Bridget D'Oyly Carte
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Dame Bridget Cicely D'Oyly Carte DBE (March 25, 1908 – May 2, 1985), was the granddaughter of Richard D'Oyly Carte and the only daughter of Rupert D'Oyly Carte and the former Lady Dorothy Milner Gathorne-Hardy. She became head of the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company from 1948 until 1982.
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[edit] Life and career
Bridget D'Oyly Carte was educated in England and abroad and later at Dartington Hall in Devon, a school with a long musical tradition. In 1926, when she was only 18, she married her first cousin, John David Gathorne-Hardy, the fourth Earl of Cranbrook, but they divorced in 1931, and she resumed her maiden name by deed poll in 1932.[1]
From 1933 to 1939 she was an assistant to her father at the Savoy Hotel. As a child, however, Bridget was reluctant to assume the family legacy. She later told The Gramophone magazine:
- "At home, you know, we weren’t allowed to hum Gilbert and Sullivan; in fact we were fined for it, because it annoyed my father. We were allowed to sing it properly, but my brother and I couldn’t –- in my family the fact that I wasn’t Mozart at about three years old was thought of as rather disappointing. So I went through a phase when I was very anti-Gilbert and Sullivan; I became rather a highbrow, and my father thought I was a bit of a snake-in-the-grass because of it."[2]
Upon the outbreak of the Second World War, she undertook child welfare work and continued with it until 1948.
[edit] Managing the family interests
Bridget D'Oyly Carte was her father's sole heir (her only brother having died in a motoring accident), and when her father died in 1948, she inherited all his interests including the Savoy Hotel group and the family’s opera company, which presented the Savoy Operas from 1875 to 1982.
She did not succeed Rupert D'Oyly Carte as chairman of the Savoy Hotel group, but became an active director, taking control of the furnishing and decoration departments (‘with considerable success’ according to The Times[3]) and later became president of the group, in which she retained a large shareholding.
In running the opera company she took steps to keep the productions fresh, engaging designers to redesign the costumes and scenery. Peter Goffin, who had previously redesigned The Yeomen of the Guard for Rupert D'Oyly Carte, designed a unit set to facilitate touring, and produced new settings and costumes for Trial by Jury (1959), H.M.S. Pinafore (1961), Patience (1957), Iolanthe (1961), The Mikado (1958 – settings only, most of the celebrated Charles Ricketts costumes being retained), Ruddigore (1948), and The Gondoliers (1958). Princess Ida was redesigned by James Wade in 1954.[4]
[edit] Setting up the charitable trusts
With the approaching end of the D’Oyly Carte monopoly on Gilbert and Sullivan performances, when the copyright on Gilbert’s words expired in 1961, Bridget D'Oyly Carte set up a charitable trust to continue to present the operas. She endowed the trust with her company's scenery, costumes, band parts and other assets, together with a cash endowment, and presented the operas on behalf of the trust until economic necessity forced the closure of the company in 1982.
In 1972 Bridget D'Oyly Carte founded the D'Oyly Carte Charitable Trust – entirely separate from the D'Oyly Carte Opera Trust and the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company – supporting charitable causes in the fields of the arts, medical welfare and the environment. In 2001, the trust endowed the D'Oyly Carte Chair in Medicine and the Arts in the UK at King's College London with £2 million.[5]
[edit] Later years
In 1974 she was elected an Honorary Member of the Royal Society of Musicians of Great Britain, and in 1975 was created a DBE. For her Who's Who entry she listed her recreations as, 'country living and gardening; reading, theatre and music.'[6] She died in at her country home in Shrubs Wood, Buckinghamshire in April 1985.
[edit] References
- Joseph, Tony (1994). D'Oyly Carte Opera Company, 1875-1982: An Unofficial History. London: Bunthorne Books. ISBN 0-950-79921-1
- Who's Who, 1984, A & C Black, London, 1984, ISBN 0-7136-2385-3
- The Gramophone, March 1975, pp. 1630-33.
- The Times, London, 3 May 1985
