Did You Really Shoot the Television?: A Family Fable

On 21 September, Aubrey wrote:

My company commander Capt. H.J. Dresser is going on leave today. Could you give him two seats for the play? He is going to stay at the Jermyn Court Hotel, Jermyn Street. I expect to go to a rest camp, in a day or two. Had two nasty heart attacks in the trenches. The first time it occurred was the day we were being relieved. I had been fooling about and joking etc, delighted at the thought of getting into billets, when suddenly at teatime I collapsed. The 2nd time the Germans were sending over rifle grenades. Suddenly they started bombing us with trench mortars as well. One went off quite close to me, and my heart started again. I’ve seen the MO and he says I’ve got a large heart, and must take a fortnight’s rest. He is seeing the colonel also. He has stopped me smoking cigarettes & alas! struck me off beer! I think it is only excessive excitement that brought it on. I’ve not told Mother.

Then on 29 September: ‘We are in a bust-up tomorrow, so I thought I’d let you know. The artillery starts today. I only told the colonel the other day I was married and he said it was a pity I had not told him before, for in case anything happened to me, it would be difficult for Elly to get a pension. I just mention this in case of events, as I know you would help to straighten it out. Give my love to dearest Mother.’ On 5 October, at Loos, the 7th Surreys’ war diary recorded laconically: ‘A [trench mortar] battery in D Coy’s trench got a severe shelling about 8am resulting in several casualties. Lt. Hastings was killed also two men and 9 others wounded.’ Aubrey was among four officers and sixty-eight men from the battalion who became fatal casualties that month. His letters reveal no lust for glory, only a deep dismay at the predicament in which he found himself. Since he was the family’s only fatal loss of the war, among three brothers who served in France, the Hastingses came off lightly. But it cannot have seemed so to Aubrey’s hapless widow.

Even as casualties rose, Basil continued to be rejected for active duty – the medical examiners categorised him B2. Mac described his father as ‘Pickwickian’. Part of this persona was that Basil, short and stout, was ill-constructed for physical exertion. Nonetheless, so desperate was the demand for men that in 1917, at the age of thirty-seven, he donned the uniform of a corporal in the King’s Royal Rifle Corps. It seemed absurd even to the staid spirits of the War Office that a talented writer approaching middle age should waste his time guarding some remote encampment. Thus he was transferred to the Royal Flying Corps, and spent the last year of the war producing a weekly newspaper for flight trainees, entitled Roosters and Fledglings. Many of its columns were taken up with recording the grisly roster of training accidents, which killed more embryo British pilots in World War I than did the Germans. Basil finished with the rank of lieutenant in the new Royal Air Force, though his commissioning letter emphasised: ‘He is clearly to understand that he is appointed for ground duties only, and in no circumstances will he be permitted to go into the air, except in connection with the actual duties of his appointment.’

Throughout the war, Basil continued to work on further plays, though West End audiences craved light entertainment. He embarked on a collaboration with the novelist and playwright Eden Phillpotts, who wrote from Torquay in January 1917:

Dear Hastings, Now I hear [H.B.] Irving has changed his mind again and may use [the stage adaptation of Phillpotts’s novel] ‘The Farmer’s Wife’. But there is something so volatile and contradictory about the actor’s mental make-up that one rather despairs. It is because the game is worth the candle – one real success worth working for – that we put time into play-writing. It’s a pure gamble of time. Drinkwater suspects that there will be a tremendous demand for plays after the war; but not khaki plays. I like your construction, but feel it won’t be worth putting the time into until we both feel we’ve got a likely proposition for [the actor-manager Gerald] du Maurier, or somebody of that sort. I’m holding ‘A Happy Finding’ and will send it in at once, when you let me know. With [Sir Charles] Hawtrey it would be bound to do well, for it is very funny, and a shrewd hit at our disgusting divorce laws. Try and get Hawtrey interested again. Yours always EP.

