love of learning, and determination. She herself was described as a woman of “cultivated mind and exquisite taste, sane in her viewpoints, with a lively sense of humour”.

The school established the Margaret Gascoigne Scholarship, awarded to a top new incoming Grade 7 student who could not otherwise afford to attend The Study.

She died on November 16, 1934, in Quebec, Canada.

Clare Gass was born in Shubenacadie, Nova Scotia, on 18 March 1887. She was the of Robert Gass and his wife, Nerissa Miller and had three brothers, Blanchard, Gerald, and Cyril. As an adolescent, she attended the Church School for Girls, a private Anglican school in Windsor, Nova Scotia (later the Edgehill School). Three years after her graduation in 1905, she left home for Montreal to train as a nurse at the Montreal General Hospital School of Nursing from 1909 to 1912, afterwards taking up private nursing practice for three years. After a brief training period in Quebe, she left for Europe in May of 1915 as a Lieutenant nursing sister with the Canadian Army Medical Corps, No. 3 Canadian General Hospital (McGill). From 1915-1918, she was posted mainly in France, with some time spent stationed in Cliveden, England, and Rhyl, Wales, and served in multiple hospitals. She spent the year after the war on transport duty, tending to wounded soldiers returning home. She was demobilized in 1919 and returned to Montreal, where she left nursing to pursue social work. She worked in the Social Service Department of the Montreal General Hospital for 28 years before returning to her hometown. Gass died at the age of 81 at the Camp Hill Veterans' Hospital in Halifax, Nova Scotia, on 5 August 1968.