Downton Abbey, Series 3 Scripts (Official)

by Julian Fellowes

  10 We’ve seen before that, at Downton, in a house party all the married women would be given their breakfast upstairs, because it solved a lot of things. For a start, it meant one less outfit, so on a sporting day, if they were going out with the guns, they could change straight into their shooting clothes and skip the frock they would have had to wear for breakfast in the dining room. Over the four days of a shooting party, this would mean four fewer dresses for the maids to plan and supervise, giving everyone more time. The ladies’ maids themselves did most of the work of getting the tray ready. The cook or the still-room maid (a character we don’t have at Downton) might scramble the eggs, but the tray would be done by a woman’s own maid, to just the way she liked it. Again, that lightened the load for everyone else. So far from making work, staying upstairs actually reduced it. But, at this point, Edith is determined to rub everyone’s nose in the fact that she’s single and jilted.

  11 Here we have Tennessee about to ratify the nineteenth amendment, giving all women – in that state, at least – the vote. For British women, the right to vote crept in through the Twenties – which we’ve referred to before – in stages, as the qualifications to make women eligible were broadened. In America it wasn’t quite the same. The laws legalising female suffrage were achieved in the different states gradually, but in most states all women were enfranchised completely when they passed the bill. They didn’t start with women over thirty, who were property owners, and all the other malarkey the British went in for.

  12 I looked them up and in this year the Derbys had just had a child, so that seemed rather fun. Alas, it was cut.

  13 I find it useful in this sort of show to keep a sense of ordinary life going. Sometimes with those glamorous shoulder-pad series the conversation is always about the power takeover of the company or the illegitimate child whom someone forgot giving birth to twenty-eight years ago, but nobody ever says, ‘What’s for lunch?’ I feel it is useful to have people complaining that they’ve run out of stockings, because then the public thinks, I know what that’s like. It connects them to the people on the screen.

  The question of what Anna is going to be called when she’s promoted to lady’s maid is something I have exploited before. In Gosford Park, Maggie Smith’s maid is a young woman to whom she pays a pittance. I didn’t want her to be called Harrison or something similar all the way through, because she is really the tour guide for the audience. She is learning about a great house and how a shooting party is managed at the same time as they are. I knew we’d cast the wonderful Kelly McDonald to play the maid, Mary, and it seemed more sensible for her to be Scottish, so I asked a Scottish friend of mine, Mike Emslie, to give me a surname that was really difficult to pronounce, and he came up with Maceachran, which is full of glottal stops. I then had Clive Owen’s character asking why Mary is still called Mary and not by her surname, which was the correct form for a lady’s maid, and she explains that her employer, Lady Trentham, can’t pronounce her surname, and so calls her Mary. ‘I don’t blame her,’ says Clive, which gives us permission to call the character Mary throughout the movie. Here, we didn’t want to change Anna’s name, because she’s fully established as a character, and so we make this special ruling because they can’t have Bates and Bates. Obviously, Carson disapproves.

  14 Will the new recruit be below Alfred or above him? Contrary to O’Brien’s argument, the decision would have been perfectly within Carson’s remit. It wasn’t a question of first come, first served; it was up to the butler to decide who was the more experienced.

  15 Mrs Hughes is unwilling to give Ethel away. She has an essentially protective feeling towards her, which obviously we are going to make use of in the drama. This is reasonable enough, as it was part of the job of the housekeeper – in this case, Mrs Hughes – to look after the maids in her charge. And with Ethel, she has failed to do so.

  16 At this stage, when I was first writing it, we wanted another sitting room operating, as I had plans to set up a sort of alternative household within Downton itself, so that Matthew’s and Mary’s life together would be lived more separately from Cora’s and Robert’s. My idea was, through this series, to refer to the nursery that’s been turned into a sitting room and then to go on with that separate life in Season Four. However, as things turned out, Dan Stevens had decided to leave the show, even though he had not yet told us. We will get to the (perfectly acceptable) reasons for his decision, but the fact remains we didn’t know until we had started to film. And by that time we had five scripts. It was quite difficult, because I had to decide how to get rid of him, knowing that the first five episodes – which included one episode dedicated entirely to Sybil’s death – were already fixed, with the cast and the directors chosen. In the slight hysteria which followed, I must have forgotten about setting up the nursery/sitting room for the married future that would never happen. But anyway, at this stage, I thought this room was going to take a more prominent part than in fact would be the case.

  17 I have always had rather mixed feelings about gardening. I mean, I do have real gardeners in my life – my grandmother was a real gardener and my mother-in-law is a real gardener – but vague, notional gardening I always find rather irritating. My mother liked to be seen as a gardener but wasn’t a gardener at all. She had a sort of trug that was mounted on a stick, like a shepherd’s crook, which you could stick into the ground and it stayed upright. You then dead-headed roses and threw them into it. Sometimes, with people coming for lunch, she would go down to the rose garden at the bottom of the lawn, and when they arrived she’d walk up the lawn with her trug of dead-heads playing the role of Judith Bliss. It was all complete nonsense.

