* Young women like the Crawley sisters were brought up in so circumscribed a fashion, with everything they said or did or wore being laid down by Mama, that overpowering physical attraction often came as a complete surprise. It was the one thing you hadn’t been trained to deal with. These days, things are very different, but Mary would have been so shielded, from the school room to the ball room, that nothing could have prepared her for this situation. In fact, there are several stories from that time where passion did overturn lives. But then, I suppose it still does.
* Some viewers may be surprised at the close relationship between Mary and Anna but the position of a body servant was a unique one. Lots of people were extremely fond of their butlers and their housekeepers (though seldom the cook), but there is something about the man or woman who is dressing and undressing you, running your bath and drying your back, that involves trust and inevitably leads to intimacy. These were often the servants who stayed on as gentlemen’s gentlemen or lady companions when all the others had gone, because there could be a real friendship there. The plain truth is, you couldn’t have someone in your bedroom holding your underpants for you if you didn’t like them.
* When they found a maid or a valet whom they really liked, most employers tried to hang on to them and in many cases, as I have said, when the way of life began to collapse after the war they stayed on as a companion or a man servant. In the series, we contrast the false friendship between Cora and O’Brien, where Cora does not really know the true O’Brien at all (which I have seen), but also the genuine affection between Anna and Mary. This scene is one of the first moments where it is used dramatically. Mary is trying to think of someone who will help her without question, and that person is her maid. Cora is the next choice because she would also be damaged by a scandal. I remember saying to a famous friend who was going through a bad patch in a marriage that it’s important only to stray with someone who has as much to lose as you do. The moment they take up with some girl who’s happy to feature in a headline, they’ve had it. And the only person in this house who will lose as much as Mary is Cora, if the family is to become notorious.
† At the time, the Pamuk story was cited by some in the press as completely unbelievable, when in fact it is one plot that is entirely rooted in truth. I heard the story many years ago, when my wife and I were staying with some friends in the country. Our host had come upon the diary of a great aunt and there he read her account of an incident that took place in about 1895. In this particular house, like Downton, there was a bachelor corridor, but, less usually, there was also a passage set aside for single women, that is young girls, spinsters or widows. One of them had smuggled a man into her room where he proceeded to die of a heart attack in her bed. Naturally she was at her wits’ end and, faute de mieux, she woke the blameless matron in the next room who was profoundly shocked, but who realised at once that if the story got out they would all be tarred by it. The only way a scandal could be avoided was to deal with the situation, and so she woke the other women along the passage and explained what had happened. Whereupon this gaggle of dowagers and debutantes, one young girl going ahead with a candle to check round every corner, carried the corpse the entire length of the house, and put him into his own bed, where he was found by his valet the following day.
Our friend had rooted out his great grandfather’s diary for the same period and it just said that poor nice Mr Thing was found dead by his valet on Sunday morning. So the ruse worked and, even more miraculously, no one talked. As I listened, I remember thinking this tale will come in useful one day. The only thing I added was to make him Turkish.
* I think that what one has to remember is that the pursuance of a courtship was quite tough if you weren’t getting much help from the girl. Mary can only see Evelyn Napier in contrast to her first mad passion (for Pamuk) and even when she compares him to Matthew, she’s not really interested. What was difficult then was to take the conversation to a courtship level, when you had to make do with a walk in the park, or a chat on the sofa after dinner. Today, we’re allowed to whisk them off to Paris for the weekend but they weren’t.
* It is very rewarding to write for Maggie. She never misses a trick and she understands her characters in all their variety. Violet Grantham is many things, tough, snobbish and absolute in her values but she has contrasting qualities, too. Here, for example, she won’t let Cora tick off Mary for being rude because she knows the girl is in a state of shock (even if she doesn’t know why). In other words, in this scene, she is kind. This almost contradictory trait could seem out of character in lesser hands, but it is not because Maggie has that ability, which only great actors have, of playing different things at once, achieving a layered performance of many colours. She is also free of the compulsion to be liked, and as a result she is totally unsentimental in what she does. She can play great emotion but she is never sentimental. This ability to synthesise the contrary elements of a character makes her work permanently interesting, because it also makes her truthfully unpredictable. I admire that very much.
* Another on-going theme in the series is the sense that the servants are always aware of what’s going on and this is truthful. One thing one can say about this world: the servants always knew far more about the family than the family knew about the servants.
* It was necessary for Mary to be allowed to show her response to the death of Pamuk. Otherwise she would have seemed too hard. And she knows that Carson is always on her side. It wouldn’t really matter if she told him she’d murdered their Turkish guest because Carson would immediately justify it, so she is safe in revealing herself. The children of a great house, when they grew up with the servants, tended to have a slightly different relationship with them than people who arrived as adults, and there are many stories of servants forming special bonds with the children of the family. I remember a chap telling me how he was the favourite of his grandfather’s first footman who would give him sweets and carry him piggy-back. And before one detects anything sinister in this, I am sure they were, for the most part, friendships born of a perfectly normal human need to have someone to be fond of. In those days, children were freer than their parents to roam below stairs. Bonds would develop and, especially where the servant was unmarried and childless, they could be very strong. Carson loves Mary like a daughter, which she knows and relies on, because he is much less critical than her own parents.
