Nationality British Role Hotel owner Children Two Service/branch Royal Navy | Allegiance United Kingdom Rank Lieutenant commander Name Donald Sinclair | |
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Full Name Donald William Sinclair Born 6 July 1909 ( 1909-07-06 ) Occupation Merchant Naval Officer, Naval Officer, Hotelier Known for Being the inspiration for the fictional character, Basil Fawlty Spouse(s) Beatrice Coutts Ritchie (1940–1981; his death) Died 1981, Torquay, United Kingdom Battles and wars Battle of the Atlantic, Battle of Madagascar, Operation Torch, World War II | ||
Donald William Sinclair (10 July 1909 – 1981) was the co–proprietor of the Gleneagles Hotel in Torquay, England. He helped manage the hotel after an extensive career as an officer in the Merchant Navy and the Royal Navy. During World War II, he twice survived the sinking of the ship he was serving on.
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He was the inspiration for the character Basil Fawlty in Fawlty Towers, owing to his allegedly stuffy, snobbish and eccentric treatment of his guests, including John Cleese and other members of the Monty Python cast.
Wartime career
Prior to World War II, Sinclair was in the British Merchant Navy. As an officer in the Royal Naval Reserve, he was called up in September 1939 for military service.
Soon after his call up, he joined the crew of the armed merchant cruiser (AMC) HMS Salopian. Salopian was a pre-war cargo liner that had been armed and converted into a warship as an emergency wartime measure. In May 1941 she was escorting a convoy in the North Atlantic. Early on the morning of the 13th, 400 miles south of Cape Farewell, Greenland, she was attacked unsuccessfully by the U-boat U-98 in heavy fog. During successive attacks in following six hours, Salopian was hit four times by torpedoes. Her engines were knocked out but she remained afloat and engaged the surfaced U-98 with gunfire. Salopian finally sank after a fifth torpedo broke her in half. All but three of the crew survived and were picked up the next day by the destroyers HMS Impulsive and HMS Icarus.
In July 1941, Sinclair joined the crew of the Infantry landing ship HMS Karanja. In May 1942, Karanja took part in Operation Ironclad, the British invasion of Vichy French-controlled Madagascar. In November 1942, she took part in Operation Torch, the Allied invasion of French North Africa. On the morning of 12 November, at Bougie, Algeria, Karanja was hit in the engine room by at least two bombs from a German Junkers 88 bomber and set on fire, before subsequently sinking.
From February 1943 until July 1945, Sinclair served on the escort carrier HMS Trumpeter. He left the navy in April 1946 with the rank of Lieutenant commander.
Hotel career and later life
Sinclair married Beatrice Ritchie (1915–2010) in Glasgow during the war. She was a policeman's daughter from Ellon, Aberdeenshire, who worked as a fashion consultant and designer at a Glasgow department store. She moved to Torquay to live with an aunt and avoid the German bombing of Glasgow. After the war ended, while her husband was still serving at sea, she opened a hotel in Torquay called Greenacres. The business was a success and in 1964, she bought a private house that she transformed into a second hotel. She named this Gleneagles after her favourite part of her native Scotland. By this time, her husband was assisting her in running the business. He made this decision reluctantly and would have preferred to remain at sea.
Sinclair died in England in 1981 aged 72, from a heart attack and stroke "when some workmen he’d upset painted his patio furniture and car gunmetal grey during the night." His wife died 29 years later in September 2010; they are survived by their two daughters.
Fawlty Towers
The Monty Python cast met the Sinclairs while staying at the Gleneagles Hotel in May 1970; they were filming in nearby Paignton. Sinclair was reluctant to let them stay, but his wife argued in favour of them, as their three-week stay in the hotel represented a considerable amount of business during the hotel's off-season. Due to Sinclair's attitude towards them, which included criticising American Terry Gilliam's table etiquette and throwing Eric Idle's briefcase out of a window because he thought it contained a bomb, all of the Monty Python cast left the hotel for other accommodation, apart from Idle, John Cleese and his then-wife Connie Booth.
Cleese stayed because he wanted to observe Sinclair further and later used his mannerisms as an inspiration for Basil Fawlty in Fawlty Towers. Several of the show's plot lines are alleged to be partly based on real-life events. Cleese later played eccentric hotel owners in the 1999 remake film The Out-of-Towners and the 2001 film Rat Race; in this later piece, his character was actually named Donald Sinclair.
Accuracy
Opinions are divided on how closely Sinclair resembled Fawlty. Former staff and visitors have remembered actual events there that were allegedly as ludicrous as those depicted in the series. However, Sinclair's family is adamant that Fawlty was an inaccurate caricature. Beatrice Sinclair later described her husband as a "gentleman and a very brave man" and not "the neurotic eccentric that John Cleese made him out to be." An accuracy she did acknowledge is that she was very much in charge of the business, just as Basil Fawlty was usually subordinate to his wife Sybil. The publication of Michael Palin's diaries in 2006 supported Cleese's assessment of the Sinclairs.