Talk:Bridget D'Oyly Carte

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

	This article is part of WikiProject Gilbert and Sullivan, an attempt to complete and improve the Gilbert and Sullivan related articles on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, you can edit the article attached to this page, or visit the project page, where you can join the project and see a list of open tasks.
Start	This article has been rated as Start-Class on the quality scale.
Mid	This article has been rated as Mid-importance on the importance scale for the G&S Project.
Article Grading: The article has been rated for quality and/or importance but has no comments yet. If appropriate, please review the article and then leave comments here to explain the ratings and/or to identify the strengths and weaknesses of the article.

[edit] Role in the opera company

Great start on the article! The previous edit said:

Dame Bridget D'Oyly Carte, born 25 March 1908, was the granddaughter of Richard D’Oyly Carte and proprietor of the D’Oyly Carte Opera Company from 1948 to 1961.

As a topic sentence, I think this is misleading. Although the corporate structure changed in 1961, Miss Carte remained at the head of it — as the article accurately goes on to say. It's usually a good idea to keep topic sentences simple, so I reworded it to say that she was head of the company from 1948 to 1982. The body of the article describes the change that took place in 1961. Marc Shepherd 13:54, 30 July 2006 (UTC)

• Quite so. Decidedly better. (En passant, I note you capitalise 'earl'. Is this Wikipedia's house style? Modern usage in England is tending to drop the upper case (also in e.g. prime minister, lord chancellor etc).) Tim riley 17:50, 1 August 2006 (UTC)

I capitalized Earl based on the usage at the Earl of Cranbrook page. I don't know if Wikipedia has an official utterance on the matter, but this is the de facto style in similar articles. Marc Shepherd 21:53, 1 August 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Life with father

I have just found an interview with Bridget D'Oyly Carte printed on pp 1630/1633 of the March 1975 edition of The Gramophone. It isn't stupendously revelatory, but I liked this:

"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."

I don't know if this is worth slotting into the Wikipedia article on her. Tim riley 17:25, 9 February 2007 (UTC)

I threw it in. See what you think. Are you sure of the sentence before the "--" above? Is a word or two missing? -- Ssilvers 17:51, 9 February 2007 (UTC)

That will do nicely. The quote is verbatim - triple checked, I promise. I read it as meaning that the children were forbidden to hum the tunes but would have been allowed to sing them properly if they had been able to - but they weren't. Tim riley 20:08, 9 February 2007 (UTC)