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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 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 life, though Lewis readily acknowledged the scale of 1914–18’s horrors, he was exasperated by those who professed that the experience was worse in kind than any other conflict. In 1963, when I was working as a researcher on what became a legendary BBC TV series, The Great War, he wrote me a letter about his own memories. He said that he had just finished reading a new book on the Waterloo campaign. ‘You know,’ he said,

those three days in 1815 were as full of mud and blood and horror and blunders as the long Somme agony was. A review of Henry Williamson’s book on the Somme by some hysterical nitwit claimed that all the good and brave and the potential leaders were annihilated, and apparently on the first day! Frightful as it was, one must remember that it was followed by the large-scale battles of ’17 and the bloody squalor of Passchendaele. British fortitude and capacity for sacrifice were not written off in November 1916. Moreover, though I know beyond peradventure that our chaps in 1918, especially after the great German attacks in March and April, were on the whole below the heroic standards of the British armies of 1916, they were still capable of inflicting upon the German Army in August, September and October 1918 the greatest defeats in German history, and of capturing more men, more guns, and more territory in that final victorious onslaught than all our bloody allies put together – French, Belgians, Americans etc. This is always forgotten. Wish I could tell you some more – about horses! About mules! Yes, the poor bloody mules!

Basil’s other brothers found the experience of war vastly less rewarding than did Lewis. Aubrey, twenty-eight years old, was commissioned into the 7th East Surreys, a unit of Kitchener’s New Army, in the spring of 1915. His battalion was sent to France that summer. Thereafter, Aubrey wrote frequently to Basil, in a vein much more familiar to modern students of the First World War than Lewis’s exuberant scribbles. He described, with mounting dismay, the usual murderous manifestations of trench warfare – shelling, bombing, sniping, losses, flies, relentless tension. By August he had become desperate to escape, and wrote to Basil asking whether his brother could exercise any ‘pull’ to secure him a transfer to the Royal Flying Corps: ‘I’ve got a certain amount of mechanical knowledge and I think my CO would recommend a transfer, on the ground of being married.’ Actuarially, had the poor man but known it, his prospects of survival as a pilot would have been more precarious than as a junior infantry officer. But in that place in those days, any posting seemed preferable to serving in the line with an infantry battalion. Aubrey wrote to Basil on 17 August 1915:

Thanks very much for enquiring about the Royal Flying Corps. I do hope it comes to something. My appearance in the casualty list for 13 August refers to the second time I’ve been hit – only slightly, Thank God! The Hun put over some shrapnel – registering shells, I think. Willie Martin and I were in command of Support trench with 3 platoons (Willie is our second captain – a ripping fellow – regular officer) we got the men in dugouts and were returning to the telephone dugout…We heard the usual whizz, it went off bang and I felt a sting in my right shoulder. As soon as it was over we emerged and I took my coat off and found I’d been hit with two splinters. They only made a small patch of blood on my shirt. It’s not the fact of being hit, Basil, it’s the frightening effect of shells etc that make you so nervy. I’m much more nervy today than when I first came out.

PS I don’t say anything to the women about the fighting, of course.

On 21 September, Aubrey wrote:

My company commander Capt. H.J. Dresser is going on leave today. Could you give him two seats for the play? He is going to stay at the Jermyn Court Hotel, Jermyn Street. I expect to go to a rest camp, in a day or two. Had two nasty heart attacks in the trenches. The first time it occurred was the day we were being relieved. I had been fooling about and joking etc, delighted at the thought of getting into billets, when suddenly at teatime I collapsed. The 2nd time the Germans were sending over rifle grenades. Suddenly they started bombing us with trench mortars as well. One went off quite close to me, and my heart started again. I’ve seen the MO and he says I’ve got a large heart, and must take a fortnight’s rest. He is seeing the colonel also. He has stopped me smoking cigarettes & alas! struck me off beer! I think it is only excessive excitement that brought it on. I’ve not told Mother.

Then on 29 September: ‘We are in a bust-up tomorrow, so I thought I’d let you know. The artillery starts today. I only told the colonel the other day I was married and he said it was a pity I had not told him before, for in case anything happened to me, it would be difficult for Elly to get a pension. I just mention this in case of events, as I know you would help to straighten it out. Give my love to dearest Mother.’ On 5 October, at Loos, the 7th Surreys’ war diary recorded laconically: ‘A [trench mortar] battery in D Coy’s trench got a severe shelling about 8am resulting in several casualties. Lt. Hastings was killed also two men and 9 others wounded.’ Aubrey was among four officers and sixty-eight men from the battalion who became fatal casualties that month. His letters reveal no lust for glory, only a deep dismay at the predicament in which he found himself. Since he was the family’s only fatal loss of the war, among three brothers who served in France, the Hastingses came off lightly. But it cannot have seemed so to Aubrey’s hapless widow.

