Mrs Hughes walks through the door alone and the nurse closes it behind her.
56C INT. PASSAGE. DOWNTON. DAY.
O’Brien walks down the passage towards Thomas.
THOMAS: Everything all right, Miss O’Brien?
O’BRIEN: Oh, yes. Everything’s all right with me, but it’ll be all wrong with you before too long. Mark my words.
THOMAS: Oh? And how is that, Miss O’Brien?
O’BRIEN: I don’t know. Not yet. But it will be. You can be sure of it.
57 INT. LANDING/ETHEL’S ROOMS. DAY.
Isobel is climbing a dismal staircase in a slum. At the top she reaches a door and is about to knock when it opens. A man is leaving. He shields his face when he sees Isobel. Ethel is holding the door, in a stained dressing gown. The two women stare at each other.
ISOBEL: Hello, Ethel.
ETHEL: How did you find me?
ISOBEL: I asked Mrs Hughes.
Ethel nods. She looks down at some coins in her hand, and puts them in a box on the table.
ISOBEL (CONT’D): I would so like to be useful to you. Please. Won’t you let me?
ETHEL: You don’t understand, Mrs Crawley. I didn’t come looking for help, not for myself. I’m past all that.
ISOBEL: Then why did you come?
Behind Ethel a child starts to cry. She looks round and back.
ETHEL: I’ve got to go… Thanks for trying, ma’am. But there’s no point. It’s all up with me. I’m done.
Almost apologetically, she shuts the door.
58 INT. KITCHENS. DOWNTON. DAY.
Carson approaches Mrs Patmore.
CARSON: Well?
MRS PATMORE: You mean —?
CARSON: Is it? Or isn’t it?
MRS PATMORE: It’s not cancer, no. It’s a benign something-or-other. Nothing more.
CARSON: Don’t mention that you’ve said anything. She doesn’t know that I know.
MRS PATMORE: I won’t say a word.
He leaves, and she goes into the kitchen taking off her coat. Mrs Hughes comes in.
MRS HUGHES: Did you tell him?
MRS PATMORE: I would prefer to say I’ve put him out of his misery.
Mrs Hughes chuckles and moves off down the passage. She stops. Someone is singing an old folk song. She moves more slowly and there is Carson, polishing away as he sings.
CARSON: Dashing away with a smoothing iron, Dashing away with a smoothing iron, Dashing away with a smoothing iron, She stole my heart away.
With a smile, Mrs Hughes shakes her head and walks on.44
END OF EPISODE THREE
1 We begin as we often begin – with the event that we set up at the end of the previous episode. As the episodes themselves take place over a comparatively short period – sometimes a couple of weeks, sometimes no more than three or four days – we allow ourselves any amount of time between them. The advantage with things like an accepted proposal is that we can just lose the engagement.
2 I wrote it, of course, but I am touched when Edith says here, ‘Something happening in this house is actually about me.’ She is voicing what we all feel. At last, this is her moment. But Violet and Cora are unconvinced by this all the way through, so in a sense they’re a step ahead of the game.
3 Patou was a very, very fashionable designer at that time – not wild, but very much what we would think of as couture. In real life, Lucile was Lady Duff Gordon, a Titanic survivor, famous really because her husband, Sir Cosmo, was supposed to have paid the sailors in their lifeboat to row away from the ship, although they later defeated this charge in court. The truth may be complicated, and I’m sure it’s very tiresome for the grandchildren every time it comes up. At any rate, her father was an engineer and she was brought up first in Canada and later in Jersey. Her sister was Elinor Glyn, the exotic novelist. After a failed first marriage, she supported herself by dressmaking until her second husband came along. He was a Scottish landowner and a thoroughly eligible match, but she was unusual among aristocratic wives in pursuing her own career after her marriage.
