Lord Forte; Independent obit (Hotelier)
Hyfler/Rosner
Hotelier and caterer whose Trusthouse Forte empire began
with a single London milk bar
The Independent
01 March 2007
Nicholas Faith
Charles Forte was one of the greatest business success
stories in post-war Britain. Unfortunately for him the hotel
and catering group he had built up over the previous
half-century was bought by Granada in 1995 after a bitter
takeover battle.
Forte was born in 1908 in Mortale, a small mountain village
between Naples and Rome (later renamed Monforte). Soon
after, his father, Rocco, followed another member of the
clan and moved to Dundee, where he opened a small ice-cream
shop. Following a miserable few weeks at a private Roman
Catholic school in Dumfries, the young Charles was educated
at a boarding school in Rome, but left at the age of 17
determined to succeed in his father's line of business.
Throughout his life he remained unmistakeably Italian in
manner and apprearance, a small, dapper, courtly,
moustachioed figure, always conscious of his dignity and the
figure he cast in the world. But, unlike many of his fellow
Italians, he was a keen sportsman, keeping fit until late in
life and enjoying the life of an English country gentleman
at his estate in Surrey.
The 17-year-old Charles joined another member of the Forte
family who had a smart ice-cream parlour in
Weston-super-Mare. He then moved to Bournemouth, where other
members of the family had built up a small chain of cafés.
But his real start came at the age of 26 in 1934 when he saw
a story in the London Evening Standard about a new type of
café, a milk bar that had recently been opened in Fleet
Street. After attempting to go into partnership with the
owner he finally found a site for his own premises, financed
by his father and a friendly equipment supplier.
After a difficult first year the Meadow Milk Bar flourished
and Forte soon owned five, the latest and biggest in
Leicester Square. By 1937 he had brought into the business
Eric Hartwell, then a part-time refrigerator salesman, who
became a key executive within the Forte organisation for
over 40 years.
As an Italian citizen - he was only naturalised after the
Second World War - Forte was interned for a few months in
the Isle of Man after Italy entered the war in June 1940. In
the midst of coping with running his businesses in wartime
he found time to marry an Italian girl, Irene Chierico, 12
years younger than him, whom he had first seen at work in
her mother's delicatessen in Soho - proposing only a week
after their first date.
Forte's great expansion came in the 30 years after the war
when he took the fullest advantage of the ever-increasing
willingness of the British public to go out to eat and
drink, to travel, and stay in hotels. Forte proved to have a
superb eye for a bargain and for new business opportunities,
for he was a far better wheeler and dealer than he was as a
caterer or hotelier.
He and his key associates were so overwhelmingly concerned
with profitability that they tended to neglect the quality
and the individuality so desirable in the hotel and catering
trades. The hotels, however historic, individual and stylish
their original appearance, were spoiled by uniform and
unimaginative decoration and furnishings. Similarly any
initiatives in providing better food in his many restaurants
were crippled by the notorious system of "portion control" -
though he himself was something of a gourmet. Indeed it
could be said that the sheer size of the Forte empire
prevented any significant general improvement in the
standard of British hotel-keeping and catering until he
finally relinquished the reins of power.
Forte's modus operandi throughout his business career
involved a clannish loyalty to a handful of trusted friends
and colleagues (though he did not employ any of his own
generation of the family in the business). For several
decades he relied largely on Hartwell and other executives
who joined him just after the war, Leonardo Ross, who had
been trained by the then dominant J. Lyons group, Jack
Bottell, who had risen from private to major during the war,
and Kenneth Hassall, who had sold his chain of Quality Inns
to Forte in the late 1950s. All became rich men in their own
right after Forte floated his group on the stock market in
1962, although it remained family-controlled for some years
afterwards.
The first of Forte's many post-war deals was the purchase of
Rainbow Corner in Shaftesbury Avenue, bought with the help
of Joe Levy, an estate agent who was to become one of
London's biggest property developers. The second was a chain
of restaurants which he renamed Variety Fare - a purchase
which brought in another member of Forte's business clan,
Rex Henshall, who would prove invaluable in spotting new
opportunities.
Even more important was Leslie (later Sir Leslie) Joseph,
whom Forte had met while he was running some of the catering
in Battersea Park during the Festival of Britain in 1951. At
the time Joseph ran what would today be called "leisure
complexes". Together they ran a fun fair in the park which
soon became rather run-down and seedy but had more success
with the Bellevue complex in Manchester.
In the course of the 1950s Forte's deals grew ever larger
and more complex as he took every possible opportunity to
buy the many institutions connected with food, catering or
leisure that had fallen into decay, while at the same time
spotting niches in new industries. The first was the
purchase in 1953 of the Criterion Restaurant in Piccadilly
Circus for £800,000, an enormous sum at the time for a
still-modest business to raise. But Forte succeeded through
an ingenious mixture of bank loans, selling the exclusive
rights to sell beer to a major brewer, and a
sale-and-lease-back arrangement by which he sold the lease
to an insurance company to help obtain the cash required. As
Forte remarked in his 1986 autobiography, Forte, "Looking
back on my early career I can see that my ability to raise
money at decisive moments was of crucial importance to me."
This purchase was followed by that of another catering
group, Slaters, where Forte found that buying a group which
owned valuable properties was relatively easy. But his pride
and joy was the purchase in 1954 of the venerable Café
Royal. Later purchases included the Hungarian restaurant
Quaglino's, and a partnership with Bernard Delfont to
convert the London Hippodrome from a music hall to a
theatre-restaurant - in its first expansionary phase Forte
concentrated on acquisitions in the West End, rarely
venturing outside W1.