Mac was seven when, in 1917, he followed the usual family path to Stonyhurst’s preparatory school, Hodder. A two-horse brake carried him from Whalley station to his new abode, full of fears which were soon fulfilled. Unlike his father and grandfather, Mac possessed no piety. He found his new residence mindlessly cruel, was himself ‘unutterably miserable’, and was bullied from the moment of his arrival. When his tormentors suspended him from a ladder in the gym, the prefect who released him – at Stony-hurst masters rather than senior boys were called ‘prefects’ – slapped his face to check his tears. ‘Physical violence, so it seemed, was a way of life…I make no excuse for the bitterness of my pen,’ he wrote long afterwards. At seven especially, but likewise afterwards, he found incomprehensible the religious tracts which he was obliged to read. At confession, he was driven to invent imaginary sins. ‘The round of daily mass and prayers was hateful to me…I parroted the words, I fingered the rosary. But deep down inside, I was wondering what it was about.’

Mac achieved a brief spasm of happiness with his introduction to school theatricals, playing Morgiana the slave girl in Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves. But he found the brutality of the Stonyhurst system unforgivable. In that last year of the war, boys with richer parents were permitted to pay for extra food such as bacon and eggs, which Mac did not receive. Because the Jesuits censored the boys’ letters home before dispatch, it was impossible for him even to reveal his miseries. Bullying was institutionalised. Not long after his arrival, in that cold, dank, draughty, cavernous place, Mac contracted pneumonia. Their matron, ‘the hag’, shrugged her shoulders and wrote him off. A Jesuit gave him the last rites with an insouciance the memory of which disgusted the boy when he defied probability by surviving. He never forgot the readiness of his keepers to deliver him to his Maker.

At Stonyhurst, he wrote later, the Jesuits ‘devoted an unconscionable time getting us ready for the next world before we were even ready for this one’. His ‘beaks’, like most pedagogues, were poor pickers of people. Boys who achieve office in their schooldays often sink without trace thereafter, ending up as secretaries of suburban golf clubs. The qualities which commend prefects and games-players to teachers are seldom those which will prove of much value thereafter. Willingness to conform is perceived as the highest good in schoolboys, but it ill fits them for any subsequent attempt to reach the stars. School masters are also the only people on earth who claim a right to place money on horses after races have been run. Decades on, they seek to embrace former pupils who have prospered in life, however abominably they treated them in childhood. This was Mac’s experience.

While recuperating after his bout of pneumonia he was granted a respite, staying with his family at St Leonards-on-Sea for the duration of one glorious missed school term. Then he was returned to Lancashire, his father assuring him, with timeless fatuity, that modern Stonyhurst was much less harsh than it had been in his own and Lewis’s day.

Mac learned to live with the place, if never to love it. When he advanced from Hodder to the main school, and began to achieve some academic success, his life brightened. From an early stage he displayed a gift for public speaking, and always applauded the fact that the school taught Elocution as a specific skill: ‘I am best in the class at Latin, English, History by heart and all oral work,’ he wrote exuberantly in November 1918. He urged his parents to come and see him perform in the Shrovetide play, but said he realised that the expense of the journey to Lancashire would probably be prohibitive, as indeed it proved. ‘We have had two holidays because the armistice has been signed. I have learned two pieces of poetry for you when I come home, The Jackdaw of Rheims and the other King John and the Abbot of Canterbury Cathedral. I wish you would tell Daddy to send me some of his articles now, especially out of the Sunday Herald. He has made a name for himself here. I’d love to tell you more but Tempus Fugit.’ A Stonyhurst report for 1919 suggested that Douglas ‘showed distinct talent as an actor’.

Mac shared the enthusiasm of almost every Hastings schoolboy through the generations for tales of war and adventure – Conan Doyle’s Sir Nigel and The White Company – ‘the fights are simply ripping’ – together with all of Kipling, especially the Just So Stories. He loved the school cadet corps, and relished any opportunity to use firearms – there were no guns at home. His toys were those of his time: Meccano, model soldiers, cigarette cards. The arrival of a new Gamages’ catalogue was a big event. He was increasingly fascinated by the countryside. Roaming the fields and woods around Stonyhurst, he developed a knowledge of birds and plants remarkable in the child of a family which was anything but rustic.

