9d (edited) • General discussion
The Bad Service Man
Donald Sinclair, former proprietor of the Hotel Gleneagles in Torquay, was the unwitting inspiration for Basil Fawlty – the irascible protagonist of the hugely-successful BBC comedy series Fawlty Towers.
Before the Second World War rolled around, Sinclair was an officer in the Royal Naval Reserve – and, consequently, in 1939, he was called up for military service. His naval career was dramatic. Sinclair was first assigned to the HMS Salopian, a converted cargo liner that had been armed and converted into a warship. On the 13th of May 1941, the ship was attacked by a German U-boat and torpedoed four times. Despite the Salopian’s engines being knocked out, Sinclair and his shipmates fought on – engaging the enemy in a gun battle when the submarine surfaced. When the German submariners finally gave up the fight and retreated back to the depths, a fifth torpedo ripped through the Salopian, breaking her in half. Sinclair, clinging to the wreckage, was picked up by the HMS Impulsive the next morning.
Two months later, Sinclair joined the crew of the infantry landing ship HMS Karanja – to take part in the impossibly butch-sounding military mission ‘Operation Ironclad’ – the British invasion of Vichy French-controlled Madagascar. Once again, Sinclair’s boat was taken out with him still on it – this time the engine room was hit by two bombs from a German Fokker, which caused it to blow up and sink.
Finally, Sinclair served on the escort carrier HMS Trumpeter, assigned to take part in the slightly less cool-sounding ‘Operation Zipper’ – a mission to assist in the recapture of British Malaya. However, by the time they reached the Far East in July 1945, the war had all-but ended, and the mission was abandoned.
During a period of extended leave in 1940, Sinclair had travelled back to the UK to marry Beatrice Ritchie – the daughter of an Aberdeenshire policeman, who worked as a fashion consultant and designer at a department store. To avoid the constant bombing of Glasgow, whose factories and shipyards made it a major enemy target, Beatrice came south to the more tranquil environs of Torquay, a popular tourist resort on the Devonshire coast, where she initially resided with an aunt.
A successful businesswoman and entrepreneur, Beatrice bought and took up the management of a local guesthouse, Greenacres, and was evidently good at it – for, soon afterwards, she purchased a second property which she quickly had converted into a hotel. Beatrice named it after her favourite part of her native Scotland – Gleneagles. It was initially promoted as ‘upmarket’ due to it having private bathrooms in each of its 41 rooms, which had all been given exotic names, like ‘Coral’ and ‘Mimosa’.
In April 1946, Sinclair, now a salty old sea dog with a well-earned reputation as a disciplinarian, returned to Blighty. Having achieved the rank of Lieutenant Commander; as an officer with his own bagman, he was more used to giving orders – and having them carried out to the letter. Arriving in Torquay, his wife Beatrice somehow persuaded him to give up his Naval career in favour of the safer option of running one of her hotels. Though he grudgingly agreed, he was not a man well-suited to the service industry.
Sinclair managed the Gleneagles with only the very keenest reluctance, treating anyone checking in as a source of considerable irritation. Marching about the hotel, swathed in his dressing gown, he would angrily berate guests – and interpret any interaction with them as the most unforgivable imposition. Indeed, according to the hotel’s former employees, requests for alarm calls, taxis, and late suppers would be routinely met by fierce looks and howls of ‘Why?’
At 10pm one evening, a young mother staying at the hotel pressed the night porter button at reception. After fifteen minutes, a furious Sinclair appeared. When she asked if she could have a flask of hot water to heat her baby’s bottle, he snarled at her for getting him out of bed for such a trivial request.
Any guest hoping to leave the hotel after supper, would be met by Sinclair bawling incredulously from the reception: “And where on God’s Earth do you think you’re going?” Another guest who enquired when the next bus into town would be was responded to by Sinclair throwing a timetable in his face.
When it all got too much for him, Sinclair would retreat to his sanctuary – a small office just off the hotel’s reception. Here, he would remain unregarded, doing little bits and pieces, such as typing up the menus.
In May 1970, the comedy troupe of the BBC sketch show Monty Python’s Flying Circus were filming for their upcoming TV series in the nearby town of Paignton – and, by chance, found themselves booked into the Gleneagles.
Aware of the booking, Donald Sinclair was apparently reticent about having a bunch of comedians stay at the hotel, but Beatrice overruled him, as the Monty Python cast members and the production crew staying at the hotel for three weeks in the off-season represented a significant amount of business.
Returning late from filming, a shoot that involved him playing football dressed as a gynaecologist, Michael Palin recorded in his diary (on the single night that he stayed at the hotel):
‘Mr Sinclair, the proprietor, seemed to view us from the start as a colossal inconvenience, and when we arrived back from Brixham, at 12.30, having watched the night filming, he just stood and looked at us with a look of self-righteous resentment, of tacit accusation, that I had not seen since my father waited up for me fifteen years ago. Graham tentatively asked for a brandy – the idea was dismissed, and that night, our first in Torquay, we decided to move out of the Gleneagles.'
