Incidentally, Crowborough wouldn’t have been the first gay peer to marry money in order to rescue his family financially. Aristocracy in decline is a subtext of the whole show and an heiress was quite a popular way out of disaster. The truth is, that life may seem magnificent and even enviable, but, in many cases, by the start of the First World War, it was resting on sand.
* I had a struggle here, because putting names outside houses is quite modern. They had nailed a huge plaque on the gates saying ‘Crawley House’, very cheerily, but I didn’t see it until the rushes. So it had to be removed by the special effects department. If you look carefully you can see slightly wobbly stones in the gate pier.
† The whole business of Matthew’s being the heir. It was very important that this would be credible. There was a certain kind of story-telling imperative that would have quite liked the heir to be a window cleaner from Solihull, picking up the salt cellar and saying what’s this?, but we just felt it would be unbelievable at that particular time, if not so much now. However, this didn’t mean the heir had to be a super-toff. In those days it would have been perfectly credible for the younger son of an earl to take up a position in the army, perhaps, and then for his son to do something else, until they would gradually grow, as a family, into the professional world. They wouldn’t have had much private income, as the system in England leaves the younger sons to shift for themselves. And so by the time you’ve got to third cousins like Robert Grantham and Matthew’s father, the junior branch is sufficiently distant not even to be quasi-aristocratic. They are respectable haut bourgeois.
* Isobel has grown up in the world of medicine and become a nurse in the Boer War, one of the first moments when you had that kind of civilian response to a war which would become much more ordinary in the First World War. Up to the Crimea, on the whole war was something that the army was doing over there, and the idea that we were all in it together hadn’t really taken root. They were patriotic, of course, but the civilians didn’t really see they had a role to play. That was essentially a twentieth-century thing. But anyway, Isobel became a nurse, which meant she’d had nursing training. You will notice that she didn’t become a doctor. I thought that would be over-egging it a bit because, although there were women doctors by the end of the nineteenth century, they were pretty few and far between and they had a tough struggle to make themselves heard.
Matthew, therefore, comes from an intellectual and knowledge-based society. He hasn’t grown up killing things and checking the bridle and girth. I suppose the fundamental philosophy of Downton is essentially that pretty well all of the men and women in the house, whatever their role there, are decent people. We have one or two who fall below that marker but mainly they are trying to do their best. Of course we need conflict, but to me it’s not enough just to have nasty people versus nice people, which is why the Downton disagreements usually depend on both points of view being reasonable. The audience will hopefully they have their sympathies and take the side of one character or the other, but I also hope they will sometimes change their minds.
* The maids would almost certainly be local girls since service was generally seen as a rite of passage. They would be chosen by the housekeepers and mistresses of the local houses, who would visit the schools to see the leaving girls, with the great houses getting first shout, and when they had been chosen, these ones would be seen as having won the prizes. The farmers, the shop keepers, the businessmen from the nearby towns would court the maids of the great houses, because they’d had a training, almost like a finishing school, in sewing and cooking and clothes, and they were mostly very competent by the time they had worked for a few years in service. In other words, they were considered excellent wife material. If you see photographs of great households with masses of maids, almost all of them are young because, as a rule, they only worked into their middle twenties, before leaving to marry. It was kind of a ten-year career really, from about fifteen to twenty-five. In this show, they are northern, because Downton Abbey is set in Yorkshire.
The footmen were more likely to have travelled to find work. William is local and so is Molesley, who started out as a footman and has been promoted, but Thomas, for instance, and later Jimmy, have both grown up elsewhere. Certainly, the senior servants, the valets, the ladies’ maids, the housekeeper, the chauffeur, were often from different parts of the Kingdom. We don’t have the generator men, figures of some mystery at the time as they understood electricity which was a frightening concept, because we just thought it was one too many but they and the butler, particularly, would often travel far afield. These were big careers and seen as such, and the employers would generally advertise in The Lady which was read by the entire servant class when in search of a job. As for casting, we asked Jill Trevellick not to worry when it came to whether or not an actor could do a Yorkshire accent. They could come from anywhere and I remember I said I wanted someone Irish because I knew I wanted to deal at a certain point with Irish politics. Our Irishman would turn out to be Tom Branson, the chauffeur. Phyllis Logan came in for the housekeeper and Mrs Hughes immediately became Scottish which she wasn’t before. We had already agreed that it was one of those roles that could be filled by someone from any part of the country.