Later he showed his keen eye for new opportunities with a
successful bid to manage the catering facilities at Heathrow
Airport, but no venture was to bring him more publicity,
almost entirely adverse, than his entry into the service
areas on Britain's first motorways.
During the 1950s the Tory party looked down on newcomers of
foreign extraction and Forte was, somewhat surprisingly, a
supporter of the Labour Party, or rather of Hugh Gaitskell
and the Campaign for Democratic Socialism, and in his
autobiography claimed that he was offered a peerage by
Alfred (later Lord) Robens - although he was also involved
in supporting a fund to celebrate Sir Winston Churchill's
80th birthday. Forte was, however, almost a model of a
Thatcherite businessman, and it was no surprise when he was
ennobled in 1982, 12 years after he had been knighted.
Throughout the 1950s and 1960s Forte continued to buy
strings of companies. Most, like the Kardomah cafés, Fullers
and Terry's the chocolate business, were in the food or
catering sector, but he was never afraid to venture outside
his chosen field - through an old business friend he bought
into Sidgwick & Jackson, the publishers, in the 1950s and
later acquired a stake in the Catholic Herald newspaper, for
he remained a devout Catholic throughout his life.
Well before his death the family firm had become best known
for its hotels, but he only bought his first, the Waldorf in
the Aldwych, as late as 1958, through a characteristic
sale-and-lease-back arrangement. In the 1960s he bought far
more hotels, not only in Britain, but also in Cyprus,
Sardinia and in France, where he acquired three of the
finest hotels in Paris, the Georges V, the Prince des Galles
and La Tremoille. In contrast with the iron control he and
executives like Hartwell exercised over the British outlets,
the three Paris hotels were very much left to their own
devices and retained their reputations.
The most traumatic event in Forte's career, and the one that
propelled him into the big league, was the merger in 1970
with Britain's most respectable and well-established hotel
group, Trust Houses, to form Trusthouse Forte. Trust Houses
included such well-known names as Grosvenor House and the
Hyde Park Fotel in London and many of the best-known,
traditional hotels in country towns. It was headed by an
arrogant autocrat, Lord Crowther, who had been a brilliant
editor of The Economist before embarking on a business
career which proved patchier than his editorial record.
In theory the two businesses fitted remarkably well. As
Crowther said at the time, "Trust Houses was a hotel company
which had gone into catering, Forte a catering company that
had gone into hotels." But an unbridgaeable gulf soon
developed, between Trust Houses' rather bureaucratic methods
and Forte's free-wheeling informal style. More important was
the personal clash between Crowther, the very embodiment of
establishment haughtiness, and Forte, the humble Italian
immgrant who had risen by his own talents and hard work.
The atmosphere was not improved after a takeover bid by
Allied Breweries which Crowther supported. He left once
Forte had defeated the bid, partly by investing every penny
he could borrow in his company's shares, but also helped by
his newly appointed chairman, Lord Thorneycroft, a former
Chancellor of the Exchequer.
Once Forte had regained his independence he continued to
expand his hotel businesses, in New York and most obviously
by buying 34 hotels, including such well-known names as the
Strand Palace and Regent Palace in London, from J. Lyons,
which had run unto financial trouble by borrowing in foreign
currencies just before the sterling started to depreciate in
the early 1970s.
He still wheeled and dealed, but found one situation where
even his talents could not prevail: his long-running battle
for control of the Savoy Group where he was outmanouevred by
the chairman, Sir Hugh Wontner, who had already seen off
assaults by such formidable operators as Harold (later Lord)
Samuel and Charles Clore. It took until 1994, after
Wontner's death, for the more tactful approach of Forte's
son, Rocco, to establish some form of management control
over the Savoy's prestigious but unprofitable caravanserais.
Rocco was the Fortes' only son (only one of their five
daughters, Olga, was involved in the business, as design
director in the hotels). He was sent to Downside and Oxford
and trained as a chartered accountant before joining the
business in 1973 and becoming, nominally at least, chief
executive in 1983. But for nearly a decade he was very much
under his father's shadow, and it was only in 1992, at the
age of 84, that Charles Forte finally relinquished the
chairmanship of a group which had reverted to its earlier
name of Forte.
The step followed considerable restlessness among
institutional shareholders, who had never been over fond of
what they regarded as the way he ran the group as a private
fiefdom, and insisted on loyally retaining directors,
executives like Hartwell, and non- executives like
Thorneycroft until they were well into their seventies or,
in Thorneycroft's case, into his eighties.
Rocco Forte had not had the time to display his managerial
talents in the short interval between his father's
retirement and the takeover. But in the 10 years between the
takeover and their father's death he and his sister Olga, a
talented designer, built up a chain of luxurious hotels
throughout Europe, as well as a development on the Sicilian
coast where they showed the sort of dedication to quality
and elegance notably absent from their father's empire -
though they had clearly inherited from him the business
sense and fiancial acumen they displayed.
Nicholas Faith
Charles Forte, hotelier and caterer: born Mortale, Italy 26
November 1908; deputy chairman, Trusthouse Forte (later
Forte) 1970-78, chief executive 1971-78, executive chairman
1978-81, chairman 1982-92, president 1992-96; Kt 1970;
created 1982 Baron Forte; married 1943 Irene Chierico (one
son, five daughters); died London 28 February 2007.