30 The formula here, where there is a list of sole heirs in order of precedence whose rights will not be transmitted in the event of their own death, was, I think, my invention, but I checked it with a lawyer to see if it would work. I had an inheritance from a female relative once and it was made per stirpes. The lawyer explained that this means, ‘If you died before she did, your heirs would have got it’ – in other words, Emma would have inherited (some furniture). Without this qualification, all the possible heirs in the Downton situation would have to be childless, and that didn’t seem very believable.
Next, we have the business of its being a huge amount, which we needed for it to be enough to save Downton. But one of the things that I have known – although, funnily enough, much more in America than here – is the phenomenon of people who are far, far richer than you would guess from the way they live. Most of the English live to the absolute outer limit of their capacity; they live in the nicest house they can possibly afford, they have the nicest holidays they can possibly afford, and the whole thing often goes right to the cliff edge. But the Americans, on the whole, are not like that, just as there are some in England who are different. It’s quite normal in Los Angeles for someone to be living in a four-bedroom bungalow on Rexford who is richer than a duke. That’s just the way they are. They buy the way of life they want, and once they’ve got it, the rest of the money can stay in the bank or be invested. And that has been Reggie Swire’s way.
Pulbrook has gone to India and vanished because we needed him still to be the probable heir at this stage, so he could not yet be irrevocably dead. We have some dramatic mileage to get out of the situation first.
31 The refusal to dress Branson because he’s been a chauffeur is based on a true incident of a servant who wouldn’t wait at the table on a former servant. I think they made it a buffet or something in the end. However, Mrs Hughes doesn’t believe the difference between the classes is part of the Divine Plan. She quite reasonably sees serving anyone the Granthams choose to invite as simply a function of the job.
32 What Branson wears had to be a very gradual transition. He is a proud man, and we felt that for him immediately to start jumping into black tie, never mind white, would look as though he were imitating something that wasn’t organic and true to him, and that he was trying too hard to please the Crawleys. So he starts off refusing to change at all. We then get to a point where he begins to wear black tie, even when they’re in white tie, and finally, when we get to the house party in series four, he puts on a white tie. But he still feels very bad about it – he feels he’s let himself down, which makes him vulnerable, as we shall see.
His clothing is all quite carefully mapped so that he doesn’t even wear completely appropriate outside clothes. Branson is clever, so it is impossible for him not to start appreciating certain things, and eventually, of course, he fits in. All of which made him a very useful character for me and full of interesting elements. Violet is not above punishing him for his recalcitrance. Robert is very unflinching. Sybil is much freer in all of this. I remember reading an article once about keeping sherry in the fridge, which was a brief fashion, and someone saying the problem with this is you have to know enough not to keep sherry in the fridge before you can keep sherry in the fridge. And rather similarly, because Sybil is perfectly at ease with people wearing white tie, it means nothing to her when they’re not. But Branson is the one who is walking on knives all the way through this series.
Naturally Carson makes everything as difficult as possible for him. But when Mary says, ‘You should buy a Downton wardrobe and leave it here,’ it’s not supposed to be a jibe. She’s just making conversation. But obviously Branson is offended by it because he’s very prickly. And then Isobel immediately feels the need to make things worse by supporting Branson’s position.
33 If you look at a newspaper from 1920, it doesn’t have the Russian Revolution or anything else, it has Ireland on every front page, partly because many families, certainly including my own, had Anglo-Irish relations, whose houses were being burnt down, or, perhaps, hopefully not being burnt down. It was uppermost in everyone’s minds. In December 1921 the treaty that led to the creation of the Irish Free State was signed, but the troubles were by no means over. Should formerly English families continue to own land and be the dominant ruling class? Or should their estates be confiscated?
My own great-grandmother was part of the Ascendancy. Her mother’s brother, the first Lord Hemphill, was the Solicitor-General for Ireland, but, oddly, she and her siblings grew up very much pro home rule, and as supporters of Parnell. However, her father’s father was strongly opposed to all of this, and so when my great-great-grandparents married he was disinherited. Thus the treatment of Ireland was a very hot topic in our family. Even down to my childhood we were taught to believe in Irish independence as desirable, which, for a family like mine, was quite unusual at that time. For all these reasons, I was keen to discuss it in the show. I give Robert the typical response of his own kind – he is not terribly unreasonable or savage, just fairly classic – but I’m probably most in sympathy with Branson’s opinion. So his arguments should be taken as perfectly sincere.
As for the Treaty in real life, de Valera, in my opinion, was not nearly the man that Michael Collins was. De Valera got completely sidetracked by the issue of the Crown. Michael Collins was not a soft man – he’d been a terrorist – but he realised the time had come for talking. And he saw that the most important thing, once they’d got the principle of self-government, was to keep Ireland unified. He argued that if they accepted the Crown and dominion status, like Canada, like Australia, then the world would support them in their struggle to keep Ireland unified. But once they turned against the Crown they would lose the support of America, amongst others, and they would be seen as unreasonable and intransigent. If they took this position then Carson, trying to keep the northern counties attached to England, would be seen as reasonable. Collins’s point was that, twenty years down the line, they could have a referendum on Crown and dominion status. But de Valera couldn’t see it, and as long as the Crown was part of the conditions he declined to go to London for the discussions. The result was that he lost a lot of support from around the world, and in the end Ireland had to accept division, dominion status and the Crown. And then Michael Collins was assassinated. But even if Collins was right, and it was silly to be sidetracked by the issue, still a lot of them did feel very strongly, which is why Branson says, ‘Would it be a problem for you to be ruled by the German Kaiser?’ Carson, of course, breaks the glass.
