Earlier this month, a new stage adaptation of John Cleese’s sitcom Fawlty Towers embarked upon a West End run. The production doesn’t require much in the way of publicity—good luck trying to get a ticket anytime soon—but try telling that to John Dixon Hart.
As the proprietor of Beverley Guest House, formerly known as Minster Garth Guest House, in the East Yorkshire market town of Beverley, Hart may very well be Britain’s most notorious hotelier and regularly inspires comparisons to Cleese’s beloved character. Indeed, upon handing him a nine-month suspended prison sentence last week, for falsely claiming that his lodgings offered four-star luxury despite being called “dirty,” “smelly,” and “threadbare,” the judge overseeing Hart’s case remarked, “I sometimes think you should be called Basil Fawlty. You need to prove you can run a guesthouse without taking the piss out of your guests.”
Sitcom aficionados will be aware that Fawlty Towers wasn’t simply about a derelict guesthouse but one run by an overwhelmingly obnoxious man. John Dixon Hart doesn’t seem like he was blessed with particularly good manners, either. As well as the animal feces, smashed windows, bloodstained sheets, and faulty electrical fittings that have been found in the rooms, the judge noted that Hart had called one woman a “cunt” and another a “fucking letch.”
Nor would these seem to be isolated incidents. In 2018, Hart made the news when a guest complained about urine stains on the toilet, and Hart responded that the customer probably had “quite a difficult wife who demands perfection.” This came one year after Hart responded to an outcry over his decision to hang a Women are not welcome sign on the hotel’s front door by declaring that “I just hate the fact that women vote.”
The judge noted that Hart had called one woman a “cunt” and another a “fucking letch.”
A jaunt through the Beverley Guest House’s Tripadvisor page suggests that this sort of behavior is normal. Featuring 294 reviews giving a rating of “terrible,” the page contains such gems as the wheelchair-user guest who found the hotel locked, only to be told that Hart “was in the pub and would be about 40 minutes.” Or the guest who, in September 2017, “checked in to find the owner drunk out of his mind smoking his face off.” Or the woman from last year who wrote, “I was told to ‘F**k off’ for asking where I should park my car [and] hung up on because ‘he won’t deal with women.’” On occasion, the hotel has taken the time to respond to negative reviews in an extremely Fawlty-esque manner. In 2013, for instance, a visitor complained about not being let into the hotel for seven hours. Eleven days later, the hotel replied with the single word “boring.”
There is a slightly sadder story to tell here. More than one review declares Hart to be an alcoholic and allegedly so troublesome that he was at least temporarily banned from all local pubs. These personal difficulties were borne out during the trial, during which Hart explained that he had lost his way after his wife left him last year—leading to a month’s imprisonment for public-order offenses—and that “in the evening, I was in the habit of drinking quite a few vodka-and-Cokes, and that worsened my behavior towards guests.”
The hope is that with this new suspended sentence, along with the $924 of compensation that he was ordered to pay disgruntled guests, Hart will now begin to turn his life and business around. While welcome, that might not necessarily be the most lucrative of paths to take. Look at the recent Willy Wonka Experience, in Glasgow, which keyed into the public’s fascination with unrepentant scams to such a degree that people are currently making movies and musicals based on it. If John Dixon Hart plays his cards right, then the very least that the Beverley Guest House fiasco can lead to is a television series. A sitcom about a comically furious hotelier? Think of the potential.
Stuart Heritage is a Writer at Large at AIR MAIL. He is the author of Bald: How I Slowly Learned to Not Hate Having No Hair (And You Can Too)
