Simon D. Messing was a medical anthropologist. He was born in Frankfurt-am-Main and studied at the Raphael Hirsch school of religious and liberal studies in that city, graduating in 1938, shortly before the Nazis closed the school. In 1939, he escaped Germany with a scholarship and a student visa to study in Liverpool, England. In 1940 he immigrated to the United States, and in 1942 he was drafted into the United States army as an “enemy alien,” admitted into the scholarly Army Specialized Training Program. Simon Messing started university studies in psychology and economics, but subsequently switched to anthropology.
Messing was in the cohort of the first American anthropologists to carry out research in Africa under the auspices of the Ford Foundation; beginning in 1953 he became a pioneering fieldworker in Ethiopia. He received his PhD in 1957 for his dissertation, The Highland Plateau Amhara of Ethiopia (HRAF 1985). He continued to work in Ethiopia, publishing books and articles, and undertook academic teaching.
Peter Alford Andrews was born in Lyme Regis, Dorset in 1936. He trained as an architect before undertaking his PhD study at the Department of the Near and Middle East, Faculty of Arts, SOAS, University of London, under Mary Boyce (also a Richard Burton Medal winner RAS BMM/14) researching The Felt tent in Middle Asia: The Nomadic Tradition and its Interpenetration with Princely Tentage. Since his initial research Peter Andrews has continued to undertake further research on nomadic tents while continuing to lecture and hold academic research posts.
He was married to Mügül (Ataç) Andrews from 1967 until her death in 2016.
Mügül Ataç Andrews, was an expert on oriental embroidery, and with her husband Peter Alford Andrews, dedicated much of her life to studying Eurasian nomadic and urban tents. She married Peter in 1967 and they had two sons.