picks off one flying buck after another as the frantic multitude run, spring, and jink at close quarters…The excitement is packed into a few vivid minutes. Then it is over. The herd swings out of the danger zone.’ The hunters then retraced their trail, gathering and cleaning carcasses for the wagon.
Lewis lived long enough to see the civilised world recoil from the slaughter of African game. What men such as he did in the early years of the century came to be regarded with revulsion. The breech-loading rifle and improvements in transport enabled hunters to kill and market animals on an industrial scale, accomplishing in the first thirty years of the twentieth century an unprecedented depletion of the continent’s wildlife. In fairness to Lewis and his generation, over the ensuing eighty years habitat loss – the consequence of exploding human populations – has proved an even more fatal foe of Africa’s game than were the massacres committed by the old white hunters. But Lewis, looking back later, confessed that he regretted the wholesale killings of elephant and buffalo in which he participated so eagerly – by which, indeed, he made his living – in the years before 1914.
Around 1911, he became fired with the new craze for aviation. He formed a friendship with a man named John Weston, who brought the first aeroplane to South Africa – the usual double-kite contraption of the period, laced with piano wire and christened the ‘Weston-Farman biplane’. Lewis adored his flights with Weston: ‘The pilot occupied a flimsy sort of box open on all sides, and his passenger a kind of Madeira chair, just behind and above him. The sensation for anyone conveyed in this way, when the unwieldy machine drooped its nose earthwards, was terrific. No modern passenger can have any conception of the ecstasies of horror and rapture induced by a trip in a thing like the Weston-Farman.’ Weston the pioneer was so obsessed by the beauty of mechanical science that when a daughter was born to him, he insisted that she should be dressed in dungarees, and play only with nuts and bolts, in the hope that she might grow up into an aviatrix. In this he was disappointed, but unlike most of the early airmen, he survived to die in bed.
Weston’s plane and his own beloved Greener .303 falling-block rifle were the only examples of modern technology which Lewis enthusiastically embraced. Despite his use of firearms for hunting, he applauded the fact that the many quarrels in the Kimberley diamond diggings were settled with bare knuckles. He himself was a keen boxer, with or without gloves. In South African mining towns, he said, ‘the flourishing of guns was a mortal offence. I remember one case where a gentleman newly arrived from Western America, in the course of an argument in one of the canteens, drew a six-shooter. That was the end of him. A dozen willing hands cast him and his weapon into the muddy Vaal River. The diggings never saw him again. And yet, oddly enough, years afterwards in the Kalahari Desert during Botha’s campaign, I recognised this same American filibuster in the ranks of one of our mounted regiments. So his heart must have been in the right place, after all.’
Lewis became intimately acquainted with a host of buccaneers and freebooters such as Leander Starr Jameson of Jameson Raid notoriety, and the bandit-smuggler Scotty Smith. Far from harbouring any dislike for the Boers – the English war with them, remember, was not long finished – Lewis admired the hardy Dutch farmers. Courage and uncomplaining fortitude were the first qualities which he sought in a man, and most Afrikaners possessed them. He also warmed to black Africans, especially Khama, paramount chief of Bechuanaland – modern Botswana. Lewis was once hunting, with the chief’s permission, in remote bush five days’ march from Khama’s capital. A native runner appeared, bearing in a cleft stick a message written at the chief’s dictation by his European-trained secretary: ‘Please to take great care now on the Shoshong, for it is this month the breeding season of the black mamba.’ Lewis was enchanted by the solicitude of the old chief, who had sent a messenger a hundred miles across country with his kindly warning.
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
