Richard Hughes

Who was Richard Hughes?

Richard Arthur Warren Hughes OBE was a British writer of poems, short stories, novels and plays.

He was born in Weybridge, Surrey. His father was a civil servant Arthur Hughes, and his mother Louisa Grace Warren who had been brought up in Jamaica. He was educated at Charterhouse and graduated from Oriel College, Oxford in 1922.

A Charterhouse schoolmaster had sent Hughes's first published work to The Spectator in 1917. The article, written as a school essay, was an attack on The Loom of Youth, by Alec Waugh, a recently published novel which caused a furore for its frank 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 in the West End at the Royal Court Theatre by 1922. He was the author of the world's first radio play, Danger, commissioned from him for the BBC by Nigel Playfair and broadcast on January 15, 1924.

Hughes was employed as a journalist and travelled widely before he married, in 1932, the painter Frances Bazley.