Did You Really Shoot the Television?: A Family Fable. Max Hastings

at the age of fifty-three, Edward suffered a heart attack, collapsed and died while bathing at Shanklin, Isle of Wight. Only a few weeks later his eldest child Ethel, just twenty-four, died of consumption – tuberculosis, then still an incurable blight upon mankind. Lying in a Bournemouth nursing home with her mother at her bedside, she said feebly, ‘I am very sorry for you, Mamma…Oh, Mamma, I’m dying.’ Lizzie Hastings said, ‘Never mind, darling, dear Jesus will take care of you.’ The girl said, ‘Oh yes, I will be with Jesus tonight.’ Her mother asked Ethel to give her love to Edward, then the girl was gone. Lizzie wrote to Lewis in Natal: ‘It would be selfish to wish her back, God’s will be done. I’m sure she will pray for us all very much in her Heavenly Home. Father Luck said he was sure she had gone straight to Heaven. She had a lovely hearse and two mourning coaches.’ Lewis arranged his own Mass for his sister at Kimberley’s Catholic church.

      I have no idea how the family coped financially after Edward died. There was probably some life insurance, because people such as the Pater took pains over such things. Somehow, the younger children’s education was completed. Fortunately or otherwise, when the First World War came four of Edward’s sons proved eligible for commissions, in an age when to become an officer it was necessary to ‘pass for a gentleman’. One of the younger boys later attracted public attention of the most unwelcome kind, being tried at Winchester assizes, convicted and imprisoned on charges of homosexual behaviour. But that scandal lay in the future. In the Edwardian years, Edward’s children had neither fame nor notoriety.

      Their circumstances remained very modest. Almost all set up London homes south of the river. They remained inhabitants of the world of Mr Pooter, albeit a literate corner of it. A typical entry in the Catholic Herald for May 1904 reports: ‘A successful concert was given on Thursday evening in the aid of the mission, at Peckham Public Hall, under the direction of Claude H. Hastings. The vocal talent was represented by the Rev. W. Alton, Miss Beryl Hastings, Miss Muriel Hastings and Mr A.J. Hastings. The following gentlemen acted as stewards: Messrs. J.D., W.D., and J.A. Newton, Master E.J. Hastings.’ The Church still loomed large in the family’s existence – their aunt Emily, Edward’s sister, presided as Mother Superior at a convent in Roehampton until her death in 1920. Basil, who lived in Denmark Hill, became a pillar of local Catholic charities, notably the St Vincent de Paul Society, for which he organised and acted in local theatricals and concerts. The South London Press reported in March 1906: ‘Few Catholic laymen are better known in South London than Mr B. Macdonald Hastings…because of the work which he has done for the Church in Southwark, for the poor and destitute. Year after year he has organised an entertainment for the benefit of the poor at St George’s Cathedral mission.’

      A jovial, enthusiastic, eagerly sociable man, Basil contributed with increasing regularity to newspapers and magazines. He published light verse, much of it about cricket, together with snippets of wit in gossip columns such as: ‘ “Kiss and never tell” is a poor adage for the billiard table. It is just the kissing that does tell’…‘The consistent borrower has the immense satisfaction of knowing that when he dies he will have finished ahead of the world’…‘A clean straw hat in May is an infallible sign of solvency.’ This sort of thing may not make a modern audience roll in the aisles, but a century ago it played well with readers of the Bystander, London Opinion, the Star and suchlike. Basil yearned to escape from his servitude at the War Office. As the first decade of the century advanced, he acquired a modest journalistic reputation.

      In 1907 he started to ‘go steady’ with the girl who became his wife, the love of his life. Billie – her full name was Wilhelmina Creusen White – was pretty, gentle, and Catholic. She lived with her parents in Peckham. Later, when some members of the family developed social pretensions, they treated Billie with condescension, complaining that she was dull, unlettered and ‘common’. This was unjust. A woman full of kindness and good nature who had much to suffer, she proved a devoted wife in good times and bad. And the Hastingses of Trinity Square, Borough, were scarcely pillars of Debrett’s.

