He was born in
Weybridge, Surrey. His father was Arthur Hughes, a civil servant, and his mother, Louisa Grace Warren, had been brought up in the West Indies in Jamaica. He was educated first at
Charterhouse School and graduated from
Oriel College, Oxford in 1922. A Charterhouse schoolmaster had sent Hughes's first published work to the magazine
The Spectator in 1917. The article, written as a school essay, was an unfavourable criticism of
The Loom of Youth, by
Alec Waugh, a recently published novel which caused a furore for its account of homosexual passions between British schoolboys in a
public school. At Oxford, he met
Robert Graves, also an
Old Carthusian, and they co-edited a poetry publication,
Oxford Poetry, in 1921. Hughes's short play ''
The Sisters' Tragedy'' was being staged in the
West End of London at the
Royal Court Theatre by 1922. He was the author of the world's first radio play,
A Comedy Of Danger, commissioned from him for the
BBC by
Nigel Playfair and broadcast on 15 January 1924. Hughes was employed as a journalist and travelled widely before he married the painter
Frances Bazley (1905–1985) in 1932. They settled for a period in
Norfolk and then in 1934 at
Castle House, Laugharne in South Wales.
Dylan Thomas stayed with Hughes and wrote his book
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog whilst living at Castle House. Hughes was instrumental in Thomas relocating permanently to the area. He wrote only four novels, the most famous of which is
The Innocent Voyage (1929), or
A High Wind in Jamaica, as Hughes renamed it soon after its initial publication. Set in the 19th century, it explores the events which follow the accidental capture of a group of English children by pirates: the children are revealed as considerably more amoral than the pirates (it was in this novel that Hughes first described the cocktail
Hangman's Blood). In 1938, he wrote an allegorical novel,
In Hazard, based on the true story of the
S.S. Phemius, which was caught in the
1932 Cuba hurricane for four days during its maximum intensity. He wrote volumes of children's stories, including ''The Spider's Palace''. During the war, Hughes had a desk job in the
Admiralty. He met the architects
Jane Drew and
Maxwell Fry, whose children stayed with the Hughes family for much of that time. After the end of the war, he spent ten years writing scripts for
Ealing Studios, and published no more novels until 1961. Of the trilogy
The Human Predicament, only the first two volumes,
The Fox in the Attic (1961) and
The Wooden Shepherdess (1973), were complete when he died; twelve chapters, less than 50 pages, of the final volume are now published. In these, he describes the course of
European history from the 1920s through World War II, including real characters and events—such as
Hitler's escape after the abortive
Munich putsch—as well as fictional. Later in life, Hughes relocated to
Ynys in
Gwynedd. He was churchwarden of
Llanfihangel-y-traethau, the village church, where he was buried when he died at home in 1976. Hughes was a Fellow of the
Royal Society of Literature and, in the United States, an honorary member of both the
National Institute of Arts and Letters and the
American Academy of Arts and Letters. He was awarded the OBE (Officer of the
Order of the British Empire) in 1946. ==Family==