  18 The whole business of playing ping pong and watching DVDs is a pretty recent interpretation of prison life and has spawned an interesting debate. To the liberals, either there shouldn’t be any prison at all, or, if there is prison, then its sole purpose is rehabilitation. For the rest of us, there needs also to be punishment involved, and society’s current suspicions that there is now no element of it – that on the whole these people are leading the life of Riley – is deeply disquieting.

  Personally, I suspect this is not true and being in prison is considerably more unpleasant than the Daily Mail would lead us to believe. Besides which, rehabilitation should definitely be part of it. Nevertheless, there is something about punishment for crime that is natural, and it is disquieting to me when the liberals refuse to accept human nature. Like leaving children to teach themselves to read, it is just wishful thinking. If you want a country to accept the end of the death penalty (which I am sure is right), then people need to feel confident that a murderer in cold blood is going to have a very tough time of it. The more who come out after six years and then immediately murder someone else, the more damage is done. One of the main arguments against the death penalty used to be that there was a risk of wrongful conviction, but the trouble is, far more innocent people have died at the hands of released murderers than were ever hanged wrongly, so it doesn’t really hold water. The point being that too many today do not have faith in the legal system.

  I remember an argument with a judge who was pleading the horrors of the childhoods that most criminals have endured, but this, to me, was to confuse his role in society. His most important job is to make law-abiding people believe that the legal structure works, not to alienate them. Of course, he was mortally offended, but it does seem to be true, that too many of them have lost touch with their role.

  19 When I was a child, I remember an all-pervasive sense of a way of life that had only just ended and, in fact, I now know that when I was a little boy it was only just ending. There had been perfectly good butlers in the local manor house until quite a few years after the war (or longer), and one of the signs that they had been in action recently was the array of pieces of equipment that had only recently fallen into disuse. I recall asking my grandmother why all the teaspoons seemed to have different shapes and she replied, ‘Because they are not
all teaspoons.’ Then she started to explain that this one would be used for a melon and that one would be used for a boiled egg, and I saw that the grapefruit spoon was slightly sharper to be able to dig into the fruit, and so on. It was a moment of revelation, that I had arrived just too late to experience a different civilisation from the one I was living in.

  For me, this is really the moment when Carson falls for Alfred, because however much he knows the boy was wished on him by O’Brien’s plotting, he admires, above all, people who are committed to the work and trying to get it done right. So from this scene on Thomas is going to lose when it comes to Alfred. Carson approves of Alfred, because he is trying to get the details right. ‘I thought soup spoons were the same as tablespoons.’ This is hardly true now. After the war, manufacturers came up with those little round soup spoons that you find in hotels, and on the whole that’s what you are given in a restaurant today. The old giant tablespoons that most people think of as exclusively serving spoons were also once used for soup. And still are, in our house.

  20 We had apparently got to the end of Ethel’s story in the previous series when she refused the Bryants’ offer and decided to keep the child. And during the gap between series several people were quite vehement, denouncing me for considering this to be a happy ending. ‘That wretched child,’ they said. ‘She’s snatched away all its opportunities.’ The truth is, we had not yet reached the conclusion. I certainly always intended that Ethel should feel she’d done the wrong thing by trying to keep the child, and we were going to squash it into Season Two, but then the decision came to retain Amy Nuttall, so we didn’t have to.

  It is true that there was a fashion among social workers in the 1990s for believing that a child must always be left with the mother, however inappropriate, however incapable, which was often almost as bad for the wretched young women – who in many cases weren’t ready to be a mother – as it was for the baby. Still, the social workers would deliberately make them feel terrible about wanting to have their child adopted. Then there was that weird prejudice against allowing middle-class adoption, which several friends of ours came up against. One couple – charming, quite well off, living a comfortable life – wanted to adopt a child, but the social worker told them their expectations would be too great. They protested that their expectations would not be any different from those of any parents. Everyone wants the best for their child, and they don’t always get it. That rule applies to any parent, duke or dustman. But the social worker would not listen, and they weren’t allowed one.

  There is now a wind of change in that department and things may be getting better, but I really felt the madness of those policies. Instead of just affecting the mad people implementing them, they were affecting the lives of hundreds of thousands of children, which seemed quite terrible to me. Anyway, Ethel has come to the same conclusion. Isobel is quite ambivalent about it, because like all do-gooders she believes in the theory more than the practice, and in theory the child brought up by its own mother will be happier than one brought up by horrible Mr Bryant. In practice, as Mrs Hughes is aware immediately, the child’s opportunities will be many as opposed to the fate beckoning with Ethel, which would have been nil. But Isobel has to take her time to get there.

  21 In Mrs Bird’s defence, a servant’s reputation was their only capital. And when a servant was employed in a house with just one or two servants and no butler to keep them in check then, if anything, their character was even more important. For Isobel to expect Mrs Bird to risk contaminating her reputation by working with an ex-prostitute is not fair. And I very much want the audience to see Mrs Bird’s point of view, even if she expresses it in a rather brusque way.