      Basil began a correspondence with Billie on 19 January 1907, dispatching the first of many passionate letters which, inter alia, reveal a fascination with her underclothes: ‘Dear Little Wilhelmina with the very long name…I am going to bed to dream of your tantalising little feet, your brown stockings, your blue garters, your pink knees and lovely foaming petticoats and things. I send you heaps of kisses for all of them.’

      On 6 August 1908, he wrote her his last letter as a bachelor, on War Office crested paper, anticipating the joys of married bliss the following week: ‘I am going to kiss you in an entirely different way next Monday night, and somewhere you never dreamt of…’

      In less fanciful vein, the day after their marriage in Peckham, Billie’s mother wrote to her daughter, describing what happened at the wedding party after the bride and groom went away. Mrs White’s letter conveys a nice sense of the genteel society in which they lived, and of its simple pleasures:

      The Pines, Lyndhurst Road, Peckham S.E.

      My dear Mina, you asked me to tell you everything what happened after you went. First they made a beastly mess with the confetti, & I think I am developing a new complaint. The symptoms are putting my finger in my mouth & making a dab at some coloured pieces of paper on the floor, well to return to the beginning again as soon as you left Willy and Harold had to see about getting home because Willy had to get to Windsor. So while Harold was racing around Peckham to try and find a taxi, I made tea which was very much liked by the ladies and also the strawberries and cream. Mr Smith had arrived by then and joined us. Mrs Mont was obliged to go by tram, then Mr Eastern waltzed The Merry Widow with Mrs Gordon, their tall hats stuck at a most ridiculous angle. Then the girls waltzed a little to Beryl playing. She was very jollie [sic] and nice, she kept us alive. After a while Father Alton had to go and Mr Eastern also. I think myself that he is rather afraid of his brother George. He made two or three trys [sic] to go, and at last ran down the road like mad. Then Mrs Hastings and the girls went, leaving us alone with pere Leo il y avait encore quelque chose dans le bouteille n’est ce pas.

      This narrative continues for many pages, before concluding: ‘There is no need to send you my hopes & wishes for you both because you know them, but may God and the blessed Virgin shower you both with blessings and may you and your husband be Pals to the end, is the one wish of your loving mother.’

      Liz Hastings, Edward’s widow, also wrote to her new daughter-in-law the day after the wedding: ‘Does Basil know he had a column in the Morning Leader on Saturday? I forget the title…You must have had dreadful trouble with confetti. Well, dearest Mina, I must draw this scribble to a close with much love and the hope that you will always be very happy in this world and the next. Very affectionately your mother L. Hastings.’

      Basil indeed found happiness with his Billie. They had two children: a son, my father Douglas Macdonald Hastings, born in October 1909; and a daughter, Beryl Ursula, who arrived two years later. The Basil Hastingses gradually drifted apart from the rest of the Tribe. Only Lewis featured much in their later lives. None of the other brothers or sisters made much mark on the world. Gladys, indeed, chose to leave it, following her great-aunt Emily into a convent and taking the veil. Among the others, though all remained churchgoers, religion no longer played the dominant, indeed oppressive, role which it had done in the lives of Hugh and Edward Hastings. Basil addressed worldly concerns with more ambition and greater success than either his unlucky father or grandfather.

      Lewis, meanwhile, was cutting an exuberant swathe across South Africa. He adopted a lifestyle so remote from those of his forebears as to defy any notion of inherited values. It was as if he set out to compensate for generations of stiff-collared family respectability and piety by cramming a century’s misdeeds and extravagances into a single lifetime. He was also writing verse. Here is a fragment of doggerel, inevitably Kipling pastiche, published in a South African newspaper in 1903, while he was serving with the Mounted Police.

      When I was out in Africa amaking of my pile,

      I met a sort of auxiliary bloke got up in reg’lar style;

      He was sitting over a Kaffir pot concocting a sort of stew,

      ‘And