Even as casualties rose, Basil continued to be rejected for active duty – the medical examiners categorised him B2. Mac described his father as ‘Pickwickian’. Part of this persona was that Basil, short and stout, was ill-constructed for physical exertion. Nonetheless, so desperate was the demand for men that in 1917, at the age of thirty-seven, he donned the uniform of a corporal in the King’s Royal Rifle Corps. It seemed absurd even to the staid spirits of the War Office that a talented writer approaching middle age should waste his time guarding some remote encampment. Thus he was transferred to the Royal Flying Corps, and spent the last year of the war producing a weekly newspaper for flight trainees, entitled Roosters and Fledglings. Many of its columns were taken up with recording the grisly roster of training accidents, which killed more embryo British pilots in World War I than did the Germans. Basil finished with the rank of lieutenant in the new Royal Air Force, though his commissioning letter emphasised: ‘He is clearly to understand that he is appointed for ground duties only, and in no circumstances will he be permitted to go into the air, except in connection with the actual duties of his appointment.’

Throughout the war, Basil continued to work on further plays, though West End audiences craved light entertainment. He embarked on a collaboration with the novelist and playwright Eden Phillpotts, who wrote from Torquay in January 1917:

Dear Hastings, Now I hear [H.B.] Irving has changed his mind again and may use [the stage adaptation of Phillpotts’s novel] ‘The Farmer’s Wife’. But there is something so volatile and contradictory about the actor’s mental make-up that one rather despairs. It is because the game is worth the candle – one real success worth working for – that we put time into play-writing. It’s a pure gamble of time. Drinkwater suspects that there will be a tremendous demand for plays after the war; but not khaki plays. I like your construction, but feel it won’t be worth putting the time into until we both feel we’ve got a likely proposition for [the actor-manager Gerald] du Maurier, or somebody of that sort. I’m holding ‘A Happy Finding’ and will send it in at once, when you let me know. With [Sir Charles] Hawtrey it would be bound to do well, for it is very funny, and a shrewd hit at our disgusting divorce laws. Try and get Hawtrey interested again. Yours always EP.

Mac was seven when, in 1917, he followed the usual family path to Stonyhurst’s preparatory school, Hodder. A two-horse brake carried him from Whalley station to his new abode, full of fears which were soon fulfilled. Unlike his father and grandfather, Mac possessed no piety. He found his new residence mindlessly cruel, was himself ‘unutterably miserable’, and was bullied from the moment of his arrival. When his tormentors suspended him from a ladder in the gym, the prefect who released him – at Stony-hurst masters rather than senior boys were called ‘prefects’ – slapped his face to check his tears. ‘Physical violence, so it seemed, was a way of life…I make no excuse for the bitterness of my pen,’ he wrote long afterwards. At seven especially, but likewise afterwards, he found incomprehensible the religious tracts which he was obliged to read. At confession, he was driven to invent imaginary sins. ‘The round of daily mass and prayers was hateful to me…I parroted the words, I fingered the rosary. But deep down inside, I was wondering what it was about.’

Mac achieved a brief spasm of happiness with his introduction to school theatricals, playing Morgiana the slave girl in Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves. But he found the brutality of the Stonyhurst system unforgivable. In that last year of the war, boys with richer parents were permitted to pay for extra food such as bacon and eggs, which Mac did not receive. Because the Jesuits censored the boys’ letters home before dispatch, it was impossible for him even to reveal his miseries. Bullying was institutionalised. Not long after his arrival, in that cold, dank, draughty, cavernous place, Mac contracted pneumonia. Their matron, ‘the hag’, shrugged her shoulders and wrote him off. A Jesuit gave him the last rites with an insouciance the memory of which disgusted the boy when he defied probability by surviving. He never forgot the readiness of his keepers to deliver him to his Maker.