34 Here, Cora, like all good hostesses, tries to save the day and change the conversation. I used Lady Dufferin and Clandeboye because my Great-Aunt Isie was married to a man whose mother had been a Rowan-Hamilton of Killyleagh Castle, and so his aunt was the Marchioness of Dufferin and lived at Clandeboye. As a result, Isie started her honeymoon there, because for marriages in those days they had a rather nice custom. The bride, in ninety-nine per cent of cases, entered the situation untouched, and so they would go to an English country house, or an Irish one, for a few days while they sort of got used to the idea… After which they would set off on their travels round Europe or wherever.
She was called Isie because her Aunt Eliza was known as Isie for short, and she died of consumption in her twenties. Isie was born soon after that.
35 Carson is absolutely right, Robert would never say ‘Mary’ to him. Robert is not a snob, actually, but the rules mean that between him and Carson she is referred to as Lady Mary. Branson calls her Mary because he hasn’t yet picked up all those customs, for which Carson despises him.
36 In a sense, Robert is allowing Branson, the chauffeur, to address him in a way he would not have been allowed to before. In service, Branson would have called him ‘your lordship’, so for him to say ‘Lord Grantham’ is a halfway step.
37 I was sad we lost this scene, because it was about being a servant. Alfred, for the first time, is talking to someone s
ympathetic to his position as a newcomer, and this sympathy comes from where he least looked for it, from the first man he has to valet. Branson’s words convey a message of quintessential Branson-esque thinking: ‘It’s not a bad place to work. And Lord Grantham’s not a bad man. But remember, you weren’t born to be a servant. Nobody is.’ But once again we had to weigh up what else would have had to go to keep it in. On the whole, I think it was the right call.
38 Of course, this was a problem across England. Arthur Inch, who was the advisor on Gosford Park and later wrote the book Dinner Is Served: An English Butler’s Guide to the Art of the Table, had been a footman and a butler all his working life. He used to say these years were very difficult, because every so often someone just dropped out of the equation and their job was added to yours. So you found yourself being a butler, the footmen, the hall boys, the valet, the chauffeur – each job previously being a full occupation. To an extent, some of the jobs would get easier, with the invention of new devices and gadgets, but nevertheless, when you were a servant in a house with two servants instead of eight, you were doing a hell of a lot more work. And so my sympathies are rather with Daisy at this point, when her workload doubles and they give her seven shillings more a month.
39 Sybil is now acknowledging that their life is much easier in Dublin because none of these issues are present. I think that it is true that when you make a tremendously uneven marriage – I suspect even today, although nobody would admit it – it is easier if you’re just outside everyone’s context. If you go and live in California, or you go to Spain, all of those differences and difficulties cease to be. My mother was rather looked down upon by my father’s relations, and the happiest time after they were first married, before she’d quite learnt to imitate as she later did, was in Africa, where he was posted. Out there, they were just part of the gang. The fact that she was a very pretty woman, young and good fun, was more important than anything else. And all the stuff that made my great-aunts unpleasant, or certainly very cold, towards her vanished in the heat. The Africa sun burnt it away.
Similarly in Dublin Sybil is just Sybil, married to this nice man. Still, even if things are more complicated at Downton, Mary is speaking truthfully – ‘We will know him. We’ll know him and value him’ – because by now she’s made the decision that she wants to get on with him. But inevitably, what’s difficult for Branson is that when Sybil is back at home she fits into this way of life because it’s what she’s always known. And he doesn’t. If you said to him, ‘Well, what do you want from her? Do you want her not to fit in?’ he’d say, ‘No, of course not.’ But that is what he wants, really. He wants them both not to fit in and to be together in their not fitting in, but this is not realistic. And that’s what the scene is about.
40 My sympathies are with Cora here. In any situation, certainly in families, you can fight things and advise against them until you are blue in the face. But when they happen, then the goalposts have moved and you have to wake up to it. Again, I was sad the scene didn’t make the final edit, but you have to ask: is there a detail here that we need to understand what they are feeling? I don’t think there is.
41 We’re about to set up the humiliation of Branson. Sybil wants Larry Grey to see the worthy man whom she’s married. She doesn’t want Larry to look down on the former chauffeur. And her instinct is to buy him a set of tails and make him look like everyone else, so Larry Grey will take him seriously. But to Branson that means she wants to sell out, to placate the enemy by draping him in their flag. Again, I hope the audience can see both points of view. ‘I just want to make things easier for you.’ Of course I sympathise with her, but I sympathise with Branson’s rage, too.
