S. Raja Ratnam came to Britain to study law at King's College, London. With the outbreak of the Second World War, he was no longer able to continue his studies and turned to journalism and writing to earn his living. While in London he became politically active, taking an anti-imperial, anti-British stance. He joined the Left Book Club and became a Marxist. He published with the New India Publishing Company and in journals Asian Horizon, Life and Letters Today, and Indian Writing.

He returned to Singapore in 1948, initially working as a journliast and later in politics.

Sunder Kabadia was the foreign correspondent in London for the Indian newspaper Amrit Bazaar Patrika in the 1930s. During his time in London, he was involved with Krishna Menon's India League.

Una Marson was born and grew up in Jamaica. After her work on the editorial staff of the Jamaica Critic in 1926, she founded her own magazine The Cosmopolitan, which she also edited. Having established herself in Jamaica, Marson moved to London in 1932 to experience life outside Jamaica and to find a wider audience for her literary work. She lodged with Harold Arundel Moody, and became involved with the League of Coloured Peoples. She worked for the League as its unpaid Assistant Secretary, organising student activities, receptions, meetings, trips and concerts. During her stay in England from Marson continued to publish on feminist issues, as she had in Jamaica. She also became increasingly interested in discussions about race, eugenics and the colour-bar, focussing on the most pressing issues faced by black migrants living in Britain.

During her first stay in Britain, Marson organized, staged and compered an evening of entertainment at the Indian Students Hostel. The line-up included the American singer John Payne, the pianist Bruce Wendell and the Guyanese clarinettist Rudolph Dunbar. By 1937 she was editor of the League’s journal and its spokesperson, working closely with Moody. Marson was also a member of the International Alliance of Women for Equal Suffrage and Citizenship and the British Commonwealth League (BCL). At the latter she met Myra Steadman, daughter of the suffragette Myra Sadd Brown. The All India Women’s congress was affiliated with the BCL. During the period she also became involved with the Left Book Club and encountered the writings of Rabindranath Tagore.

After two years in Jamaica, Marson returned to Britain in 1938. In 1939 Marson was offered work by the BBC as a freelancer for the magazine programme 'Picture Page' to arrange interviews with visitors from the Empire. She also drafted three-minute scripts for the programme. After the outbreak of the Second World War, Marson lectured occasionally at the Imperial Institute and worked as a talks and script writer for the BBC. In 1941 she was appointed full-time programme assistant to the BBC Empire Service, where she hosted and coordinated the broadcasts under the title 'Calling the West Indies'.

In November 1942 George Orwell asked her to contribute to the six-part poetry magazine 'Voice', broadcast on the Indian Section of the BBC’s Eastern Service, with Marson taking part in the fourth programme dedicated to American poetry, which also featured William Empson. She read her poem ‘Banjo Boy’. In the December edition of the programme she appeared alongside M. J. Tambimuttu, T. S. Eliot, Mulk Raj Anand, Narayana Menon and William Empson. This led Una to devise a similar programme for the West Indies, titled 'Caribbean Voices', which in later years under the direction of Henry Swanzy would introduce authors such as George Lamming, Sam Selvon, V. S. Naipaul and Edward Kamau Braithwaite to a wider audience. The programme ran for fifteen years until 1958. She returned to Jamaica in 1945 and died in 1965 from a heart attack.

Political activist Amiya Nath Bose was from a family of radicals. He was the son of Sarat Chandra Bose who was interned in India in 1941 for Forward Bloc activities, and the nephew of the better known Subhas Chandra Bose, founder and leader of the Forward Bloc movement and notorious for his allegiance to the Axis powers during the Second World War. It is perhaps no surprise then that Amiya Nath Bose was already involved in student politics in India, before his departure for Britain.