His language reflected not only the period, but also a natural exuberance which persisted for most of his life. He was always ‘working like blazes’, his latest acquisition was ‘topping’, ‘ripping’, or ‘hairy’. He developed a mild interest in racing, and was extravagantly impressed by a schoolfriend whose father owned two horses. To the end, he tolerated Stonyhurst rather than loved it. Thank Heaven, he never considered sending me, his own son, there. Its oppressive devotion left him almost entirely irreligious. The Catholic Church’s spell upon our family was broken. But Mac retained a grudging gratitude for the education he received, for the classical and literary enthusiasms Stonyhurst awakened, and for the eloquence and powers of self-expression the school promoted.

At home, he grew up in a mildly bohemian literary world, focused upon family homes with such coy addresses as Wella Willa, Pickwick Road, Dulwich; then later in rented country cottages, of which the longest-tenanted lay near Winchester. He sat at the feet of such friends of his father as Hilaire Belloc, whom he asked breathlessly whether he had indeed, as he recounted in print, walked from London to Paris with only sixpence in his pocket. ‘Young man,’ responded Belloc magisterially, ‘I am a journalist.’ Mac remarked later that this exchange provided him with an early hint about the merits, when composing contributions for newspapers, of tempering a strict regard for truth with some savouring of romance.

G.K. Chesterton, another Catholic author, likewise favoured him with advice: ‘As I went out into the world,’ the old sage said, ‘I would meet two sorts of great men: there were the little great men who made all those around them feel little; and the great great men, who made all those around them feel great.’ Mac shook the hand of Kipling, and was much in awe of his father’s familiarity with such literary stars as J.M. Barrie and James Agate, as well as of his constant appearances in newspapers and on theatre bills. Yet Basil’s efforts to repeat the success of The New Sin yielded continuing disappointments.

His first post-war play, A Certain Liveliness, opened at the St Martin’s in February 1919, then swiftly closed. A month later, his dramatisation of Joseph Conrad’s novel Victory received its first performance at the Globe. This was a project which had been almost three years in the making. In July 1916 the actor-manager H.B. Irving had written to Conrad, then fifty-eight, urging him to agree that Basil, ‘a dramatist of some standing’, should adapt Victory for the stage. Here was implausible casting. The novel is a dark work which ends in wholesale death and tragedy, while Basil was at his best composing light pieces. But Irving persuaded both playwright and novelist that a collaboration was feasible. A month later the three met at the Garrick Club for discussions.

Basil wrote a vivid account of his first encounter with Conrad, whom he found surprising. ‘Unlike my books?’ demanded the novelist with a smile. Basil replied: ‘On the contrary – just like your books, and not in the least like a retired captain of sailing-ships.’ Conrad put his head on one side,

a birdlike gesture that was common with him. When he talked to me he showed enthusiasm only when I said anything challenging. His eyes would light up, and he would argue eagerly, at the same time giving the impression that he was trying to satisfy himself that I was right. Never was there a more flattering talker. He raised all those with whom he came in contact. It was as if one had been blessed. I do not suppose he bared his soul to anyone save in his books. He charmed you into telling your thoughts. Never was there a more courteous man, and I think he was conscious of this quality and proud of it.

Basil wanted to create the play in active collaboration with Conrad. At the outset, the novelist insisted that the theatrical adaptation should be the dramatist’s work alone. But over the next two years Conrad wrote Basil many letters, advising on passages of dialogue, details of clothing and sets. He explained, for instance, that the character Jones is ‘at bottom crazy…a psychic lunatic’; that the façade of Schomberg’s Hotel on Java, the principal setting, had three arches, with wooden tables beneath them. ‘A play must be written to seen situations,’ he observed. Sometimes Conrad was moved to write to the dramatist explaining the profound emotions which stirred him in passages of his own novel: ‘I give you my word, Dear Hastings, I wouldn’t have let out a whisper of it if your letter had not prodded me to the quick…Victory, don’t forget, has come out of my innermost self.’ They met often, usually at Conrad’s urging, when some special problem was identified. Basil sustained deep respect for the passion and intellect of the novel’s originator. Yet he became increasingly doubtful about the commercial prospects of the play. He was eager to ensure that both he and Conrad received the cheques for their parts in the production well before its opening. Basil felt that the novelist’s ‘mental attitude…did not allow him to appreciate what was theatrically significant’. As he urged Conrad that the plot must be modified to take account of the requirements of the stage, Conrad replied that he did not wish to see the stuff of his novel become too diluted: ‘Not too much water! My dear Hastings, not too much water!’

