page_title: Rupert D'Oyly Carte
section_title: Personal life
hierarchical_section_title: Rupert D'Oyly Carte / Life and career / Personal life
caption_attribution_description: Coleton Fishacre House and Garden in Devon UK
context_page_description: Rupert D'Oyly Carte 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.
context_section_description: In 1907, Carte married Lady Dorothy Milner Gathorne-Hardy (1889–1977), the third and youngest daughter of the 2nd Earl of Cranbrook, with whom he had a daughter, Bridget, and a son, Michael (1911–1932). Michael was killed at the age of 21 in a motor accident in Switzerland. In 1925, Carte and his wife had a country house built for them in Kingswear, Devon named Coleton Fishacre. The house is still known for its design features and garden with exotic tropical plants. After her parents' divorce, Bridget D'Oyly Carte took over the house, which her father, who lived in London, would visit for long weekends. She sold the house after his death, and it is now owned by the National Trust.
  Carte's private pastimes included gardening, notably at Coleton Fishacre, driving and yachting. He was an early devotee of the motor car and incurred the displeasure of the courts more than once. He was fined £3 for driving at 19 miles an hour in 1902, and the following year he was subject to criminal prosecution for knocking down and injuring a child when driving at the speed of 24 miles an hour. He made "every provision for the comfort of the child", who recovered from the accident. In the years after the First World War he was a frequent competitor in yachting races. From 1919 he raced his yacht "Kali" in the Hamble River class. Later, he owned and raced a 19-ton cutter, "Content".
  In 1941, Carte divorced his wife for adultery. The suit was undefended. Lady Dorothy moved to the Bahamas and married St Yves de Verteuil, who had been the co-respondent in the divorce case. De Verteuil died in 1963, and Lady Dorothy de Verteuil died in February 1977.
  P. G. Wodehouse based the character Psmith, seen in several of his comic novels, on either Rupert D'Oyly Carte or his elder brother Lucas. 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'." Bridget D'Oyly Carte, however, believed that the Wykehamist schoolboy described to Wodehouse was not her father but his brother Lucas, who was also at Winchester College. Rupert D'Oyly Carte was "shy, reserved and at times distinctly taciturn." Psmith, by contrast, is outgoing and garrulous.
caption: Carte's House at Coleton Fishacre
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