Stephen Hastings
 | This article needs additional citations for verification. (December 2011) |
Sir Stephen Hastings | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Member of Parliament for Mid Bedfordshire | |
| In office 16 November 1960 – 13 May 1983 | |
| Preceded by | Alan Lennox-Boyd |
| Succeeded by | Nicholas Lyell |
| Personal details | |
| Born | Stephen Lewis Edmonstone Hastings 4 May 1921 Knightsbridge, London, England |
| Died | 10 January 2005 (aged 83) Wansford, Cambridgeshire, England |
| Political party | Conservative |
| Spouses | Harriet Tomlin
(m. 1948; div. 1971)Elizabeth Naylor-Leyland
(m. 1975; died 1997) |
| Children | 2 (by Tomlin) |
| Relatives | Max Hastings (cousin) |
| Alma mater | Royal Military College, Sandhurst |
| Military service | |
| Allegiance |  United Kingdom |
| Branch/service |  British Army |
| Years of service | 1940–1948 |
| Rank | Major |
| Unit | Scots Guards |
| Battles/wars | Second World War |
| Awards | Military Cross |
Sir Stephen Lewis Edmonstone Hastings
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 politicians of the white minority regime. Over the next twenty 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 1965, Hastings was a prominent member of the Rhodesia lobby opposing sanctions – against the official party line.
Fourteen years later, he strongly supported the
Although Hastings claimed to have been invited to join Edward Heath's ministry, 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 Hall, the only person whose photographs were displayed in more than one room (apart from those of his beloved late wife, Elizabeth) were those of Ian Smith.
Early life
Hastings was born at
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
He learned to ride in Windsor Great Park, becoming an accomplished horseman. He attended Durnford School in Dorset (1929–34)[2] and Eton College (1934–39).[2] 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.[citation needed]
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
After disagreements with his company commander he joined the
Then, after being diagnosed with chronic
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
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
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
The unproven imputations put forward in the book Spycatcher, in which Hastings was portrayed as participating in an attempt to destabilise the Harold Wilson government were always vehemently denied by him. The book's author, Peter Wright, was regularly denounced by Hastings as "that traitor", though no one knew exactly to what betrayal he was referring.
His disgust at the
He could be an effective Commons performer. His self-confident, upper-class drawl and theatrical oratorical style enraged Labour MPs. He was often embroiled in controversy concerning Communist infiltration. In 1977 he alleged that five prominent trades union officials were agents for
In 1986 Hastings successfully sued The Observer newspaper for libel following allegations that he had been one of two Conservative MPs involved in an MI5 plot to oust Harold Wilson.
Hastings remained a friend of Thatcher after his retirement from the Commons in 1983. He and his wife entertained the Thatchers and other notables at
Outside his parliamentary duties, Hastings continued to ride, hunting regularly with the Fitzwilliam and other hunts. In 1982 he was elected chairman of the
Hastings was chairman of the
Hastings was an accomplished painter, a fine sculptor, and wrote two books, The Murder of TSR2 (1966) and a well-received autobiography, The Drums of Memory (1995). He regularly skied in Switzerland until he was in his ninth decade, and hunted with the Fitzwilliam over forty times in the year before his death.
Stephen Hastings married first, in 1948 (dissolved 1971), Harriet Tomlin, with whom he had a son Neil and a daughter Carola. He married secondly, in 1975, Elizabeth Anne Marie Gabrielle, the former Lady Naylor-Leyland. Lady Hastings was born the younger daughter of the 2nd and last Viscount FitzAlan of Derwent and Joyce Langdale of Houghton Hall, West Riding, Yorkshire, who secondly married Thomas Wentworth-Fitzwilliam, 10th and last Earl Fitzwilliam.
In 1979 Lord Fizwilliam left the bulk of his great art collection and the estates of Milton, Cambridgeshire,
Sir Stephen Hastings died on 10 January 2005 at Stibbington House, Cambridgeshire, from
References
- ^ a b c "Obituary Peterborough Cathedral". peterborough-cathedral.org.uk. Archived from the original on 13 April 2005. Retrieved 14 December 2017.
- ^ a b c d e "Hastings, Sir Stephen Lewis Edmonstone (1921–2005), politician | Oxford Dictionary of National Biography". oxforddnb.com. 24 July 2012. Retrieved 14 December 2017.
- ^ a b "The Times obituary". timesonline.co.uk. Retrieved 14 December 2017.
Further reading
- Sir Stephen Hastings' own autobiography The Drums of Memory.
- Lady Hastings' obituary in Christie's magazine, and various personal reminiscences of Sir Stephen and The Hon. Lady Hastings.
External links
| International | |
|---|---|
| National | |
| People | |
| Other | |
