"My guiding principle is to work hard and live within my means. My father died when I was seven and my mother’s inheritance was embezzled, so she had to work on night duty as a nurse to look after my brother and me. We never felt deprived, but we acquired a sound work and spending ethic."

Albert Newall was born in 1920 in Manchester in the United Kingdom. Newall enlisted with the Royal Air Force (RAF) in 1937, where he trained and later served as an aerial photographer, until his discharge in 1941 due to ill health. Newall returned to Manchester where he began part-time studies at the Manchester School of Art and worked as a freelance photographer for Temple Press Ltd.

Robert Mokxotho Matji was born on 22 August 1922 in Pretoria, Transvaal (now Gauteng). He later moved to the Eastern Cape, settling in Port Elizabeth, where he worked as a factory worker, and later became a bookkeeper in a general store in the New Brighton location of Port Elizabeth. He became an active trade union activist, and joined the African National Congress (ANC) and the South African Communist Party (SACP).