Early Life
He was born in London. His father had run away to Southern Rhodesia at the age of 17 after a disagreement with his father, and, after the First World War, bought a farm there. 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, who was a Lumsden of Pitcapel. Hastings was proud of his Scottish ancestry, among whose relations were the MacDonalds of Sleat. He had an abiding affection for his cousin the historian and journalist Sir Max Hastings.
He learned to ride in Windsor Great Park, becoming an accomplished horseman. He attended Durnford School in Dorset (1929–34) and Eton (1934–39). 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.
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“Many a woman shudders ... at the terrible eclipse of those intellectual powers which in early life seemed prophetic of usefulness and happiness, hence the army of martyrs among our married and unmarried women who, not having cultivated a taste for science, art or literature, form a corps of nervous patients who make fortunes for agreeable physicians ...”
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