A CARNIVAL FILMS / MASTERPIECE CO-PRODUCTION

THE WORLD OF

DOWNTON ABBEY

TEXT

JESSICA FELLOWES

FOREWORD

JULIAN FELLOWES

TEXT ONLY EBOOK EDITION

LORD GRANTHAM

‘My dear fellow. We all have chapters

we would rather keep unpublished.’

Contents

Cover

Title Page

FOREWORD

Family Life

Society

Change

Life in Service

Style

House & Estate

Romance

War

Behind the Scenes

CAST LIST

FURTHER READING

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Copyright

About the Publisher

Foreword

I have always enjoyed country houses. There is something about their completeness, with their different rooms and offices catering to almost every need, making up a microcosm of a complete world, that is very satisfactory to me. But, as a child, wandering around the homes of my parents’ friends and relations, I was aware that I was looking at the remains of a way of life that, with rare exceptions, was no longer being lived in by them. Those empty attic rooms, often still boasting an iron bedstead or a dusty cupboard with vacant nameplate holders on the doors, spoke of a once-crowded place, peopled then only by ghosts. Those echoing stables, full of abandoned toys and rusting gardening equipment, those vast kitchens, jammed with discarded luggage and broken bicycles and signs for use in the village fête, were haunted to my childish eyes by shadows of what used to be.

Of course, I grew up in the sad years for these monuments to the past. They had lost their value as the aristocracy largely threw in the towel after the war, and in the 1950s they could hardly be given as presents. Instead, palace after great palace, those that were not considered suitable for some new and frequently inappropriate role, fell victim to the demolition ball, and an immense part of our nation’s heritage was literally thrown away. Until 1974, when the new director of the Victoria and Albert Museum, Roy Strong, decided to stage an exhibition, The Destruction of the English Country House, and it is not an exaggeration to say that everything changed, almost overnight. We woke up to the idea that these houses were an integral part of our history, that the life formerly lived in them had involved us all, whether our forebears had been behind the green baize door or in front of it, that they were not simply huge and unmanageable barns, no longer viable without sufficient staff, but expressions of our national character that we should be proud of.

And as we learned to love them again, so a younger generation invented a new way to live in them. They didn’t mourn the servants they had usually never known. They simply saw the space and its possibilities. The big kitchens were re-opened and the horrible converted ante-rooms and passages that had served as kitchens for our parents’ generation were abandoned. But this time, the family chose to occupy the kitchens in their own way, importing televisions and sofas and toys and making them right for the way we live now. Helpers did not sleep upstairs in the garrets but came in from the village and called the owners by their Christian names and felt, quite rightly, that they had a stake in making the house work. In a way, the landowners reinvented themselves, as the aristocracy has done so many times before, and found a place, for themselves and their houses, in modern Britain. This was perhaps the main inspiration for the series, Downton Abbey, because we did all feel that were we to go into this territory, it must be right for our present zeitgeist to give equal weight, in terms of narrative or moral probity or even likeability to both parts of the community of a great house, the family and their servants. This I hope we have done, favouring neither group over the other, which I am convinced remains one of the principal strengths of the show.

Like most of the good things in my life, Downton Abbey came about entirely by chance. I had been trying to get a completely different project off the ground with the producer, Gareth Neame, and when at last we realised it was not going to fly, we met for dinner to call it a day. It was then that Gareth suggested venturing back into the territory of a film I had written some years before, Gosford Park, but this time for television, and that is how it began. Gosford was set in a large country house in November 1932 and it dealt with a shooting party and their servants, both those working in the house and for the guests, so it was clear at once what Gareth wanted. I was a little nervous initially, at the risks of asking for a second helping, but the idea grew on me and so Downton Abbey was born. Television – or rather, a television series, with its open-endedness, with its unlimited time to develop any character – held possibilities that the space allowed for a film narrative could not offer. We decided at once to retreat twenty years to 1912, since the underlying theme of Gosford Park had been that it was all coming to an end; but we didn’t want to go further back than that as we both agreed that we needed the action to take place in a recognisable universe – with cars and trains and telephones and many other modern devices, albeit in embryo, which defined the period clearly as the parent of the present day.

As to why I find the subject so appealing, I suppose it is because that half century from around 1890 to 1940 seems to me to form a bridge from the old world into the new. At the beginning, society was run along much the same lines it had been since the Conquest. Inventions had altered things, of course, but the strict pyramid shape, the idea that everyone had their different roles to play and that, to a great extent, they were born to play them, was still unchallenged, or so it appeared. In fact, of course, beneath the smooth surface of the long Edwardian summer, a good deal was being questioned. Trades unions, women’s rights, Marxism, were all waiting in the wings and it would only take a couple of years of war before they started to stride centre stage. New modes of travel would shrink the world, new methods of production would transform it. For most of the population of Monarchical Old Europe, at least for those who were young adults at the turn of the last century, the world they would die in would bear almost no resemblance to the world of their beginnings, whatever their nationality, whatever their class.

My own great-aunt Isie, the model for Violet Grantham, was born in 1880, making her more than ten years older than Lady Mary Crawley, and she would die at ninety one in 1971, so I knew her well. She was one of the generation of young ladies who never went to school and her Mama would only allow her to attend university lectures in London if she agreed to two conditions: the first that she would never sit an exam, the second that she would be accompanied at all times by a maid. She was presented in 1898, married before the First World War and set up house in one of the Cadogans, ‘quite near Peter Jones, dear,’ with a butler who had been first footman to Mrs Willie James, reputedly the illegitimate daughter of King Edward VII. She lost her husband in the first war, her only son in the second, and she would live to see men land on the moon. From knowing her and listening to her story, a clear sense came to me that ‘history’ is not so long ago.

For most of them, the way of life lived at Downton would come to an end in 1939. Of course there would be people after the war who employed butlers and cooks, there are quite a few of them now, but as a way of life lived, to a degree, in every village and hamlet from Land’s End to John o’Groats, it was over. Many of the houses were requisitioned by the services, some to their cost, and the debts and mortgages accumulated since the collapse of the agricultural economy in the 1880s and 90s, made the idea of re-opening them when the fighting ended six years later, unalluring. Their renaissance would not come for thirty years or so after the Second World War and then, as I have said, the new owners chose to live in them differently. Happily, this revival has, in many cases, proved successful and Britain’s old families have written and continue to write another chapter in their long history. Which brings us back to the Crawleys of Downton Abbey, but when it comes to how far we will travel with them through the decades of challenge and change that lie ahead for their civilisation, that must remain to be seen.

Julian Fellowes

July 2011

Family Life CHAPTER ONE

April 1912.

The sun is rising behind Downton Abbey, a great and splendid house in a great and splendid park. So secure does it appear that it seems as if the way of life it represents will last for another thousand years.

It won’t.

Welcome to the world of Downton Abbey, a place that has captivated an audience of millions, all following the lives of one family and their servants. Against the backdrop of a fading Edwardian society, we watch their personal dramas unfold and see them through the horrors and change that the First World War brought to Britain. This perhaps is what fascinates us: not just the beautiful scenery, the sumptuous costumes, nor even the skill of the actors, but the fact that we are experiencing something of how life was a hundred years ago. We notice the differences between our lives and theirs; the rigid social hierarchy, the nuances of etiquette, the stifling clothes and the battle for women to be heard. But alongside this, we see something that is the same: family life.