John Cleese, however, seemed fascinated by the hotel manager, describing him later as ‘the most wonderfully rude man I had ever met.’
After Palin had checked out (along with Terry Jones and Graham Chapman), Sinclair set about endearing himself to the remaining Pythons. In the hotel’s dining room, as they were eating supper the second evening of their stay, Sinclair leaned over the table where Terry Gilliam – the only American Python – was finishing his meal, and – putting his knife and fork together on the plate for him – advised: ‘This is how we do it in England.’
The following morning, Eric Idle left his briefcase by the front door whilst he was waiting for a taxi to pick him up for filming – and inadvertently forgot it. Returning later, Idle enquired after the bag. “What?” came the growling response. “Oh, yes. It’s behind the wall,” Sinclair said brusquely, pointing out the front door, towards a swimming pool with a large white wall behind it. Idle responded by asking, not unreasonably, why his bag was behind the wall.
‘Erm,” Sinclair returned. “I thought it might contain a bomb!” “A bomb?” queried Idle. “Why would it contain a bomb?” “Well…” Sinclair told him. “We’ve had a lot of staff problems recently.”
The rest of the Pythons soon relocated to the Imperial Hotel, but Cleese decided to stay on – and even sent for his wife Connie Booth to join him – and the pair set about observing Sinclair and gathering material that would later be used to create Cleese’s most enduring comedy creation, Basil Fawlty.
Sinclair’s peculiar behaviour obviously remained percolating in his head for a while. For, in 1975, Cleese drew on his encounters with the cantankerous hotelier whilst penning No Ill Feeling! – an episode of the popular TV comedy Doctor at Large.
In it, Barry Evans’ character, Dr. Upton, is put up at a provincial hotel run by the irritable and curt, ‘Mr Clifford’. Played by actor Timothy Bateson, like the real Sinclair, Clifford was a small man, totally dominated by his overbearing wife.
“Now, he was quite small, physically, and Mrs. Sinclair was sizable. So, it was more obviously the sort of henpecked husband situation. By reversing it, because I couldn’t be small, obviously, and Pru is not very tall, we kind of took it away a little bit from the more obvious aspects of the henpecked husband.”
This early incarnation of Cleese’s Basil Fawlty character is little more than a thumbnail sketch of what was to come; Clifford, though testy and clearly ill-suited to running a hotel, has none of Basil’s neurosis. And when he discovers that his guest there is a doctor, there is none of Fawlty’s trademark fawning and attempting to ingratiate himself with the non-‘riff-raff’ element.
It appears Sinclair wasn’t the only member of the Gleneagles staff that – ahem – inspired Cleese and Connie Booth’s writing. Working at the hotel at the time was an efficient German-Swiss housekeeper called ‘Jetty’ – transformed in Fawlty Towers into Booth’s own character ‘Polly’ – and a bewildered Spanish waiter named ‘Pepe’ – who became Andrew Sach’s ‘Manuel’.
Indeed, the Gleneagles itself is name-checked in the Fawlty Towers episode The Builders as a suggestive alternative location for the guests’ dinner while Fawlty Towers undergoes emergency renovations.
Sinclair died back in Torquay in 1981, having emigrated to Canada in the mid-1970s. In 2002, his widow Beatrice broke her silence to complain about Fawlty Tower’s unfair portrayal of her late husband. Stating that the TV comedy had ‘turned her husband into a laughing-stock’, she agreed that he was a disciplinarian who did not suffer fools gladly – but that he was in no way the ‘neurotic eccentric’ portrayed.
According to Sinclair’s former employees though, the Basil Fawlty character barely did him justice. On one occasion, while the guests were enjoying a drink in the hotel’s bar after dinner, Sinclair suddenly pulled down the bar shutters and told everyone to get out because he was going to bed. When guests complained he told them it was ‘tough’ – and designated them ‘a bunch of cowboys’.
On another occasion, Sinclair astounded guests when he suddenly cancelled an advertised dinner dance at a moment’s notice. When they complained that they had only come to the hotel for the event, he dumped a record player in the middle of the room – and then headed off to bed.
During one memorable breakfast at the hotel, Sinclair flew into a rage because one of the waiters had placed a teapot on the wrong side of a table. He immediately halted breakfast, and going up systematically to each table, interrogated the diners for a description of the guilty waiter.
Finally, a waiter prevailed, however. The Hotel Gleneagles was closed permanently in February 2015 – and demolished the following November. Where it once stood, there is now a housing development called ‘Sachs Lodge’ – its name, an abstruse reference to the actor that played Fawlty Tower’s beleaguered Spanish waiter Manuel, Andrew Sachs.
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The Bad Service Man
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