42 I always think it’s a sort of casual insult when people can’t remember your name right.
43 This was a phrase used by travelling gunmen in the Middle West, an advertisement they would put in local papers, and if a sheriff wanted a deputy or to form a posse, if the town was having trouble with Indian raids and you wanted some protection, you would answer the ad. According to the philologist Eric Partridge, this phrase may also be found in The Times personal columns from about 1900.
44 The point of this scene, I suppose, is to make it clear that this marriage has long passed the point where Cora’s money is a principal factor. The fact that they’ve lost it, which is very sad, is not actually going to alter their relationship in any way, which I think it was necessary to make clear. She also has a different perspective. She is not an English landed toff, and the fact that they’re going to sell the house and move to another house is not the end of the world for her. She’s mainly sorry for him.
45 Here we have the alliance between Mary and Carson operating again. It never occurs to Mary, or at least not yet, that there’s going to be any kind of cutting down in the scale of life at Downton, and we can see that this is going to be Robert’s big problem, explaining it to her. That must have been particularly hard for those men – and there were still quite a lot of them, not only in my youth, but later – who didn’t include their women in the business side of their life at all. My mother had a friend whose husband died and she said to her, ‘I’ve never written a cheque.’ It’s terrifying, really, to think that was in the 1960s.
46 We have already had this situation with William in the first series. His mother didn’t want him to be a groom, but instead chose the ladder for him of footman leading, hopefully, to butler. There was, as we know, a very firm class system below stairs, and naturally mothers were ambitious for their children to be at the top of it.
47 The point of the scene was to explain to the audience how difficult it’s going to be for Robert to tell them their way of life is over and that they’re going to have to sell up.
48 New styles arrived in the 1920s, but gradually. We didn’t jump them all into flattening their hair and looking like Clara Bow because that all came in the middle Twenties. So we’re creeping in the changes. Edith clings to the fact that Bates is older than Anna and yet they’re very happy, which gives her hope that everything can work out with Strallan.
49 O’Brien is asking for Thomas’s help to train Alfred so that he’ll be able to work his way up the ladder, but, by doing so, she infuriates Thomas even more and deepens their antipathy. I always find in life the more similar people are the more they dislike each other, so that seems quite truthful to me.
50 Larry Grey, Baddie of the Week. Sometimes, because I tend to take an essentially benevolent view of the landowning classes, it’s important to have someone come along who’s a complete bastard, just to remind ourselves, and the audience, that the opposition to my point of view is not a hundred per cent incorrect. The trouble with any hereditary system is it does empower some nasty people. This doesn’t mean that everyone who’s empowered by the class system is nasty, but obviously it does happen and, here, Larry is that person. He’s infuriated that he should have been beaten to Sybil by someone whom he regards as vastly inferior.
51 It was important for me that we didn’t always see Branson as the downtrodden person being squashed. He can come back fighting, and it’s necessary to show it.
52 An advertising jingle from the 1890s that survived. The Man from the Prudential was still going when I was young. It was a phrase they stuck with for ages. Of course, these days, no catchphrase lasts longer than about two or three years.
53 It was in this era that cocktails began. We don’t often serve cocktails at Downton – in fact, I think we only do it about twice – and Carson hates them. One of the things that is almost invariably wrong in period drama is giving people drinks before dinner, which was a completely post-First World War phenomenon. It came to London from America, and spread out across the country, but quite slowly. Even in the 1950s, I had great-aunts who were reluctant to give you anything. Drinking wine during dinner was fine, and afterwards you could be as drunk as a lord, but to drink before was just considered excessive.
54 The Black and Tans (the nickname came from their
uniforms) were a so-called peacekeeping force put in by the British in the 1920s, who were oppressive and unpopular, and behaved, generally speaking, very badly. It was still a term of abuse during my teens when I used to spend my summers in Ireland. My parents had an island near Kerry, and at that time, if you were English and before they got used to you, you might walk into a pub and hear someone muttering ‘Black and Tan’.
55 That’s all we need.
56 I thought the chap who played Lord Merton, Douglas Reith, gave a marvellous performance. He wrote to us later, asking, ‘Would you see Merton coming back?’ and I must say there can have been few letters written by a member of Equity that produced such results, because he came back with a whole story of his own. It just shows you, there are no small parts, only small actors. It was a very small part, but he was so good that we just had him straight back.
57 We have here a situation that we’ve already set up – that Matthew’s best man has ducked out and it allows him to offer the post to Branson. In my head, he does this partly for Mary, as a peacekeeping gesture, but also because he is coming to see that now Tom Branson is in the family they might as well get on with it.
58 This next scene is to prepare the way for Mary to be told that they’ve lost all their money. I was very torn about this, because in a way it seems unfair of Robert to tell her before the wedding, so I gave him the rather elaborate excuse about their needing to discuss where they’re going to live. I’m not sure I’m completely convinced by it. In real life I think one would have held it back till they got back from the honeymoon. But one mustn’t get too precise about real life when writing for television.
59 This story was, as much as anything, to stop Bates looking like a victim. We needed a narrative action in which he became the positive proactive man, instead of just being the reactive wrongly imprisoned man. That was the point of it.
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