* This was widely seen as a desirable outcome in these situations, if it could possibly be arranged; the bloodlines would be mixed together and justice was seen to be done. Of course, by the 1890s, unlike other European countries, we didn’t really go in for arranged marriages. The system here was for your daughters to participate in what came to be known as the London Season and young men from a similar background would meet them. In effect what you said to your children was: You must choose from within this gene pool, but within the pool you can please yourself. That was the rule of thumb. Obviously there were a few great prizes every year, the elder sons of great families, and there were the heiresses, although, until the American girls arrived, there were not many of those because of the English system, which meant that the girls got nothing if there was a boy. That’s why the American heiresses were such a bonus, because American rich people made all their children rich and so to have an American heiress it wasn’t necessary that her siblings were dead and she had no brother. Consuelo Vanderbilt, who became Duchess of Marlborough, had two brothers but that didn’t stop her bringing a huge fortune into the Churchill family. This would never happen in an English dynasty. By definition, if an heiress was English, her family would have more or less died out, which meant they were often bad breeders, whereas an American heiress carried no such stigma – they came from perfectly healthy stock. In all this, breeding was a pretty key element, and unless your estate was in need of rescue, it was better to marry into a family like that of the Duke of Abercorn, a famously fertile tribe, where every one of them produced enormous families. If you married a Hamilton from the Abercorn branch, you had a pretty strong chance of healthy descendants.
That said, in the highest echelons there was still a certain amount of nudging involved. Very few duchesses at that time had not been born at the very least the daughter of an earl. And so, inevitably, when someone did appear who was beautiful and the daughter of an earl and very nice, on the whole she had the pick of the room. Nevertheless, as I have said, as a system it was less constraining than those in a lot of the continental countries.
We are told that Mary had been pushed towards first Patrick, who went down on the Titanic, and then towards Matthew. Of course my own theory, which is expressed by Anna the maid, is that Mary probably would not have gone through with it with Patrick. It is one thing to entertain the idea of marrying for social reasons, but when the reality of letting someone into your life and your bed starts to take shape, it is quite a different matter.
* One reason for this scene was to show that Matthew, although he’s a clever fellow, has curious spots of blindness when it comes to other people’s feelings.
† This scene is annoying because somehow the riding habit got put on wrongly. When a woman was riding
side-saddle she wore breeches and boots under the skirt of her habit to protect her legs but these were concealed by the habit. In period drama on television you will often see petticoats fluttering away and stockinged legs as the skirt flies up, which is all complete nonsense. Bare or stockinged legs would be rubbed raw of skin within five minutes. Women wore perfectly normal breeches and boots and so the skirt of the riding habit was essentially a coat which was designed to break open at the waist if she fell, so she would not be dragged. But of course the wrapover part of it was meant to go underneath, against the horse, and for some reason here it was put on backwards. When Matthew comes out and Mary is in the saddle, you can actually see her breeched leg. We were told off for this by several viewers and quite right, too.
‡ I felt that it wasn’t enough for them just to be introduced. There had to be some electricity in the meeting. If Mary could take against Matthew at the very beginning then obviously it made the ensuing journey more interesting. In Hollywood, this used to be called ‘meeting cute’ which meant some comic mishap would start the whole thing off wrongly. Any Tracy/Hepburn or Day/Hudson movie will show you what I mean.
* Mary is really affronted by the fact that everything is going to pass to a stranger instead of coming to her, and her position is not at all unreasonable to a modern audience. In fact, to our generation, it is the law that seems unreasonable in denying any inheritance rights to someone simply because she’s female. We find that extraordinary. I think many in the audience would be genuinely amazed to discover that it is still the case.
* The butler was really the head of the household, but only the male staff were specifically under his command, the footmen, the hall boys and so on, even if he had a kind of watching brief for the whole operation. A housekeeper was in charge of the female staff, that is all the housemaids, but it was anyone’s guess if she was in the charge of the lady’s maid because the lady’s maid had the ear of the mistress so in that area they had to walk fairly gingerly. The other big trouble spot could be the cook, because the cook, male or female, was in charge of the kitchen staff, so technically the housekeeper couldn’t really give orders to a kitchen maid although there was no question that she was considerably her superior in rank. But then there was an odd detail in that the housekeeper was in charge of the stores and the cook in a great house never had a key to the store cupboard. Instead, she would have to ask the housekeeper for the ingredients to do her own job. This situation famously resulted in many passionate battles, as one can easily imagine.
The housekeeper and the butler usually ate with the rest of the servants, but in some houses, though not at Downton, together with the valet and the ladies’ maid, they would leave after the main course and go to the housekeeper’s room to eat their pudding separately. We thought of doing this, but on reflection it felt like a bridge too far. Even so, what I hope we still get is that sense of a complicated pecking order: the butler, the cook, the housekeeper, the ladies’ maids and the valets, would comprise what was known as the Upper Ten. Why they were called the Upper Ten and the rest were called the Lower Five nobody knows, because there were usually far more than five of the maids and footmen and so on, and there were often fewer than ten of the seniors, but anyway that’s how it was. And whatever the technical rank of the rest, people deferred to the butler.
* Violet would never be rude to Mrs Crawley in an obvious way. If you said why were you so rude to her, she’d say ‘Rude? I wasn’t rude’, because it is part of her self-image that she always behaves perfectly. Here, I think she is simply sending out a clear message that just because the law has placed them in this, to her rather invidious, position, it doesn’t mean they’re all going to cosy down by the nursery fire. Violet is quite sure this is never going to happen and after this exchange, so are we.