Basil’s first draft was finished in the spring of 1917, but Irving then changed his mind about which character he himself wished to play. This meant substantial script changes. By autumn, Irving had lost confidence in the whole project, and decided to abandon it. But Conrad had become enthusiastic about Basil’s work, so much so that he contributed an article to Roosters and Fledglings under the title ‘Never Any More’, about his own sole experience of taking to the air. The two men obviously liked each other. Conrad suggested that once Victory had reached the stage, Basil might dramatise his novel Under Western Eyes. In place of Irving, the actress Marie Lohr, who was co-lessee of the Globe Theatre, agreed to stage the play and herself play a leading part. The script was heavily rewritten – yet again – after a brief and unsuccessful American production of an early draft. After Conrad attended the first rehearsal, he declared that he ‘carried away an intense impression of hopefulness and belief in the play’. It opened on 26 March 1919, received some warm notices, and ran for eighty-three performances. Basil made useful money. But literary and dramatic critics never thought much of his dramatisation, and it has rarely been revived. This reflected two realities. The first was that Victory was illsuited to the stage. Basil, who himself became conscious of this difficulty early in the drafting process, wrote after the event: ‘It was really a crime to turn that wonderful novel into a play.’ Second, though Basil was a successful entertainer, he was out of his depth realising themes of the intellectual profundity addressed by Conrad.

There is an exchange in The New Sin where one character says to another, who is a playwright: ‘Bah! Your plays are just prostitution.’ The playwright answers: ‘I’m not proud of them, but I’m proud of the fact that I can sell them.’ Basil was a professional, wholly unembarrassed that he wrote for money. At his first meeting with Conrad to discuss collaboration, he said frankly: ‘There are not two forms for a work of art. This thing is only worth doing for the money there may be in it. If you are rich, it would be absurd for you to agree.’ In truth, Conrad was anything but rich – at that time, his income was smaller than Basil’s. But the playwright minded about the money much more than did the novelist. Having experienced middle-class poverty after his father Edward’s death, Basil was determined to cling to the place he had won for himself, significantly higher up the economic and social scale than that of his nineteenth-century forebears.

Hanky-Panky John, a farce of his creation, achieved a modest success in 1921, but by that date he was earning much of his income as a dramatic critic and journalist, mostly for the Daily and Sunday Express. The tenor of his essays is well captured in a sample from the index to one of his published collections, Ladies Half-Way: ‘Actresses, insulted; Americans, affectionate; Bennett, A., prostrate; Carnations, eating; Conrad, letter from; Crocodiles, kinder to; Eggs, awkward with’. Basil was a humorous columnist whose pieces about – for instance – the merits of cocktails and changing women’s hairstyles would fit as readily into the feature pages of a modern newspaper as they did into those of the 1920s. At that time also, he published a bad novel entitled The Faithful Philanderer, but we should not hold that against him.

I am a shade doubtful about the quality of Basil’s judgement. He opposed the mooted creation of a National Theatre, on the grounds that such an institution would encourage endless productions of Shakespeare, an author whom he thought better read than performed: ‘All the world’s worst actors, the offspring of what is known as Shakespearean experience, would flock to the stage door.’ When he was theatre reviewer of the Daily Express, he incurred the wrath of Arnold Bennett, a director of the Lyric Theatre, Hammersmith. Basil dismissed a Chekhov production at the Lyric as ‘fatuous drivel’, and described its author as ‘a great writer of stories, but a paltry dramatist’. In similar vein, Basil listened to some 1926 radio broadcasts by Winston Churchill, then commented: ‘I hope political hopefuls do not listen in when Mr Churchill broadcasts. He speaks clearly and powerfully, and every word, I am sure, could be heard in Tattersall’s in the five minutes before the start of a big race, but his pauses between sentences – and even between words – suggest an Olympian contempt for the value of time. How often must listeners have shouted out the word he was groping for!’