As Maison Lucile, her London business flourished, and later she opened branches in Paris, New York and Chicago. She also designed for the theatre. Alfred Worth had been the first designer to use living models to display his creations, but his models wore protective sheaths to prevent the dresses actually touching their skin. Lucile had the mannequins in her catwalk shows wearing the clothes as they would be worn by the women who bought them. She was much admired by the upper middle and upper classes, because her look was a classy and attractive version of normal, which was what they liked. But that is to underestimate her contribution to fashion: the looser fitting, the abandonment of restrictive underwear, all stemmed from her innovations.
Her Titanic experience definitely scarred her. My mother recalled as a young woman in 1935 going to a cocktail party and, on being introduced to Lady Duff Gordon, she remarked that the name seemed familiar. Immediately Lady Duff Gordon burst into a litany of protest: ‘We didn’t do it, you know. We didn’t do it. We did not pay them to stay away. We offered them a chance of a reward if we got back, but that’s all.’ Afterwards, my mother considered how there was a gap of twenty-three years between the sinking and the party, and yet it was still so near the surface of the woman’s brain. I’m afraid the rest of her life was obviously blighted by that one interlude. But one mustn’t be too kind. The moment when the ship went down, she turned to her Italian maid and said, ‘Well, Francatelli, there goes that beautiful nightgown you were so proud of.’ I can’t believe she was terribly empathetic to the fate of those still aboard.
4 The business of Irish independence, the division of Ireland in 1921, very much concerned Britain at this time and I was keen to reflect that in the show. In the cut material, Mary quotes Talleyrand, because I’m a big admirer of his. I think he is one of the great survivors of history and so I love him, but we’re also setting up Branson’s Irish story.
5 The origins here are all in my ancestry. My grandmother was called Wrightson and my great-grandfather, John Wrightson, had a house called Charford Manor in Wiltshire in a village called Downton, where he started something called the Downton Agricultural College. My Fellowes grandfather went there as a student to learn how to manage an estate, fell in love with the daughter of the owner and they married. Those were my grandparents. John’s brother, Sir Thomas Wrightson, was a late-Victorian engineer, with an estate called Neasham in North Yorkshire, but they originally came from the bordering estate that’s since been incorporated into the whole. It’s called Eryholme and for many years it has been the dower house to Neasham Hall. The River Tees goes through their park.
Connecting me further to North Yorkshire is obviously my school, Ampleforth. When they said they wanted to set the series in the North, the only part I really knew was the North Riding of Yorkshire, so that’s why I had to put Downton near Thirsk and Ripon. At one point we did wonder if we might change houses, and this storyline was going to give us the option, but, in the event, Highclere seemed too central to the whole show to be changed. I had mixed feelings about this decision. The business of having to sell the main house and downsize would have been quite a nice twentieth-century touch.
6 Thomas, in trying to get revenge on O’Brien for the shirt plot, has spread the rumour that she is leaving. It’s a permanent state of tit for tat, really.
7 Charkham is the maiden name of Fiona Shackleton, the famous divorce lawyer. We are very friendly with her and her husband, and in fact we use her name twice. Lady Shackleton (as she is now) is a character in a later series…
8 I’m sorry this was cut. I am always trying to find opportunities to remind the audience how recent the world of Downton was, how someone who was born in 1893 was only fifty in 1943, only sixty in 1953, and would very probably have lived on to the 1960s and 1970s. I had a great-aunt who was born in 1880 and died in 1971. I knew her perfectly well – she died when I was twenty-two – but she was ten years older than Mary Crawley. So this
generation really does span the divide between the old world and the new. I’m afraid some of them weren’t very happy about it. My grandmother once remarked that she had seen ‘too much change’, and I think that was the price they paid, but at any rate that is the point of the line.
9 Daisy’s character is learning to be herself, to have more confidence in who she is and what she wants. And we will continue that journey quite strongly through the fifth series, when she starts to educate herself. I always feel that one of the great advantages of education is the confidence it gives you in your own abilities, and that’s why the deconstruction of education has been such a disaster for so many millions of men and women. As a matter of fact, I find the resistance to the reforms going on at the moment really reprehensible, because we all know – every statistic tells us – that our social mobility has dried up, and the reason for this is because state education has collapsed. Of course, there are many wonderful and hard-working teachers, but the teaching establishment has got lodged in the thinking of the 1970s, and it is hard not to feel that behind the irresponsibility of their fighting change is the realisation of their own failure. It enrages me because it’s not their own futures that the Luddites are putting at risk; it’s the future of the boys and girls they’re supposed to be teaching.