* It is a truism that the upper classes never talk about money, but like many truisms it is not really true, or at least it is misleading. The British aristocracy is, and always has been, aware that their way of life and their presentation generally depends on sufficient funds being available. This has led them into curious marriages and business arrangements, many to be later regretted, times without number. As I have observed elsewhere, they may never talk about it, but they never think about anything else.
† Before the great changes of the 1870s and 1880s, local health, schooling and everything else was run by the families of the great estates. The daughters of the house and the daughters of the agent and the daughters of the vicar would all go down and teach geography and letters and numbers and religious instruction. It was a bit haphazard but not entirely inefficient and, rather depressingly, the percentage per capita of literacy was if anything higher at the turn of the century than it is now. The syllabus was not wide. The emphasis was on providing the children with the necessary equipment to earn their living. They had to be literate, they had to be numerate, and they needed good handwriting, another detail that is lost to this generation. But I didn’t really want a school, which would be difficult to manage in terms of the narrative strands for young pupils, whereas a hospital seemed to me to be a good way of creating a dynamic within the village so that we would not be solely dependent on the activity in the house. It would also provide the chance of some rebellion for Isobel who, with her medical training, would be able take a superior position to the Crawleys. I always feel a little sorry for Richard Clarkson, the doctor, so wonderfully played by David Robb, because the stories continually depend on his misdiagnosing everything.
* Matthew’s career is a secondary strand in the series because I don’t think we’re terribly interested in it. But it was important to contrast the American and middle-class work ethic with the aristocratic assumption that unless you are going to have a career as a diplomat or in Parliament, you should stay at home and manage the rent roll. Matthew wants to work and this allows Cora, as an American, to sympathise with him, while Robert is bewildered. It’s not because Robert is lazy. He just doesn’t understand why working on the estate and overseeing it isn’t enough, while Matthew doesn’t want to become dependent on his rich and grand relation. He wants some money in his trousers that he’s earned himself. It is a typical Downton plot, in that one hopefully sympathises, to a degree, with both sides.
* Some of this was cut, but I think it’s interesting for the audience to see what they missed. Here we have Matthew talking about bicycling to the station which is quite unnecessary as we see him do it. When you’re writing something you often forget that it’s going to be told visually, and so there are things that don’t need to be said.
* ‘… a sense of pride and dignity, that reflects the pride and dignity of the family he serves’. I think we’ve forgotten this side of being a servant because the PR for service, as a job, was not good for the generation who grew up after the Second World War. They saw it as a servile career and an improper one, doing things that people ought to do for themselves. But with any kind of labour, it is necessary for an employee to feel that there is some honour in what they’re doing and for the employer to be aware of this. At least if you want the workers to be happy. That was true of the great households. In those days, to work in these palaces was something to be proud of, you were at the top of the tree in that career, someone to be reckoned with. If you went into the pub and you were working at Blenheim, you were something. You were not, after all, working at the Rectory.
* I was sorry they cut the reference to Isobel’s father and brother, although it wasn’t a surprise when they did. The Front Office for any film or television production can get a bit nervous when characters talk about people who aren’t then represented in the drama as they tend to think it muddles the audience. But I disagree. I believe it is this sort of casual detail that creates a sense of the world beyond.
* I was very keen that Isobel should not simply be a great lady rolling bandages, but instead someone with real medical knowledge. So in her very first episode we have the plot of John Drake. The name is in fact lifted from the fat
her of one of my son’s school friends. The wretched contents of our address book have had to endure watching television on Sunday night and finding their own names jumping out of the screen at them.
I was interested by the dropsy plot, because dropsy sounds like a nineteenth-century disease when it isn’t, in fact, but I enjoyed all the medical stuff. I have a friend, Alasdair Emslie, who is a doctor and I would write to him, explaining that I needed an illness where, say, someone is perfectly all right on Tuesday, dying on Wednesday and on Thursday they’re playing cricket. He then replies that this could happen in a case of myeloencephalitis, or whatever, and that in fact this particular disease has a six-hour span. I would write it and send the script to him and he would reply that, no, she would never say he was too cold and she’d have to use a stick to apply the liniment and not a fork. I’d then correct the details and hand it in.
* Matthew has a resistance to a level of luxury which he suspects is unmanly. He has someone washing his smalls and helping him into his coat and he feels it must be wrong. But we (I hope) don’t quite agree because we know this is someone’s work. And so, just as we thought that Robert was in the wrong in objecting to Matthew wanting a career, so now we think Matthew is slightly in the wrong. Why should he deprive Molesley of his living? Part of this way of life means being a creator of jobs, a local employer. Once again, in the Downton way, at a certain point you’re slightly on the side of one character but when you hear the other argument you could change sides.
Molesley in the hands of Kevin Doyle became wonderfully melancholic and of course I started to write for that because this is what happens when people develop a character. The story here should make the audience aware that when people work for you, you mustn’t take away their dignity, whatever it is they’re doing. For me, that is the mistake that Matthew is making, which would – and does eventually – horrify him.
Downton Abbey Script Book Season 1 Page 35