  22 This is when I start to have my anti-Catholic fun. The anti-Catholicism of the upper classes is something that was still going when I was in my teens and even twenties. By then, they didn’t mind you being invited to a daughter’s coming-out dance, or staying in the house, or even shooting their pheasants. But they did not want you to marry their child. They didn’t want a Catholic in the family and God knows they didn’t want Catholic grandchildren. As a result, there was a certain bonding among the Catholics, from the Duke of Norfolk’s children down to vaguely toffish families like my own. We were probably all much more intimate than we would have been if we’d been Anglican. A lot of the boys had been to a Catholic school, which is again much less observed now. I went to Ampleforth, but my son went to Winchester, and in fact the present headmaster there is Catholic. I can tell you if someone had asked in 1968 how likely it was that Winchester would have a Catholic headmaster, it would have made fairies seem probable. It was a different world.

  For most of them, it wasn’t a question of savage persecution, it was a sort of mistrust. It came from the idea that you were more loyal to a slimy old geezer in Rome than you were to the Queen and your values couldn’t be trusted, because you might have a sort of foreign bias. The vague sense of your being a fifth columnist was what put them off. A man like Robert would go six months without giving the Catholics a thought, but when he does he has to reveal his prejudice. ‘I don’t want thumbscrews or the rack, but there always seems to be a touch of Johnnie Foreigner about the Catholics.’ That was completely true of his type.

  23 I never have to invent any reason for a servant character to arrive or leave if Mrs Patmore is in the scene, because she can always send one of the characters upstairs with the food. So she is a built-in dramatic mechanism.

  24 Fifteen years later, Dr Cosmo Lang, by then Archbishop of Canterbury, would make trouble for the Prince of Wales over Mrs Simpson. The son of a Scottish Presbyterian minister, he was made Archbishop of York in 1908 and he would be raised to the See of Canterbury in 1928. Like many of the English, I have rather mixed feelings about the abdication. King George VI was considerably more suited in every way for the role of a constitutional monarch than his older brother. So, like a lot of us, I never know whether to bless or to curse Mrs Simpson. Lang did represent the absolute intolerance that King Edward was up against, and I have a vague sympathy, but I believe privilege must be paid for.

  It suits, I would still say, a majority of the British to have a hereditary monarchy, but the other side of it is that we feel we have a right to expect a certain level of personal sacrifice, a degree of unselfishness and concern for the common good, that King George and our present Queen have both consistently displayed, but it is doubtful that King Edward was capable of such things. Obviously, since the dawn of time, some members of the family have cut loose, but happily, at least since Queen Victoria, the monarch has always been able to put the country first. The only one who was going to be the exception to that rule was Edward VIII. So, on the one hand, I see Lang as intolerant, but on the other, I see the new King as personally unsuited to the task. In our present sovereign, we have been given someone who seems to have grasped the true nature of the role from a very early age. Marvellous, really.

  25 I was a little bit torn here, because when you are in the dining room at Highclere it is pretty difficult to hear what’s going on at the front door. There’s the whole width of the hall and pretty thick walls. But I felt we would get away with it, because the front door is next to the dining-room windows when you are facing the front of the house.

  26 In my experience, there is an instinct in some people to normalise a situation, and in others to dramatise. Almost everyone you know falls into one category or the other. I am one of those, like Alfred, who would ask after the luggage.

  27 ‘The Troubles’ in Ireland were raging by this point, and the burning of the country houses was frequent and ruthless and cruel. I don’t believe it was especially bloodthirsty. I cannot say that no one ever lost their life, but the normal practice was to give people ten minutes to get out. That said, it was certainly very hard. There’s a story of one man who managed to save a few things – a portrait of his mother, some furniture – and the following day they caught up with him on the road and burned the cart. In those moments the reb
els were pitiless. But they were fighting for their very existence. The English establishment had to be made to understand that the days of the Ascendancy were numbered. Although in my opinion the system was due for change by this time, I am not sure that the burnings were necessary, because the political will was no longer there to keep Ireland enchained. But it was a very difficult time there, and it seemed to me we needed one instance where the audience was made aware of what was going on.

  Branson’s involvement in the riot I have always left slightly nebulous. What I find truthful is that seeing the family watching their home burning affected him much more than he expected. Possibly because he’s now a member of such a family, whether he likes it or not. And in this sort of struggle, the one thing you must avoid is letting your enemy become a normal person in your mind, with normal feelings. War propaganda is designed specifically to stop this happening. That was the reason (wasted on some playwrights) why Queen Elizabeth would never meet Mary Queen of Scots, which Mary wanted. Elizabeth knew that the moment she met her first cousin, her nearest surviving relation on her father’s side, it would be far harder for her to deal with her as a political pawn in the great game.

  This is what has happened to Branson, even if he is only dimly aware of it. The landowning aristocracy have become real people to him, as opposed to heartless tyrants. Later, he starts a romance with a woman who is close to him politically, but she has not made that leap. The upper classes are still generic types to her, machines without feelings, and in the end he breaks up with her because he can’t go there. That is what has begun to happen here.