McLaughlin's mother was the daughter of the Reverend John Bartholomew Vale (1823–1896), Rector of Crostwight, Norfolk, and of his wife Clara (1836–1919).

Hubert McLaughlin was Rector of Burford, Shropshire, a rural dean and the Prebendary of Hunderton at Hereford Cathedral.

In 1945, as vice-admiral commanding the 4th Cruiser Squadron of the British Pacific Fleet, he took the surrender of the Japanese forces in Hong Kong.

[10] These were: Deciding to follow his father and grandfather into the priesthood of the Church of England, McLaughlin was ordained as a deacon and a priest and quickly took to elaborate Anglo-Catholic ritual.

The society was begun late in 1942 when McLaughlin and Shaw asked the Bishop of London (Geoffrey Fisher, later Archbishop of Canterbury) for permission to use the St Anne's clergy house as a kind of mission centre for thinking pagans.

[13] The location of St Anne's, near to the theatres, colleges and restaurants around Bloomsbury and also to the Inns of Court, was ideal for such an intellectual outreach programme,[13] and the Society soon included C. S. Lewis, Agatha Christie, Charles Williams, Arnold Bennett and Rose Macaulay, as well as T. S. Eliot and Dorothy L. Sayers, among its members.

[1] However, he found the Church of England and the then Bishop of London, Robert Stopford increasingly hard to live with, and in 1962 McLaughlin resigned his Anglican orders.

[10] He subsequently went to live in Rome, taking a job as a translator for the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.