Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, was a member of the British royal family as the husband of Queen Elizabeth II. He was President of the Zoological Society of London for two decades and was appointed an honorary fellow in 1977.
Sir William MacGregor Henderson was a Scottish veterinary expert on foot and mouth disease. He was President of the Zoological Society of London 1984-1989.
Nicholas Avrion Mitchison is a British zoologist and immunologist. He was President of the Zoological Society of London 1989-1992
Field Marshall Sir John Lyon Chapple is a retired British Army officer who served as Chief of the General Staff from 1988-1992. He was President of the Zoological Society of London 1992-1994.
Sir Martin Wyatt Holdgate was born in 1931 and grew up in Blackpool. He was educated as Arnold School. He then attended Cambridge University as an undergraduate at Queens' College, Cambridge from 1949, graduating in 1952 with degrees in zoology and botany and, subsequently, a doctorate in insect physiology.
He taught at Manchester University, Durham University and Cambridge, as well as undertaking expeditions to Tristan da Cunha, south-west Chile and the Antarctic. He was CHief Biologist to the British Antarctic Survey, then research director of the Nature Conservancy Council and, for eighteen years, Chief Scientist and head of research at the Department of the Environment. Subsequently, he was Director General of the International Union for Conservation of Nature. After his retirement he was a member of the Royal Commission on Environment Pollution and served as co-chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Forests, and Secretary of the UN Secretary General's High-Level Board on Sustainable Development. He was President of the Zoological Society of London 1994-2004.
Patrick Bateson was an English biologist with interests in ethology and phenotypic plasticity. He was Professor at the University of Cambridge and served as President of the Zoological Society of London from 2004 to 2014.
Sir John Rex Beddington is a British population biologist and Senior Adviser at the Oxford Martin School, and was previously Professor of Applied Population Biology at Imperial College London, and the UK Government Chief Scientific Adviser from 2008 until 2013. He is the President of the Zoological Society of London.
William Alexander Forbes was an English zoologist. He was the son of James Staats Forbes. He studied natural sciences at St John's College, Cambridge, and later taught at Rhodes College.
In 1879 he was appointed prosector to the Zoological Society of London. Forbes lectured on comparative anatomy at Charing Cross Hospital Medical School. As an anatomist he wrote papers on the muscular and voice organs of birds.
On 8 February 1878, Forbes was elected Secretary of the Cambridge Natural History Society. He also edited the book compiling the late Alfred Henry Garrod's scientific papers. The book was published in 1881 along with a memoir of Garrod written by Forbes.
In 1880 Forbes visited the forests of Pernambuco, Brazil, and published an account of his trip in The Ibis in 1881. In 1882 he travelled to West Africa to study the native fauna, starting from the mouth of the Niger delta. He was taken ill shortly after Christmas and died in Shonga.
Forbes is commemorated in the names of the Forbes's blackbird, Anumara forbesi, white-collared kite, Leptodon forbesi, and the Forbes's plover Charadrius forbesi.