Stephen Hastings

Sir Stephen Lewis Edmonstone Hastings (4 May 1921 – 10 January 2005) was a British Conservative politician who was elected Member of Parliament for Mid Bedfordshire in a 1960 by-election and held it until he stood down at the 1983 general election. He was also a soldier, MI6 operative, Master of Foxhounds and author.

The son of a Southern Rhodesian farmer, Hastings had visited the country only briefly as a young child, but he grew up with tales of the veldt and the farm. A year after he was elected to Parliament, he accepted an invitation from the British South Africa Company to visit the country, and from then on made frequent visits, getting to know the leading white politicians. Over the next 20 years, Hastings devoted his political energies to injecting what he felt was much needed balance into the debate about Rhodesia's future. When Rhodesia's Prime Minister, Ian Smith, unilaterally declared the independence of Rhodesia in 1964, Hastings was a prominent member of the Rhodesia lobby opposing sanctions – against the official party line.

Fourteen years later, he strongly supported the Internal Settlement between Smith and the moderate nationalist leaders under which Bishop Abel Muzorewa became Prime Minister, though effective power remained in white hands. He saw the Lancaster House Agreement of 1979, which created an independent Zimbabwe and led to Robert Mugabe's election, as a disaster caused by "unnecessary deference to the delusion of the Commonwealth, the Afro-Asian lobby and to the Americans by a series of British governments".

Although Hastings claimed to have been invited to join Edward Heath's administration, his stance on Rhodesia effectively rendered him ineligible for office. Even Margaret Thatcher, whom he counted as an ally, kept him on the backbenches, though she recommended him for a knighthood in 1983. In his latter years at his Cambridgeshire home, Stibbington House, the only person whose photographs were displayed in more than one room (apart from those of his beloved late wife, Elizabeth) were those of Smith.

Early life

Hastings was born at Knightsbridge in Central London, son of Major Lewis Aloysius Macdonald Hastings (1880-1966) and Meriel Eda St John (1888-1971), daughter of Lieutenant-Colonel Neil Edmonstone, of the 4th Hussars. Lewis Hastings had run away to Southern Rhodesia at the age of 17 after leaving his school, going on to prospect for diamonds, serve in the Cape Mounted Police, and operate as a political organizer; after the First World War, he bought a farm there, founded the Southern Rhodesia Tobacco Growers' Association, and became an MP and war correspondent for the BBC. For the first two years of his life, Stephen lived with his parents on the farm; then he and his younger sister were sent home to England, where they were brought up by their doting and affluent maternal grandmother in Berkshire. Hastings was proud of his Scottish ancestry, among whose relations were the MacDonalds of Sleat. He had an abiding affection for his cousin the historian and journalist, Max Hastings.

He learned to ride in Windsor Great Park, becoming an accomplished horseman. He attended Durnford School in Dorset (1929–34) and Eton College (1934–39). At Eton he managed to combine an undistinguished academic career, and with the clandestine help of his grandmother and her chauffeur, to engage in racing as an amateur jockey and, more importantly for his future, Hastings began a lifelong love for steeplechasing and fox hunting.

Military career

On leaving school, his grandmother offered to pull strings to enable him to pursue a career either as a racehorse trainer or in the Scots Guards. He chose the latter. Commissioned in the Scots Guards from Royal Military College, Sandhurst in January 1940, with the service number of 112983, Hastings saw action against the Italians and Germans in the Western Desert, taking part in Operation Crusader, which relieved Tobruk and threw Rommel out of Cyrenaica.

After disagreements with his company commander he joined the SAS, and before El Alamein participated in a successful operation against an airfield, and a disastrous one against Benghazi, earning a Mention in Dispatches.

Then, after being diagnosed with chronic bronchitis, he landed a job in Cairo as ADC to the Minister of State, Richard Casey. By mid-1943 Hastings was pronounced fit again, and joined SOE. His first assignment was to accompany the Franco-American landing in the south of France. He arrived in the newly liberated Paris in August 1944, then was dropped with a wireless operator and interpreter behind enemy lines in the Apennines as chief liaison officer to the Italian partisans.

He found them demoralised and largely non-existent, but successfully trained and armed them, despite internal conflicts and frequent enemy attempts to capture him. By early April he had organised three divisions of about 4,000 partisans, which seized Piacenza and held a bridgehead over the River Po in a three-day operation. Hastings was constantly to the fore, coolly directing and encouraging his men while under constant machine-gun and mortar fire, according to the citation for his Military Cross.

After the capture of Piacenza, Hastings and a few companions journeyed through German-held territory, and strode into the piazza of a seaside village on the Adriatic. Hastings thereupon convinced the German officer in charge that it would be in his best interest to provide them with a fine seaside villa and supplies of champagne for the weeks that it would take the Allies to arrive. At the end of April 1945, Hastings was in the Piazzale Loreto at Milan and saw the bodies of Benito Mussolini and Clara Petacci, who along with other executed fascists, were hanging upside down. He noted that Petacci's skirt had been pinned to her stockings to prevent her underwear from being revealed. Hastings considered this to be a perfect example of the often paradoxical delicacy of the Italian temperament.

The Piacenza operation was universally considered a major contribution to the Allied advance. He also found time to assemble a scratch pack - the Brindisi Vale Hounds - which hunted a reported, but probably non-existent, fox.

He was spared a posting to Nagasaki by a friend finding him a job in the economic division of the control commission in Austria, a post for which, he admitted at his interview, he had no relevant qualifications. When the friend returned to England, Hastings remained in Austria, taking a staff job with the Army with the sole duty of looking after the polo ponies, and occasionally played himself.

He was then sent to a former Wehrmacht training centre, above the Judenburg in Styria, where he captained the British troops' ski-racing team but broke a leg during a competition against the French.

1948 onwards

Finding peacetime duties unexciting, Hastings left the Army in 1948. He turned down an offer from Gillette and was refused a job by the BBC
...