Originally, there were three family historians: Augustus Fossett Vaughan, Humphrey Vaughan Hughes, and Kathleen Hughes – an uncle, his nephew, and his niece. The major collectors and organisers of material about the Hughes and Vaughan families, they were very different in character and style.
Little is known about Augustus due to the loss of almost all the material about him and the Vaughan family, his papers having been burnt after his death by his son Seneca. What remains includes some sensationally coloured anecdotes about this markedly strange and eccentric man, who had begun his family researches in September 1866 at the age of 21.
Humphrey and Kathleen were close and affectionate siblings, and a great deal is known about them, not only because of Kathleen’s memoirs about their childhood and early youth, but also because Humphrey became famous within certain spheres as a writer and a musicologist. They had beautiful manners (which Augustus clearly did not) and were highly intelligent, cultured, and artistic. Nonetheless, their lifepaths diverged considerably as Humphrey would spend over half a century as a celibate Benedictine monk whereas Kathleen would marry twice and have three children.
L-R: Kathleen, Humphrey, and their sister Margery, around 1908
Both changed their names. Kathleen’s was the simplest case. Her first husband Leonard Urch died tragically a mere seventeen months after their wedding. Her second marriage lasted 35 years, and she lived almost 60 years of her life as Kathleen Mack.
Humphreys’ change of name is slightly more complex. When he made his life vows as a monk in 1923, he took the Christian name of Anselm, it being customary to adopt the name of an inspirational past figure of the Church. Anselm was a Benedictine monk, abbot, philosopher, and theologian, who served as Archbishop of Canterbury from 1093 to 1109. Humphrey’s new name was usually prefixed by ‘Dom’, short for ‘Dominus’, ‘Master’, an honorific title which is a mark of respect for a solemnly professed Benedictine monk. The letters ‘OSB’ which often appear after his name stand for ‘Ordo Sancti Benedicti’, the Order of Saint Benedict. As Dom Anselm Hughes OSB, he would become highly revered and world-famous in the esoteric community of medieval musicologists, but to his family he always remained Humphrey or ‘Paxi’.
This family nickname was based on the Latin word ‘Pax’, ‘Peace’. It is not known how early this nickname was invented but the word Pax often appeared on the printed notepaper of his Benedictine community, so he may have been dubbed with it in the 1920s, or alternatively even earlier, perhaps after he was ordained as a priest in 1913. His family was addicted to nicknames, and the only person who did not have one, so far as I know, was Kathleen.
Augustus, meanwhile, doggedly stuck to his original names, but is known to have sometimes signed himself tersely as ‘Aug: Fos: Vaughan’.
The combined work of these three family historians appears on THE CATALOGUE, while some aspects of the family’s history also appear on this website.
JENNIE MACK GRAY, April 2026