Rupert D'Oyly Carte (3 November 1876 – 12 September 1948) was an English hotelier, theatre owner and impresario, best known as proprietor of the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company and Savoy Hotel from 1913 to 1948.
Son of the impresario and hotelier Richard D'Oyly Carte, Rupert inherited the family businesses from his stepmother Helen. After serving in the First World War, he took steps to revitalise the opera company, which had not appeared in central London since 1909, hiring new designers and conductors to present fresh productions of the Gilbert and Sullivan operas in seasons in the West End. The new productions generally retained the original text and music of the operas. Carte launched international and provincial tours, as well as the London seasons, and he released the first complete recordings of the operas. He also rebuilt the half-century-old Savoy Theatre in 1929, opening the house with a season of Gilbert and Sullivan.
As an hotelier, Carte built on his father's legacy, expanding the Savoy Hotel, refreshing the other hotels and restaurants in the Savoy group, including Claridge's and the Berkeley Hotel, and introducing cabaret and dance bands that became internationally famous. He also increased marketing activities, including foreign marketing, of the hotels.
P. G. Wodehouse based a character in his novels, Psmith, on a Wykehamist schoolboy whom he identified as Rupert D'Oyly Carte. At his death, Carte passed the opera company and hotels to his only surviving child, Bridget D'Oyly Carte. The Gilbert and Sullivan operas, nurtured by Carte and his family for over a century, continue to be produced frequently today throughout the English-speaking world and beyond.
Life and career
Early life
Rupert D'Oyly Carte was born in Hampstead, London, the younger son of the impresario Richard D'Oyly Carte and his first wife Blanche (née Prowse), who died in 1885. Like his elder brother, Lucas (1872–1907), he was given his father's middle name. He was educated at Winchester College, noted as among the most intellectually rigorous of English public schools. He then worked for a firm of accountants before joining his father as an assistant in 1894. In a newspaper interview given in the year of his death, Rupert 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.
He was elected a director of the Savoy Hotel Limited in 1898, joining his father and Sir Arthur Sullivan, who had served on the board since the Savoy Hotel was built. By 1899 he was assistant managing director. Richard D'Oyly Carte 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 her husband's decline. Rupert's brother, Lucas, a barrister, was not involved in the family businesses and died of tuberculosis, aged 34.
Taking over the family businesses
In 1903, at the age of 27, Rupert took over his late father's role as chairman of the Savoy group, which included the Savoy Hotel, Claridge's, The Berkeley Hotel, Simpson's-in-the-Strand and the Grand Hotel in Rome. At this time, the whole group was officially valued at £2,221,708. He immediately issued £300,000 of debentures to raise capital for a large extension to the Savoy (the "East Block"). Like his father, Carte was willing to go to great lengths to secure the best employees for his hotels. When Claridge's needed a new chef in 1904, he secured the services of François Bonnaure, formerly chef at the Élysée Palace in Paris. The press speculated on how much Carte must have paid to persuade Bonnaure to join him, and compared the younger Carte's audacity with his father's coup in securing Paris's most famous maître d'hôtel, M. Joseph, a few years earlier.