Past Times and Pastimes

Abstract

Gilbert and Sullivan. They must always be thought of together, collaborators in immortal works that I rejoice to see are still being produced. I knew them both well. Gilbert somewhat sarcastic, and somewhat bitter in his sarcasm. Sullivan an altogether charming character. I also knew D’Oyly Carte very well. He produced all the Gilbert and Sullivan operas at the Savoy. He was in very bad health, poor man, and at the beginning of one season he had chartered my yacht Cariad. My secretary having occasion to go to the Savoy on some matter with regard to the charter, was told a curious story by, I think, D’Oyly Carte’s valet. At the time that Sullivan was in extremis D’Oyly Carte was so ill that it was necessary to keep the sad news from him. Carte’s bedroom overlooked the Embankment along which the funeral cortège passed. After it had gone by, some one went to D’Oyly Carte’s room and found him out of bed and prostrate by the window; asked what he was doing there he replied, ‘I have just seen the last of my old friend Sullivan.’ Do some people under some circumstances develop an abnormal or embryonic sense of perception? I do not know; but it is curious that some impulse induced D’Oyly Carte to leave his bed and struggle to the window and to assume that a passing funeral was that of his friend, for, though doubtless he knew Sullivan was ill, he did not know that he was in danger of death.

Windham Thomas Wyndham-Quin, fourth Earl of Dunraven and Mount-Earl (1841–1926) won acclaim and recognition in journalism (he was a correspondent for the Daily Telegraph during the expedition to Abyssinia in 1867 and again during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870), big-game hunting, horse-breeding, yacht-racing (his Self-Instruction in the Practice and Theory of Navigation, published in 1900, instantly became a standard reference) and diplomacy. He might well have wanted to be remembered first and foremost for his work in seeking grounds for compromise in the relationships between Irish landlords and tenants, which became the basis of the Wyndham Land Act (1903), and for negotiations that sought to advance the cause of Irish devolution. The poignant anecdote reprinted here records D’Oyly Carte’s grief-stricken acknowledgement of the fact of Sullivan’s death.