10 This part of the scene was cut in one of the edits, but I argued for it back because I felt we needed to know that the family was genuinely starting to accept Branson, and that Matthew, who is the least set in his ways, certainly of the men, should logically be the first one to befriend him. After all, he got Matthew to the church on time and now, as Robert says here, they’re all getting used to Tom, ‘and I hope you will, too’. Strallan illustrates what Branson is up against. He is not a bad man, but he is quite awkward with him initially.
11 In the 1920s, they were starting to see the customs of the Victorian age as slightly funny, so things began to be allowed in this generation, like going out for dinner in restaurants, which before the war would have been absolutely verboten. The war had changed that, and by this point there was something humorously naughty about leaving a couple together alone, especially if they were going to marry. In the 1850s it wouldn’t have happened and it wouldn’t have been seen as humorous. They would probably have been allowed to sit on a sofa and talk, and quite deliberately any others present would sit out of hearing on the other side of the room, but even so, it wasn’t exactly wild. There was this rooted idea that to leave a girl alone with a man was to court danger. I said once to my Great-Aunt Isie that it seemed ridiculous to think that if a girl were alone in a room with a man, whom she probably didn’t even know, he would immediately say something improper or make some suggestive overture. My aunt nodded and agreed with me that obviously it was absurd, but she added, ‘Of course, you were furious if he didn’t.’
12 The American heiress Consuelo Vanderbilt had married the Duke of Marlborough in 1893. That they were very ill-matched and in fact couldn’t stand each other was soon pretty common knowledge. They just about stayed together for a decade, but at some point in about 1904 they separated and her father, Willie K. Vanderbilt, built for her the house that’s next door to the Curzon cinema in Curzon Street, opposite Crewe House. It was called Sunderland House when it was first built, because that’s one of their courtesy titles, and originally it had been intended to be the London house of the Marlborough family. They had built Marlborough House on the Mall for this purpose, but that had reverted to the Crown in the eighteenth century, and they were always fairly peripatetic after that.
On their separation, Consuelo lived at Sunderland House and, rather interestingly, she was allowed to function in Society as a separated woman, just as after the divorce, which came in 1921, she was also allowed to carry on in Society. Before then, a divorced woman had a pretty tough time. It can’t have hurt that Consuelo was a multi-millionairess and gave some of the best parties in London, but it nevertheless meant that the price exacted for divorce had dropped. Maybe they still couldn’t enter the royal enclosure at Ascot, or present anyone at Court, but they were no longer non-people as their mothers would have been in such a case. As a matter of fact, if a divorced woman’s daughter was to be presented, someone else had to do it, and it is true that divorcees were not welcome at King George V’s Court. The rule might sometimes be broken in a private situation, but not publicly. But the truth remains that, after the First World War, society couples were no longer prepared to stay together when they were unhappy. In a way, when the Marlboroughs divorced it was the beginning of a new era. There might not have been a tidal wave, but there was certainly a bit of a swell of smart divorces.
13 Edith would have been three.
14 What I wanted to make clear in Mrs Patmore’s speech about Baked Alaska and the dinner afterwards is that the modern fashion for having a sit-down feed after a wedding was not an upper-class practice until very recently – some would say after 2000. Before that, upper-class weddings were always stand-up, mill-about affairs. There might have been a lunch beforehand for some of the people who’d comes from miles away, there might even have been a modest dinner for some people who hadn’t gone home, but the wedding reception was a walkabout, and that’s what we’re saying here. I was married in 1990 and the idea of a sit-down dinner was never even mooted. They came in a lot later on.
15 This is the all-important letter, which Matthew obviously doesn’t want Mary to see, so I’m afraid I fairly shamelessly teased it out.