At the forefront of everything at Downton is family, whether this stands for the blood ties of the Crawleys or the relationships between the servants below stairs. All of us can recognise a familiar character amongst them: Violet, the dowager Countess, the old-fashioned grandmother; Mary, Edith and Sybil, the squabbling sisters; Robert and Cora, the loving parents; or Rosamund, the interfering sister-in-law. Any of us who have left behind our families to make our own new, adopted ties with those we work with or with friends we choose are creating a new family, just as the servants do at Downton. With Carson and Mrs Hughes as the firm but fair parents, Thomas and O’Brien as the scheming siblings and Daisy as the baby, the servants are close by on the other side of the green baize door that separates upstairs and downstairs. Thrown together in cramped quarters, working long, hard hours, the servants nevertheless find security in their relationships with each other. Like all families, they have their ups and their downs, their favourites and a few petty fights.

Downton Abbey is more than just a house, it is also a home to both the family and the servants. Everyone living here is striving to keep the house and estate in good order, ready to pass on to the next generation. So when the question is raised of who will inherit, everyone is affected – above and below stairs. Even a miniature kingdom needs to know who is king.

For the moment, of course, Robert, the Earl of Grantham, is still the master of his realm. In this role, he has his own duties to fulfil just as much as Daisy, the scullery maid at the very bottom of the pecking order. A place like Downton Abbey cannot run well unless everyone within it understands their role and carries out their work efficiently.

There is a clear hierarchy at Downton; each servant has a position. The maids deal with the laundry, but the finishing of the clothes for the master and mistress of the house is the responsibility of Bates, valet to Lord Grantham, and Miss O’Brien, lady’s maid to Lady Grantham. These servants enjoy senior roles in the household, are two of the few that move seamlessly between below stairs and above, and enjoy the confidence of their employers. The rest of the staff probably think that these two have easier daily routines than the other servants, having nothing more to attend to than the earl and his wife’s needs. But from the first cup of tea brought up in the morning to whatever they might want last thing at night, they must be on duty all day with little respite. Their relationship with their employers is one of trust and practicality: Bates and O’Brien are welcome in the bedrooms, dressing rooms and even the bathrooms of their employers, making them privy to many details of the family’s private lives, and giving them a powerful position in the household. They could use this to their advantage when back downstairs, teasing or threatening the other staff with it – as when O’Brien learns before anyone else that the heir to Downton Abbey has been drowned during the Titanic disaster.

By contrast, the housemaids – Anna, Ethel, Gwen and Daisy – work behind the scenes. They are up early to complete the dusting of the drawing room and libraries, the plumping of the cushions, the cleaning of the grates and the laying of the fires before the family comes downstairs for breakfast. Only when the bedrooms are empty do the maids go in, to change the sheets and refresh the biscuit jars and water carafes. The rest of the day is spent on cleaning tasks set by the housekeeper, Mrs Hughes, such as beating rugs or polishing brass, as well as assisting the daughters of the house or any female guests who come to stay without their maids. They can be called upon at any time; each room in the house has a cord, pulled to summon assistance. The cord is connected to a wire that rings one of many bells on a board in the servants’ hall below; each labelled with the relevant room so the appropriate servant can attend. The jangle of bells is a sound that rules the servants’ lives.

Writer, Julian Fellowes

‘In a house this size, there would normally be a scullery maid, who did the washing up; a vegetable maid, who prepared the vegetables; and a stillroom maid who did the baking. For the purposes of narration, we amalgamated several maids’ jobs into one for Daisy.’

Hugh Bonneville is Lord Grantham

‘Downton Abbey is a microcosm of society. It had its own machinery that needed to keep working – it’s not masters and slaves but had its own order in which everyone depended on each other to keep it going.’

A DAY IN THE LIFE OF DAISY

4.30am: In the small, dark hours of the morning, the kitchen maid, Daisy, awakes alone, dresses herself in her hand-me-down corset, simple dress and apron and steals down the stairs to stoke the kitchen fire. She creeps round the family’s bedrooms to light their fires, before going down to the kitchen to blacken the stove and lay the breakfast things in the servants’ hall.

6am: Daisy knocks on the doors of the housemaids to waken them, then takes her basket of logs with brushes, blacking, matches and paper to lay and light the fires in the rooms on the ground floor – the libraries, drawing room, dining room and great hall. The hall boy, another lowly servant who was only occasionally seen and never heard, has already delivered the coal and kindling wood to the scuttles.

10am: Daisy is still in suds up to her elbows as William and Thomas bring the cleared breakfast things, except for the glasses, which they wash in the servery. There’s no respite even as the last plate is stacked to dry; Mrs Patmore tells her to start on scrubbing pots and pans needed for lunch before she chops vegetables.

2pm: Once luncheon has been served and cleared away, Daisy has to wash all the pans and crockery once more, ready for dinner.

4pm: The servants enjoy tea, although not all of them can sit down at the same time. This well-earned break ends with the dressing gong, which marks the time when the family retires upstairs to dress for dinner.

7pm: By now, Daisy has been up for 13 hours but she cannot allow her eyelids to droop. The busiest part of her day is about to begin with the final preparations for the family supper, as well as laying out the servants’ supper.

8.30pm: The pots and pans, which had been scoured to gleaming after luncheon, ready for cooking dinner, need to be cleaned again now that it has been served.

9.45pm: When the family’s dinner is finished, Daisy puts her aching hands into the hot soapy water for the last time that day, cleaning the crockery and cutlery. Once she has had something to eat herself in the kitchen, the cook will send her to bed, much to her chagrin – it’s only when the servants have finished their work for the day and are relaxing in the servants’ hall after dinner that the fun begins.

Tomorrow will be the same again. With just one half day off a week, the routine is relentless. At the end of her arduous day, Daisy trudges wearily up the stairs to her room. Just a few hours later, she’ll wake again to another day in Downton Abbey.

Writer, Julian Fellowes

‘While bells are now seen as a symbol of servitude, at the time the bell-boards came in, around the 1820s, they were hailed as an absolute liberation. Up until that point, the footmen had to sit on hard wooden chairs within earshot of the family – usually in the hall. They would get a message, say, “Please ask my maid to come and see me”, then have to go downstairs, find the maid and then go back to their chair. With the bell-board, they could not only simply be wherever they wanted to be but if the bell rang from, say, the mistress’s bedroom, it was immediately obvious who was needed.’

THOMAS

‘And they’re off.’

Carson, the butler, is the most senior member of the below-stairs family, overseeing the work of all the male servants, and is Lord Grantham’s right-hand man. Butlers were sometimes grand enough to attain a little notoriety: Edwin Lee, the long-serving butler for Cliveden, an estate comparable to Downton in size and splendour, was known even by guests as ‘Lord Lee’. While the butler’s practical duties are few – monitoring the wine cellar, decanting port, pouring wine at the dinner table, and cleaning the fine pieces of silver (the footmen clean the rest) – he is the one who makes sure that everything is running exactly as it should be, and woe betide the footman who neglects to snap to attention. Carson believes the responsibility for the entire house is his, and if there is no one to do something that needs doing, he’ll do it himself. When they are short-handed during the war, he risks his own health rather than let standards slip.

