Lewis’s first body-servant and gun-bearer was a Zulu named Shakespeare, who stayed with him for years, and often entertained him with tales of his tribe’s 1879 war with the British, only a quarter of a century earlier. Shakespeare claimed that his own father had been among the party which cut down the Prince Imperial, son of the exiled French Emperor Napoleon III. Perceiving that the dead man was a chief of some importance, Shakespeare asserted that, in accordance with tribal custom, his killers extracted and shared a mouthful apiece of the Prince’s raw heart. Lewis believed this story to be true. It left him puzzled about what might therefore repose in the casket supposedly containing the boy’s heart which had been returned by Lord Chelmsford with much ceremony to his grieving mother, Empress Eugénie, in Surrey.
Lewis loved the legends of the African tribes, of which he often included samples in his own anecdotage. But in his attitude to the continent’s indigenous peoples, he was a man of his time. ‘A lot of nonsense is talked about the yearning for freedom of this and freedom of that,’ he observed characteristically. ‘The only freedom Africans want is freedom from trousers.’ That line appeared for years in a dictionary of quotations, until a squeamish modern editor deleted it. Lewis loved to meet Africans in what he perceived as their natural setting – villages amid the vast expanse of the bush. He was moved to pity when he saw them in the towns of South Africa and Rhodesia, where they seemed to him to shrink and become lost souls.
In the last years before the First World War, Lewis devoted increasing energy to journalism and politics, to which he was introduced by the ex-Jameson raider turned financial magnate Sir George Farrar. Farrar persuaded Lewis to help organise the Unionist Party in the Transvaal. He worked closely with two former members of the ‘Milner Kindergarten’, Patrick Duncan and Richard Feetham. In July 1913, in their company Lewis played a dramatic part in suppressing the huge, violent miners’ strikes which convulsed South Africa. Thousands of rioters, many of them armed, converged on Johannesburg. Lewis, though the youngest man in the Rand Club that day, found himself called upon to command a local ‘Civic Guard’. This was the occasion when he broke a Mauser rifle over the head of a man whom he saw raising a gun to fire at his company. Lewis cheerfully admitted afterwards that he held no special opinion one way or another about the merits of the authorities’ case, or that of the strikers. He merely took his usual view that if there was a fight, he wanted to be in it. Botha and Smuts suppressed the rioters by promising generous concessions, none of which were fulfilled. A few months later, Lewis found himself with a real war to fight, on a scale which satisfied even his own gluttony for trouble.
I was brought up to idolise Lewis, as my father did. Even in old age, he retained his magical speaking voice. He presented a magnificent tawny figure, about whom no legend could be doubted. He was entirely of his time and place. A sceptic would have said that his life was selfish and reckless. Most of his virtues were those of the Clubland Heroes of fiction, founded upon courage, physical prowess, a boundless appetite for excitement and fellowship. His views and prejudices lacked any shading: somebody was a white man, or a rotter; a cause was worthless, or to die for. Yet Lewis possessed real literary gifts, not least a talent for verse. When he exercised his brain and pen, the results were sometimes remarkable. His accomplishments were much slighter than they might have been, because he always chose to please himself, to forswear discipline, to pursue whatever overhead star momentarily seized his imagination.
To my father and later myself, when we read of the Hastingses of the nineteenth century, they seemed respectable, hard-working, decent Christian people. But glamour and romance were lacking from their lives. Lewis, by contrast, towered over every room he entered. Even in old age, in any company he looked willing as well as able to knock down any man who deserved it. Like so many black, or at least grey, sheep he was much more fun than the chaps who got made head of house at school or lived blameless lives in – well, Trinity Square, Borough, where the Tribe grew up. And by 1914, the fun in Lewis’s life had hardly started.
My father disliked the name with which he was christened, Douglas, almost as much as his own father Basil resented being Basil. Grandfather sought to assuage the pain by signing himself in print Basil Macdonald Hastings. Once Douglas Macdonald Hastings escaped from infancy, he became universally known as ‘Mac’. At the time of his birth in 1909, his father was a struggling freelance journalist. A year later, Basil became assistant editor of the Bystander magazine, then in its heyday. In this role, he once sought to persuade Max Beerbohm to contribute an article about his schooldays at Charterhouse. ‘Dear Hastings,’ Beerbohm wrote back, ‘I fear that I must decline, for if I accepted I know that the poison would creep into my pen.’ How well I recognised this sensation as I read the letter seventy years later! By then I had myself experienced the miseries of the same school.
Basil prospered at the Bystander, and spread his wings. In 1911 he wrote a comic play entitled The New Sin, and sent it to the Vendome-Eady theatrical management. They accepted it at once, gave him a princely £10 on account of royalties, and a contract promising him 5 per cent of weekly receipts, rising to 10 per cent on anything over £1,000 a week. After the play’s first night at the Criterion, there were fears. A pessimistic producer muttered about ‘complete failure’ – then was confounded. The New Sin became the hit of the season and ran for two years. It was translated all over Europe and performed on Broadway with an all-star cast. Basil travelled to New York on the Lusitania for its opening. Six thousand copies of the play were sold in bookshops. There were negotiations for the cinematograph rights. Basil wrote: ‘Heaven send me a few more such “complete failures”.’
The plotline of The New Sin, a comedy, concerns a man who needs to stay alive, because if he dies ten feckless siblings stand to collect large inheritances. Originality derived from the fact that its characters were all male. Pasted into the flyleaf of our family copy of Saki’s Beasts and Superbeasts is a note from the Cocoa Tree Club in St James’s Street: ‘12.2.12 Dear Mr Hastings, congratulations on your brilliant play, sincerely yours, H.H. Munro.’ A host of other literary stars, including J.M. Barrie, paid tribute. Great things were predicted for Basil. By the time young Mac became conscious of the world, his father was a recognised figure in the London theatre.
Basil’s subsequent plays, though cast with such starry names as H.B. Irving (elder son of Henry) and Cyril Maude, were notably less successful. Love – and What Then? flopped. ‘Though witty and amusing,’ said The Times, ‘it has a weak and unconvincing story.’ The Tide in 1914 did no business. When The Advertisement opened at the Kingsway Theatre in April 1915, The Times was again unenthusiastic: ‘There are in it excellent passages, interesting ideas and some dramatic situations, but on the whole it resembles the chief character in being good only in parts.’ A 1915 collaborative effort with Stephen Leacock, Q, was likewise a box-office failure.
Basil was much more successful, however, as a writer of revues, which enjoyed immense popularity throughout the First World War, especially with men back from the trenches. At one moment in 1915 he had three productions running simultaneously in the West End, of which Razzle-Dazzle at Drury Lane, starring Harry Tate, was the biggest hit, running for over four hundred performances. Basil collaborated with the famous trench cartoonist Bruce Bairnsfather, creator of Old Bill, to write The Johnson ’Ole. He continued to contribute light pieces to newspapers, and was for a time a regular columnist for the Evening Standard. In 1916 he earned £1,100, a good income for the time. His own health was poor, rendering him ineligible for active service, but three of his brothers were fighting in France, and often wrote to Basil seeking tickets for his shows for fellow officers coming home on leave.
Today, it is taken for granted that the First World War was an unspeakable experience for all those who