Did You Really Shoot the Television? by Max Hastings Read Free Book Online Page A

solicitude of the old chief, who had sent a messenger a hundred miles across country with his kindly warning.
    Lewis’s first body-servant and gun-bearer was a Zulu namedShakespeare, who stayed with him for years, and often entertained him with tales of his tribe’s 1879 war with the British, only a quarter of a century earlier. Shakespeare claimed that his own father had been among the party which cut down the Prince Imperial, son of the exiled French Emperor Napoleon III. Perceiving that the dead man was a chief of some importance, Shakespeare asserted that, in accordance with tribal custom, his killers extracted and shared a mouthful apiece of the Prince’s raw heart. Lewis believed this story to be true. It left him puzzled about what might therefore repose in the casket supposedly containing the boy’s heart which had been returned by Lord Chelmsford with much ceremony to his grieving mother, Empress Eugénie, in Surrey.
    Lewis loved the legends of the African tribes, of which he often included samples in his own anecdotage. But in his attitude to the continent’s indigenous peoples, he was a man of his time. ‘A lot of nonsense is talked about the yearning for freedom of this and freedom of that,’ he observed characteristically. ‘The only freedom Africans want is freedom from trousers.’ That line appeared for years in a dictionary of quotations, until a squeamish modern editor deleted it. Lewis loved to meet Africans in what he perceived as their natural setting – villages amid the vast expanse of the bush. He was moved to pity when he saw them in the towns of South Africa and Rhodesia, where they seemed to him to shrink and become lost souls.
    In the last years before the First World War, Lewis devoted increasing energy to journalism and politics, to which he was introduced by the ex-Jameson raider turned financial magnate Sir George Farrar. Farrar persuaded Lewis to help organise the Unionist Party in the Transvaal. He worked closely with two former members of the ‘Milner Kindergarten’, Patrick Duncan and Richard Feetham. In July 1913, in their company Lewis played a dramatic part in suppressing the huge, violent miners’ strikes which convulsed South Africa. Thousands of rioters, many of them armed, converged on Johannesburg. Lewis, though the youngest man in the Rand Club that day, found himself called upon to command a local ‘Civic Guard’. This was the occasion when he broke a Mauser rifle over the headof a man whom he saw raising a gun to fire at his company. Lewis cheerfully admitted afterwards that he held no special opinion one way or another about the merits of the authorities’ case, or that of the strikers. He merely took his usual view that if there was a fight, he wanted to be in it. Botha and Smuts suppressed the rioters by promising generous concessions, none of which were fulfilled. A few months later, Lewis found himself with a real war to fight, on a scale which satisfied even his own gluttony for trouble.
    I was brought up to idolise Lewis, as my father did. Even in old age, he retained his magical speaking voice. He presented a magnificent tawny figure, about whom no legend could be doubted. He was entirely of his time and place. A sceptic would have said that his life was selfish and reckless. Most of his virtues were those of the Clubland Heroes of fiction, founded upon courage, physical prowess, a boundless appetite for excitement and fellowship. His views and prejudices lacked any shading: somebody was a white man, or a rotter; a cause was worthless, or to die for. Yet Lewis possessed real literary gifts, not least a talent for verse. When he exercised his brain and pen, the results were sometimes remarkable. His accomplishments were much slighter than they might have been, because he always chose to please himself, to forswear discipline, to pursue whatever overhead star momentarily seized his imagination.
    To my father and later myself, when we read of the Hastingses of