Alongside Carson is Mrs Hughes, the housekeeper, who is in charge of the housemaids – both their work and their welfare. With a big bunch of keys jangling at her waist, she manages the household accounts, draws up the servants’ rotas, checks the linens (sheets and tablecloths are used in rotation so they last for years) and keeps a careful eye on orders for the kitchen store cupboard. This last responsibility, of course, is a bone of contention between Mrs Hughes and the cook, Mrs Patmore, who cannot understand why the stores do not fall under her jurisdiction.

Working long hours in a kitchen that was boiling hot all year round, cooks were famously short-tempered, understandably so when you learn that Mrs Patmore is up before 6am and won’t go to bed until 18 hours later, after cooking eight meals for the family and the servants.

Attending to guests

Gordon Grimmett was second footman at Cliveden while it was the country home of the Astors. The many high-profile guests, including film stars, politicians and writers such as Charlie Chaplin, Gandhi, T.E. Lawrence and Winston Churchill, meant a lot of work for the staff. ‘Every morning would see us up at seven, running down to the stillroom, eventually emerging with six small morning tea trays arranged on one large butler’s tray, distributing them round the guests’ rooms, opening curtains and gently but firmly waking them. We didn’t want them slipping back to sleep again and blaming us for their having missed breakfast. Then we collected their clothes from the night before, and whipped them into the brushing-room, to sponge, brush, fold and hang them. Then we would be laying up the breakfast table, and bringing in the various dishes ... and the constant running to and fro with fresh toast.’

PREPARING FOR HOUSE PARTIES

The arrival of guests at a house such as Downton is an important event not only for the family, but for the servants, too. Most household staff had real pride in their work and the house in which they served, and visits were a chance to show just how good they were at their jobs. The presence of a very noble visitor, such as a Duke, was considered an honour and the servants would be eager to serve him and make sure that he left feeling that their house was a well-run one.

CARSON

‘It’s certainly a great day for Downton, to welcome a Duke under our roof.’

Preparations at Downton are begun by Cora, who decides which bedrooms will be used, then the right menus are put together with Mrs Patmore – for meals that will show off the best of the home farm produce as well as the cook’s ability to create a worthy feast. Once agreed, the menus are written in French. Cora then decides the placement around the dining table at each meal in advance. At the lunches and dinners, if more people are staying than the footmen could reasonably be expected to serve, the valet is asked to help. Carson might help out in the dining room if necessary, but never a maid – although this rule had to be relaxed on occasion during the war when there weren’t enough men.

Mrs Hughes then makes sure the bedrooms are made up freshly on the day of the guests’ arrival, and clean towels and new soaps are placed in the bathroom. Inkwells must be full, and sheets of Downton Abbey writing paper and envelopes must be laid out on the bedroom table. The head gardener is asked to supply cut flowers for the house and for an arrangement in a vase for each of the guests’ bedrooms.

If the visitors arrive without either a valet or lady’s maid of their own, a footman or housemaid is assigned to them. Branson, the chauffeur, is despatched to the station to meet everyone off the train. Arriving at the house, they are greeted by Lord and Lady Grantham and their daughters, Carson, and William and Thomas, who take the luggage.

Guest luggage is unpacked in a room that has a series of locker-like cupboards. If several ladies are staying, this is the opportunity for their maids to compare the dresses planned for the Saturday-to-Monday and thus avoid anyone wearing anything too similar at the same time.

The footmen, Thomas and William, are the servants most visible to the family and any guests, and therefore they are dressed in tailored livery. They answer the front door, deliver messages to the village, serve in the dining room and stoke the fire if a member of the family is in the room. William is also in charge of walking Pharaoh, Lord Grantham’s Labrador, first thing in the morning and last thing at night, and Thomas has been given the unusual responsibility of cleaning all the clocks in the house, because his father was a clockmaker. Footmen were often known for their arrogance – their appearance gave them an advantage over the rest of the servants and they weren’t afraid to use it.

MRS HUGHES

‘You have to ease up a bit or you’ll give yourself a heart attack. Things cannot be the same when there’s a war on.’

CARSON

‘I do not agree. Keeping up standards is the only way to show the Germans they will not beat us in the end.’

Below stairs, the day begins early, and breakfast is eaten after completing their morning tasks but before the family come down from their bedrooms. Gordon Grimmett, third footman at Longleat House during the First World War, did not look forward to breaking his fast in the morning: ‘It was a picnic kind of meal with people coming and leaving as their duties required. There was little variety, it seemed it was always kedgeree on weekdays and bacon on Sundays. As it was war time we were each given a quarter of a pound of butter a week, which we kept in a small tin; once that was gone it was dry bread.’

Lord Grantham and his daughters, as well as any guests, arrive in the dining room for breakfast at around 9am – Lady Grantham is absent, as married women enjoy the privilege of breakfast in bed. The footmen serve tea, as well as coffee and hot toast, but otherwise everyone helps themselves. This is the most informal meal of the day, when the family themselves lift the lids of silver chafing dishes, kept warm by small oil burners beneath and laden with bacon, eggs, devilled kidneys and porridge. Cold slices of tongue, ham and grouse are placed on the sideboard. Cornflakes, called ‘Post Toasties’, which have come from America, are on the table, with milk from the house’s dairy.

Phyllis Logan is Mrs Hughes

‘I like the scenes with Carson. In those moments they have a chance to be themselves, because they’ve always got his character very much in charge. Carson takes it all very seriously, but when he has his little chats with Mrs Hughes that’s his one opportunity for a bit of a release. So I do enjoy those scenes.’

LIFE IN THE KITCHEN

The kitchen staff worked the longest hours of all the servants, from the early morning start baking bread and preparing a cooked breakfast, until the servants’ supper late at night, not to mention the washing up of pots, pans and crockery in between. In every large house, the kitchen was the workplace of the cook and her ‘family’, who discouraged the interference of other servants; neither the butler nor the housekeeper, nor indeed any of their staff, were welcome within it without a good reason.

Although hard on her staff in the heat and bustle of the day, Mrs Patmore has her moments as a caring matriarch of her kitchen family, dishing out advice to Daisy, as the youngest member of her staff. The division between the servants applies to meals, too, with Mrs Patmore and her kitchen staff always eating separately in their own dominion; there they can all finally put their feet up in an atmosphere that is less stuffy than that of the servants’ hall, where the butler is on alert for any cheekiness and the housekeeper keeps a beady eye on any flirtation, poised to stamp it out with a fierce glare.

Lesley Nicol is Mrs Patmore

‘The basis for everything is something the historical advisor said to me: “Consider this like a show. It’s got to be the best show.” Then I got it. When someone comes to stay, they’ve got to leave saying it was perfect. My character has enormous pride and commitment. It just can’t go wrong, she can’t allow things to go wrong. But what else has she got? That’s her life.’

