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 participated. Yet, as in all conflicts, there was a small minority of eager warriors, who welcomed the opportunities and challenges which the battlefield offered. Among these, inevitably, was Basil’s elder brother. In South Africa in August 1914, at General Smuts’s request Lewis managed a recruiting campaign for the Imperial Light Horse, to fight in German SouthWest Africa – modern Namibia. Lewis, by then thirty-four, possessed notable gifts as an orator. He used these to effect in a barnstorming tour, addressing meetings up and down South Africa. When the recruiting drive was over, he was invited by the Transvaal government to accept some token of its thanks. In those days, volunteers for the ILH were expected to supply their own kit. Lewis asked for a horse and saddlery, to outfit himself for the campaign. A dinner was thrown by the Transvaal Unionist Party at the Noord Street concert hall in Johannesburg. A pretty girl rode Lewis’s charger, a big chestnut named Ensign, up the steps and into the hall for presentation. During the speeches, Ensign disgraced himself by lifting his tail, to riotous applause. Then Lewis rode the horse down the steps into the city street, and off to war.
‘D’ Squadron of the Imperial Light Horse was composed of the sort of men whom Bulldog Drummond would have applauded – Currie Cup rugby players (who included Lewis himself), boxers, athletes, horsemen all, well accustomed to firearms. Together with the troopers of other units such as the Natal Carabiniers and Rand Rifles, they celebrated riotously at their camp outside Cape Town before boarding the ships which carried them to South-West Africa in September 1914. Once in the Kalahari Desert, Lewis and the other Light Horsemen were deployed as scouts and intelligence-gatherers for the main British column. The South Africans found themselves skirmishing with Uhlans of the German regular cavalry, quite unversed in bush life. ‘The squadron bag in the first three days consisted of about a dozen Huns, three camels and an adolescent seal,’ wrote Lewis. The latter poor creature, miles from the sea, had been the mascot of a German unit, and was now adopted by the Light Horse. Lewis was delighted to meet the seal again a few months later, ‘pleased and glossy in Pretoria Zoo’.
Trooper Hastings enjoyed himself shamelessly, despite the atrocious conditions prevailing on the battlefield. ‘All desert campaigns have much in common, and we suffered the usual pests of sandstorms, veldt sores, heat, dirt and flies. The supply system was scandalous. It wasn’t only that we were on starvation rations and that a diet of dry biscuit and bully caused rampant desert sores, but the equipment supplied by rapacious profiteers in the Union was rotten. Nearly all the water-bottles developed leaks in the first twenty-four hours.’ In one skirmish, Lewis was hit on the shin by a spent bullet, and dismounted to have the wound dressed. His hard-living general, old Sir Duncan McKenzie, chanced to gallop by at that moment. He blazed at Lewis: ‘What the hell are you doing here? You can ride, can’t you? Then why the hell aren’t you with your troop?’ Lewis hastily remounted, though when the action was over he was obliged to retire to hospital for a fortnight.
He loved his time in the SouthWest, mostly serving under a tough old Boer named Jacobus van Deventer, who when war came in 1914 had mustered his Commando, then cabled General Botha: ‘All my burghers armed, mounted and ready. Whom do we fight – the British or the Germans?’ On one march in April, the South African horsemen covered two hundred miles in eleven days, despite being obliged to haul forward in trucks every gallon of water for horse and man. German resistance was feeble: in the entire campaign only 113 South Africans were killed by enemy action, as against 153 who died from disease or accidents. Hardship rather than peril was the hallmark of the experience, as Lewis readily acknowledged.
By early 1915, the South Africans deployed 43,000 men in South-West Africa. The Germans, heavily outnumbered and lacking a commander to match the genius of von Lettow-Vorbeck in Tanganyika, surrendered in July. When Lewis’s unit returned to Cape Town, he was among many men who hastened onwards to England, to join a vastly more serious war. Commissioned into the Royal Field Artillery, he spent the rest of the war in France, entirely happy commanding a battery of eighteen-pounders, finishing as a major with the Military Cross. He saw the terrible first day of the Somme from an observation post in the front line, and never forgot ‘the orderly rows of British dead in front of the German wire’. He wrote to Basil on 29 April 1917: ‘Recently I’ve seen dozens of air fights, which are the cream of spectacles when you get anything like a near view. The Bosch is now getting it in the neck up above, thank goodness. For the present, we’re more or less in trenches again – but a moving order may come at any moment. I’m writing this in an OP in the outpost line on a comparatively peaceful and sunny morning. Love to Billie and the youngsters, yours ever, Lewis.’
For the rest of his