Children in a series are extremely difficult to manage. As they age, you would need to produce a new child roughly every three episodes. This means we can’t explore the different relationship that children would have had with the household, which is rather a shame. For instance in proper households they would have called the butler ‘Mr Carson’. It would have been considered ill bred for them to call him ‘Carson’. They would go down to the kitchens and lounge around, begging the cook to give them the lickings out of the bowl and getting under everyone’s feet. I was trying to suggest some of this, and Mary’s relationship with Carson is the nearest I could get without having a child in the cast.
* I am often asked for favourite scenes in an episode or a series, but this remains one of my all-time favourites. The revelation of Bates’s pain, not just physical but emotional, the absolute sympathy and understanding from the woman who knows him, but does not know him, all this is expressed here with the most extraordinary economy by Phyllis Logan and Brendan Coyle in a deeply moving exchange. Really marvellous work.
* It was around now that the format of the show was beginning to be settled and, without its becoming an absolute law, we usually have some kind of event, a big dinner party or a hunt or a shoot or a funfair or a trial, at the heart of the episode. Originally this script was written without one which was why we first became aware of the fact that, coincidentally, all the earlier episodes had been centred on a resonant happening. So I went back to the drawing board and put in the funfair, which now plays through the whole of it.
* After the Pamuk affair Mary has become ess
entially a different person. She is no longer the cold Ice Queen. She has, in the process, acquired a dimension of physicality which is interesting and good, but it has opened her up and made her more vulnerable than she was before. Michelle understood all that completely of course, and played it very well.
* The Irish troubles were a hot topic throughout this period, much more even than in the 1970s. We remember the Suffragettes and the emergence of the unions, but in fact if we’d been alive at that time the front page would have been dominated by Ireland, so here Branson is bringing those troubles to Downton. Because, by this stage, the show had developed its own method of dealing with these things. We don’t usually introduce famous characters like Lloyd George or Curzon or De Valera, but we allow our characters to refer to political events and scandals and things that were happening.
To achieve this, to make the Crawleys and their servants aware of what was going on, I had the idea of bringing in an Irish chauffeur who was political and a republican. He is not active, in the sense of being a freedom fighter, but he is energetically pro-independence for Ireland. It seemed to me that such a chap would allow us to talk about the topic without its seeming contrived. I also thought – although only vaguely when I was writing this episode – that we might have a cross-class romance at some point and so it seemed a good idea that he should be young and handsome, whether or not we actually did anything with it. The actor who plays Branson (Allen Leech) had worked with me and our producer, Liz Trubridge, on a film I wrote and directed, called From Time to Time. He impressed us both and he had a kind of gritty, very real sort of good looks, as opposed to the face of a film star, which is more useful in this kind of drama.
† I was sorry they cut this section, when Robert invites Branson to borrow books. It was taken from Below Stairs by Margaret Powell, whose memoirs of a life in service have just been reissued, for which I wrote the preface. She takes a fairly jaundiced view of the world but she was operating in smaller households than Downton, where she was only one of two or three servants and they worked like dogs. But, once, she does go to a grander house on a temporary basis to replace a cook, and there all the servants were encouraged to borrow books from the library. When I read it, I thought it was rather a nice touch and quite Robert’ish. Since I knew it was based on truth I was looking forward to being attacked but in the event it was cut. Naturally, Carson can’t bear the idea.
* This scene had originally been set in the drawing room, but the episode was largely made up of interiors and so the director understandably took it outside because the weather was so lovely. But I’m afraid it didn’t seem to me believable that these two would have tea in a place where they were not able to sit in the shade. Those women avoided the sun like the plague at any time and just a little hat would not have answered. If they’d found a summer house it would have been fine, but to have them sitting out in the open, as they do, made the scene feel modern and odd, to me anyway.
* Molesley had acquired by this stage a kind of bruised pride that is endlessly entertaining. He is not exactly prim, but always slightly on the defensive.
* Of course the servants don’t know why Daisy is ‘down in the mouth’, but the audience does. I think it’s always interesting to have moments where the audience knows more than the people on the screen.