Alongside the endless cooking, the cook has to supervise the preparation of everything that comes out of her kitchen. She has an army of kitchen maids to help her, as everything from consommé to horseradish sauce must be made from scratch, not to mention the constant baking – every loaf of bread, cake and biscuit is homemade, ready for elevenses as well as afternoon tea.

MRS PATMORE

‘No! Listen to me! And take those kidneys up to the servery before I knock you down and serve your brains as fritters.’

Dinner is the big event for everyone in the house. Dressed in white tie, the family would assemble in the drawing room, where they would talk but not drink. In London there is a growing fashion for cocktails before dinner, but it hasn’t reached Downton yet. At dinner, with three courses at the very least – five if there are important guests – Mrs Patmore does her best to show off her culinary finesse (for the family anyway; the servants make do with simpler fare such as lamb stew and semolina, prepared by the kitchen maids).

At the table, Lord Grantham sits in the middle on one side, his wife opposite, as the Royals do. His mother, Violet, sits at his right as the next grandest woman in the room. Carson pours the wine and Thomas and William, wearing gloves (only footmen wore gloves and only to wait at table – never for any other task), serve the food, à la Russe. They begin by serving whoever is sitting on Lord Grantham’s right and work their way clockwise around the table, men and women alternately. The modern restaurant fashion for ‘ladies first’ is continental. The serving dish is held on the diner’s left while they help themselves. Finished plates are collected from the right-hand side. Only when Lord Grantham has the decanter of port and glasses (he will pour it himself) in the dining room and the women have been served coffee in the drawing room, may the servants have their supper. It is their first chance to relax since they started their working day.

BEHIND THE GREEN BAIZE DOOR

From the early hours of the morning until late at night, the servants are permanently on duty to attend to all the demands of the house and family. Below stairs, just a few moments of calm may be snatched during the day and are a welcome relief indeed.

Once the family have finished breakfast and gone about their business for the day, everyone has a list of chores to get on with until lunch. There is a brief respite for the servants’ midday meal at around noon before the machine is set in motion again for the family to be served their lunch promptly at 1pm. At about 4pm the servants are given bread and cheese by the cook and this must keep them going until they have their supper, a substantial two courses, but only after the family have finished theirs and the dining room has been cleared away. The crockery is brought downstairs for Daisy to wash up, but the glasses are left in the servery – they will be carefully cleaned the next day.

THOMAS

‘This isn’t her territory. We can say what we like, down here.’

Supper for the servants is always looked forward to – their work is over and it is the longed-for moment when they can all breathe, kick back and relax. It is also a time when the staff can have time to themselves away from the family and can indulge in some gossip about the goings-on in the house and amongst their employers. As Alastair Bruce, historical advisor, told the actors: for the servants, observing the family upstairs was the equivalent of watching Coronation Street or EastEnders today. But although the atmosphere is informal at the end of their working hours, lapses of manners are not permitted. Carson ensures that the servants of the house continue to reflect the gentility of the people they serve. A strict order of precedence is set around the table, just as in the dining room upstairs. Mrs Hughes sits at the right hand of Carson, the footmen sit by the butler, the head housemaid and lady’s maid by the housekeeper, with the lower-ranking servants at the other end of the table. In a house such as Downton Abbey, there is no concept of ‘off-duty’.

Knowing your place

On set, there is a genuine sense of an above and below-stairs division. On the first day Alastair Bruce divided the cast into ‘above’ and ‘below’ and they were put in different rooms to hear his talk on what life would have been like for them. Once they were filming, many of the below-stairs cast worked nearly all the time at Ealing Studios, rarely venturing to the big house to film at Highclere Castle, and vice versa. Lesley Nicol, who plays Mrs Patmore, says: ‘When you do a job like this, you start to take on the genuine feelings of your character. So when I went to Highclere, I felt very small indeed! It was overwhelming to be there.’

Away from the steaming hubbub that is the kitchen, the cogs of the estate turn at a rapid pace. Occasionally, the outside world intrudes. Deliveries are made throughout the day – newspapers early in the morning (The Times for his Lordship, The Daily Sketch for her Ladyship), fresh vegetables and meat from the home farm, produce from the dairy and goods from village shops. Post was delivered and collected twice a day – the family ‘posted’ their letters into a box in the hall, which had a sign on it: ‘Post will be collected at 9am and 4pm’. The butler took these letters, stamped them and gave them to the postman. The system was efficient – if a letter was received in the morning, a reply sent in second post arrived the next day. Telegrams were sent and received within hours; the footmen were dispatched to the Post Office with any urgent message to be relayed.

While Lord Grantham does not have a paid job – hence the family’s shock at Matthew Crawley’s intention to carry on his work as a solicitor – he is kept busy with the affairs of the estate. He is helped by members of the extended servants’ family: an estate manager who oversees the farm as well as the tenants’ cottages, and a gamekeeper who rears and protects the game and their cover for the shooting season, not forgetting the head gardener and his team of several under-gardeners. There are grooms, too, for the horses used for riding, hunting and to draw carriages.

Lady Grantham does not concern herself with the business of running the estate, but she has plenty of matters of her own that need attention. As the châtelaine, she is important to anybody who wishes to use the influence of the house – a fund-raising effort or the village flower show, for example. She also works closely with Mrs Hughes to ensure that any guests are well looked after, deciding which room they are staying in and which maid or footman will see to their requirements during their visit, if needed. Placement cards for the dinner table must also be written. Lady Grantham would also decide who to put next to whom at dinner, strictly observing the precedence of rank, of course. Whether entertaining visitors or not, each morning she would consult with Mrs Patmore in Cora’s sitting room for half an hour or so, and look over the day’s menu.

Siobhan Finneran is O’Brien

‘I loved filming all the scenes round the servants’ hall table. We all get on very well and there’s such a good atmosphere there, where you can get a bit lost at Highclere. I think we probably drove the directors mad because we’re all so noisy, but I think that helps the scenes.’

LOOKING AFTER THE FAMILY

While there were daily jobs that required everyone to work together in a synchronised way, such as mealtimes, there were many other essential tasks and details that needed addressing which were allocated to specific servants.

Carson, as butler, ensures that every member of his staff is occupied before retreating to his pantry to carry out jobs such as paperwork and decanting port. The perfect port at dinner must be poured in front of a lit candle, to check the colour, into a funnel covered with gauze to catch any dregs. Julian Fellowes was taught this method by Arthur Inch, footman to the Londonderry family before the war, and the advisor on Gosford Park. A scene was filmed showing this, but it was later cut, so Julian was delighted to be able to use it in Downton Abbey.

DAISY

‘Why are their papers ironed?’

O’BRIEN

‘To dry the ink, silly. We wouldn’t want his Lordship’s hands to be as black as yours.’

