18 November: W S Gilbert

Sir William Schwenck "W.S." Gilbert, the lyricist half of the team of Gilbert and Sullivan was born on this date in 1836.

1. He was educated in France, and as a child, would write his diary in French so that the servants could not read it.
2. Gilbert's first career ambition was to join the Royal Artillery, but the Crimean war had ended and so he would not have been able to get the commission he wanted so he became a civil servant instead. He served in the Militia, a volunteer defence force in his spare time, and reached the rank of captain.
3. He was an assistant clerk in the Privy Council Office for four years and hated it. Then he inherited some money and used it to train as a barrister, but he only managed to get about five clients a year - so he started writing comic poems, stories and reviews to supplement his income.
4. He was a war correspondent for The Observer during the Franco-Prussian war.
5. Gilbert's first theatre productions were pantomimes, co-produced with Charles Millward. The first theatre production he wrote by himself was a pantomime called Dulcamara, or the Little Duck and the Great Quack.
6. His first collaboration with Arthur Sullivan was in 1871, when John Hollingshead commissioned them to work on a holiday piece for Christmas, Thespis, or The Gods Grown Old, at the Gaiety Theatre. The production was a great success, but it was four years before the two men worked together again, on Trial By Jury, which was also the start of the collaboration with Richard D'Oyly Carte.
7. Gilbert had a reputation for being prickly, bad-tempered and misanthropic, and for micro-managing the cast and crews for his productions, refusing to work with actors who challenged him. On the other hand, he was known for acts of extra-ordinary kindness.
8. Gilbert and Sullivan often disagreed over subjects for operas; Sullivan complained that Gilbert's plots were too repetitive, too "topsy-turvy" and not realistic enough. They would frequently fall out, and D'Oyly Carte would have to stage performances of their older works while they worked things out, which they generally did after a few months.
9. It all ended finally over an argument about a carpet. D'Oyly Carte purchased a new carpet for the theatre and charged the cost of it to Gilbert and Sullivan. Gilbert contested it as a maintenance expense that he should not have to pay for - Carte refused to change the accounts, and Gilbert stormed out and went on to sue him, and withdraw the performance rights to his libretti, vowing to write no more operas for the Savoy. Eventually, Tom Chappell, the music publisher responsible for printing the Gilbert and Sullivan operas, upset that there were no more profits to be made from the partnership, stepped in to mediate, and within two weeks had succeeded. However, the next two operettas they wrote were not nearly as successful as previous ones, and so that was the final end of it.
10. Gilbert died from a heart attack he suffered when diving into a lake to save a young woman who had got into difficulties during a swimming lesson.