At Stonyhurst, he wrote later, the Jesuits ‘devoted an unconscionable time getting us ready for the next world before we were even ready for this one’. His ‘beaks’, like most pedagogues, were poor pickers of people. Boys who achieve office in their schooldays often sink without trace thereafter, ending up as secretaries of suburban golf clubs. The qualities which commend prefects and games-players to teachers are seldom those which will prove of much value thereafter. Willingness to conform is perceived as the highest good in schoolboys, but it ill fits them for any subsequent attempt to reach the stars. School masters are also the only people on earth who claim a right to place money on horses after races have been run. Decades on, they seek to embrace former pupils who have prospered in life, however abominably they treated them in childhood. This was Mac’s experience.

While recuperating after his bout of pneumonia he was granted a respite, staying with his family at St Leonards-on-Sea for the duration of one glorious missed school term. Then he was returned to Lancashire, his father assuring him, with timeless fatuity, that modern Stonyhurst was much less harsh than it had been in his own and Lewis’s day.

Mac learned to live with the place, if never to love it. When he advanced from Hodder to the main school, and began to achieve some academic success, his life brightened. From an early stage he displayed a gift for public speaking, and always applauded the fact that the school taught Elocution as a specific skill: ‘I am best in the class at Latin, English, History by heart and all oral work,’ he wrote exuberantly in November 1918. He urged his parents to come and see him perform in the Shrovetide play, but said he realised that the expense of the journey to Lancashire would probably be prohibitive, as indeed it proved. ‘We have had two holidays because the armistice has been signed. I have learned two pieces of poetry for you when I come home, The Jackdaw of Rheims and the other King John and the Abbot of Canterbury Cathedral. I wish you would tell Daddy to send me some of his articles now, especially out of the Sunday Herald. He has made a name for himself here. I’d love to tell you more but Tempus Fugit.’ A Stonyhurst report for 1919 suggested that Douglas ‘showed distinct talent as an actor’.

Mac shared the enthusiasm of almost every Hastings schoolboy through the generations for tales of war and adventure – Conan Doyle’s Sir Nigel and The White Company – ‘the fights are simply ripping’ – together with all of Kipling, especially the Just So Stories. He loved the school cadet corps, and relished any opportunity to use firearms – there were no guns at home. His toys were those of his time: Meccano, model soldiers, cigarette cards. The arrival of a new Gamages’ catalogue was a big event. He was increasingly fascinated by the countryside. Roaming the fields and woods around Stonyhurst, he developed a knowledge of birds and plants remarkable in the child of a family which was anything but rustic.

His language reflected not only the period, but also a natural exuberance which persisted for most of his life. He was always ‘working like blazes’, his latest acquisition was ‘topping’, ‘ripping’, or ‘hairy’. He developed a mild interest in racing, and was extravagantly impressed by a schoolfriend whose father owned two horses. To the end, he tolerated Stonyhurst rather than loved it. Thank Heaven, he never considered sending me, his own son, there. Its oppressive devotion left him almost entirely irreligious. The Catholic Church’s spell upon our family was broken. But Mac retained a grudging gratitude for the education he received, for the classical and literary enthusiasms Stonyhurst awakened, and for the eloquence and powers of self-expression the school promoted.

At home, he grew up in a mildly bohemian literary world, focused upon family homes with such coy addresses as Wella Willa, Pickwick Road, Dulwich; then later in rented country cottages, of which the longest-tenanted lay near Winchester. He sat at the feet of such friends of his father as Hilaire Belloc, whom he asked breathlessly whether he had indeed, as he recounted in print, walked from London to Paris with only sixpence in his pocket. ‘Young man,’ responded Belloc magisterially, ‘I am a journalist.’ Mac remarked later that this exchange provided him with an early hint about the merits, when composing contributions for newspapers, of tempering a strict regard for truth with some savouring of romance.

G.K. Chesterton, another Catholic author, likewise favoured him with advice: ‘As I went out into the world,’ the old sage said, ‘I would meet two sorts of great men: there were the little great men who made all those around them feel little; and the great great men, who made all those around them feel great.’ Mac shook the hand of Kipling, and was much in awe of his father’s familiarity with such literary stars as J.M. Barrie and James Agate, as well as of his constant appearances in newspapers and on theatre bills. Yet Basil’s efforts to repeat the success of The New Sin yielded continuing disappointments.