Miss O’Brien is perhaps the most sophisticated of the servants; to perform her role she must be skilled in dressing hair and the art of a lady’s toilette. She also has to be accomplished in fine sewing, as she is expected to mend her lady’s dresses and make some of her undergarments. Similarly, Bates must ensure his Lordship’s wardrobe is immaculate and ready to be worn whenever it is required, which means polishing cufflinks and shoes and mending any damaged garments. Servants learned the tricks of the trade by experience – their own and that of others around them – but there were also bibles of domesticity available to offer information, such as Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management. Published in 1861, her advice was still being followed well into the twentieth century. ‘Polish for the boots is an important matter to the valet, and not always to be obtained good by purchase; never so good, perhaps, as he can make for himself after the following recipe: Take of ivory-black and treacle each 4oz, sulphuric acid 1oz, best olive-oil 2 spoonfuls, best white-wine vinegar 3 half-pints: mix the ivory-black and treacle well in an earthen jar; then add the sulphuric acid, continuing to stir the mixture; next pour in the oil; and, lastly, add the vinegar, stirring it in by degrees, until thoroughly incorporated.’

Tricks of the trade

Charles Dean went to work for the Duke of Beaufort at Badminton, in 1920, as second footman. While there he was taught by the under butler, Jimmy Weedon, how to clean silver: ‘For him it was a ritual. He had two lead sinks; in one he had a mixture of soft soap and water and whisked it until it had a good froth; this he made in the morning and it lay there all day, being occasionally replenished. In the other sink he rinsed the silver under the hot tap, then transferred it to the soapy water, returned it and rinsed it in cold. Then he would lay it on the draining board on its side; it could stay there all day and not get smeary. When it was required he would throw a jug of hot water over it, wipe it and it was perfect.’

Tips from the Servants’ Hall

• Clean satin ball slippers by rubbing them with breadcrumbs.

• Fill red wine glasses with warm water so stains can’t develop before they are properly washed.

• Use soda to get marks out of a collar.

• Salt of sorrel will clean copper pots.

• Scour copper bowls with water and vinegar to get a high shine.

• Split card laid beneath brass buttons will protect the coat when polishing them.

• Wrap a delicate evening coat in linen when sewing on a missing button.

MARY

‘Women like me don’t have a life. We choose clothes and pay calls and work for charity and do the Season. But really we’re stuck in a waiting room until we marry.’

Elizabeth McGovern is Cora

‘Mary is a very well-written typical eldest child in that she puts her own needs at the forefront ... She’s not as inclined to conciliate or placate. Cora is fascinated by Mary.’

The daughters of the house – Mary, Edith and Sybil – find it hardest of all to carve out a role for themselves. In 1912 it was difficult for women to enjoy any kind of independence until they were married. While living under their father’s roof, they are subject to his rules. Fortunately, Cora and Robert are interested parents and Cora, as an American, might enjoy her children’s company more than her British counterparts would have done. Still, the girls’ time is mainly spent preparing themselves for a successful marriage. A governess was employed to teach French and possibly German. Then the girls would have been trained to start conversations, in preparation for their coming social duties with tongue-tied inferiors. Julian recalls that members of his own family had precisely this sort of instruction, ‘My great-aunts would be taken round the gardens by their governess and at every shrub they would have to introduce a new subject. The idea was that you could keep a conversation going even with someone who was completely socially incapable.’ On top of all this, any musical skill was always a bonus; playing the piano and singing – though only ever for private entertainments. Painting in watercolours was considered an asset (not, as a rule, oils, which were considered a little Bohemian), and embroidery and decoupage were encouraged.

Like all sisters, the girls can be arguing fiercely one minute and loyally defending each other the next. Edith, squashed between the beautiful Mary and the ambitious Sybil, sets herself up in competition with her elder sister, scheming to win their battle to land a suitable husband. Mary, as the first born, feels the pressure to get the very best husband possible; when potentially brilliant suitors appear to be making overtures to Mary, the whole household is on tenterhooks.

When not plotting invitations to eligible sons, writing carefully worded letters to them, or practising any of the skills that are supposed to improve their marriage prospects, the girls spend most of their time changing their outfits throughout the course of the day. The choosing of skirts and accessories, finding clever ways to update details and trying out new hairstyles, turns the chore of dressing into something rather more pleasant. At least this side of life is unashamedly fun when they are all together and getting on well, gossiping with each other and the maids, who are helping them dress. At all other times, the lives of the daughters and the servants could not be further apart, but in those moments they share in the simple delight of being young girls together.

Dan Stevens is Matthew

‘There’s no such thing as a typical day’s filming, but if it’s a full day, I’ll be collected by car at 5.30am and driven to Highclere to meet other bleary-eyed actors. After breakfast and 20 minutes in the make-up chair, I’m ready to start shooting. Sometimes we manage two or three scenes in a morning, but often it takes that long for a single scene. Lunch is a good chance to sit on the bus and chat to the other actors and crew. We shoot more scenes in the afternoon until tea and cake at 4pm, which causes a flurry. We can’t take any food or drink that’s not water into the house, so we usually cower under a rain shelter, but if there’s glorious sunshine we can have tea on the lawn. We wrap about 7pm and then I’m driven home.’

Elizabeth McGovern is Cora

‘I think Cora is very much an emotionally connected mother. As an American she would have a distinctive approach, different to the English aristocracy’s way of doing things. Her instinct is to be involved with the day-to-day and to go about things in a more hands-on way.’

Society CHAPTER TWO

Mary: ‘I hope you’re not dreading it too much?’

Robert: ‘Not dreading it exactly, but it’s a brave

new world we’re headed for, no doubt about that;

we must try to meet it with as much grace

as we can muster ...’

To be truly accepted into Society at the turn of the last century, you had to be born into it. While there were books published on etiquette, there were pages and pages more of unwritten rules that should be observed – and a knowledge of these marked out those who were grand as opposed to those who were not. For someone like Violet, the Dowager Countess, the notion of her world changing and allowing a broader cross-section of people to enter it was insupportable. Some things were preordained and immutable: Society, and the circle of people who encompassed it, was one of them.

Violet is an aristocrat through and through and, as a firm believer in noblesse oblige, is committed to its principles. Although aware of the changes occurring, or threatening to occur, in the younger generation’s way of life, Violet nevertheless believes that the rules of Society are fixed. So when she is faced with a middle-class interloper, with his ‘weekends’ and his bicycles, taking over her late husband’s family’s title and estate, she expects that the sheer might of her aristocratic power and privilege will win out and preserve the status quo.

VIOLET, THE DOWAGER COUNTESS

‘I have plenty of friends I don’t like.’

ISOBEL CRAWLEY

‘What should we call each other?’

VIOLET, THE DOWAGER COUNTESS

‘We could always start with Mrs Crawley and Lady Grantham.’

However, the situation is not as bleak as Violet would paint it; although he has a lot to learn when it comes to the subtle politics of life as a nobleman, Matthew is not a man without social standing. He is, in fact, a part of the prosperous, professional upper-middle class. Brought up in Manchester by well-educated parents, he could certainly conduct himself with ease in even the upper tiers of Society – he can ride and is affronted when Thomas infers that he may not know how to serve himself at dinner. Yet Matthew is also a liberal: he understands the argument put forward by the suffragettes and is sympathetic to their cause. He is on the side of social change and so when he discovers he is to inherit a new position in the higher ranks of Society, as an earl with a great estate, he does not immediately feel it is a good thing. Matthew is not socially ambitious, but his feelings are irrelevant; whatever happens he will become an earl, what matters is how he handles this transition.

