Despite offers from family friends such as Lord Beaverbrook and Edgar Wallace who wished to help him complete his schooling, Hastings refused and went in search of work to support himself and his mother.
[1] While working at Lyons, Hastings began to branch out, writing journalistic pieces and freelancing them to various news corporations, including the BBC.
Hastings was an occasional contributor to the literary magazine Lilliput, for which he wrote fiction under the pseudonym Lemuel Gulliver.
In 1951 after the closure of Strand Magazine he was recruited by an Anglican priest, Marcus Morris, to write for a new boys' comic, The Eagle.
He wrote around thirty books, was author of a series of detective novels and appeared on television as a weekly correspondent on Tonight in the late 1950s and early 1960s.
[citation needed] Macdonald Hastings described himself as a "lapsed" Catholic but added that "[S]aintly men and women in my family outnumber the sinners."
His favourite uncle, Major Lewis Hastings, MC, was there, too, and also contributed to the other family tradition as a famous BBC military commentator in World War II.