Yet Basil’s verdicts were perhaps no worse advised than those of many newspaper pundits of the past century, including others named Hastings. He understood that a good columnist must be a professional controversialist, seeking to tease and provoke. At home as well as in print, though essentially benign, he liked to play the part of the irascible grumbler. At Christmas, he hung a sign in the hall of the family house in Holland Road, West London, proclaiming ‘Peace and goodwill to all men, with the following exceptions:’. He appended a pencil, with which visitors were invited to make their own additions to his list.

In that clubbable age, he loved the Savage, whose members were almost all writers, painters, actors, musical hall stars. He was a regular performer, sometimes producer, at the club’s smoking concerts. Poems were recited, songs sung, turns rehearsed by some of the great comics of the day, including George Robey and Wee Georgie Wood – who lived long enough for me to be introduced to him at the Savage. Though Basil was a Londoner by upbringing and instincts, he professed a devotion for rural life, which caused him to rent a country cottage, tend his vegetable garden, and enthuse about the superiority of Sussex pubs to London ones. He organised a regular Savage ‘Country Members’ Night’, at which his friends dressed in yokels’ smocks and sang jolly rustic songs. Keenly gregarious, Basil was never happier than when chattering in the club bar with a cluster of theatrical friends

He never made a fortune, but achieved a comfortable living by the standards of the day. His account books, meticulously kept by his wife Billie, who also typed his manuscripts, show him earning £1,333 in 1912; £870 in 1914; £815 in 1915; £1,100 in 1916. In 1922, his most successful year, largely because of back royalties, he received £2,550. It is interesting to notice the scale of payments for journalism at the period. In 1905, Basil received a guinea apiece for occasional contributions to newspapers; by 1915 this had risen to seven guineas a time from the Evening Standard and four guineas from Punch. His books earned tiny sums, and theatrical royalties were never large, but he was well paid for Victory.

His 1923 adaptation of A.S.M. Hutchinson’s novel If Winter Comes failed in London, but Basil cherished high hopes for its New York production. For its opening, he crossed the Atlantic on the Aquitania, which he adored, as he did the play’s star, Cyril Maude. From the ship, he wrote to his wife full of hopes:

26 March 1923

Adorable Bill,

No, I’m not a bit worried about the London failure. They are cowardly and incompetent and one can only pity them. The play is a great success in Australia. Sir George Tallis cables: ‘Winter opened splendidly. Excellent performances. Prospects good. Think undoubted success.’

We shall succeed here, don’t you worry. How I will fondle you when I come home. I almost reel when I think of pressing your hair to my face. Billie, I love you, I love you. If you don’t spend at least £10 on yourself, I shall be angry. Everything you have on when I come home must be new to me…There is a certain amount of dancing every night, but the ship rolls too much for it to be enjoyable. Maude is splendid company. I have had the entire story of his past life, as I fancied I would, not to mention complete details about all his family…Cyril is very perturbed as to whether to be a bad man for the rest of his life or very religious. I have persuaded him to be very religious. We lunch today with Lord Chichester in the Ritz Carlton restaurant. His name is ‘Eggy Eric’.

There is a priest on board, and there will be mass tomorrow in the card room. I was amused to find that the water is rough in the swimming bath.