Violet, the Dowager Countess

‘Violet believes that if you take a brick out of the aristocratic wall the whole thing comes crumbling down’, says Julian Fellowes. Violet knows that she can do nothing about Matthew Crawley inheriting Lord Grantham’s title – in 1912 there was no legal mechanism in place which would enable someone to renounce a peerage – but she decides she must do all she can to save Cora’s money for Mary, if not the whole estate itself. As she herself said: ‘Mary holds a trump card. Mary is family.’ After all, Violet worked for years to keep the estate going and continues to live on it as the Dowager Countess; she cannot allow this remote cousin to threaten the formidable walls of prestige that buttress her own existence.

More sympathetic to Matthew’s plight is Cora, who, as an American, is well versed in the treatment meted out to outsiders. Her mother-in-law has, after all, managed to be insufferable to her for 24 years. While Cora is educated in the strange ways of the English upper classes and has adopted most of them as her own, she is not a snob and she does not denigrate people who try to make their own way in the world. ‘I can’t see why he has the right to your estate or my money,’ Cora tells Robert later. ‘But I refuse to condemn him for wanting an honest job.’

MATTHEW

‘I still don’t see why I couldn’t just refuse it.’

ISOBEL CRAWLEY

‘There is no mechanism for you to do so! You will be an earl. You will inherit the estate.’

Cora’s story is a familiar one amongst the English aristocracy at the time. She was part of a wave of eligible American girls who came to Britain from the late 1870s for the next 50 years; they were known as the ‘Buccaneers’. These girls were often daughters of self-made men who had originated in the backwaters of America but had now left that life behind them with newfound wealth. Having made their money and built opulent houses, these entrepreneurs wanted to secure their daughters’ futures with good marriages. They wanted the thing that money couldn’t buy: class.

But there was just one problem. The upper echelons of Society in Virginia or Wisconsin, let alone New York, were almost impenetrable. Usually there was a formidable society hostess at the top, and she would decide whether you were in or out. If there was even a hint of scandal in the past or your family was not deemed ‘old’ enough, you weren’t in –and there was very little you could do to get there. So the more determined matriarchs made their way to Europe, where the aristocrats were secure enough in their titles and estates to welcome the pretty, rich and fun young women to the party. And, they liked the smell of the American girls’ money. One of the earliest of these matriarchs leading the wave across the Atlantic was the mother of Jennie Jerome. She managed to secure a noble marriage for her daughter to Lord Randolph Churchill, which gave Jennie her entrée into Society. Their son was Winston, who became the famous wartime Prime Minister.

MARY

‘You’re American. You don’t understand these things.’

Cora, the daughter of Isidore Levinson, a dry goods millionaire from Cincinnati, arrived in England in 1888, when she was 20 years old, with her mother as chaperone. By this time, even respectable rich American girls preferred to find their husbands amongst the nobility. Thanks to the successes of the earlier Buccaneers and a fashion for all things European, from interiors to dress designers such as the House of Worth, pursuing an English marriage had now become desirable. For these families, the many years in which Americans had fought to escape the clutches of colonial rule and create their own republic appeared to have been forgotten.

In fact, even the early Buccaneers found that getting a title was positively easy: many members of the English upper classes had fallen on hard times and they needed American money to bail them out and secure their estates. In order to achieve such a match, Cora’s mother knew she had to ensure that her only daughter made the best possible entrance into Society. There was only one way to do this: to get presented at Court.

American heiresses

Unlike their English counterparts across the pond, American women were able to be – and frequently were – the heiresses to their fathers’ millions. As a general rule, the American rich divide their money between their children (which is why so few American fortunes last), meaning the daughters of a rich man are wealthy in their own right. Consuelo Vanderbilt was an American heiress who famously married into the Marlborough dukedom, bringing with her a dowry of $9 million, an almost unbelievable sum at the time, even though she had two perfectly healthy brothers. This would never have happened in England.

This wasn’t as difficult as it sounds – while the daughters of dukes and earls obviously had an easy route in, the net of invitees was thrown relatively wide. There were three criteria: you had to be a girl of upstanding morals, you had to be introduced by someone who had themselves been presented (you could arrange this for a fee with some of the less scrupulous former debutantes); and you had to be either aristocratic or of the ‘ranks’ – the amorphous body which included the clergy, military, merchants, bankers and large-scale commerce dealers. Once presented, Cora would have enjoyed a packed Season (her daughters would later attend the same parties, with almost all the same families) – in itself a thinly veiled excuse for husband-hunting.

Learning your place in Society

The intricacies of aristocratic etiquette were explained to Consuelo Vanderbilt by her husband’s friend, Lady Lansdowne, and came as a shock to her more informal sensibilities: ‘I gathered from her conversation that an English lady was hedged round with what seemed to me to be boring restrictions. It appeared that one should not walk alone in Piccadilly or in Bond Street, nor sit in Hyde Park unless accompanied … that it was better to occupy a box than a stall at the theatre, and that to visit a music-hall was out of the question. One must further be careful not to be compromised, and at a ball one should not dance twice with the same man. One must learn to take one’s place in the social hierarchy … One must, in other words, learn the “Peerage” [the book that lists all the noble families in Britain] … Indeed my first contact with society in England brought with it a realisation that it was fundamentally a hierarchical society in which the differences in rank were outstandingly important.’

However, despite the enthusiasm with which these rich American girls were welcomed onto English shores, Cora’s entry into Society would not have been entirely easy. While there were those who courted her because of her beauty and in the hope of a slice of her cash-rich pie, there were more who would have looked down their noses at her too-fashionable dresses, her lack of knowledge of the finer points of etiquette and her American nationality itself. Without much help, Cora would have had to learn quickly the English way of doing things – even if she already thought she knew which fork to use and how to compose a menu. She would, for example, have been thrown by the fact that while Americans were happy to introduce themselves, the English waited for a formal introduction, which for someone like her might not always have been forthcoming.

By the end of her first Season, Cora had become engaged to Robert, later Lord Grantham, who was in dire need of money to rescue his estate. Their marriage was born from convenience but grew into romance, as they fell in love the year after they married. But marriage to an earl did not mean that life would now be easy for Cora. Once settled into her new home, Cora would have found herself in a land that was almost alien to her upbringing. As the wife of a peeress, she would be entitled to wear velvet and ermine at coronations, as well as often taking the place of honour at dinners; her writing paper would bear the family crest and her bed sheets would be monogrammed.

Elizabeth McGovern is Cora

‘My approach to the part is about my own experiences as an American living in England. Things aren’t addressed in conversation openly, but by inference, nuance and understanding.’

Not all of the new elements would be welcome to someone who was an enlightened, educated and lively American girl. ‘It also probably meant inheriting an ancestral home full of creaky ancestral machinery: shooting parties for which the guest list hadn’t changed in three generations, family jewels that could not be reset no matter how ugly they were … Marrying the peer turned the heiress into an institution, incessantly compared to the last woman who’d held the job and, because she was American, frequently found wanting,’ wrote Gail MacColl and Carol Wallace in To Marry An English Lord. In an enormous house miles away from the excitement of London, let alone the vast ocean that separated her from her family and friends, Cora would have been inhuman not to have felt lonely and bewildered in the early days of marriage.

