Derek Davis was born on 3 May 1945 and educated at Clifton College, a school renowned for its excellence in classical and modern language teaching. By 1962 he had a Russian A level, had visited Russia and, armed with Hindi-Russian dictionaries and conversational phrasebook, was at Scindia School, Gwalior, where he taught Shakespeare, Dickens and Gerald Durrell to 13-year-olds who would go on to become public servants, generals, admirals, businessmen and academics. He then went up to Balliol College, Oxford, where he read Greats.
During the Oxford long vacation of 1965, he embarked on an overland trek to India via Erzurum and back with his Balliol friend, Christopher Bayly. An unexpected consequence was that the latter changed his proposed research subject from Russian and Eastern European history to work instead (with Professor Sarvepalli Gopal) on South Asia.
His career in the civil service left little time for Pushkin, but on his retirement, he continued to work on his translations of the History of Pugachev and the Journey to Arzrum which was published by the Royal Asiatic Society as a supplement to their Journal in 2022. He also served on the Society's Council and its Finance and Investment Committee.
He died on 8 July 2023.
Annemarie von Gabain (7 April 1901—15 January 1993) was a German scholar who dealt with Turkic studies, both as a linguist and as an art historian. She was born in Morhang and received primary and secondary education in Mainz and Brandenburg. She went to Berlin for university education. She took courses on mathematics, sciences, Sinology and Turcology, completing her dissertation in Sinology. Von Gabain then studied Turcology with Johann Wilhelm Bang Kaup who was the founder of the Berlin school of Turkic studies. Later, she began to work on the Old Turkic materials kept at the Academy of Sciences in Berlin.
Von Gabain was particularly interested in the question of the extent to which the religious ideas of the Central Asian peoples had been influenced by Zoroastrianism or other Iranian beliefs, and this perspective is reflected in several of her publications but she was also interested in more general Turkic-Iranian contacts and interactions.
Karl Jettmar (August 8, 1918 - March 28 , 2002 ) was an Austrian ethnologist, religious scholar and archaeologist. he was the son of the Viennese painter Rudolf Jettmar and studied at the University of Vienna from 1936, first in German and history, then in ethnology, folklore and prehistory. He received his doctorate in 1941 After his military service, he initially couldn't find a job as a scientist, but had to earn his living as a salesman. In 1953/54 he was a visiting scientist at the Frobenius Institute in Frankfurt am Main, then until 1958 he was an assistant at the Museum of Ethnology in Vienna.
In 1961 he accepted an appointment as a full professor of ethnology at the University of Mainz. From 1964 until his retirement in 1986, he was professor of ethnology at the University of Heidelberg, director of the South Asia Institute and from 1969 he was a full member of the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences.
Jettmar retired in 1983 abut continued to publish works on the indigenous religions, art and prehistory of Central Asia. In 1999 he became honorary member of the German association of anthropologists (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Völkerkunde, DGV).
Gordon Calver, had been a member of the British Institute since 1967 and a member of the council from 1977. His life-long interest in Iran and the Arab world grew from his work for the Imperial Bank of Iran for his entire working life. He was until 1985 a member of the advisory committee of HSBC.
Richard Phelan was born in 1934 In Kilmacow, Ireland, became Brother Peter in the La Salle Order in 1950 and went to Sabah in 1963. A teacher in various schools throughout his career in Sabah, and principal of St Martin's Secondary School in Tambunan during 1978-87, he had many sustained interests in the indigenous cultures. He was one of Sabah's resident authorities on a number of cultural subjects. He was given the 1980 Barwis-Holliday Award for Far Eastern Studies by the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland for his essay on the Bobohizan priesthood system in Sabah. He spent some 15 years at Tanjung Aru near Kota Kinabalu. then lived about 10 years in Tambunan and lived in the Nabawan area since 1990. He died in 2010.