From the St Regis in New York a fortnight later, he wrote:

About a million damned Irishmen have just marched down Fifth Avenue because of St Patrick’s Day. I longed for a machine-gun. Did all the shows. David Belasco rang me up this morning and offered me seats for The Comedian on Thursday, and Kiki on Friday. Kiki has been running for years and is said to be wonderful. Here’s a letter I’ve had from Mac. I think I’ll write to him now – and Beryl. I’ll buy them both wrist-watches – and for you a handbag, silk stockings, & (I hope) some undies. [On dress rehearsal night] over 1000 dollars advance booking yesterday! Laurette Taylor has asked me to dinner and is going to show me the film of Peg o’ My Heart at her house. She’s a darling, but I can’t fall in love with any more girls just now. Rather rotten for you about the drains – keep Weston up to the scratch. No, I’m not dancing, but I have a good time apart from aching for you.

We open at the Gaiety (perfect theatre) on Easter Monday. Cast splendid. It will be a vastly better show than London. Peggy is a divine Effie…Everyone predicts gigantic success – but, oh dear, how often have I heard that word! Gave a dinner party and bought a bottle of whisky for two guineas. Saw Nazmura last night – worst play I’ve ever seen…Your eternal lover, BASIL.

Mac wrote to his father from Stonyhurst: ‘Thanks awfully for your letters, you seem to be staying at a ripping hotel. I hear you are having filthy weather in New York. I should like if you please a present of a wrist watch from America, a little one. So with heaps of love and good luck to the success of the play…’

However, to Basil’s bitter dismay, the New York venture failed. The play closed within a month. He returned to London, still the man who wrote The New Sin, a pillar of the Savage Club, friend of George Robey and Edgar Wallace, favoured literary protégé of Lord Beaver-brook. He was painted by the fashionable portraitist James Gunn, but though he was still in his early forties, Basil’s features already suggest a disappointed man, rather than a rising one. His income declined steadily. He had saved nothing in the good times. From 1925 onwards, his health declined rapidly. Late in 1926 he was diagnosed with bowel cancer, which had killed his mother Lizzie only six years before. The last months of his life were a torment of pain and financial fears. Like all the family, Basil had lived for the day, spent freely, taken no heed for the morrow. Royalty income from his plays had dried up. He was soon almost incapable of writing. The family lived in a rented house, and owned no property. Mac, in his last year at Stonyhurst, was abruptly brought home. School fees could no longer be paid.

Basil was driven to increasingly desperate measures, begging loans. He wrote to a friend in March 1927, appealing for £50: ‘If I die before I have paid, I shall tell Billie that the £50 has first call on my estate…Feel good today – I have done a comic article about my broadcasting experience for 2 LO.’ 2 LO was the forerunner of the BBC. Basil’s first radio broadcast, a reading from his own essays, was almost his last professional engagement. Most of his friends, struggling writers like himself, felt unable to respond to his pleas for loans. The Royal Literary Fund sent him a modest cheque, which sufficed only to keep the family fed. In the opiate-drowsy months which followed, Basil scribbled desperate, almost incoherent instructions to Billie: ‘Big ledger must be shown to no one, not even solicitors.’ He urged her to seek financial help from Lord Beaverbrook and other former mentors, and to dispose carefully of his books, especially those signed by famous names. There was £2,000 in life assurance money, he said. He died in agony early in 1928, aged forty-seven. It was a dreadful end to a life and career which had seemed full of promise barely fifteen years earlier, yet lapsed into disappointment, indeed misery. Having striven so hard to achieve a prosperity and celebrity which eluded his father, Basil quit the stage knowing that he left his wife and children almost penniless.

FOUR Mac (#ulink_a858ea66-4567-52ca-ae0b-ff0a871463ba)

Basil’s wife Billie suffered a nervous breakdown following his death. His last years had been overwhelmed by financial troubles overlaid upon the horrors of a disease whose symptoms contemporary medical science could do little to ameliorate. She was left struggling in a morass of debts. Theatrical friends organised a West End benefit matinee which raised a little money. Lord Beaverbrook and Edgar Wallace made a generous offer, which Billie accepted, to pay for her daughter Beryl to go to finishing school in Paris. Those two rich benefactors also offered to fund Mac through Oxford. With a delicate sense of honour, which he afterwards regretted, the young man refused. He said that he thought it his duty to go out and make a living, to support his mother. For the rest of his life, Mac was nagged by self-consciousness about his lack of a university education, and displayed an exaggerated deference towards those who possessed it. Though in old age he talked volubly about most of his experiences, he said nothing about this period, which left enduring scars. For a few miserable months, he devilled as a clerk at Scotland Yard. Then his fortunes improved. He found a job in the publicity department of J. Lyons, located at 61 Fleet Street, where he hugely enjoyed himself for the next nine years.

