Rupert D'Oyly Carte

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Rupert D'Oyly Carte, born Hampstead, London, November 3, 1876, was an English hotelier and impresario, best known as proprietor of the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company from 1913 to 1948.

Contents 1 Life and career 1.1 Early life 1.2 Becoming head of the family business 1.3 Innovations and renovations at the Savoy 1.4 Later years 2 Surname and Residence 3 Psmith 4 References 5 External links 6 Notes

[edit] Life and career

[edit] Early life

Rupert D'Oyly Carte was the younger son of the impresario Richard D'Oyly Carte and his first wife Blanche (née Prowse), who died in 1885. He was educated at Winchester College, noted as among the most intellectually rigorous of English public schools. He then spent some time with a firm of accountants before joining his father as an assistant in 1894. (The comprehensive Gilbert and Sullivan website, The Gilbert and Sullivan Archive[1] states that Rupert attended Magdalen College Oxford, but if he did so it could only have been fleetingly if the above dates, taken from Who’s Who are correct.)

In a newspaper interview given in the year of his death he recalled that as a young man he was entrusted, during his father’s illness, with helping W.S. Gilbert with the first revival of The Yeomen of the Guard at the Savoy Theatre^[1].

Rupert's father, Richard, died in 1901, and Rupert's stepmother, the former Helen Lenoir (who had married Richard in 1888), assumed full control of most of the family businesses, which she had increasingly controlled during Richard's decline. Rupert's older brother, Lucas, a barrister, was not involved in the family businesses and died of tuberculosis in 1907.

[edit] Becoming head of the family business

Rupert took over his late father’s role as Chairman of the Savoy Hotel in 1903 when he was aged 27 and proved an enterprising and successful businessman, adding Claridges, the Berkeley and Simpsons-in-the-Strand to the family's hotel and restaurant portfolio. In late 1906, Helen Boulter (Rupert's stepmother had remarried) acquired the performing rights to the Gilbert and Sullivan operas from Gilbert (she already had Sullivan's) and staged a repertory season at the Savoy Theatre, reviving the opera company, which had been in decline after 1901. In 1911, the company hired J. M. Gordon, who had been a member of the company under Gilbert's direction, as stage manager and later director. Gordon, under Carte's direction, preserved the company's traditions in exacting detail for 28 years.

In 1907, Rupert married Lady Dorothy Milner Gathorne-Hardy (the youngest daughter of the second Earl of Cranbrook), with whom he had a son, Michael, and a daughter, Bridget. Michael was killed in a motor accident in Switzerland in 1932.

In 1913 on the death of his stepmother, Rupert succeeded to the remainder of his father’s estate, including the D’Oyly Carte Opera Company. After the repertory seasons in 1906-1908, the company did not perform in London again until 1919, instead touring throughout Britain. Carte later recalled, "I went and watched the Company playing at a rather dreary theatre down in the suburbs of London. I thought the dresses looked dowdy.... I formed the view that new productions should be prepared, with scenery and dresses to the design of first class artists who understood the operas but who would produce a décor attractive to the new generation."^[2]

[edit] Innovations and renovations at the Savoy

In the succeeding years after World War I (during which no renovation work could be undertaken, Rupert put this aim into effect, hiring, most famously, Charles Ricketts RA to redesign The Gondoliers and The Mikado, the costumes for the latter, in 1926, being retained by all subsequent designers until the closure of the company in 1982. Other redesigns were by Percy Anderson, George Sheringham, and Peter Goffin, a protégé of Bridget D’Oyly Carte. For London seasons, Rupert engaged guest conductors, first Geoffrey Toye, then Malcolm Sargent, who examined Sullivan’s manuscript scores and purged the orchestral parts of accretions.^[3] So striking was the orchestral sound thus produced by Sargent that the press thought he had retouched the scores, and Carte had the pleasant duty of writing to correct their error. "…the details of the orchestration sounded so fresh that some of the critics thought them actually new… the opera was played last night exactly as written by Sullivan."

Carte also had the Savoy Theatre redesigned. On June 3, 1929 the Savoy closed, and it was completely rebuilt to designs by Frank A. Tugwell with décor by Basil Ionides. The old house had three tiers; the new one had two. The seating capacity was decreased from 1,292 to 1,138.^[4] The theatre reopened 135 days later on October 21, 1929,^[5] with The Gondoliers, designed by Ricketts and conducted by Sargent.

Finally, Carte nurtured a long association with Sadler's Wells (a large, profitable house for the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company) until he died in 1948.

[edit] Later years

Rupert and Lady Dorothy were divorced in 1941. Who’s Who rather unusually records that he obtained a decree nisi, in contrast to the usual conduct of upper class divorce in England at the time, when the husband would normally allow the wife to divorce him rather than vice versa (regardless of the circumstances). During World War II, Rupert served as a King's Messenger, a person who carried important papers of state between heads of other governments and UK government.

Rupert D’Oyly Carte died at the Savoy Hotel, after a brief illness, on September 12, 1948.

[edit] Surname and Residence

There seems little doubt that the family’s surname is Carte, D’Oyly being a given name. Leslie Bailey refers to his interviews with ‘Mr Carte,’ and later Kenneth Sandford recalled a conversation with the company manager in which Dame Bridget, before she received the accolade, was referred to as ‘Miss Carte’. ^[6]

Rupert and Lady Dorothy D'Oyly Carte had a country house built for them in Devon between Paignton and Kingswear, named Coleton Fishacre, now owned by the National Trust. Rupert was a keen gardener and sailor, pastimes in which he indulged at this house. After her parents divorced, Bridget D’Oyly Carte took over the house, to which her father, who lived in London, would come for long weekends.

[edit] Psmith

The English comic novelist P. G. Wodehouse based a character on Rupert D’Oyly Carte. In the introduction to his novel Something Fresh, Wodehouse says that Psmith (originally named Rupert, then Ronald) was ‘based more or less faithfully on Rupert D’Oyly Carte, son of the Savoy theatre man. He was at school with a cousin of mine, and my cousin happened to tell me about his monocle, his immaculate clothes and his habit, when asked by a master how he was of replying, “Sir, I grow thinnah and thinnah”.’ Dame Bridget D’Oyly Carte, however, believed that the Wykehamist schoolboy described to Wodehouse was not her father but his elder brother Lucas.^[7] Lucas was also at Winchester.

[edit] References

• Who Was Who, Vol IV, 1941-50, A & C Black, London, 1952
• Current Biography 1948, H W Wilson Co, New York, 1949
• Who’s Who in the Theatre, 10th edition, London, Sir Isaac Pitman & Sons, 1947
• Jones, Brian (2005). Lytton, Gilbert and Sullivan’s Jester. London: Trafford Publishing.

[edit] External links

• Article on Carte family
• D'Oyly Carte Opera Company Website

[edit] Notes