VIOLET, THE DOWAGER COUNTESS

‘I mean, one way or another, everyone goes down the aisle with half the story hidden.’

Fortunately, Robert is a kind man and became a loving husband: one who would be a much-needed pacifier between his wife and mother. Violet did not change her views and decide to be more welcoming of her daughter-in-law because, as Julian Fellowes explains: ‘She understands about money but she sees aristocratic virtues as more important. She didn’t encourage Robert’s marriage where his father certainly did. She would rather have taken less of a dowry with someone who knew the ropes better.’ Above all, Cora failed to provide a son, and as the years went by this would have diminished her to almost nothing in Violet’s eyes. According to Julian: ‘The lack of a son is an issue. In those days the selection of the sex – in fact, anything “defective” about a child – was thought to be the woman’s fault. By definition, of course, your mother-in-law had always managed to have a son.’

Without a son, as we know, the matter of the passing on of the title and Downton Abbey is greatly affected. On marriage, Cora’s sizeable dowry and later inheritance had been wrapped up tightly within the estate. This was not unusual; primogeniture – when only the eldest male heir may inherit – was a law that had ring-fenced the British aristocracy for hundreds of years. Tied up with it was the policy of entail, which meant that estates were bound in trust so they could only be passed on whole from one generation to the next, which ensured all the ancient properties remained intact, preventing bits being divided off and sold or given away to any other person. Younger sons or daughters could never inherit more than a token amount of cash or trinkets: the house and its contents – from jewels to paintings and furniture – and all its land would go solely to the next male heir. Usually that was the eldest son, but when no son was forthcoming, as in Cora and Robert’s case, it went to the nearest male relation. So while her mother had been an heiress, Mary could not be. Even to her, steeped as she was in the traditions and expectations of her class, this was beyond the pale: ‘I don’t believe a woman can be forced to give all her money to a distant cousin of her husband’s. Not in the twentieth century. It’s too ludicrous for words.’

THE REAL-LIFE CORA: LADY CURZON

The idea for Cora was born when Julian Fellowes read about Mary Leiter in To Marry An English Lord, by Gail MacColl and Carol Wallace. Mary, was a dark-haired beauty, the daughter of a fantastically rich Chicago real estate speculator and a very vulgar, ambitious mother. Riding on the crest of the Buccaneer wave, Mary came to Europe following social success in Washington, New York and Newport. However, she failed to make much of an impression during several visits in the late 1880s, until 1890, when in a single day she met the Prince of Wales (later King Edward VII and a well-known champion of American girls), a Duchess and a former Prime Minister. Later that Season she went to a ball, entering as ‘a statuesque beauty in a stupendous Worth gown’ and the Prince of Wales asked to have his first dance with her.

After that, she was made: invited by the inner London social circles to every luncheon, dinner and ball. Men were throwing themselves at her feet, but she had fallen in love with the Honourable George Curzon, a very bright but equally broke young man. He, too, had certainly noticed her at that first ball but, afraid that to propose to her would be too obviously a fortune-hunter’s move, he held back. In the summer of 1891 they saw each other every day but his feelings remained ambiguous. Mary waited for him for years, always believing he would come to her, despite only measured responses from him. Even when he did propose in 1893 he told her to keep the engagement secret, leaving her mother wondering impatiently why her daughter was yet to marry despite her numerous suitors. Only in 1895 did he finally talk to her father and his, and then they were married.

Her father bought them a house – 1 Carlton House Terrace – and gave them £6000 a year. He also settled a sum rumoured to be somewhere between $700,000 and $1 million on Mary, with an additional amount set aside for any children they might have (they had three daughters: Irene, Cynthia and Alexandra – the last was born in 1904).

While Mary had always been utterly in love with George – she once said that when he came through a door, she felt ‘that the band is playing the Star Spangled Banner and that the room is glowing with pink lights and rills are running up and down [my] back with joy’ – it was only after he had been posted to India as Viceroy, three years after their marriage, that he came to love her with equal fervour. Sadly, just over ten years after their wedding she grew ill in India and died, in 1906. But she died a happily married woman and, as Vicereine of India, the highest-ranking American, man or woman, in the history of the British Empire.

Yet even in a remote seat like Downton Abbey, Cora is not bereft of influence, as the aristocracy tended to be a matriarchy. Downton is one of the great houses of England, and if anyone locally wants an invitation or support for a project, it is Cora that they have to get on their side. As a peeress, she could invite several young men to the house on any one of her daughters’ behalf, because most of their mothers would be only too pleased to be thought of as a friend. Her only difficulty would be that there weren’t all that many available. ‘I’m afraid we’re rather a female party tonight, Duke,’ she explains when the raffish Duke of Crowborough is staying. ‘But you know what it’s like trying to balance numbers in the country. A single man outranks the Holy Grail.’ (A sentiment that many a country hostess would feel even in the twenty-first century.)

Perhaps her most modern achievement has been to imbue her daughters with the sense that power is theirs for the taking. The only difference is in the manner with which they take it. ‘Mary wants power but is prepared to play by the old rules,’ says Julian. ‘Sybil wants it by the new rules. And Edith just wants anything she can get.’

As the girls reach eighteen, the time arrives for them to ‘Come Out’. For Cora’s daughters, their entry into Society as debutantes took a more simple route than that of their mother; as aristocracy they had an automatic ‘in’ that had been denied Cora. The Season was their opportunity to meet the right circle of men from which to choose a husband. ‘For marriage market it was,’ writes Anna Sproule of this annual ritual in The Social Calendar. ‘Nobody in the pre-1914 era made any bones about the fact that marriage was a woman’s sole career, and she owed it both to herself and the family that had so far supported her to get on with it.’

The girls’ entrée into Society would begin, as it had for their mother, with their presentation at Court. Despite the different years in which they were presented, each of the daughters would have worn more or less the same outfit for the occasion: a long, low gown and three ostrich feathers pinned to their head (a dictat of King Edward VII), a veil and a decent length of train.

SYBIL

‘There’s nothing wrong with doctors. We all need doctors.’

MARY

‘We all need crossing sweepers and draymen, too. It doesn’t mean we have to dine with them.’

Presentation would be followed by the Season, which traditionally began with the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition. With no shooting or hunting at that time of year, and the men in London to attend Parliament, they were available to escort their wives and daughters around the social whirligig. Four thousand of the richest and smartest people in England descended on the capital from the end of April to the latter part of July for the Covent Garden opera season, the Eton and Harrow cricket match, Royal Ascot (in 1910 everyone wore black mourning for the King who had died the month before), lawn tennis at various venues, including Wimbledon, the Henley Regatta, and a series of garden receptions, private concerts, balls, dinners, receptions and just plain parties.

LADY ROSAMUND

‘I’m sorry you haven’t received more invitations. But then, after four Seasons, one is less a debutante than a survivor.’

The Season was really all about parties, especially those given in the great London palaces, which many of the most significant families still owned and lived in. They would host enormous gatherings every night and every day the newspapers would report who had been present, as well as who had hosted what the previous night – who went and who was giving the next one. Essentially it was an endless succession of opportunities for young people to meet and for their parents to catch up. Even in the daylight hours there was no time lost in finding a way to see and be seen, as young men and women on horseback cantered up and down Hyde Park’s Rotten Row for exercise.