Bose went to England to attend university in 1937. He studied economics at the University of Cambridge, gaining a Second Class, and was called to the Bar in 1941, living between London and Oxford. According to Indian Political Intelligence documentation, he was strongly influenced by his uncle who recommended reading for him, attempted to secure for him correspondentships on Indian newspapers, and put him in touch with Pulin Behari Seal with whom he began a close working relationship. Soon after his arrival in Britain, he made trips to Germany and Austria, which the government considered to be suspicious behaviour. Further, rumours circulated about his dislike of the English, and fellow students of the Oxford Majlis claimed he was opposed to the politics of both Nehru and Gandhi, perhaps considering them to be insufficiently radical in their approach to British imperialism. On the arrest of his father in India for associating with the Japanese, Bose became increasingly embittered and his views increasingly in line with those of his uncle. In the early 1940s, surveillance reports claim that Amiya Nath Bose was circulating his uncle’s ‘Manifesto’ and listening to his speeches on a radio purchased specifically for this purpose, and that he had a large photo of him in his room.

Amiya Nath Bose, with his close associate Seal, was key to the formation of the Committee of Indian Congressmen in 1942, assuming the position of General Secretary. Also closely involved with the organization were the Birmingham-based doctor Diwan Singh and Said Amir Shah. Bose's and Seal's alleged pro-Axis leanings, however, caused tensions within this organization, eventually causing the departure from it of numerous Indians, as well as strong opposition from without. In 1944 Bose moved to Birmingham, with Seal and his family, to escape the bombings. As a consequence the CIC became active in the Midlands and the north, recruiting from among the Indian workers based there. In August 1944, Bose, together with Drs Dutt and Vakil, organized the Indian Political Conference in Birmingham. Bose also established the Council for the International Recognition of Indian Independence in the USA as a sub-group of the CIC in order to spread his political message internationally.

Bose left for India on 2 November 1944, citing family reasons and the desire to obtain recognition for the CIC from the Indian National Congress, and delegating his responsibilities in Britain to Pulin Behari Seal and Said Amir Shah. Once in India, he was appointed special correspondent for Cavalcade.

Hsiao Ch'ien was born into a sinicized Mongolian family in Beijing, China, in 1910. His father died before his birth and his mother died when he was seven. In 1931, he enrolled at Furen University where he and a young American named William Allen founded the English magazine China in Brief. In 1933, he entered the Faculty of English at Yenching University but switched to the Faculty of Journalism later that year before graduating in 1936.

In 1939, just before the Second World War broke out, he travelled to England to teach Chinese at the School of Oriental and African Studies and serve as a foreign correspondent for Takung Pao. After the outbreak of war, he also served as a war correspondent. SOAS relocated to Cambridge during the Second World War so, after spending one night in London, Hsiao Ch'ien went to Cambridge. He was classified as an 'enemy alien' by the Home Office but this changed after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor and the Chinese became members of the grand alliance.

The BBC chose Hsiao Ch'ien to report back to China about the European war and the war effort of the English. Around this time, he became good friends with Mulk Raj Anand and supported the Indian call for independence. He voiced his support for the Indian cause in his weekly BBC broadcast but the censors deleted it before it went on air. Later George Orwell, who was head of the BBC's Far Eastern Division, invited him to do several special broadcasts to the Indians and Americans, but strictly on the subject of literature.

SOAS moved back to London in July 1940 and Ch'ien took up residence in a house that catered especially to Asians; he shared the ground floor flat with a Tamil named Rajarantu, who later became the first deputy premier and foreign minister of Singapore. In wartime London, Hsiao Ch'ien socialized with Bloomsbury Group affiliates like Bertrand Russell, Leonard Woolf and E. M. Forster, with whom he became close friends. According to his autobiography, he first met Forster at the PEN Club memorial meeting for Rabindranath Tagore held on 9 May 1941. However, according to India Office files, this meeting was hosted by Krishna Menon and the India League. The speakers were Edward Thompson, Hewlett Johnson (Dean of Canterbury), Nagendranath Gangulee (Tagore's nephew), Beatrix Lehmann (actress), Bhicoo Batlivala, Helen Kirkpatrick (Chicago Daily Tribune) and M. Maisky (Soviet ambassador). Other attendees included Mulk Raj Anand, Tahmankar, Sunder Kabadia, Krishnarao Shelvankar, Alagu Subramanian, Iqbal Singh, Sasadhar Sinha and Asha Bhattacharya led the singing of Tagore's songs.

