Patrick Hastings - Military Service and Call To The Bar

Military Service and Call To The Bar

Hastings left the failed mining operation in 1899, and travelled to London. Just after he arrived, the Second Boer War broke out, and the British government called for volunteers to join an expeditionary force. The only qualifications required were that the recruit could ride and shoot, and Hastings immediately applied to join the Suffolk Imperial Yeomanry. He was accepted, and after two weeks of training the regiment were given horses and boarded the S.S. Goth Castle to South Africa. The ship reached Cape Town after three weeks, and the regiment disembarked. Their horses were considered too weak to be ridden, and so they were instead discharged and either put down or given to other soldiers. Hastings did not enjoy his time in the army; the weather was poor, the orders given were confusing and they were provided with minimal equipment.

Hastings was made a scout, a duty he thoroughly enjoyed; it meant that he got to the targeted farms first, and had time to steal chickens and other food before the Royal Military Police arrived (as looting was a criminal offence). Hastings was not a model soldier; as well as looting, he estimated that by the time he left the army he had "been charged and tried upon almost every offence known to military law". After two years of fighting, the Treaty of Vereeniging was signed in 1902, bringing an end to the Second Boer War, and his regiment was returned to London and demobilised.

By the time Hastings returned, he had decided to become a barrister. There were various problems with this aim: in particular, he had no money, and the training for barristers was extremely expensive. Despite this, he refused to consider a change of career, and joined the Middle Temple as a student on 4 November 1901. It is uncertain why he chose this particular Inn of Court (his uncle J. Comyns Carr, his only connection with the Bar, was a member of the Inner Temple), but the most likely explanation was that the Middle Temple was popular with Irish barristers, and Hastings was of Irish ancestry. The examinations required to become a barrister were not particularly difficult or expensive, but once a student passed all the exams he would be expected to pay the then-enormous sum of £100 when he was called to the Bar – £100 in 1901 would be worth approximately £8,100 as of 2012 – and Hastings was literally penniless.

As soon as he joined the Middle Temple, Hastings began saving money for his call to the Bar, starting with half a crown from the sale of his Queen's South Africa Medal to a pawnbroker. The rules and regulations of the Inns of Court meant that a student was not allowed to work as a "tradesperson" but there was no rule against working as a journalist, and his cousin Philip Carr, a drama critic for the Daily News, got him a job writing a gossip column for the News for one pound a week. This job lasted about three months; both he and Carr were fired after Hastings wrote a piece for the paper that should have been done by Carr. Despite this, his new contacts within journalism allowed him to get temporary jobs writing play reviews for the Pall Mall Gazette and the Ladies' Field. After two years of working eighteen-hour days he had saved £60 of the £100 needed to be called to the Bar, but had still not studied for the examinations as he could not afford to buy any law books. Over the next year his income decreased, as he was forced to study for the examinations rather than work for newspapers. By the end of May 1904 he had the £100 needed, and he was called to the bar on 15 June.