Read Did You Really Shoot the Television? for Free Online

at a convent in Roehampton until her death in 1920. Basil, who lived in Denmark Hill, became a pillar of local Catholic charities, notably the St Vincent de Paul Society, for which he organised and acted in local theatricals and concerts. The South London Press reported in March 1906: ‘Few Catholic laymen are better known in South London than Mr B. Macdonald Hastings…because of the work which he has done for the Church in Southwark, for the poor and destitute. Year after year he has organised an entertainment for the benefit of the poor at St George’s Cathedral mission.’
    A jovial, enthusiastic, eagerly sociable man, Basil contributed with increasing regularity to newspapers and magazines. He published light verse, much of it about cricket, together with snippets of wit in gossip columns such as: ‘ “Kiss and never tell” is a poor adage forthe billiard table. It is just the kissing that does tell’…‘The consistent borrower has the immense satisfaction of knowing that when he dies he will have finished ahead of the world’…‘A clean straw hat in May is an infallible sign of solvency.’ This sort of thing may not make a modern audience roll in the aisles, but a century ago it played well with readers of the Bystander , London Opinion , the Star and suchlike. Basil yearned to escape from his servitude at the War Office. As the first decade of the century advanced, he acquired a modest journalistic reputation.
    In 1907 he started to ‘go steady’ with the girl who became his wife, the love of his life. Billie – her full name was Wilhelmina Creusen White – was pretty, gentle, and Catholic. She lived with her parents in Peckham. Later, when some members of the family developed social pretensions, they treated Billie with condescension, complaining that she was dull, unlettered and ‘common’. This was unjust. A woman full of kindness and good nature who had much to suffer, she proved a devoted wife in good times and bad. And the Hastingses of Trinity Square, Borough, were scarcely pillars of Debrett’s .
    Basil began a correspondence with Billie on 19 January 1907, dispatching the first of many passionate letters which, inter alia , reveal a fascination with her underclothes: ‘Dear Little Wilhelmina with the very long name…I am going to bed to dream of your tantalising little feet, your brown stockings, your blue garters, your pink knees and lovely foaming petticoats and things. I send you heaps of kisses for all of them.’
    On 6 August 1908, he wrote her his last letter as a bachelor, on War Office crested paper, anticipating the joys of married bliss the following week: ‘I am going to kiss you in an entirely different way next Monday night, and somewhere you never dreamt of…’
    In less fanciful vein, the day after their marriage in Peckham, Billie’s mother wrote to her daughter, describing what happened at the wedding party after the bride and groom went away. Mrs White’s letter conveys a nice sense of the genteel society in which they lived, and of its simple pleasures:
The Pines, Lyndhurst Road, Peckham S.E.
    My dear Mina, you asked me to tell you everything what happened after you went. First they made a beastly mess with the confetti, & I think I am developing a new complaint. The symptoms are putting my finger in my mouth & making a dab at some coloured pieces of paper on the floor, well to return to the beginning again as soon as you left Willy and Harold had to see about getting home because Willy had to get to Windsor. So while Harold was racing around Peckham to try and find a taxi, I made tea which was very much liked by the ladies and also the strawberries and cream. Mr Smith had arrived by then and joined us. Mrs Mont was obliged to go by tram, then Mr Eastern waltzed The Merry Widow with Mrs Gordon, their tall hats stuck at a most ridiculous angle. Then the girls waltzed a little to Beryl playing. She was very jollie [sic] and nice, she kept us alive. After a while Father