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