* This is one of my favourite lines, which counters a perennial error, when costumiers put a butler in gloves, as you see in many, many period shows. Butlers never wore gloves. The reason was really that they never handled the plates, but it was also a question of status. And footmen only wore gloves to serve at table. On television you see them carrying suitcases in gloves, walking down the lawn in gloves, when it was simply to wait at table. An odd detail, which we did write in originally, was that they didn’t wear them at shooting lunches. Except in very, very grand houses, they would normally have been in outside clothes. A reference for all this is a film called The Yellow Rolls-Royce, directed by Anthony (‘Puff’) Asquith, son of the Prime Minister, the first Earl of Oxford and Asquith. Puff Asquith must be one of the very few directors in film history who grew up with a butler. In the film the butler is never seen wearing gloves so I always quote this as an eyewitness account.
* O’Brien has less back story than some. We know she was one of several siblings, and a little more is revealed in the second series, but she has self-knowledge. When she looks in the glass in the last episode and says: ‘Sarah O’Brien, this is not who you are’, there is a sense of the complexity of this woman. I believe that she revels not in nastiness but in power which is why she treats Cora as she does. For a servant in a large household the opportunities to be powerful were limited, and the power of a lady’s maid was principally in manipulating her mistress. I had several purposes for the character of O’Brien. I wanted to demonstrate, as I have often said, that servants always knew more about the family than the family knew about the servants. But I also wanted to show that one can see someone every day and not know their true self. If they are a good performer one can be completely deceived. I’ve witnessed this with film stars and toffs and millionaires who can apparently be taken in by fairly horrible associates and never know it. If, socially, you’re a great prize it is hard to keep reminding yourself that people will only be showing you their nicest side. So, here, Cora does not see through O’Brien and she talks of how fond O’Brien is of her, which is not true, at least not yet. O’Brien only becomes fond of Cora out of guilt, but before the guilt she’s not fond of anyone in that house except possibly Thomas.
* It was not uncommon for the head housemaid to have duties as a lady’s maid. In fact for the daughters of a house to be maided by the head housemaid was quite ordinary because it was not considered appropriate that a woman should be solely employed to maintain a young girl’s appearance. There were exceptions to this of course, and when the girl turned eighteen, she might be allowed her own maid. Sometimes nannies would stay on and seamlessly develop from nanny into lady’s maid.
If a housemaid had ambitions beyond simply marrying a farmer when she was twenty-five, which was the most ordinary route, then the two jobs that stood at the head of the ladder were lady’s maid and housekeeper. Both of these would have started as a housemaid. In some households, if they liked a particular maid, they might send her away for a course in hairdressing, or the woman herself might pay for some training, which would enhance the chances of getting a good job. The point of all this is to remind the audience that service, in those days, could be a real career. And if you were a top lady’s maid, a top butler, a top cook you had skills that might eventually take you beyond service, into the catering trade, for example, even possibly running your own hotel, as many did.
* Violet is not a fool. She is a good judge of character, and although she’s quite waspish with him, she knows that Matthew will do what she wants because his own sense of honour will force him to. He will be far more scrupulous than an ordinary lawyer, who might skim it for the fees, without taking any trouble. Matthew must be quite, quite sure there is no doubt about his right to inherit. In that she has judged him correctly.
† This, and the later line about being a good sailor, were inventions of Shelagh Stephenson’s, and they really make me laugh. I embellished it because I discovered that the swivel chair was invented by Thomas Jefferson.
* As I have said elsewhere, one of the great bones of contention in most of these houses was that the housekeepers had the key to the store cupboard, but the cooks did not. If they wanted something they had to ask the housekeeper and it would be given to them. Many cooks saw the custom as a lack of faith, as if they could not be trusted. The defence of it was that if more than one person had keys it would be impossible to keep a proper record of what was in store, of what was running out and what was not. The housekeeper did all the ordering and so that was the logic behind it, but it drove the cooks mad.
* I like the moment when William is trying to get up his nerve to ask Daisy to go to the fair and Thomas deliberat
ely wrecks the plan. It is a demonstration of power. Thomas is a complicated character, both arrogant and defensive. His status is important to him, but his homosexuality makes him vulnerable. When you are a secret member of a group which is always being derided and condemned but you say nothing, it fosters a fury in you for keeping silent, until crushing others is almost the only revenge available. Thomas hates himself for not speaking up, and this is his revenge for that hatred. It’s almost like being secretly Catholic or secretly Jewish or secretly anything where you let yourself collaborate in your own degradation by staying silent whenever it comes up.
I have always wondered if that was the reason why Lord Rosebery, Prime Minister at the end of the nineteenth century, despite being one of the greatest and richest noblemen of his day, introduced death duties. That it was a revenge against his own class for being forced to live a lie because he was gay. All his rank and possessions did not protect him from needing to be dishonest about who he really was, from the moment he woke to the hour he slept. As a result, he set en train the destruction of that very society that had forced him to live in a miasma of dishonesty. I think this anger at the world is what we see here in Thomas, but of course it is not what Bates sees.
Downton Abbey Script Book Season 1 Page 37