Udham Singh was a political activist from the Punjab. He was closely linked to communist activists and parties associated with the independence movement. During the early 1920s, after a brief three-month stay in Dover in 1921, he spent some time in the US, working in Detroit for the Ford Motor Company as a tool maker, before relocating to California. While in California, he established contacts with the Ghadar Party, which was dedicated to Indian freedom and independence. It had strong communist tendencies and was founded by South Asians living in America and Canada. He returned to India in 1927.

Back in the Punjab, Udham Singh was arrested for the illegal possession of firearms and sentenced to five years imprisonment. Singh was released from prison in October 1931. He managed to acquire a passport and made his way to London in 1934. In his application for his passport endorsement, he claimed to have been working as a sports outfitter in India, but since his arrival, living in Canterbury, Kent, he was unable to secure employment. There are suggestions that in this period he worked as a pedlar. During 1937, he worked as an extra in crowd scenes for Alexander Korda’s London Studios at Denham. During 1938, he worked as a carpenter at the RAF Station at Great Chessington, Gloucestershire, before becoming unemployed.

Udham Singh was well known in the Indian community at the time and also had contacts with Sikh pedlars living in Coventry, and Southampton. The objective of his stay in London was to find an opportunity to assassinate Michael O’Dwyer, the Governor of the Punjab in 1919, whom Singh held responsible for the Amritsar massacre, which had left a lasting impression on Singh after his brother and sister were killed there. Subsequently he had sworn to avenge the massacre. Singh had had a few opportunities to assassinate O’Dwyer but he was waiting for an occasion when his actions would have the most public impact.

On 13 March 1940, Singh shot O’Dwyer at a meeting of the East India Association and the Royal Central Asian Society at Caxton Hall. O’Dwyer was killed instantly and Lord Zetland, Lord Lamington and Louis Dane were also hit and wounded by the shots. Singh was immediately arrested and held in Brixton prison. There he staged a thirty-six day hunger strike, which resulted in him being forcibly fed through a tube. The assassination of O’Dwyer was reported widely in the press. In police statements and at court Singh gave his name as Mohamed Singh Azad as a symbol of Hindu-Muslim unity in the fight for Indian freedom. He was tried at the Old Bailey on 4 June 1940. Krishna Menon was part of his defence team. After a trial in which the prosecution presented a simple case and the defence of Singh was often sketchy and chaotic he was sentenced to death by hanging on 5 June and executed on 31 July at Pentonville Prison, where he was also buried. In 1974, his body was repatriated to India and cremated in his home village of Sunam.

Chuni Lal Katial was a doctor and politician. He moved to England in 1927 after graduating with a medical degree from Lahore University and working for five years with the Indian Medical Service in Iraq. He resigned his position to continue his training in public health. He studied in Liverpool and gained a diploma in tropical medicine. He later became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Tropical Medicine. On moving to London Katial established his own practice, first in Canning Town and later in Finsbury, attending mainly to working-class patients. He was a member of the Indian Social Club and the Indian Medical Association, and was involved with the Hindu Association of Europe.

He became heavily involved with the India League and was a supporter of Krishna Menon. During the second Round Table Conference in Autumn 1931, he put himself at the disposal of Gandhi, arranging meetings and effectively becoming his chauffeur. The meeting between Charlie Chaplin and Gandhi took place at his house.

He won a seat for Labour on Finsbury Borough Council in 1934 and served as Deputy Mayor from 1936 to 1938. He became the first South Asian mayor in 1938, a position he held until 1939. In 1946, he was elected to the London County Council to represent the borough. His work as Chairman of Finsbury’s public health committee had the most wide-reaching impact, with Katial being a driving force for the creation of a health centre for the borough, which opened in 1938. It concentrated under one roof a number of services and health provisions for the borough’s population, such as doctors’ surgeries, a TB clinic, a dentist and a women’s clinic. It was a trailblazer for similar provisions which formed an integral part of the National Heath Service, created in 1948.

During the Second World War, Katial worked as a civil defence medical officer and chaired the air raid precautions medical service and food control committee. He also provided training in first aid for the St John’s Ambulance Brigade. For his services to the borough he was made a freeman of Finsbury in 1948. The same year he returned to India and worked as Director-General of the Employees’ State Insurance Corporation of India until 1953. He returned to London in the 1970s and died in Putney in 1978.

Narayana Menon studied at Madras and Edinburgh Universities. He was a Carnegie Scholar in English from 1939 to 1941 at Edinburgh where he became active in student politics, joining the Executive Council of the Indian Student Association of Great Britain. He graduated with a PhD in English for his thesis on the development of William Butler Yeats, which was published in 1942. E. M. Forster reviewed it favourably on BBC radio, which marked the start of a life-long friendship. Menon became a Senior Carnegie Scholar in 1941-2.

Menon was an accomplished veena player and gave numerous performances, amongst other at a charity concert in aid of the Indian poor in the East End of London in 1938. He joined the Indian Section of the Eastern Service in 1942. George Orwell commissioned him to write talks and Z. A. Bokhari used him on many occasions as a talks reader in Hindustani and English. His work at the BBC was diverse and included broadcasts on literature and music. He participated with Mulk Raj Anand in the fifth instalment of Orwell’s poetry discussion programme ‘Voice’. He also wrote programmes on E. J. Thompson in the ‘Friends of Bengal’ Series, adapted Tagore’s ‘The King of the Dark Chamber’ for the Hindustani Service and the Prem Chand story ‘The Shroud’ for the series ‘Indian Play’. He was advisor and producer of the Music Programme for the BBC Eastern Service, a post he held until 1947. Menon was a committed supporter of the Indian independence movement. He was involved with V. K. Krishna Menon’s India League and regularly gave music recitals at its events. He had also close links with Rajani Palme Dutt and Krishnarao Shelvankar.

After his return to India he became Director of Broadcasting in Baroda State from 1947-8, before moving to All India Radio, for which he worked from 1948-63, later becoming its director general.