Early Life
Hastings was born on 17 March 1880 in London to Alfred Gardiner Hastings and Kate Comyns Carr, a painter and the sister of J. Comyns Carr. Having been born on Saint Patrick's Day Hastings was named after the saint. His father was a solicitor with "somewhat seedy clients", and the family were repeatedly bankrupted. Despite financial difficulties, there was enough money in the family to send Hastings to a private preparatory school in 1890 and to Charterhouse School in 1894. Hastings disliked school, saying "I hated the bell which drove us up in the morning, I hated the masters; above all I hated the work, which never interested me in the slightest degree". He was bullied at both the preparatory school and at Charterhouse, and did not excel at either sports or his studies.
By 1896 the family had hit another period of financial trouble, and Hastings left Charterhouse to move to continental Europe with his mother and older brother Archie until there was enough money for the family to return to London. The family initially moved to Ajaccio in Corsica, where they bought several old guns and taught Hastings and his brother how to shoot. After six months in Ajaccio the family moved again, this time to the Ardennes, where they also learnt how to fish and ride horses.
While they were in the Ardennes, Hastings and his brother were arrested and briefly held for murder. While attending a fête in a nearby village Archie got into a disagreement with the local priest, who accused him of insulting the French church after misunderstanding one of his comments. The brothers returned to see the priest the next day to demand an apology, and after receiving it, they began to return home. On the way there they were stopped by two gendarmes who arrested them for murder, informing them that the priest had been found dead ten minutes after they left his house. As the gendarmes prepared to take the Hastings to the police station, two more officers turned up with a villager in handcuffs. It transpired that the priest had been having an affair with the villager's sister, and after waiting for the Hastings to leave he had entered the priest's house and killed him with a brick. The Hastings were quickly released.
Soon after this incident, the family moved from the Ardennes to Brussels after a message from their father that the financial problems had ended. When they reached Brussels they found that the situation was actually worse than previously, and the family moved between cheap hotels, each one worse than the one before. Desperate for a job, Hastings accepted the offer of an apprenticeship with an English engineer who claimed to have made a machine to extract gold in North Wales. After about a year and a half of work they discovered that there was no gold to be found in that part of Wales, and Hastings was informed that his services would no longer be needed.
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