Father Hugh was born May 24, 1863 in Brookline, Mass., christened John Byron Diman. In 1883, he graduated from Brown University, and subsequently became the Episcopal minister of a fashionable Rhode Island summer church. In 1896, he decided to become a schoolmaster, and founded “Dimans School for Small Boys” in Armistad Cottage, Newport. This school was later renamed St. George’s.
St. George’s, thought Father Diman, came close to the ideal of a general education, but because it tried to teach character and not job skill, it "clearly and necessarily had to be a school for rich boys.” Even while he wrestled with the multitudinous problems attendant on the firm establishment of St. George’s, Father Diman applied himself to a study of conditions in the Fall River slums. He longed to do something for working-class boys. With characteristic ambition, Father Diman raised funds, engaged an able instructor, and in 1912, the Diman Vocational School opened its doors in Fall River, Mass., the big mill town where his father had been a minister. Supported by Unionist John Golden, the school trained boys between the ages of 14 and 16 in manual trades—boys too old for grammar school, but too young for the mills. Today Diman Vocational School is part of the Fall River Public School System.
By 1917, twenty years after its founding, St. George’s had gained recognition as one of America’s important preparatory schools. In this same year Father Diman, now fifty- four, resigned as headmaster of St. George’s and was received into the Roman Catholic Church. This was no hasty decision on Father Hugh’s part. For some time he had been examining Catholic doctrines and had been hoping to find in them satisfactory answers to the profound spiritual problems confronting him. Following war service as a captain in the Red Cross, he studied with the Jesuits in Oxford and at the ecclesiastical Academy in Rome and was ordained a Priest in 1921. In 1923, he joined the Benedictine Order, and in 1926, was assigned by his superior, the Abbot of Fort Augustus in Scotland, to establish a boy’s school. Thus at the age of sixty-three Father Hugh faced the difficult task of building anew. His past experience, his driving energy, his great courage, and his strong faith, more than helped him in his struggle to successfully carry out the assignment of his superior. Since then, in the comparatively short space of twenty-three years, Portsmouth Priory School, the result of all his labor has become one of America’s most prominent prep schools.
Father Hugh’s educational views stressed the Classics, character, and religion, but the most important of these was religion, "for without religion, there can be no real education. Religion as a living force in deepening and enriching personality has been almost completely diminished from schools, and with it, the most powerful instrument for the development of character.” To all who ever associated with him, the opportunity of having known and learned from Father Hugh Diman will ever be a cherished and inspiring memory.
(The Beaverboard – Portsmouth Priory School, April, 1949)