Come 12 August, the grouse season opened in Scotland and everyone shut up their London houses again. You had to hope that by that time you had already caught your future husband as securely as a salmon on a fly hook.

To make her mark, a girl had to be pretty, finely dressed and of excellent parentage. Mothers chaperoned their daughters everywhere, sizing each other up across the dance floor. They would be assessing the competition, as well as the potential suitability of their daughters’ beaux. No one could be seen to dance with the same man for the whole evening, so the opportunities to gauge whether you liked him or not were scant. Instead, opinions were formed on the gossip and stories that related to his fortune, background and character. Naturally enough, the men did the same about the women.

The ceremony of ‘Coming Out’

In 1911, Lady Diana Manners, the third daughter of the 8th Duke of Rutland, was presented at Court: ‘I had made my own train – three yards of cream net sprinkled generously with pink rose-petals, each attached by a diamond dewdrop. The dress was adequate and the three feathers springing out of my head looked less ridiculous when everyone was wearing them… I was nervous of making my double curtsy. The courtiers are very alarming and martinettish – they shoo you and pull you back and speak to you as they would to a wet dog, but once the trial is successfully over you have the fun of seeing others go through the same ordeal.’

Not that a deb’s troubles were over once she had ‘caught’ a fiancé. Any potential husband would be checked out by both the family and the servants. When Mary brings home Sir Richard Carlisle, he is seen as the classic arriviste and there is consternation in the ranks. But he enters their lives in the middle of the war: all around them there is change, and Society is changing too, as impossible as that had seemed to the older generations. Bringing with him money and confidence, Sir Richard is unfazed by the stuffy ways of the Crawleys. He is happy to do his best to fit in with the grand country family (he orders a country suit to go walking in) but is unembarrassed when he doesn’t quite manage it (he has mistakenly ordered a heavy tweed more suited to shooting). As unpalatable as he may be at times, Sir Richard represents the future – a way into power that doesn’t depend on blue-blooded connections but an agile mind and ambitious drive instead.

With new pathways to the top of Society being laid in this decade, Matthew may feel the pressure to be a pioneer on top of his duty to Lord Grantham to preserve the traditions of Downton Abbey. His future earldom will give him a seat in the House of Lords but it might be, after all, his upper middle-class background and professional career that enable him to make his peerage a success rather than, as Violet and Lord Grantham fear, hold him back.

THE REAL-LIFE SIR RICHARD CARLISLE: LORDS BEAVERBROOK AND NORTHCLIFFE

Sir Richard Carlisle is loosely based on the newspaper magnates who made their fortunes out of the First World War. The Canadian tycoon Max Aitken, later Lord Beaverbrook, was a prominent figure largely because of his political friends as well as his rousing leaders in the Daily Express. But it was Lord Northcliffe who led the way in tabloid journalism with the establishment of the Daily Mirror and the Daily Mail – his descendant, Lord Rothermere, is still the majority shareholder of his newspaper group.

Aitken is compelling for his political bombast. A protégé of the Conservative party leader, Bonar Law (who formed the wartime coalition government with Lloyd George), and a friend of Winston Churchill, his personal alliances guided his newspaper editorials, which were hugely influential in directing politics after the war. But it was the brash effrontery of Lord Northcliffe, born Alfred Harmsworth in Dublin to ‘a tough mother and a feckless hard-drinking father’ in 1865, that could be said to be responsible for influencing some of the major decisions of the war cabinet, including – with Beaverbrook’s Express – the destruction of the Liberal government.

When the Daily Mail was first printed in 1896, the immediate effect was electrifying. Gone were the word-for-word dull reports of political speeches; in were first-person accounts of events. Easy on the eye with lots of white space on the page and an early use of big pictures, one could say that the founding principles still operate on the paper today. ‘The three things which are always news are health things, sex things and money things,’ Northcliffe told a reporter. Cheap to buy and titillating to read, the paper made him a millionaire. Northcliffe died in 1922 quite mad, probably due to a blood infection, and a newspaper man to the end; he telephoned his night editor and told him: ‘They say that I am mad: send your best man to cover the story.’

Change CHAPTER THREE

EXT. NORTHERN ENGLAND. DAWN.

At dawn, a steam train travels through this lovely part of England. As the camera moves in, we can see a man, whom we will know as John Bates, sitting by himself in a third-class carriage. Above him run the telephone wires, humming with their unrevealed, urgent messages. The train flies on.

TIMELINE

1912

On 17 January Captain Scott and his team successfully reached the South Pole, only to perish in March as they made their way home. On 15 April, tragedy struck again when the ‘unsinkable’ ocean liner RMS Titanic hit an iceberg on her maiden voyage across the Atlantic. It sank within hours, killing over 1500 people, mostly men from first and second and passengers from third class. The summer brought more scandal as the British government was accused of profiting from information about the Marconi Company.

1913

The suffragette movement continued to claim headlines when Emily Davison ran out in front of the King’s horse at the Epsom Derby in June. She died of her wounds a few days later, but she lived on in the minds of many as a controversial figure whose actions may, in fact, have blighted the suffragette cause.

1914

The assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria in June 1914 by a Serb nationalist heralded the start of tensions between the two nations. As other countries across Europe took sides, military momentum gathered that could only lead to the announcement of the First World War and Britain’s call to arms.

1915

1915 saw no let up in hostilities, and for the first time London suffered the effects of the First World War directly when streets were hit by Zeppelins. Meanwhile, Britain tried to carry on as normal, bringing in change in these shifting times. In this year photographs were required on passports for the first time, and the Women’s Institute was formed in response to the demands made on women to help the war effort.

1916

July brought the commencement of the Battle of the Somme; an offensive by British and French armies against the German Army which lasted until November. It became one of the bloodiest military operations ever recorded, causing over 1.5 million casualties, with over 60,000 British soldiers lost in the first day alone. Over in Dublin, Irish republicans mounted an insurrection during Easter week, aiming to end British Rule in Ireland. The Easter Rising was suppressed after seven days but succeeded in bringing the issue to the forefront of Irish politics. As the year drew to a close, back home the Prime Minister, H.H. Asquith, lost the support and confidence of the press and his government and resigned his position in December. He was succeeded by David Lloyd George.

1917

After the dramatic losses sustained during the Battle of the Somme, 1917 saw another, equally horrific battle take place, notorious for the horrendous conditions endured by the troops. Passchendaele saw fighting from July until November in the muddy quagmire of Ypres, resulting in heavy casualties. After a failed harvest back in Britain, the Government’s Food Production Department swiftly set up the Women’s Land Army, which mobilised women in farming to ensure food reserves could supply the nation.

1918

A year of great changes began with the passing of the Representation of the People Act, which finally gave women the vote – if they were over 30 and owned property – as well as to men in residence over the age of 21. Food supplies continued to be regulated with the introduction of ration books. In Russia, the incarceration of the Russian royal family came to an end when the Bolsheviks executed them in a panic on 16 July, believing that Czech forces were on their way to rescue them. On 11 November the news came that everyone had been waiting for – the Allies had won the war and the Germans had signed the armistice that ended the conflict.

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