A family of intellectuals, Robert Montgomery (1859-1938), Neil Montgomery (1895-1979), his wife Margaret (1896-1984) and their children Lesley Le Claire (1927-2012) and Hugh Montgomery (1931-2008) were notable for their scientific and literary achievements.

Robert Montgomery, born in Argyll, Scotland, the son of a weaver, became the headmaster of Hillhouse Central School, Huddersfield. His son Neil, who in 1925 married Margaret Gibson Scott, a school teacher from Glasgow, was a distinguished psychiatrist who served as the superintendent of Storthes Hall Hospital, a Huddersfield psychiatric institute. He had a strong interest in metaphysics, literature and theological matters with a particular interest in the philosophical poetry of Denis Saurat (1890-1958), an Anglo-French scholar, writer and broadcaster. He also wrote for the New English Weekly.

Neil and Margaret's children went on to excel in divergent fields. Hugh Montgomery (who married Jeanne Martin) was a physicist specialising in the study of the solid state at low temperatures and later on electromagnetism. He worked at the Atomic Energy Research Establishment at Harwell, Oxford, then at the Argonne National Laboratory, Illinois, and then at the University of Edinburgh. A member of the Scottish Arctic Club, he went on a series of expeditions to Greenland and Iceland in the 1970s and 1980s, and like his father thought deeply about philosophy and religion, writing later in life about his views on the relationship between science and Christianity.

Lesley Montgomery (who married Alan Le Claire, a physicist, later in life) studied English at Glasgow University and became a much respected librarian in Oxford, finishing her career as Librarian of Worcester College (1977-1992). She was an expert, in particular, on seventeenth-century Britain, corresponding with academics and authors including Eric Sams, a musicologist and Shakespeare scholar. In addition, she wrote a playscript for Worcester College students dramatizing the Putney Debates of 1647, which was eventually produced for radio, and went on to write other B.B.C. Third Programme documentaries.