Family
Duggan was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina where his father Alfred was honorary Attaché to the British Legation. At an early age the family returned to England where Duggan and his elder brother Alfred Duggan, the historical novelist, were brought up. Alfred Duggan senior was a Roman Catholic and his sons were brought up in that faith, but he died "of drink" in his early thirties when Duggan was 11.
His immensely rich American mother Grace married leading statesman Lord Curzon in January 1917. Duggan was therefore well-connected with the Conservative Party from an early age. As neither his stepfather nor his mother were Catholic, his faith gradually lapsed.
Duggan regarded his stepfather positively and countered suggestions that the humourless image he projected to the public was accurate in private. In later years he angrily denounced W. Somerset Maugham's comedy Our Betters which gently satirised Americans marrying into aristocratic British families.
Read more about this topic: Hubert Duggan
Famous quotes containing the word family:
“Nothing strengthens the judgment and quickens the conscience like individual responsibility. Nothing adds such dignity to character as the recognition of one’s self-sovereignty; the right to an equal place, everywhere conceded—a place earned by personal merit, not an artificial attainment by inheritance, wealth, family and position.”
—Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815–1902)
“The life-fate of the modern individual depends not only upon the family into which he was born or which he enters by marriage, but increasingly upon the corporation in which he spends the most alert hours of his best years.”
—C. Wright Mills (1916–1962)
“Having a thirteen-year-old in the family is like having a general-admission ticket to the movies, radio and TV. You get to understand that the glittering new arts of our civilization are directed to the teen-agers, and by their suffrage they stand or fall.”
—Max Lerner (b. 1902)