Though brought up in Britain, he was born Alfredo León Duggan in Lomas de Zamora, Buenos Aires, Argentina, to a family of wealthy landowners of Irish descent.
In 1917, his mother, the Alabama-born Grace Elvira Hinds, daughter of the U.S. Consul General in Rio de Janeiro, became the second wife of Lord Curzon, the former Viceroy of India.
Duggan and his brother, Hubert (1904–1943), were brought up in Britain at Curzon's seats, and were educated first at Wixenford[1] and Eton.
Thereafter Alfred went to Balliol College at Oxford, where he became acquainted with Anthony Powell and Evelyn Waugh.
"[3] Alfred Duggan kept a car while at Oxford, one of the few students with sufficient funds and influence to do so; the University Statutes prohibited undergraduates from keeping a car within a certain distance of the town centre at Carfax, and so Duggan kept his, an early Rolls-Royce, just outside the limit of the jurisdiction of the University Proctors, and would regularly drive himself and his friends to and from London during the social season.
[4] During 1938–1941, Duggan served with the London Irish Rifles, with active service in the Norwegian Campaign.
[5] According to a review by John Derbyshire, Duggan "in later years, his inheritance gone... adjusted philosophically to his changed circumstances, living a bookish and domestic life utterly at odds with the extravagant dissipation of his youth.