Lyons dominated Britain’s catering industry. The company processed and retailed all manner of foods, owned teashops in almost every town in Britain, together with prestige hotels and restaurants in London, of which the Trocadero in Piccadilly Circus was the most famous, Lyons’ Corner House in Coventry Street the most popular.

Mac, in those days eagerly gregarious, discovered that he was good at writing advertising copy, and that Lyons offered unparalleled opportunities to enjoy what a somewhat credulous young man perceived as the high life. Almost every night, dressed in white tie and tails, he disported himself at one or other of the company’s restaurants or show palaces. He learned to call C.B. Cochrane’s Young Ladies by their first names – and more important, as he observed gleefully, they learned to know him by his. He practised the ‘Buchanan roll’ with the famous performer Jack Buchanan, and was dispatched on a notably unsuccessful ballroom dancing course at Lyons’ expense. Less happily, offered unlimited access to free drinks, he acquired a taste for alcohol in extravagant quantities.

Mac had charm, enthusiasm and talent, and made the most of all three. He was a true believer in almost everything except God. He possessed that gift more useful than any other in public relations, of espousing passionately any cause to which he was professionally committed. He did not pretend to love Lyons, he really did so. He became a protégé of Montague Gluckstein, the company’s boss, who indulged him. ‘Major Monty’, as the staff called him in accordance with common practice so soon after war service, often sent for Mac in the morning while he was being shaved in the barber’s shop of the Royal Palace Hotel. The young publicist was expected to pass on gossip from the shop floor, and also to make Major Monty laugh. Once, Mac was summoned to account for an outrageous expenses claim following a press dinner he had given on Lyons’ chit, opening with cocktails and champagne, ending with Château d’Yquem, old port and cigars. After an inquest, the great man put down the frightful bill and said: ‘When you leave this firm, Hastings, I sincerely hope that you will remain one of our customers. God knows, you are the sort we need.’ Mac continued to party not merely night after night, but year after year. In his twenties, he could take it.

He prospered in the job, for he was good at stunts. When Lyons were building the Cumberland Hotel by Marble Arch, he arranged for them to complete a room on the top floor first, then gave a big media lunch, for which guests had to ascend ladders through the building’s skeleton. This might not win the approval of modern Health & Safety gauleiters, but it played big with the press in 1934. On another occasion, Lyons showcased the great novelty of frozen foods. Journalists were invited to throw steaks at the wall, then sit down and eat them.

When his sister Beryl had completed finishing school and a secretarial course, through Mac’s intercession she became personal assistant to ‘Major Monty’. After a few years at Lyons, she used the expertise she had acquired to start her own restaurant in the City of London. She ran successive places with her mother Billie, and eventually her husband Leslie, for forty years. Though mid-market catering never made them rich, it provided them with a decent living. Beryl, devoid of the social pretensions which have been the undoing of so many Hastingses, was a tough, cheerful professional who worked hard all her life, neither demanding nor receiving a break from anybody. The harsh experiences of her youth rendered her prudent and cynical. She admired her brother’s gifts and later success, but despaired of his excesses, alcoholic and financial.

Mac’s trouble was that he never knew when to stop. It was tremendous fun to party with chorus girls, but in 1936 he went a disastrous step further, and married one. He was twenty-six, she was a fifty-two-year-old divorcee named Eleanor Daisy Asprey. The alliance lasted only a few months, but he was obliged to pay his ex-wife maintenance almost until the day he died. With misplaced chivalry and a dislike of rows, even when a well-wisher informed him thirty years later that his ex-wife was cohabiting with a man whom he, Mac, had been effectively supporting for years, he refused to go back to court. He admired women, and they were often attracted to him. But he lacked the slightest notion about how to treat them as human beings, or else was too selfish to learn, a vice which some claim can be hereditary.

