Did You Really Shoot the Television?: A Family Fable. Max Hastings
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the list of books, for which I thank you. (2) please send the timetable. Please (3) answer question 34 more fully. I have told Gladys you thank her for her letter. (4) find out the derivation of the word ‘blandyke’. (5) what does ‘Night Studies’ in the Stonyhurst Calendar mean? (6) have you got Ethel’s umbrella? (7) have they any rules at Hodder, and can you send me a copy of them.
There followed an extract from Gladys’s journal of their Channel Islands holiday, then further bullet points, culminating with:
(17) I regret to hear of the drowning of the Jesuit you mention…By the bye – don’t call us your parents, but ‘my dear pater and mater’. It is a point of the utmost significance that when you leave Stonyhurst you should enter the world well apprised of its dangers and infinitely on your guard against bad company and the love of vanities and pleasures. You cannot fortify yourself too much against these evils. You must bring along with you all your religion. I wish you to pray to God to know your vocation.
The barrage of questions was punctuated with fragments of whimsy: ‘Have you asked for Lumley’s Select Plays Of Shakespeare? – which you lost. Responde mihi. Have you found Smith’s Latin Grammar?, respondez s’il vous plaît. I thank you for the programme of the concert of the 1st of November 1892 which was not, as you allege, a Sunday, but a Tuesday – Please apologise.’
Soon after Basil was promoted from Hodder to the main school at Stonyhurst, on 15 February 1893, his father demanded:
Did you cry when you left Hodder?
Do you suck your thumb still?
Do you feel at home at Stonyhurst?
Do you like any of the boys?
Do the boys kick or ill-treat you?
Please answer all questions.
And a week later:
We were sorry to hear that you were spending your holidays in the Infirmary. Did you offer up the sickness to God ‘all for thee, Oh my God – To do thy will, o God’. If you did not – you missed a grand opportunity of earning merit in the sight of God, for this sickness was a great disappointment to you – entailing as it did the loss of 15 days skating. Did you get any skating at all before you were taken ill? The 3rd term’s Report has come. You have attained only 13 marks in Religious Doctrine as against a possible 75 of marks attainable!!!
Edward’s obsession with recording trivia amuses his descendants, but suggests eccentricity of heroic proportions. In great-grandfather, pedantry tipped over into dottiness.
Basil’s Stonyhurst diary was as banal as most schoolboy records, as shown by this entry in 1894: ‘84 more days…Retreat began today. Association. I played right-wing and got two goals, 17 marks for my Greek theme. I have saved 9d. Xmas presents: Lewis got 2 pocket knives, a top hat, a purse; I got a pack of Snap cards, 2 coloured tops; sweets; a steerable balloon; parlour cricket; an artificial nose.’ More interesting was his catalogue of books read. First, there were those from the Spiritual Library: St Paul of the Cross, St Elizabeth of Hungary, The Little Flowers of St Francis. Then came works that he read for pleasure. He listed seventy-six titles, and many were exactly those tales of adventure which his own son, and later I, his grandson, in due course learned to love. G.A. Henty and Walter Scott figured prominently among favourite authors. Basil mentioned with special enthusiasm Bonnie Prince Charlie, Tales of Daring and Peril, The Talisman, St George for England, In the Dashing Days of Old, A Cornet of Horse, Stirring Stories by Land and Sea, Cutlass & Cudgel. A passion for books, and for historical romance, has persisted in the family. To give Edward his due, he did not allow his preoccupation with religion to deny the children fun.
More and more of his father’s letters to Basil included lines of congratulation on prizes won, runs and goals scored. But Edward could never abandon the habit of admonition, as in April 1894: ‘Your poem on Stonyhurst is disfigured by things attractive to the senses being given more prominence than things in which the mind plays a part.’ Nine months later, in January 1895, Edward was quoting Samuel Butler: ‘Nothing is more dangerous and nice and more difficult than for a man to speak much of himself without discovering a complacency in himself…and without discovering symptoms of secret self-love and pride.’ On 22 March, he advised Basil: ‘In your essay on the capture of Gibraltar you might bring in these saints as follows: “Not only did the capture of Gibraltar lead to the establishment of the Moorish dominion in Spain, but indirectly it may be said to have led to numberless martyrs sealing their fidelity with their blood. Had not Gibraltar been captured by the Moors it may be doubted whether saints like ss Nunilo and Alodia would have had the opportunity of winning their crowns.”’
As Lewis and Basil grew older, money matters intruded with increasing frequency into their father’s postal injunctions to them, as in this succinct note of 12 October 1896: ‘Dear Basil, please return enclosed bills with your observations. Don’t have any more neckties. Pater tuus S. Edward Hastings.’ Immense pains were taken to economise on their journeys to and from school. As an end of term approached, Edward dispatched a banknote to Basil with these lines: ‘3rd class railway ticket Whalley to S. Pancras 17-6; margin for contingencies 2-6. £1 supplied. Please give me a written account of how you spend it, and hand back to me the balance. Lewis omitted to write and acknowledge receipt of the £1.10s. This was a solecism on his part.’
Shillings mattered to the Hastingses.
In 1898 Edward’s eldest son Lewis, my great-uncle, was in his last year at Stonyhurst when a seismic shock fell upon him and the family. He was accused by the Jesuits of a homosexual relationship, and sacked. Lewis – big, bold, passionate Lewis – emphatically denied wrongdoing. His father, however, insisted that the Jesuits could not be mistaken. Edward took the part of the school against his eldest son, prompting a breach between them that was never healed. Here was the most unsympathetic aspect of the Pater’s religious fervour – a belief that Mother Church was incapable of error.
Lewis responded in a manner worthy of one of G.A. Henty’s wronged young men, of whom he had read so many tales. Always attracted by the notion of wild places, he had devoured the writings of the great African hunters, Selous and Gordon-Cumming. Now, shaking the dust of England from his feet, he ran away to South Africa, working his passage before the mast on a sailing ship, with all his worldly possessions crammed into an orange box. On landing at Cape Town in the midst of the Boer War, he joined a group of young professional hunters who eked a living supplying meat to the mining community. Later, still conforming to a storyline stolen from fiction, he served for a couple of years in the Cape Mounted Police. In its ranks he found himself perfectly at home among other runaways, adventurers and remittance men. He fell in love with Africa, and spent the happiest years of his life there.
There is no record of the row about Lewis, but it must have inflicted a deep trauma on such a family as the Hastingses. Basil’s last years at Stonyhurst were clouded by the memory of his elder brother’s disgrace, whatever his own academic successes. After leaving the school he briefly enrolled at King’s College, London, but quit almost certainly because there was insufficient money to fund him. For the third time in three generations, the education of a young Hastings was cut short. In 1902 he became a clerk in the War Office at a salary of £75 a year. There he remained for the next eight years, though his energies and ambitions became increasingly focused upon freelance journalism.
Only a few months after Basil started work, the family suffered a new blow. Edward’s health was never good. In April 1896 he had visited a specialist, Sir Dyce Duckworth, to discuss his persistent cough. He recorded afterwards that Sir Dyce ‘noticed certain blood vessels below the breast and said I was a hot-tempered man but the temper was soon over. Advised me to discontinue shaving – go for my holiday to a district without trees like Tunbridge Wells or Malvern; eat fat bacon – avoid catching cold; open window of bedroom at night – said I would live 90 years more.’ This diagnosis emphasises the quackery which prevailed