Sir Max Hastings - Did You Really Shoot the Television? - A Family Fable

I have not written much about my own schooldays, which were disagreeable in the usual banal way. This is the story of a family, not about the miseries of English boarding education for boys who are no good at games. I have described in earlier memoirs – Going to the Wars and Editor – my experiences first as a foreign correspondent, later running the Daily Telegraph for a decade. Did You Really Shoot the Television? is a prequel. I have written it in fits and starts, and held back from publication until my mother, last of her generation of Hastingses and Scott-Jameses, was dead. My admiration for her will become plain, but she never appreciated my jokes.

I grew up with an exaggerated pride in my family’s journalistic and literary heritage. I only realised in adulthood how modest this is by the standards of serious writers. At the outset, I was obsessed with sustaining it. At seventeen, I had read almost all the forty-odd books which the previous two generations of Hastingses and Scott-Jameses had then published. Like most children, I passed through a phase of awe towards my parents, into one of scepticism which persisted for several decades. Today, I can enjoy the memory of my own mistakes alongside theirs, and draw pleasure from the fact we alike experienced adventure, editorship and authorship. A condescending critic might say that we scrambled on the lower slopes of literary endeavour. I prefer to think of us all as reporters, sharing many of the same thrills and spills – three generations in turn discovering that you are as good as your last story, until finally, as Tourneur observes, ‘That which would seem treason in our lives is laughter when we are dead.’

Max Hastings

Hungerford, Berkshire

Lots of families possess delusions of grandeur about their ancestry, and ours is no exception. Tess Durbeyfield’s feckless peasant father liked to indulge a fantasy about his descent from the grand Dorset family of d’Urberville. Some modern Hastingses of our branch of the name cherished a notion that they should be earls. Both my father and his cousin Stephen were at pains to assure me that if there was any justice in the world, the Huntingdon peerage would rest in our hands, rather than in those of the upstart Hastingses who possess it. They wasted several hundred pounds, significant money fifty years ago, on a joint attempt to prove as much, with the aid of professional genealogists. Steve, a veteran Tory MP and Master of Foxhounds, married en secondes noces into the grand Fitzwilliam family. In old age, he became rather cross when I suggested that in truth – and as the evidence shows – our paternal ancestors were a pretty humble lot. Though some important people in British history have been called Hastings, it is impossible to trace connections between them and us. Walter Pater, asked if he was related to the French painter of the same surname, answered: ‘I hope so; I believe so; I always say so.’ This is charming, but silly.

I have no idea what our family did with itself before the nineteenth century, when we emerged as small-town Northern Irish Catholics, in an era from which few records of such people survive. Since Hastings is not an Irish name, I would surmise that some ancestor crossed from England in the sixteenth or seventeenth century, perhaps as a soldier. The first of my forebears of whom I know anything is James, who lived at Brooke-borough, Co. Fermanagh, in the early 1800s. The most notable characteristic of the Brookeborough Hastingses was that they were not merely Papists, in that fiercely Protestant society, but devout ones. God played a dominant part in their lives throughout the ensuing century. In the bitter years before Catholic Emancipation, when the 1798 uprising was a recent memory, several of them emigrated to the United States, where two became Jesuits.

My own great-great grandfather, Hugh, born in 1810, briefly attended Queen’s University in Belfast, moved to England in 1827, married a Wiltshire girl named Ann Sweatman, and taught mathematics and classics at various schools. He worked for a time in the 1850s as a jobbing writer at Knight’s Agency in Fleet Street, producing essays and articles on any subject required, including the geography of Fermanagh and the topography of London. This was the family’s first association with the Grub Street world which would loom large in our lives in the following century. In 1857 Hugh emigrated to America, where he taught at a school in Harper’s Ferry, Virginia. He was living there with his five children, among them my great-grandfather Edward, born in 1850, when John Brown staged his famous raid, which helped to precipitate the US Civil War. I still possess my great-great aunt’s narrative of the drama.

Conflict brought only grief to the Hastingses. Hugh was too old to fight, even had he wished to. His enthusiasm for the Southern cause prompted him to invest his tiny savings in Confederate bonds, an early instance of the family’s hereditary improvidence. When he decided to return to England, he was obliged to borrow the passage money from a friend. Late in 1862, broke and disappointed, Hugh Hastings reached London once more with his family. He spent the last years of his life teaching at University College School.

Somehow, despite their modest income, there was just enough cash to send Edward to Stonyhurst, the grim Jesuit public school in Lancashire ‘for the education of English Catholic gentlemen’s sons’. In 1867, the boy had just completed five Spartan years when his father suffered a stroke and died. Family hopes that Edward might study science at London University were dashed. He had to make a living. He was articled to a solicitor at a salary of thirteen guineas a quarter, and remained a solicitor’s clerk, albeit later a valued and well-paid one, for the rest of his life. Fortunately, a family friend provided him with an allowance of £75 a year to supplement his earnings.

In 1877, Edward married Elizabeth Macdonald, a Scottish teacher working in Carlisle – heaven knows where they met. The couple produced eleven children. The family’s income never much exceeded £400, yet on this they managed to occupy a relatively large and comfortable London house south of the river – 29 Trinity Square, Borough – and to send all the boys to Stonyhurst. Edward and his family inhabited the genteel lower-middle-class world familiar to us through The Diary of a Nobody . His writings and experiences echo those of Mr Pooter. Yet the family correspondence also reveals Edward, like his father, as a literate and devout Pooter, fluent in Latin and Greek. His religion was the core of his life.

Basil Macdonald Hastings, Edward’s second son and my grandfather, was to become the first of the family who made a living from the pen. His boyhood in that big Victorian family – ‘the Tribe’, as they called themselves – is minutely recorded, because many years later he published a charming account of it, Memoirs of a Child . He said nothing of his father’s spiritual torments and worldly disappointments. Basil merely rejoiced in an early life full of incident, in which a modest income somehow sufficed to provide fun as well as education. I first read his narrative when I was twelve, and it inspired me with a sense of heredity which is usually the privilege of grander dynasties.

Probably because Edward’s financial circumstances made close budgeting essential, as well as because he possessed a meticulous temperament, he commissioned custom-printed account books. In these, he recorded every detail of expenditure on behalf of each member of the ever-expanding Tribe. Ethel, his first child, arrived in 1879; Lewis, the eldest son – named for Leyson Lewis, the family benefactor who provided Edward with his vital allowance – in the following year; my grandfather Basil in 1881. Thereafter babies, all born at home, followed in a profusion that must have gladdened the heart of the family priest. Like Dickens’s much-put-upon clerk, ‘the Cherub’ Reginald Wilfer of Our Mutual Friend , Edward had a ‘limited income and an unlimited family’. The account books eventually contained separate pages for: