One of six siblings--five boys and one girl--he acquired early in his life a love for animals. When eight years old, Lofting was sent to Mount Saint Mary, a Catholic public school, which he attended for almost a decade--a stay about which little is known.
Since all the Lofting boys were expected to select professions that provided a dependable means of support, Hugh decided upon civil engineering, although he might have preferred a career as a writer. In 1904 he traveled to the United States and enrolled at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Two years later he returned to England, attended London Polytechnic, and there completed his studies. The next several years he worked prospecting for gold and surveying in Canada and for railroads in West Africa and Cuba.
In 1912 Lofting came back to the United States and, settling in New York and rejecting engineering as a career, began to write professionally. That same year he married Flora Small; within several years two children, Elizabeth and Colin, were born. When World War I began in 1914, Lofting went to work for the British Ministry of Information in New York. Two years later, having enlisted in the British army and having been commissioned a captain of the Irish Guards, he spent two years on active duty in Flanders and France, where he was wounded.
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