Samuel Hughes

Lieutenant-Colonel Samuel H. S. Hughes, QC (1913–2002) was a Canadian lawyer who served as a justice of the Supreme Court of Ontario. He had a less well-known background as a Canadian military historian during the Second World War. Shortly after retiring as a judge he took on the task of chairing a Royal Commission known as the Hughes Inquiry into allegations of child abuse by members of the Christian Brothers of Ireland at Mount Cashel Orphanage in Newfoundland. Early life Born in 1913, Hughes was the only son of Garnet Hughes, who commanded the 1st and 5th Canadian Infantry Divisions during the First World War, by his marriage to Elizabeth Irene Bayliss Newling in 1910. He was named after his grandfather Sir Sam Hughes, Canadian Minister of Militia and Defence during that war. Thanks to the war, he grew up in the United Kingdom, accompanying his father, and they returned to Canada in 1928, when Garnet Hughes ended his military career and returned to life as an engineer. Sam Hughes was then educated at Upper Canada College and the University of Toronto, and then proceeded to Oxford, with a Massey College Scholarship. His subject was history, and he graduated from Oxford with no particular career in mind.