Ralph Vaughan Williams was born on 12 October 1872 at Down Ampney in Gloucestershire, England, the son of the Reverend Arthur Vaughan Williams. Despite the double-barrelled "Vaughan Williams" surname often being mistaken for a purely Welsh name, Ralph himself was English-born and English-raised: after his father's early death the family moved to Leith Hill Place in Surrey, the home of his mother's family, the Wedgwoods, and it was in the English home counties that he grew up.
The Welsh element in his background is real but distant. His paternal line descends from Serjeant John Williams, a Welsh barrister, whose son Sir Edward Vaughan Williams became an English judge — by the time Ralph was born, three or four generations later, the family had been settled among the English legal and academic gentry for decades, and had intermarried with prominent English families including the Wedgwoods and the Darwins (his mother, Margaret Susan Wedgwood, was a great-granddaughter of both Josiah Wedgwood and, through her mother, related to Charles Darwin). This is a case of surname and ancestral origin rather than a lived Welsh upbringing or identity.
Vaughan Williams became one of the most significant English composers of the 20th century, drawing heavily on English folk song and Tudor music for works such as Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis, The Lark Ascending and Fantasia on Greensleeves, alongside nine symphonies. He studied at the Royal College of Music and Trinity College, Cambridge, and later taught composition at the RCM for decades. He died on 26 August 1958. Given the several-generations-removed nature of the Welsh ancestry and his own English birth and upbringing, famouswelsh.com records this as a genealogical footnote rather than a genuine lived Welsh connection.