Lord Forte

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.

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

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