His first post-war play, A Certain Liveliness, opened at the St Martin’s in February 1919, then swiftly closed. A month later, his dramatisation of Joseph Conrad’s novel Victory received its first performance at the Globe. This was a project which had been almost three years in the making. In July 1916 the actor-manager H.B. Irving had written to Conrad, then fifty-eight, urging him to agree that Basil, ‘a dramatist of some standing’, should adapt Victory for the stage. Here was implausible casting. The novel is a dark work which ends in wholesale death and tragedy, while Basil was at his best composing light pieces. But Irving persuaded both playwright and novelist that a collaboration was feasible. A month later the three met at the Garrick Club for discussions.

Basil wrote a vivid account of his first encounter with Conrad, whom he found surprising. ‘Unlike my books?’ demanded the novelist with a smile. Basil replied: ‘On the contrary – just like your books, and not in the least like a retired captain of sailing-ships.’ Conrad put his head on one side,

a birdlike gesture that was common with him. When he talked to me he showed enthusiasm only when I said anything challenging. His eyes would light up, and he would argue eagerly, at the same time giving the impression that he was trying to satisfy himself that I was right. Never was there a more flattering talker. He raised all those with whom he came in contact. It was as if one had been blessed. I do not suppose he bared his soul to anyone save in his books. He charmed you into telling your thoughts. Never was there a more courteous man, and I think he was conscious of this quality and proud of it.

Basil wanted to create the play in active collaboration with Conrad. At the outset, the novelist insisted that the theatrical adaptation should be the dramatist’s work alone. But over the next two years Conrad wrote Basil many letters, advising on passages of dialogue, details of clothing and sets. He explained, for instance, that the character Jones is ‘at bottom crazy…a psychic lunatic’; that the façade of Schomberg’s Hotel on Java, the principal setting, had three arches, with wooden tables beneath them. ‘A play must be written to seen situations,’ he observed. Sometimes Conrad was moved to write to the dramatist explaining the profound emotions which stirred him in passages of his own novel: ‘I give you my word, Dear Hastings, I wouldn’t have let out a whisper of it if your letter had not prodded me to the quick…Victory, don’t forget, has come out of my innermost self.’ They met often, usually at Conrad’s urging, when some special problem was identified. Basil sustained deep respect for the passion and intellect of the novel’s originator. Yet he became increasingly doubtful about the commercial prospects of the play. He was eager to ensure that both he and Conrad received the cheques for their parts in the production well before its opening. Basil felt that the novelist’s ‘mental attitude…did not allow him to appreciate what was theatrically significant’. As he urged Conrad that the plot must be modified to take account of the requirements of the stage, Conrad replied that he did not wish to see the stuff of his novel become too diluted: ‘Not too much water! My dear Hastings, not too much water!’

Basil’s first draft was finished in the spring of 1917, but Irving then changed his mind about which character he himself wished to play. This meant substantial script changes. By autumn, Irving had lost confidence in the whole project, and decided to abandon it. But Conrad had become enthusiastic about Basil’s work, so much so that he contributed an article to Roosters and Fledglings under the title ‘Never Any More’, about his own sole experience of taking to the air. The two men obviously liked each other. Conrad suggested that once Victory had reached the stage, Basil might dramatise his novel Under Western Eyes. In place of Irving, the actress Marie Lohr, who was co-lessee of the Globe Theatre, agreed to stage the play and herself play a leading part. The script was heavily rewritten – yet again – after a brief and unsuccessful American production of an early draft. After Conrad attended the first rehearsal, he declared that he ‘carried away an intense impression of hopefulness and belief in the play’. It opened on 26 March 1919, received some warm notices, and ran for eighty-three performances. Basil made useful money. But literary and dramatic critics never thought much of his dramatisation, and it has rarely been revived. This reflected two realities. The first was that Victory was illsuited to the stage. Basil, who himself became conscious of this difficulty early in the drafting process, wrote after the event: ‘It was really a crime to turn that wonderful novel into a play.’ Second, though Basil was a successful entertainer, he was out of his depth realising themes of the intellectual profundity addressed by Conrad.

There is an exchange in The New Sin where one character says to another, who is a playwright: ‘Bah! Your plays are just prostitution.’ The playwright answers: ‘I’m not proud of them, but I’m proud of the fact that I can sell them.’ Basil was a professional, wholly unembarrassed that he wrote for money. At his first meeting with Conrad to discuss collaboration, he said frankly: ‘There are not two forms for a work of art. This thing is only worth doing for the money there may be in it. If you are rich, it would be absurd for you to agree.’ In truth, Conrad was anything but rich – at that time, his income was smaller than Basil’s. But the playwright minded about the money much more than did the novelist. Having experienced middle-class poverty after his father Edward’s death, Basil was determined to cling to the place he had won for himself, significantly higher up the economic and social scale than that of his nineteenth-century forebears.