16 The point we make here is that it doesn’t really occur to Robert that it might be inconvenient for the people to whom the house has been let that twenty strangers would turn up and have lunch on the lawn. In those moments, we do show that, however nice Robert is and however much he’s trying to be modern, there is still an assumption of droit de seigneur that goes pretty deep.
17 We were very fortunate in the distinguished actress who played Mrs Bartlett – Claire Higgins. I have known her since we were young and in rep. She has since done some extraordinary work and, indeed, I worked with her in a play at the National by Dusty Hughes called Futurists, but I hope they will give her her head for this next chunk of her career, as I know she could do some astonishing and definitive things. So it was a real privilege that she wanted to be in Downton. Getting that level of actor for these smaller parts layers them so much, and you have a real sense that you’re watching one or two scenes out of a much larger performance. She created a character which could have starred in a play called Mrs Bartlett, and that’s what you want.
Also, to me, it’s important that she’s on Vera’s side. I never like to have a situation where you have an unmitigated black and horrible character, and in this instance Vera Bates had a point. In an earlier series we glimpsed the other side of Bates from his mother, who implied that when Bates used to drink he could become very angry. I don’t think he actually beat Vera up, but I am sure he was horrible to her, and now that is what we’re hearing from Mrs Bartlett. Vera was clearly pushed to the limit. For a woman to hate a man so much that she wants not only to kill herself but to make sure he’s blamed for her death is pretty bad in anyone’s book. So Mrs Bartlett is there as Vera’s champion.
18 This is another opportunity to demonstrate that Bates has not lost his spirit while he’s been in prison, that he is still a fighter.
19 Mrs Bartlett’s belief that Bates put the poison in the pie gives a rather Sweeney Todd element to the murder/suicide story. I remember asking myself whether or not the plot wasn’t more suited to a melodrama like Lady Audley’s Secret, but I couldn’t think of another death that Vera could set up for herself that would look like someone else’s fault, other than poisoning herself with something that had been made earlier while Bates was there. If she just took poison it wouldn’t be believable that he’d made her take it, and she could hardly strangle herself. It was quite a problem, but anyway we seem to have got away with it.
20 Normally, no woman would sit next to a chauffeur, although that was beginni
ng to happen more and more. For her to ride in the front seat meant that someone she knew was driving the car. Sports cars were not built for chauffeurs; they were built for young men to drive. In the days before cars, ordinary gents might have had a trap or a chaise that they could drive themselves around in, but with a coach and horses you didn’t get up on the box, as a rule, and drive with the coachman, but driving a car, right from the start, was considered racy and fun. Although a chauffeur was part of a country-house staff for quite a long time, nevertheless it wasn’t unusual for a member of the family to drive. Actually, I can never understand how women in particular managed; you can’t tell when you look at an old movie and there’s Carole Lombard or Marion Davies whizzing along, but without power steering it was incredibly hard to turn the wheel.
What Isobel is really saying in this scene is that she is free. She doesn’t need a chauffeur, she doesn’t care. She has young friends and she likes to ride in the front. So it is essentially a statement of modernity. Strallan is a man who likes to drive himself, but of course he can’t now because it is after the war. In real life probably Strallan would be in the front with the chauffeur and Isobel would be in the back, but it suited us to put her in the front for the dialogue between Strallan and Violet. And so Strallan has to make the point that Isobel has forced him to sit in the back.
21 Here is a memory of another way of life, which came from a conversation I read about somewhere, of the now Dowager Duchess of Devonshire, when she was a young wife, talking to her mother-in-law and discussing all the houses the Devonshires used to have. The older Duchess, Evelyn, was saying that they would always go to Chatsworth for this and that and then they’d go to Devonshire House in London, and then they’d go to Bolton for the shooting and then to Lismore for the sailing, and then came Hardwick… until finally her daughter-in-law said, ‘But what about Chiswick?’ The old Duchess thought for a moment. ‘I think we sometimes went there for breakfast.’
Downton Abbey, Series 3 Scripts (Official) Page 19