It took time for Mac to achieve his ambition of becoming a journalist. While working at Lyons, he offered occasional contributions to newspapers and magazines, then in the late 1930s began to do some broadcasting. He performed first for the commercial station Radio Normandy, graduating to becoming a contributor for the BBC. His early ‘talks’ were whimsical, rather in the style of Basil’s essays. Mac was deeply, indeed exaggeratedly, conscious of his father’s reputation, which flickered on for some years. He often asserted that one of the best days of his life came when a stranger said, ‘I really enjoyed that piece of yours.’ Mac said, as he had grown accustomed to saying, ‘I think you mean of my father’s.’ The stranger replied, ‘No, no – it really was yours.’ In due course, I would experience the same sensation myself.

Mac was prompted to make a clean break with Lyons by an experience one night as he stood waiting for a girl in the foyer of a restaurant, clad in carnation, white tie and tails. Tapping a patent leather shoe impatiently, he was reflecting upon what a fine figure he cut when a stranger approached, demanding: ‘Have you got a table for two?’ To Mac’s horror, he perceived that instead of looking the perfect man-about-town, as he supposed, he had acquired the proprietorial demeanour of a head waiter. He resigned from Lyons amid expressions of mutual regret – sufficiently sincere that years later, Monty Gluckstein sought to woo him back on generous terms – and set about making his living as a freelance writer and broadcaster.

Mac’s surrogate father in the 1930s was his uncle Lewis. Indeed, Lewis became a far more potent role-model for him, and later for me, than was his father Basil. Although Mac remembered Basil with love and respect, his memories were tarnished by the horrors of the last years, and of financial ruin. Basil was also a domesticated body, a man of the pavements. Mac’s imagination had become fixed on the wide-open spaces. He wanted adventure, and his uncle was its embodiment. Lewis stood six foot two, and was broad to match, a leonine figure with flowing hair and military moustache, in all respects larger than life. He was forever bursting with ideas and enthusiasms. Having relished the war, he set about securing a livelihood. In 1920 he married a Scottish heiress named Marigold Edmondstone, whom he met while recuperating in a military hospital from the after-effects of a bad trench gassing. Marigold was divorced, an unusual condition in grand families of the time. C.S. Forester’s General Sir Herbert Curzon, meeting his future wife for the first time, was struck by a sudden thought that her features resembled those of Bingo, ‘the best polo pony he ever had’. This seemed to me true of Marigold when I met her in later years, but I doubt whether Lewis bothered to look much at her face. Her fortune kept him in some style for the rest of his life, and her earlier mis-hit at marriage was a matter of indifference to him.

Uncharacteristically bitchy family gossip, broadcast by grandmother Billie and my aunt Beryl, held that Lewis never bothered to divorce his first wife, Clare – acquired and discarded in South Africa with equal insouciance around 1911–12, and recalled by his sister-in-law in shameless period vernacular as having ‘a touch of the tarbrush’ – before marrying Marigold. Such a solecism would certainly have accorded with his ruthless, reckless character. The notion of Lewis as a bigamist caused some later family amusement. Both Marigold and her son Stephen – who became Sir Stephen Hastings, MP – were keenly conscious of pedigree. Marigold recoiled from the vulgarity of Basil and family, especially his wife Billie. Class, class, class reared its head in the Hastings family as often as it does everywhere in British life. Billie was a woman of exceptional good nature, who endured her tribulations without bitterness. But she extracted from Mac a promise that he would never be nice to Marigold, because this queen of the hunting field was so damnably condescending to her. I always wonder why Lewis gave no financial help to Basil in the desperate circumstances of his brother’s last months. Either the two were no longer close, or Marigold held the purse strings too tightly. In any event, the gulf between the financial circumstances of Basil’s widow in her little West London flat and those of Lewis’s family in a succession of manor houses obviously exacerbated tensions between them.