Hanky-Panky John, a farce of his creation, achieved a modest success in 1921, but by that date he was earning much of his income as a dramatic critic and journalist, mostly for the Daily and Sunday Express. The tenor of his essays is well captured in a sample from the index to one of his published collections, Ladies Half-Way: ‘Actresses, insulted; Americans, affectionate; Bennett, A., prostrate; Carnations, eating; Conrad, letter from; Crocodiles, kinder to; Eggs, awkward with’. Basil was a humorous columnist whose pieces about – for instance – the merits of cocktails and changing women’s hairstyles would fit as readily into the feature pages of a modern newspaper as they did into those of the 1920s. At that time also, he published a bad novel entitled The Faithful Philanderer, but we should not hold that against him.

I am a shade doubtful about the quality of Basil’s judgement. He opposed the mooted creation of a National Theatre, on the grounds that such an institution would encourage endless productions of Shakespeare, an author whom he thought better read than performed: ‘All the world’s worst actors, the offspring of what is known as Shakespearean experience, would flock to the stage door.’ When he was theatre reviewer of the Daily Express, he incurred the wrath of Arnold Bennett, a director of the Lyric Theatre, Hammersmith. Basil dismissed a Chekhov production at the Lyric as ‘fatuous drivel’, and described its author as ‘a great writer of stories, but a paltry dramatist’. In similar vein, Basil listened to some 1926 radio broadcasts by Winston Churchill, then commented: ‘I hope political hopefuls do not listen in when Mr Churchill broadcasts. He speaks clearly and powerfully, and every word, I am sure, could be heard in Tattersall’s in the five minutes before the start of a big race, but his pauses between sentences – and even between words – suggest an Olympian contempt for the value of time. How often must listeners have shouted out the word he was groping for!’

Yet Basil’s verdicts were perhaps no worse advised than those of many newspaper pundits of the past century, including others named Hastings. He understood that a good columnist must be a professional controversialist, seeking to tease and provoke. At home as well as in print, though essentially benign, he liked to play the part of the irascible grumbler. At Christmas, he hung a sign in the hall of the family house in Holland Road, West London, proclaiming ‘Peace and goodwill to all men, with the following exceptions:’. He appended a pencil, with which visitors were invited to make their own additions to his list.

In that clubbable age, he loved the Savage, whose members were almost all writers, painters, actors, musical hall stars. He was a regular performer, sometimes producer, at the club’s smoking concerts. Poems were recited, songs sung, turns rehearsed by some of the great comics of the day, including George Robey and Wee Georgie Wood – who lived long enough for me to be introduced to him at the Savage. Though Basil was a Londoner by upbringing and instincts, he professed a devotion for rural life, which caused him to rent a country cottage, tend his vegetable garden, and enthuse about the superiority of Sussex pubs to London ones. He organised a regular Savage ‘Country Members’ Night’, at which his friends dressed in yokels’ smocks and sang jolly rustic songs. Keenly gregarious, Basil was never happier than when chattering in the club bar with a cluster of theatrical friends

He never made a fortune, but achieved a comfortable living by the standards of the day. His account books, meticulously kept by his wife Billie, who also typed his manuscripts, show him earning £1,333 in 1912; £870 in 1914; £815 in 1915; £1,100 in 1916. In 1922, his most successful year, largely because of back royalties, he received £2,550. It is interesting to notice the scale of payments for journalism at the period. In 1905, Basil received a guinea apiece for occasional contributions to newspapers; by 1915 this had risen to seven guineas a time from the Evening Standard and four guineas from Punch. His books earned tiny sums, and theatrical royalties were never large, but he was well paid for Victory.

His 1923 adaptation of A.S.M. Hutchinson’s novel If Winter Comes failed in London, but Basil cherished high hopes for its New York production. For its opening, he crossed the Atlantic on the Aquitania, which he adored, as he did the play’s star, Cyril Maude. From the ship, he wrote to his wife full of hopes:

26 March 1923

Adorable Bill,

No, I’m not a bit worried about the London failure. They are cowardly and incompetent and one can only pity them. The play is a great success in Australia. Sir George Tallis cables: ‘Winter opened splendidly. Excellent performances. Prospects good. Think undoubted success.’

