Who Is The Man Behind The Real ‘Fawlty Towers’?

Everyone will have likely stayed in a disappointing hotel at some point in their lives. But not many can say they have stayed in a hotel run by two would-be genteel types who, in running a provincial hotel, had condemned themselves to quite the wrong vocation, were convinced their clientele were total riff-raff and by whom the most modest request was interpreted as an unforgivable imposition.

For when the Monty Python crew were staying in Torquay while filming, they happened upon these same worst hoteliers in England. The rest of the Pythons left within two weeks – so bad was the service – but John Cleese and his then-wife Connie Booth decided to stay longer, partly out of laziness, and partly as an exercise in unconscious comedic inspiration.

Indeed, the owner in question, a certain Donald Sinclair, became the basis for John Cleese’s character of Basil Fawlty: a hotelier from hell.

After an extensive and decorated career in the Merchant and Royal Navy, including on two occasions surviving the sinking of the ship he was serving on, Mr Sinclair reluctantly took on the job of managing the Gleneagles Hotel in Torquay with his wife, Beatrice.

Over the years that he ran the hotel, he became widely regarded as the illest-fitting human in hotelry. To put it kindly he had no touch, or desire, for service. He despised his guests. He was a disciplinarian who could not tolerate fools.

Donald and Beatrice Sinclair

He marched about in his dressing-gown berating guests for wanting hot water to heat a baby’s bottle, early alarm calls, late suppers, or if they requested a taxi. ‘Why?’ he’d howl incredulously. 

Perhaps, if you wanted to go out late he might yell at you, ‘And where do you think you’re going?!’ The most mild-mannered of customers would be told, ‘We do ask our guests to be prompt for meals.’

After being torpedoed three times throughout his naval career, Sinclair was always ‘behind schedule, highly stressed and extremely irascible’. 

A certain Mrs Harrison, who worked at the hotel and became the inspiration for Polly – the genteel but short-tempered hotel assistant – recalled an occasion when Mr Sinclair halted breakfast because a waiter had given up waiting for him to make tea and had pinched teapots designated for another table. ‘He went up and down the tables like a policeman, questioning the guests. He came across a set of teapots at a table for two. He realised because of their size they were meant for a table for four, and he asked the guests for a description of the waiter.’

The old Hotel Gleneagles, Torquay

In the diaries of the Python Years, the entries of 11 and 12th May 1970 recount that Sinclair saw the Pythons as a “colossal inconvenience”, and that when Michael Palin decided to leave after one night, Beatrice Sinclair gave them a bill for two weeks. Eric Idle’s suitcase was thrown out of the window onto the street as Mr Sinclair believed it contained a bomb, and berated the American Terry Gilliam for not straightening his cutlery on the plate after he had eaten.

Sinclair died in Torquay in 1981 aged 72, perhaps characteristically from a heart attack ‘when some workmen he’d upset painted his patio furniture and car gunmetal grey during the night.’

It seems as if Fawlty Towers could also be a certain homage to Cleese’s upbringing in Weston-super-Mare, where on the surface there is ‘a kind of brittle politeness and underneath a lot of seething rage’.

Other trivia includes that the character for Manuel, with his comic linguistic mangling and unforgivably from Barcelona, was inspired by a Torquay waiter who pronounced ‘architect’ as ‘heart attack’.

It must be said that Beatrice Sinclair, allegedly the real-life Sybil Fawlty, broke her silence after more than 30 years to defend her late husband, protesting he had been “turned into a laughing stock”. She complained that Cleese had ‘held my family up to ridicule’ and that although her husband was a disciplinarian who could not tolerate fools, he was not a ‘neurotic eccentric’. 

Cleese’s opinion was more mannered: ‘I do remember all the other Pythons left but Connie Booth and I were lazy. We stayed on and didn’t realise we were accumulating material. I take the point that he was a war hero but as a hotelier he was astonishingly rude.’