Michael Pitt-Rivers, briefly infamous for his part in the "Montagu Trials" of 1954 (Montagu was imprisoned for twelve months for consensual homosexual offences along with Michael Pitt-Rivers and Peter Wildeblood), was a West Country landowner and conservationist of colourful antecedents.

It was his great-grandfather Lt-Gen A.H. Lane Fox Pitt-Rivers whose ethnographic collection, donated to Oxford University in 1883, formed the basis of the museum named after him. He married Sonia Brownell in 1958. He and Sonia Brownell were divorced in 1965.