We shall succeed here, don’t you worry. How I will fondle you when I come home. I almost reel when I think of pressing your hair to my face. Billie, I love you, I love you. If you don’t spend at least £10 on yourself, I shall be angry. Everything you have on when I come home must be new to me…There is a certain amount of dancing every night, but the ship rolls too much for it to be enjoyable. Maude is splendid company. I have had the entire story of his past life, as I fancied I would, not to mention complete details about all his family…Cyril is very perturbed as to whether to be a bad man for the rest of his life or very religious. I have persuaded him to be very religious. We lunch today with Lord Chichester in the Ritz Carlton restaurant. His name is ‘Eggy Eric’.

There is a priest on board, and there will be mass tomorrow in the card room. I was amused to find that the water is rough in the swimming bath.

From the St Regis in New York a fortnight later, he wrote:

About a million damned Irishmen have just marched down Fifth Avenue because of St Patrick’s Day. I longed for a machine-gun. Did all the shows. David Belasco rang me up this morning and offered me seats for The Comedian on Thursday, and Kiki on Friday. Kiki has been running for years and is said to be wonderful. Here’s a letter I’ve had from Mac. I think I’ll write to him now – and Beryl. I’ll buy them both wrist-watches – and for you a handbag, silk stockings, & (I hope) some undies. [On dress rehearsal night] over 1000 dollars advance booking yesterday! Laurette Taylor has asked me to dinner and is going to show me the film of Peg o’ My Heart at her house. She’s a darling, but I can’t fall in love with any more girls just now. Rather rotten for you about the drains – keep Weston up to the scratch. No, I’m not dancing, but I have a good time apart from aching for you.

We open at the Gaiety (perfect theatre) on Easter Monday. Cast splendid. It will be a vastly better show than London. Peggy is a divine Effie…Everyone predicts gigantic success – but, oh dear, how often have I heard that word! Gave a dinner party and bought a bottle of whisky for two guineas. Saw Nazmura last night – worst play I’ve ever seen…Your eternal lover, BASIL.

Mac wrote to his father from Stonyhurst: ‘Thanks awfully for your letters, you seem to be staying at a ripping hotel. I hear you are having filthy weather in New York. I should like if you please a present of a wrist watch from America, a little one. So with heaps of love and good luck to the success of the play…’

However, to Basil’s bitter dismay, the New York venture failed. The play closed within a month. He returned to London, still the man who wrote The New Sin, a pillar of the Savage Club, friend of George Robey and Edgar Wallace, favoured literary protégé of Lord Beaver-brook. He was painted by the fashionable portraitist James Gunn, but though he was still in his early forties, Basil’s features already suggest a disappointed man, rather than a rising one. His income declined steadily. He had saved nothing in the good times. From 1925 onwards, his health declined rapidly. Late in 1926 he was diagnosed with bowel cancer, which had killed his mother Lizzie only six years before. The last months of his life were a torment of pain and financial fears. Like all the family, Basil had lived for the day, spent freely, taken no heed for the morrow. Royalty income from his plays had dried up. He was soon almost incapable of writing. The family lived in a rented house, and owned no property. Mac, in his last year at Stonyhurst, was abruptly brought home. School fees could no longer be paid.

Basil was driven to increasingly desperate measures, begging loans. He wrote to a friend in March 1927, appealing for £50: ‘If I die before I have paid, I shall tell Billie that the £50 has first call on my estate…Feel good today – I have done a comic article about my broadcasting experience for 2 LO.’ 2 LO was the forerunner of the BBC. Basil’s first radio broadcast, a reading from his own essays, was almost his last professional engagement. Most of his friends, struggling writers like himself, felt unable to respond to his pleas for loans. The Royal Literary Fund sent him a modest cheque, which sufficed only to keep the family fed. In the opiate-drowsy months which followed, Basil scribbled desperate, almost incoherent instructions to Billie: ‘Big ledger must be shown to no one, not even solicitors.’ He urged her to seek financial help from Lord Beaverbrook and other former mentors, and to dispose carefully of his books, especially those signed by famous names. There was £2,000 in life assurance money, he said. He died in agony early in 1928, aged forty-seven. It was a dreadful end to a life and career which had seemed full of promise barely fifteen years earlier, yet lapsed into disappointment, indeed misery. Having striven so hard to achieve a prosperity and celebrity which eluded his father, Basil quit the stage knowing that he left his wife and children almost penniless.