They came from all sorts of backgrounds: truck drivers, retired army men, riggers.
The queen was an army driver, and Prince Philip served in the Royal Navy, participating in sea battles in the Mediterranean.
Emilia met his father, Ted, a British army driver, in 1945 when he was stationed on the Istrian peninsula.
Hazare, a retired army driver, has transformed himself into the most prominent social activist in his home state of Maharashtra in recent decades.
There was much euphoria when it all began in April, with the fast-unto-death campaign of a truly austere man, a former army driver and a social reformer, Anna Hazare.
The Austrian, once a tearaway with an eye for female flesh and owner of the first motorbike in his village of St Radegund, was conscripted and served as an army driver in 1940 and 1941.
Aleksandr Sorontin, an army driver who was drinking beer in the same railroad bar car, complained of his $165 a month pay, saying, "Very few people, only 10percentt, get jobs on these oil projects".
In April, Anna Hazare, a septuagenarian social activist who was once an army driver, left his village in Maharashtra State, came to Delhi and announced a fast-unto-death to demand that the government create an autonomous anti-corruption institution that would have the powers to investigate and prosecute anybody.
There was, Balcon says, something of the Pied Piper about Trinder – a quality, he argues, that is visible in The Foreman Went to France (1942), in which he plays an army driver in charge of a gang of French refugee children.