In June 1944, Hsiao Ch'ien became a journalist for Dagongbao and set up an office in Fleet Street, London. Soon afterwards he was sent to France and other parts of Western Europe as a war correspondent; he covered the meeting of the United Nations in San Francisco, and attended the Potsdam Conference in July 1945.

Hsiao Ch'ien returned to Shanghai in 1946 and took up writing. He was considered right-wing by the Chinese government and banished to the countryside but later received redress. He died in 1999 in Beijing.

Barbara Castle spent her formative years in Bradford before attending the University of Oxford where she read philosophy, politics and economics. In 1937, after working for her local Labour Party in Hyde and as a columnist for the left-wing paper Tribune, she became a Labour Party councillor for the borough of St Pancras, where she worked alongside Krishna Menon.

Castle was elected as Labour MP for Blackburn in the 1945 General Election, becoming the youngest woman in the Commons and holding her seat for the next thirty-five years. In the 1960s, she held several ministerial offices, including Minister of Overseas Development, Minister of Transport, Secretary of State, and Secretary of State for Employment and Productivity.

G. V. Desani was born in Nairobi, Kenya, where his parents were working as wood merchants. The family returned to Karachi in 1914, where Desani was educated. He arrived in Britain at the age of 17, to escape from an arranged marriage. When he arrived in England in 1926, he was befriended by George Lansbury, who helped him acquire a reader's pass to the British Museum Reading Room. During this period he also found work as an actor in films. Furthermore, he worked as a foreign corespondent for a number of Indian newspapers and news agencies, such as the Associated Press, Reuters and The Times of India. He returned to India in 1928, touring Rajasthan, on which he subsequently lectured extensively for the Bombay, Baroda and Central India Railway Company.

Desani returned to Britain in the summer of 1939, only weeks before the outbreak of the Second World War.  He continued to work as a writer, journalist, and broadcaster for the Indian Section of the BBC Eastern Service and the Home Division. Desani broadcast both in Hindustani and in English and was praised for his wit, humour and ability as a script-writer. He also acted in radio plays. Furthermore, Desani lectured for the Ministry of Information and the Imperial Institute, regularly touring the regions and speaking to soldiers, schools and university colleges. These lectures featured as one of his Talks Programmes in Hindustani, titled 'My Lecture Tours' (broadcast 8 May 1943). They were widely praised and drew large audiences.

During this period, he wrote his best known work of fiction, the experimental novel All About Mr. Hatterr (later republished and revised as All About H. Hatterr). On publication the book was very well received by critics. For example, T. S. Eliot praised it as a remarkably original book: 'It is amazing that anyone should be able to sustain a piece of work in this style and tempo and at such length'. The critic C. E. M. Joad compared the book to 'Joyce and Miller with a difference: the difference being due to a dash of Munchhausen and the Arabian Nights'.  With its inventive use of language and its endorsement of hybridity, the work is a trailblazer for the fiction of Salman Rushdie, who has acknowledged its influence.

While in England, Desani also published his ‘poetic play’ Hali, as well as short fiction, sketches and essays. Shortly after the publication of Hali, Desani left Britain and returned to India. He was offered a position as cultural ambassador for Jawaharlal Nehru, however he did not take this up. In 1959 he travelled to Burma to study Buddhist and Hindu culture. During the 1950s and 1960 he wrote a regular column, 'Very High, Very Low', as well as articles for The Times of India and Illustrated Weekly of India. In 1967 he was appointed Professor of Philosophy at the University of Texas, Austin, a position he held until his retirement in 1978. He spent the final years of his life in Dallas.

Born in 1884, St Nihal Singh was a journalist. He lived and travelled through the USA, Canada and Japan as well as living in Britain with his wife, Cathleyne. He was educated at Punjab University. Saint Nihal Singh was a prolific writer for American, British and Indian publications.